Category: Technology News

The iconic smartphone advertising company is letting about 100 people go out of around 1,000 total employees.

InMobi, a mobile ad company that has been seen as a considerable Indian success story that has been drawing leading talent and investors throughout the tech industry has now revealed that it is laying off a massive ten percent of its staff.

The cutbacks are going to affect approximately 100 people out of the total staff of 1,000 company employees.

This is the most recent indicator that the mobile ad network is finding it increasingly challenging to be able to survive the staggering competition from giants such as Facebook and Google. The startup has been in direct competition with those massive players when it comes to the data-driven mobile marketing arena. InMobi had been maintaining great hopes for their products, but the startup has not been meeting its targets when it comes to revenue, moreover the burn rates don’t appear to be decreasing, say many media reports.

The mobile ad network has received venture funding from exceptionally powerful top investors.

Among those investors are Sherpalo Ventures from Caulfield & Byers and Ram Shiram, and Softbank from Japan. In 2011, it was the recipient of $200 million from SoftBank, bringing it to the point of being a startup that had more than $1 billion as its market cap.

According to an anonymous source who has knowledge of the latest developments at InMobi, “Investors have told them (InMobi) to reduce costs,” adding that “The layoffs have happened from the senior executive level to the programmer ranks.”

A spokesperson was reported to have said in an email query response that employees have left for a range of different purposes, such as starting their own ventures or moving forward with various career aspirations. That individual explained about the mobile ad network that “We also let go of a few people for performance reasons each year.” That person stated that the startup has a strategy in place for 2016 for driving growth, which included the hiring of 40 additional employees and that it had issued offers for more than 48 management and engineering grads.

The MLB has now given its approval for the use of wearables throughout its current season.

The Major League Baseball (MLB) playing rules committee for the sport has now given its approval for the use of either of two different wearable technology devices during the games throughout the current playing season.

The two wearable devices that have received the MLB’s approval aren’t exactly the usual Fitbit.

Instead, the first is the Motus Baseball Sleeve, which is wearable technology for gauging stress to the elbows of a player. The second is the Zephyr Bioharness, which monitors breathing and heart rates of the players. Aside from those two, the committee has also gone ahead to give their approval for a couple of sensors for the baseball bats. Those bat sensors are to be used on the field during workouts, as opposed to during the games themselves. The first of the sensors is from Blast Motion while the second is from Diamond Kinetics.

The goal is to use wearable technology to identify player habits that may eventually lead to injuries.

That said, the players union has expressed some concern with regards to the use of wearables and maintaining player privacy. It wants to ensure that the information collected by the teams will respect the privacy of the players. Both sides of this discussion have agreed that there will need to be talks throughout the bargaining that will occur this year.

At the time of the writing of this article, none of this information had been officially announced. Instead, people with knowledge of this subject were willing to share what they knew with the media in exchange for anonymity.

Technically, this is not the first time the sleeve wearable tech received approval. Last year, the committee gave provisional approval for that device. That said, this does represent the first time that full consent was given for the use of this or any other wearable device by the MLB.

The committee that gave the approval for the wearable technology device use consisted of Chris Antonetti from Cleveland, John Schuerholz from Atlanta, Terry Ryan of Minnesota, and John Mozeliak from St. Louis.