NEW YORK—Kellogg is hoping Pringles will satisfy its craving for a salty snack.

The food giant is best known for its lineup of sweet breakfast items, including Frosted Flakes and Eggo frozen waffles. But on Wednesday, it became the world’s second-biggest savory snack maker behind PepsiCo Inc.’s Frito-Lay with a $2.7 billion deal to buy the potato snack brand from Procter & Gamble.

The addition of Pringles bolsters Kellogg Co.’s cupboard of salty snacks such as Cheez-It and Keebler’s Club crackers. It also positions the company to expand at a time when the appetite for on-the-go foods is growing worldwide, particularly in emerging markets like China and India.

“When you have people moving to the cities and becoming urbanized, they’re less likely to eat foods they grow themselves,” said Tom Graves, an analyst for Standard & Poor’s who follows Kellogg. “There’s a bigger opportunity to sell packaged foods.”

Kellogg, which gets most of its revenue from North America, is looking for Pringles to help it expand into a global snacking company. P Full Post…

Boulder-based email technology firm SendGrid said it has raised $21 million in a Series B venture capital financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

Existing investors Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups and Bullet Time Ventures also participated in the financing.

SendGrid will use the funds to meet customer demand, accelerate hiring and invest in business operations.

Since its launch in December 2009, SendGrid has grown from a seed-funded startup into one of the largest email platforms in the world. The company sends about 2.6 billion emails per month for customers in more than 150 countries.

SendGrid employs 70 people at office in Boulder and Anaheim, Calif.

“This investment allows us to more quickly fulfill our original vision of making email simple and easy for developers everywhere,” said Isaac Saldana, president and co-founder of SendGrid.

Bessemer Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm with offices in Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Mass.; New York, Mumbai and Herzliya, Israel.

Eccentric billionaire Richard Branson has made the news once again in one of his trademark publicity stunts, this time using a blimp to poke fun at the British Airways sponsored London Eye, which was suffering a technical glitch.

In a move that exemplifies Branson’s quick-thinking, the company was able to erect an airship with a slogan that poked fun at the company and promoted Branson’s corporation at the same time.

“I was woken up at 5.30am one morning to be told that the BA-sponsored London Eye had a technical problem – they couldn’t erect it,” Branson said on his blog.

“They had the world’s press waiting to see it going up and I knew we had a duty to give them something to look at. We had an airship company just outside London so we scrambled a blimp and the end result was an airship flying over the wheel bearing the slogan ‘BA Can’t Get It Up!!’”

It’s yet another of Branson’s signature stunts for various product launches, although some have been more successful than others. Some have flopped alt

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Despite the downturn, the Irish appetite for property is undiminished, and almost three quarters of Irish buyers at special property auctions held there this year paid in cash.

Of the $67 million worth of houses, apartments and commercial buildings sold in Ireland this year, 72% were bought by people who did not need financing. 


Robert Hoban, Allsop Space director of auctions, told the Irish Examiner this week he had observed a pattern of buying from people who had sold their homes at the height of the boom and then stayed out of the market. 



‘Its perfectly reflective of the reality we are in. There are lots of people who want to buy but they cant because there is no finance from the banks. 



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Read more:

More news from Ireland on IrishCentral

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Irelands economic recovery an illusion says NY Times Krugman

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‘Its a distorted market. Theres an assumption out there that anyone who buys at auction is a hardcore vulture, that its blood on the streets sales, but that couldnt be further from the truth. 


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