Spiritcube Develops App for 3D media sharing

SPIRITCUBENEWSNewsletter Winter/Spring 2014/15

YOUR LIFE IMMORTALIZED

Volume 10, Issue 5

Austin, TX - Spiritcube Inc., an emerging developer of digital afterlife presence and “Media Imaging” projection, has initiated development, of its new mobile Application (App), which allows greater mobility for new users to create an account and easily send and receive their personal “Cube”.

By taking this seismic step today, the company is making functionality more widespread with the public beta launch of its Spiritcube App. New Users will be able to download the App on both iOS and Android devices. Once downloaded, the free Spiritcube App will display a six sided three dimensional spinning cube with the front side being a transparent

company logo. The 3D spinning cube feature allows users to upload five photos from their hand held devices to quickly and seamlessly create a personal cube that can be shared.

Users will tell their story with five sides of media, displayed transparently, encapsulating their current social or business status, and share personal solemn tributes

Once downloaded, the free Spiritcube App will display a six sided three dimensional spinning cube with the front side being a transparent company logo. The 3D spinning cube feature allows users to upload five photos from their hand held devices to quickly and seamlessly create a personal cube that can be shared.

The Spiritcube App had previously been in a private, alpha testing mode with a small handful of company customers. Without releasing too much information the company’s tech management team indicated that there will be some one-of-a-kind features on the cube app and it is a key feature piece on the website.

“Technology has fundamentally changed how we interact with one another and how we present ourselves to others,” said Spiritcube Founder and President Chris Nelson. “We believe mobile tributes and personal imaging is an integral part of todays and tomorrows social media. This will enable users to quickly interact personal, social, and business information, with a tap of the “Cube”. This utility is limitless.” ■

INSIDE

“Technology has fundamentally

changed how we interact with one another and how we present

ourselves to others.”

CHRIS NELSON

Alibaba, Largest Global IPO Ever ▶2

Hadoop purveyor Hortonworks files IPO

under JOBS Act ▶3

iPhones vs Android ▶ 4

Attention Friends and Stakeholders ▶6

Follow us on Facebook ▶ 7

Follow us on Twitter ▶ 8

2 ■ SPIRITCUBENEWS

It all started with a $60,000 Investment.Before the New York

IPO, the Hong Kong bourse had declined to list Alibaba Group

under a structure that gave Ma and his

managers control even though he

wound up owning less than 8 percent

of the stock after the offering.

That didn’t seem to bother anyone when the shares started trading on the NYSE. Alibaba’s $231

billion market capitalization suddenly made the company Ma had founded in his apartment with $60,000 in seed money more valuable than Facebook and larger than Amazon.com Inc. and EBay (EBAY) Inc. combined.

Among tech icons, only Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google had larger market values.

By Nov. 9, after reporting better than forecast second-quarter results, Alibaba’s capitalization had risen to $282.4 billion -- overtaking both General Electric Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to become the world’s 7th biggest company.

After stepping down as chief executive officer in 2013 while remaining executive chairman, Ma is devoting time -- and $3 billion of his IPO profits -- to such causes as The Nature Conservancy’s China program, which he chairs.

After claiming the record for the largest US-listed initial public offering, Alibaba Group can now say its record-breaking IPO was the biggest in the world.

The company announced that underwriters had exercised an option to purchase additional shares at the $68 IPO price, boosting the total amount raised by Chinese e-commerce giant and its selling shareholders from $21.8 billion to $25 billion. Bankers bought an additional 48 million American depositary shares, taking the total amount of shares sold in the offering to 368 million, or about 14.9% of the company.

Existing shareholders Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai and Yahoo YHOO +1.79% provided the extra shares sold in the over-allotment. Ma sold an additional 2.7 million shares, selling a total of about 15.5 million shares in the IPO, while Tsai sold 5.2 million shares, after offloading an additional 900,000 shares in the greenshoe.

By selling in the over-allotment, Yahoo became the largest seller in Alibaba’s IPO, surpassing the 123 million shares offered directly from the Hangzhou-based company. Yahoo sold an additional 18.26 million shares, offloading a total of 140.3 million shares in the IPO for more than $9.5 billion in pre-tax cash. ■

Largest Global IPO Ever

Alibaba

SPIRITCUBENEWS ■ 3

Founded in 2011, the Apache Hadoop

distributor had raised upwards of $248 million in its

last five funding rounds.

Hortonworks, an open source distributor of Apache Hadoop that has become somewhat of

a darling in the enterprise IT world, filed for an initial public offering on Monday.

Details on the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is minimal, refraining to reveal the number of shares to be sold and the price range for the proposed offering likely until the IPO roadshow.

As demonstrated by other major recent tech IPOs, such as Twitter’s IPO filing last September or the still pending Box debut, a company seeking to go public can file confidentially if it is valued at less than $1 billion, under the Jumpstart Our Businesses ACT, a.k.a. the JOBS act.

For now, Hortonworks announced Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Credit Suisse Securities will act as joint lead book-running managers for the offering with RBC Capital Markets as book-running manager. Pacific Crest Securities, Wells Fargo Securities and Blackstone Capital Markets have been tapped as co-managers.

Hortonworks also offered a glimpse into its balance sheet. For the nine months ended September 30, 2013 and 2014, Hortonworks reported revenue of $15.9 million and $33.4 million, respectively. That’s on top of net losses of $48.4 million and $86.7 million for the same time frames.

Founded in 2011, the business software vendor had raised upwards of $248 million in its last five funding rounds, according to the company’s CrunchBase profile.

In that time, Hortonworks has attracted attention from many large tech stalwarts. In July, Hewlett-Packard boasted a $50 million investment as part of a broad integration pact aimed at big data analytics customers.

As noted on the S-1, Yahoo’s investment portfolio extends beyond its highly-hyped interest in Alibaba. The technology company is the largest shareholder with 19.6 percent

Hadoop purveyor Hortonworks files IPO under JOBS Act

of Hortonworks shares, followed by Silicon Valley venture capital firms Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures with 18.7 percent and 9.5 percent respectively. Teradata owns 8.3 percent of shares and HP has 5.9 percent.

Hortonworks’s enterprise platform was also established with help from “a core team of Hadoop developers and engineers” at Yahoo with the goal of expanding upon the early technology developed by Yahoo in Hadoop.

Product-wise, Hortonworks has collaborated on a slew of integrations in the last two years as Hadoop continues to pick up steam in managing massive amounts of big data. Those deals have included partnerships with EMC’s Pivotal Initiative, BMC Software, Red Hat, and Accenture.

Hortonworks has also been scaling on its own through acquisitions, such as the purchase of one year old startup XA Secure in May for the purpose of developing a more comprehensive approach to Hadoop security.

As of September 30, 2014, Hortonworks affirmed it had 233 support subscription customers and 292 total customers “across a broad array of company sizes and industries,” according to the S-1 ■

By Rachel King for Between the Lines

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Smartphones and their apps are the new way of the world, and developers are lured by their

increasing popularity. But with two major platforms -- Apple’s recently upgraded and renamed iOS 4 and Google’s Android -- competing with one another, how does a developer choose between them?

For developers who have one app in mind and envision their code running on multiple mobile platforms, the going is rough in today’s world.

Android apps are written in the Java programming language. Many developers have made careers in enterprises by becoming very proficient in Java, so developing for the Android platform is a natural fit for those folks.

On the other hand, applications that run natively on the iPhone operating system are written in Apple’s Objective-C, a dialect of the more common C language that has elements of Smalltalk. Developers who have spent their careers working with C and C++ probably won’t find Objective-C to be a difficult language to pick up, although there may be speed bumps along the way.

There is no obvious way to write one set of code that targets

both platforms You cannot run

Java on iPhone, and you cannot

run Objective-C on Android.

Android is well liked by some developers because it provides an open development platform, one on which rich applications with potentially game-changing feature sets can be deployed. Developers can leverage the Android device hardware, create location-aware apps by accessing GPS and other sensory information on the device, set alarms to remind users of events, include notifications and other information on the status bar of the device, and more.

In contrast, iPhones have difficulty displaying multiple notifications, since applications are restricted to pop-up messages that are shown only one at a time.

Additionally, developers on Android, at least in the United States, can leverage various carrier features across the spectrum of Android devices, whereas iPhone devices are limited to the network features that AT&T allows.

On the other hand, developers fare pretty well when writing apps for the iPhone, at least at the outset. Since the iPhone operating system is a closed system, created specifically by Apple for its own devices, developers have a known spectrum of devices to target, with a well-defined scope of capabilities and limitations.

Ultimately, the arguments for and against the approaches taken by Apple and Google are irrelevant from the perspective of end users, the eventual consumers of the applications that the developers create. What matters to all but the tiniest minority of customers is the overall experience: the marriage of form and function.

The onward march of technology generally renders obsolete any arguments about tool kits and platforms. It is noted that the upcoming HTML 5 standard will solve much of the Adobe-Apple argument for many developers. So we regardless of your preference iOS or Andriod, the future will be interesting.

iphones vs AndroidDEVELOPERS PROS AND CONS

SPIRITCUBENEWS ■ 5

Get the new SpiritCube app now.

iphones vs AndroidDEVELOPERS PROS AND CONS

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2014 was a good year for Spiritcube. I am delighted with

the milestones that we have achieved, and I am sure that

many of our shareholders are as well. We packaged and

rolled out our Regulation D offering amid the continuing

challenge of the most difficult global economic environment

in decades. We have delivered a strong operating performance

that puts us in the top tier in our industry. We are now preparing

for what could be our most significant revenue gains.

I’m very proud of what the teams here at Spiritcube have accomplished on behalf of our shareholders this past year. A major highlight that was targeted was expansion of our user network through the use of a mobile application. Our developers are laying out the final stages of our new app that is beyond what’s expected or required and will make positive headlines now and in future.

The Eureka MomentWhile designing and building out the tribute portion of our website we began to develop a feature presently referred to as the “3D-Cube”. Originally, the “3D-Cube” was designed as a final component that branded the Spiritcube Accounts with a definitive uniqueness. The 3D-Cube rotates and displays account media along with the company logo.

Upon completion of a Tribute account, a typical user is able to use the uploaded media in their account to create a customized unique 3D-Cube. This feature was originally set to render select images into the coded format (3D Rotating Cube) as the account set up was completed, thus creating a positive user experience to entice sharing with friends and family.

The 3D-Cube was designed to replace a written URL and create interest with recipients. The received cube can be clicked on and directed to the created tribute site. From Design inception the 3D-Cube was developed to be our Pinnacle feature. Basic code development scheduling was such that we were unable to use the feature until other milestones where met. While developing and testing the prototype 3D-Cube, it became apparent that this feature is more than a peripheral piece and it has become part of our central focus.

Management evaluated the opportunity and realized that we were poised on what can be called a “Eureka Moment”. It is the realization that we have an application (the 3-D Cube) that has a more definitive value than we originally anticipated. Therefore, understanding the market as well as knowing that time is of the essence, we expeditiously focused our software engineers’ efforts to develop what would have been a final development segment and made it a preeminent immediate feature.

With the new developments in our media sharing app, we are convinced that we will blaze a new trail as the world’s leading “Life-Identity,” “Life-Management” and “Life-Remembrance Application.” Spirit Cube’s strengths are plain to see; we have a very unique brand, we have technological expertise and innovative power and we have tenacity that all put together, is unparalleled in our industry.

On behalf of everyone at Spirit Cube, I want to thank you for your continued support and investment. We know that by working together, we can continue to deliver innovations that impact lives and improve quality of life around the world now and well into the future.

Chris Nelson Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer

Attention Friends andShareholders,

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111 Congress Ave, Suite 400, Austin, TX 78701 Ph: 512-236-1468www.spiritcube.com

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