Company Announcements

Picarro secured a $7 million round of Series D equity financing in July, led by Focus Ventures and joined by DAG Ventures, NTT Electronics and Mingxin China Growth Fund.

In October, Ocean Optics named COO Richard Pollard president.

Block Engineering named Griot Group as a US sales representative for the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountain region and Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.

Avacta and Pall Life Sciences extended in September their distribution agreement to India.

Advantest America opened an office in Princeton, New Jersey, in October.

In October, LI-COR Biosciences announced new distributors for its environmental research tools: Soldan, the exclusive distributor for South Korea; Lab Technology for Egypt; and RESTECH for Saudi Arabia.

Mut acquired in October a minority stake in RGB Lasersysteme, a provider of microspectrometers. Mut’s Avantes unit will distribute RGB products.

Product Introductions

Los Gatos Research launched the portable OCS Analyzer for the measurement of carbonyl sulfide in ambient air samples and the simultaneous measurement of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and water vapor over a wide range of mole fractions.

B&W Tek introduced two new Exemplar miniature spectrographs: the extremely compact Exemplar LS and the Exemplar Plus, featuring an increased focal length.

Centice launched a low cost, deep UV coded aperture Raman spectrometer in September for trace analysis of surface chemicals and contaminants. It utilizes a low cost discharge lamp for excitation of the surface area.

CRAIC Technologies added Raman capability to its 20/20 Perfect Vision microspectrophotometer.

Edinburgh Photonics launched the modular FLS980 fluorescence spectrometer for steady state, lifetime and phosphorescence measurements.

In October, TOPTICA Photonics released the new TeraFlash system for time domain terahertz spectroscopy, with a peak dynamic range of more than 70 dB.

Perten Instruments introduced the third-generation DA 7250 NIR instrument.

Bruker introduced in November a new line of IRIS tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy probes.

Sales/Orders of Note

FOSS announced in September the sale of 49 Infratec 1241 NIR grain analyzers to the Korean National Agricultural Products Quality Management Service. This follows the purchase of 70 instruments in 2011. The products are being used for new rice labeling regulations.