The midfielder becomes the second Chelsea player to be urged to move to the Parc des Princes after Yohan Cabaye revealed his admiration for winger Eden Hazard
The Stamford Bridge outfit take on PSG in the quarter-finals of the Champions League, with the first leg in Paris on Wednesday, and former Sao Paulo man Lucas has singled out Oscar as a player he would love to line up alongside next season.
"Oscar is a very good player. A rare talent in today's football, given his qualities. He is very complete and is very smart. We need someone like him at PSG," the Brazilian is quoted as saying by The Daily Telegraph.
"I think he would help us a lot. The more quality players there are, the better it is for the squad. Also, he's a very good friend of mine. I would be very happy if he came to PSG, the club too."
"Eden Hazard is the Chelsea player. He can make the difference at any time, can be dangerous every time he touches the ball," the France international told PMU.
"Who would I recruit if I was the sporting director? Hazard is a player I would like to see at PSG. It would do so much good in Paris and for the championship. He is one of the best players I’ve played against."
The former Manchester United man hit out at the Gunners' record against their title rivals, insisting the north London outfit are "a million miles" away from winning the league
Arsene Wenger has hit out at Paul Scholes' assessment that Arsenal are "a million miles" away from winning the Premier League.
The former Manchester United man, while acting as a pundit for Sky Sports, criticised the Gunners' poor showings against their title rivals, adding: "[Arsenall] go to Chelsea, to Liverpool, to [Manchester] City and they just do nothing."
Arsenal have drifted from contention in recent weeks following a 6-0 defeat to Chelsea and a 2-2 with Swansea City - but Wenger dismissed the remarks ahead of Saturday's clash with Manchester City.
"People who have managed zero games have opinions. We have to accept that," he told reporters.
"If six points is a 'million miles away', I don't know what the translation of a mile into a point is."
Scholes also hit out at the progression of Jack Wilshere, insisting he has not improved since coming to the fore at the age of 17, but Wenger pointed out the youngster's multiple fitness setbacks over the years.
He added: "Jack has been handicapped by many injuries, but once he is back and playing consistently he will show everybody that [Scholes] is wrong about that.
"He is an exceptional player - and Scholes knows that."
The Swansea result left Arsenal six points clear of fifth-placed Everton, who have a game in hand, and prompted Wenger to admit he is looking over his shoulder at Roberto Martinez's men.
"There is no other priority other than coming first - that is still our target," he said. "If people say Everton can catch us then we can catch the teams above us.
"The mood is of course disappointed but we want to prepare for the next game. We gave everything against Swansea. "We want to focus on our own strengths and we need to have a top defensive performance."
Arsenal host City on Saturday and will be keen to banish memories of a 6-3 defeat in the reverse fixture, although Wenger believes there are positives to be drawn from that performance.
"There's plenty of positives to take from the game at the Etihad," he said. "But of course we must defend better. We haven't started the big games on the front foot and we want to change that.
"We were 17 or 18 times top of the league this season. We need to continue to work well, we have been unlucky with injuries.
The Nerazzurri boss says his side would be higher up the Serie A standings if they'd had more luck in front of goal
Walter Mazzarri has admitted that he is looking forward to putting a "peculiar" first season in charge of Interfirmly behind him.
After a dismal ninth-placed finish under Andrea Stramaccioni last term, the Nerazzurri are currently fifth in Serie and thus on course to return to continental competition via the Europa League.
However, Mazzarri claims that Inter would be higher up the standings had 'Lady Luck' not deserted his side so often, citing Sunday's 2-1 loss to Atalanta and Thursday's 0-0 draw with Udinese as two obvious cases in point.
"This has been a peculiar year," he told Sky Sport Italia. "In light of these last two games, we deserve more points than we have.
"It may be that we are not cynical enough; I don't know. I believe, however, that by continuing on this path we will be able to move forward in the best fashion.
"This year it's important to grow, everyone. In June, we will make some decisions based on the expectations of the club. I have already spoken of my ideas.
"Then we will start my second year in charge in a determined fashion; in the best way."
Addressing the Udinese stalemate at San Siro, Mazzarri felt that Inter had once again paid the price for their profligacy.
"The ball wouldn't go in but we created so many chances to score a goal," he lamented.
"I didn't enjoy the first half; Udinese were very organised. But in the second half, from the hour mark on, we could have scored two or three goals but the ball would not go in.
"We created chance after chance. But we needed one to go in. There's nothing else to say. We just have to pick up as many points as possible now and look forward."
Mino Raiola insists the Frenchman will consider offers from other clubs as well as a potential new deal in Turin - but only after the showpiece in South America
Juventus midfielder Paul Pogba will not make a decision on his future until after the World Cup, according to his agent Mino Raiola.
Pogba has enjoyed a superb season with the Bianconeri, notching eight goals in all competitions having firmly established his place in Antonio Conte's first-choice midfield alongside Andrea Pirlo and Arturo Vidal.
Paris Saint-Germain have long been linked with a big-money move for the 21-year-old, while Real Madrid have also been credited with an interest, but Raiola has made it clear Pogba's future will not be settled until after France's campaign in Brazil this summer.
"My priority is always the same: to look after the players I represent," Raiola was quoted as saying byTuttosport.
"Between now and the World Cup, nothing will happen. Everything you speak of - a renewal or a possible transfer - will be carefully assessed, but only after Brazil.
"Pogba is happy with Juve, just as Juve are glad to have Pogba. He still has a contract in Turin until 2016. There is no rush, no urgency. For now, Pogba will not go.
"I say for now he will not go, because if one day a crazy offer for him comes in, we would assess it together.
"We will evaluate everything after the World Cup: any offers from other clubs, as well as proposals to renew his contract at Juventus. Everything is postponed, as Juventus know. I repeat: there are no problems of any kind."
Raiola was eager to stress that Pogba's sole focus is on securing silverware this season, both in Serie A and in the Europa League.
"At this moment, the boy is thinking about playing, about winning the Scudetto and the Europa League," the agent added.
"Pogba is bursting with motivation. He wants to win everything with Juventus, here at the end of the season, and then go to the World Cup with France - an amazing achievement for a phenomenal guy who only a year ago won the World Under-20 championship."
SAN FRANCISCO--Robots and drones and satellites, oh my.
A new $20 million fund aimed at hardware startups is the latest sign that Silicon Valley investors are increasingly looking beyond software.
Lemnos Lab, a two-year-old early stage venture capital firm with three portfolio companies having already reached Series A funding said today its new fund will be aimed at hardware companies, especially those developing products in the aerospace, robotics, connected devices, transportation, and agriculture fields.
Founded by two 29-year-old MIT graduates, Jeremy Conrad and Helen Zelman Boniske, Lemnos Labs runs an incubator in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood. There, it provides its portfolio companies with office space, equipment, and access both to other hardware startups and frequent industry visitors.
Though the firm won't identify the institutional investors who raised the $20 million for the fund, it's clear there are a number of factors that inspired their investments. For one, Lemnos has already demonstrated a track record for success. Out of its previous, $1.85 million fund, its ten portfolio companies have raised a total of $35 million, with three raising Series A rounds.
In addition, Lemnos' focus areas are already proving to be in very lucrative markets, suggesting a higher likelihood of profitable exits for the investors. For example, Google has recently purchased eight robotics companies. And while it's not clear how much the search giant paid for those companies -- including Boston Dynamics -- it's thought to be well into nine figures or higher. Similarly, 194 aerospace startups tracked by AngelList have an average valuation of $5.1 million.
According to Conrad, Lemnos invests an initial $100,000 in each of its portfolio companies, in return for a 10 percent stake. In some cases, he said, Lemnos may raise the investment to $250,000. Each portfolio company is asked to spend between a year and 18 months working inside Lemnos' Dogpatch warehouse, a period the firm believes is crucial to the cycle of a startup's development.
All told, Conrad said, Lemnos plans on making between eight and 12 investments per year, and its goal is that half of them to reach Series A funding.
Over the last couple of years, a major narrative in Silicon Valley has been the so-called Series A crunch, a dynamic that has made it harder for post-seed stage startups to raise the $5 million or $10 million they need to survive. But Conrad said that hardware has been immune to such a crunch. In part, he said, that has been driven by the huge exits by companies like Nest -- which was purchased by Google for $3.2 billion. Facebook's announcement yesterday that it has purchased Oculus VR for $2 billion will only fuel the hardware investment fire.
Lemnos, of course, is not the only hardware incubator. Others, like Level 2 and HAXLR8R, are also putting money into the space. But Lemnos hopes that it can stand apart by building a community around its portfolio companies. Each becomes part of a growing network that Conrad and Zelman Boniske are fostering, helped along by the regular help and mentorship of industry leaders who visit Lemnos' offices.
In fact, Conrad said, much of Lemnos' deal flow is coming to the firm from VCs who aren't ready to fund early-stage companies. In turn, Lemnos sends its successes to the larger VCs when they're ready, he said.
Among Lemnos' companies are Airware, which created a development platform for drones, 6Sensor Labs, which is developing devices to help people test their food for gluten and other ingredients, and Compology, which has built a system to help cities better manage waste collection.
Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie at Box Dev 2014.Nick Statt/CNET
SAN FRANCISCO -- On the heels of its IPO announcement earlier this week, cloud storage and collaboration company Box announced its first standalone service, document app Box View, alongside a series of new platform features at its first ever Box Dev conference at the Fort Mason Center here Wednesday.
Box View is in essence a way to convert any PDF or Microsoft Office document into an embeddable HTML5 file that can be shared anywhere.
"For the first time, you can take a Box API and extend it to your app even if you're not storing that data in Box," CEO Aaron Levie said.
Box ViewBox Inc.
Developers can also build on top of Box View, creating custom document viewers for Web and mobile. To facilitate that, Box is also open sourcing aspects of View, releasing on GitHub viewer.js that allows the construction of custom animations and analytic tools for custom documents.
The service will be have a free standard tier allowing 1,000 document conversions a month. For $250 a month, businesses can use a custom viewer for up to 2,500 document conversions, while a custom pricing plan can be negotiated for large enterprise customers for more than 10,000 document conversions.
Box also opened up Metadata, its developer tool for attaching customizable data to stored files, unveiled at BoxWorks 2013, from a private beta to an open access one available to all developers.
In between the healthy amount of platform and service announcements, Levie made sure to inject his infamous off-the-cuff humor and snarky asides while scoping out the horizon of the cloud market to the crowd stacked at the far end of the waterside Fort Mason warehouse.
To the sound of Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball" -- yes, really -- the often tongue-in-cheek 29-year-old CEO initially took the stage to kickoff the keynote and draw a remarkably big picture narrative about future of the cloud market.
"We are at the center of the greatest shift in business that has ever occurred," Levie said. "Every job is becoming software-enabled, every industry digitized." That was, however, after Levie showcased an early photo of the Box team -- Levie with flowing curls -- alongside a chart illustrating the inverse relationship between one's hair size to sales, finishing it off with a photo of Steve Ballmer.
On the subject of figures, Box announced that its platform now has 35,000 developers, with more than 1,000 partners in its OneCloud mobile app ecosystem. Over the last year, the company says its third-party usage increased by 292 percent.
Its IPO is slated for next month on the New York York Stock Exchange, with Box seeking to raise $250 million at a valuation likely far higher than the $2 billion amount quoted late last year in the company's final round of funding. Share pricing details are currently pending.
Amazon Web Services said it met the Department of Defense's security requirements in all regions in the US.
Specifically, AWS regions such as its AWS GovCloud, received a Department of Defense authorization for its cloud security level 1-2.
Simply put, AWS has shown that it can meet the DoD's security and compliance requirements, and that means more agencies can become customers (AWS has more then 600 government agencies in the fold but can expand its wallet share). The DoD's security authorization means it will be easier to move workloads to AWS.
With the DoD security and compliance blessing, AWS is now listed in the department's cloud service broker catalog.
AWS' compute; storage; virtual private cloud; elastic block store; and identity and access management services are covered under the DoD authorization.
