Michael Bazeley
Recent Posts
Do you code?
We interrupt this news blog…The Mercury News is looking for a programmer/web developer who can do ongoing, periodic contract work with us, everything from quickie jobs to more involved projects. The right person is familiar with XML and the usual LAMP stuff – ie: MySQL, PHP and, in this case, Python. Bonus points if they’re familiar with Django and WordPress. We’d prefer someone in the SF Bay Area. There’s a chance it could turn into… Continue Reading
HuffingtonPost.com raises $5 million, but East Coast money
Updated
HuffingtonPost.com, the online news site and group blog focused on politics, just announced that it has raised a $5 million round led by venture capital firm SoftBank Capital. East Coast’s Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners also invested in the round.
The media landscape is changing by the minute. Unlike business and tech, which is drawing interest by West Coast firms like Elevation, the politics stuff is attracting the East Coast folks, which makes sense.
We have no idea… Continue Reading
Elevation, Bono grab ownership stake in Forbes
By NYT
Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private equity firm run by industry Roger McNamee and U2’s Bono, among others, has acquired a minority position in Forbes Media LLC, publisher of Forbes magazine, the New York Times reported.
Forbes Media includes Forbes.com and other business media properties. No financial terms were disclosed, but the NYT reported “some people said that the deal gave Elevation a stake of more than 40 percent at a cost of $250 million… Continue Reading
AOL responds to data leak. They screwed up.
John Battelle has gotten an early response from AOL about the data leak that we posted about early yesterday. Here’s the summary:
This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.
Although there was no personally-identifiable… Continue Reading
Google’s grab for videos
Google Video is now paying MTV’s parent, Viacom, for video content, according to this AP story. This is significant because Google is the biggest online advertising network, and if you follow the logic, it will therefore most likely to be able to “monetize” these videos. If so, would this spill over to the masses of other amateurs, where Google would steal them from upstarts like YouTube with the promise that Google may help them make… Continue Reading
Watch out for low flying pigeons in Silicon Valley
Gotta love this place, Silicon Valley. The latest is a flock of pigeons, outfitted with designer cell phone backpacks, taking to the sky over the region this week.
They’ll be equipped with sensors that collect pollution data, which will be related to a blog at www.pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net. The flights occur at 6:30pm. Tuesday and Saturday.
At least we hope they’ll fly. We’re sure they’ve been tested out, but we’re looking at the size of the backpack (click on image… Continue Reading
The Business Week article on Digg, continued
We got an email from an old gym friend. Our schedules have varied, and we haven’t seen each other for months.
He wanted to get back in touch, he told us, because he’d just read Business Week’s story on Digg: “…the story on Kevin Rose and it is inspiring me to think about my project again. I have thought of it before, but because it has been so hard for me to find the right job… Continue Reading
Top VC firm Sequoia adds another partner, Chris Olsen
Sequoia Capital, Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firm, has quietly added another partner, Chris Olsen. He jumps there from Technology Crossover Ventures.
At TCV, he focused on investments in financial and other companies, serving on the boards of eBags, Oak Pacific Interactive Corp, Whitepages.com, and Claria, the controversial ad network company-turned-homepage-organizer. Chris will now focus on “software and services,” according to his Sequoia profile.
The VC bidding wars, and how SolFocus more than doubled its money
SolFocus is a start-up in Palo Alto developing technology that uses mirrors to concentrate the sun on solar cells, effectively squeezing more energy out of less silicon. Below is an account of the bidding war at SolFocus. It is part of a larger story about clean-tech investing in the Mercury News this morning:
If you see this (Valleywag) guy, run!
by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid
Here’s the Mercury News story on Valleywag author, Nick Douglas.
When news broke that Nick Douglas, a.k.a. the writer behind the online gossip site Valleywag, was mugged last month in downtown San Francisco, it struck some as fitting.
“The muggers got to him first,” joked Marc Canter, an entrepreneur and frequent victim of Valleywag’s acerbic wit. “His whole body demeanor asks to be punched.”…
He’s becoming known simply as “the Punk,” and to be profiled… Continue Reading
AOL Research exposes data; we’ve got a little sick feeling
(AOL has responded, saying they screwed up, and have taken the data down. More at update here).
Here are some excerpts from a post from Adam D’Angelo, over at CalTech, about AOL Research’s efforts to engage with the research community. Does anyone else think they’ve gone over the line with this?
AOL just released the logs of all searches done by 500,000 of their users over the course of three months earlier this year. That means that… Continue Reading
Roundup: The elitist Facebook copycat, NEA climbs wave to Bangalore, InFreeDA belly up?
An elitist Facebook look-alike launches — Hmmm, this new company, called Top20Network.com is only for Harvard, Princeton, Yale, U. of Pennsylvania, Duke, MIT, Stanford, Cal. Tech., Columbia, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Wash. U., Brown, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, U. of Chicago, Rice, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, and Emory. Keeps out riff-raff.
Here’s the release which floated in yesterday. The site locked us out, because we’re not a student at one of those schools. Interesting logo: A tall building with what looks… Continue Reading
Silicon Valley ad veterans launch start-up, Adify; raise $8million
Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. So it is with Larry Braitman and Richard Thompson, the guys who formed Flycast Communications a decade ago, to create an online advertising network that served smaller Web sites. It enjoyed a $500 million IPO and then, in the frothy year of 1999, was acquired by CMGI for $2.3 billion.
They are trying it again with a new start-up, Adify, and are looking to aggressively undercut rivals.
Braitman
Flycast had created… Continue Reading
Woz drives to South Pole in a Hummer
Wozniak
Eric Savitz, of Barrons has a precious piece about Woz, who confided his summer plans to Savitz at the recent AlwaysOn conference.
The Woz said he plans to drive to the South Pole in a Hummer in 2007. He said that in passing, and it seemed so absurd that I had to find out more. So after his talk, I went up and asked. Woz explained that he was participating in an expedition planned for December… Continue Reading
Kapor starts new Foxmarks: cross between Google & Wikipedia
Mitch Kapor, co-founder of Lotus 1-2-3 and more recently of the personal info manager product Chandler, has started a new search start-up, called Foxmarks (no Web site yet).
Mitch says merely that it will intersect search and social production — think cross between Google and Wikipedia. Co-founder is Todd Agulnick.
Kapor
Not much else is known, but Richard MacManus has the full scoop plus links to Mitch’s blog post about it.
Evernote raises $6 million to save all kinds of notes
EverNote, a Sunnyvale start-up that wants to let you save all aspects of your online and offline life, has raised $6 million from individuals, the company told us yesterday.
There’s increasing competition in this sector. So it wants to differ from the others by offering the kitchen sink, letting you save everything that goes on around you and to have it everywhere you go. By letting you save photo-shots, but also web pages, it wants to… Continue Reading
Secretive hydrogen fuel company, Ion America , raises $103M
Ion America, the secretive Silicon Valley (Moffett Field) start-up apparently developing a fuel cell to produce hydrogen and electricity to power cars and trucks, has raised $103 million in its latest equity financing, its fourth round.
That is a lot of money, and we are not surprised, because the hand of Silicon Valley firm New Enterprise Associates is behind this one — and the firm, fresh from raising one of the largest venture funds ever, is… Continue Reading
BusinessWeek on Digg: Crash, Sizzle, Pop!
Updated
Here’s an entertaining, if bubbly story about the Digg guy Kevin Rose and how he embodies the new Silicon Valley elite:
…Rose had given every last piece of himself to the project — all his time, all his cash, and even his girlfriend, who fought with him after he poured his savings into Digg instead of a downpayment on a house. Today, Digg, Version 3, the one that would go beyond tech news to include politics,… Continue Reading
Meebome may do fine without eBay
Meebo is reporting that about 7,500 Meebome instant messaging widgets were created within twelve hours of being launched yesterday. An unrelenting barrage of people hit our site yesterday and chatted with us via our Meebome button. Peoples’ overwhelming response was one word: “Cool!”
So cool, perhaps, that “Meebome” looked to eBay more like an “amoeba,” the fast-growing penetrative parasite that takes over large bodies. Thus the Meebome on eBay has been taken down.
Skyrider gets $8M to launch new sort of search engine: of peer-to-peer
Skyrider, a Mountain View start-up, is developing technology that will be able to search peer-to-peer traffic, in order to help media and other companies become more profitable.
The two-year old company has raised $8 million from Silicon Valley’s top VC firm Sequoia Capital, along with Charles River Ventures. The company’s product will be announced in fall, the company told us last night. (Here is their release.)