Thor Muller
Recent Posts
How to Achieve Elegance
I interviewed Matt May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, about the topic of elegance. He says that the four qualities of elegance are: symmetry, seduction, subtraction, and sustainability. If you’re interested in creating elegant products and services, you’ll find it very interesting. Check out the interview here. Please mark it “found useful” if you did.
More on elegance and design at Design.alltop.
How to Build a Brand Community
Dave Balter, the founder of BzzAgent, provided me with ten tips for building a brand community. Check out his tips here if you’re trying to build an online community for your company. Please mark it “found useful” if you did.
More about social media at Socialmedia.alltop.
Quantum Secure, physical security infrastructure co., raises $4M (officially)
Quantum Secure, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of enterprise physical security solutions, said it has raised $4 million for its first round of funding. This is more than the $3.54 million we originally reported in Oct., before the company was able to make its official announcement.
Dunrath Capital and Crestline Investments co-led the deal, and were joined by seed backer NexGen Capital Ventures.
Sequoia reportedly invests in SF blog for women, Sugar Publishing
Michael Moritz (pictured below), venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital, and backer of Google and Yahoo, is apparently funding a blog company called Sugar Publishing, which runs four popular blogs, including flagship PopSugar, that caters to young, hip women.
The San Francisco start-up, which has a social networking component, says it is already getting 13 million monthly page views (or so it said in August), and 1.5 million unique visitors.
Rumor of the investment appeared here… Continue Reading
News Corp scores $900M from Google, a coup
Updated
Google will pay the parent of social networking company MySpace.com at least $900 million in shared advertising revenue over the next three and a half years, and become the exclusive search engine for the site.
This is significant because News Corp paid $580 million for Intermix Media, which owned MySpace, last year. This deal means that News Corp will have already gotten that much in revenue, and more, from the income its gets from Google. Then… Continue Reading
Shutterfly IPO filing perplexes
Shutterfly, the Redwood City online photo site, has filed for an initial public offering, something hinted at earlier this week — but its finances don’t look as good as we thought.
To pull off an IPO in this crowded area of online photography, you’d expect Shutterfly to be showing plenty of momentum. A host of growing and hungry competitors, from start-ups like Photobucket to more established players like HP’s Snapfish, appear to be doing well.
GoingOn v. PeopleAggregator: May the best man win!
Marc Canter
You may be confused by the launch plans of two very similar social networking services, PeopleAggregator and GoingOn, and it’s not your fault.
They are both platforms that let you create a personal profile and then export that profile to different areas on the Web. They also let you create networks, so if you’re a company you can create a network for your customer group, for example. You can also enter your profile from other… Continue Reading
Silicon Valley’s DFJ raises largest clean-tech venture fund
Venture capital firm DFJ Element has raised a record-sized fund for investing in green technology companies, the latest sign that this area is red-hot.
The fund, an affiliate of well-known Silicon Valley firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, raised $284 million, almost double the target of $150 million it set last year — in part because of the keen interest by investors.
The firm has offices in Menlo Park and in Pennsylvania, and is run by two partners in… Continue Reading
Sequoia bets on Stardoll, a site for little girls
Stardoll, a site where young girls can create and dress up celebrity dolls of themselves or others, is not your classic Silicon Valley high-tech sort of investment.
Yet Sequoia has invested $6 million in the Stokholm company, Stardoll told us yesterday. It is the latest example of how Sequoia is betting on niche consumer Web sites that don’t show any particularly amazing technology, but where their innovation is in market execution; they just do one thing… Continue Reading
Amid photo-sharing hype, Shutterfly makes IPO move?
Shutterfly, the online photo site based in Silicon Valley (Redwood City) is pursuing a sale or possible initial public offering, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing sources — in a deal targeted at $400 million to $500 million.
It is about time, as this venture-backed company has been profitable for three years, Jeff Housenbold told us in a conversation a few months ago (the WSJ estimates profits are at $20 million, which is good stuff for… Continue Reading
VideoEgg opens service to most publishers
VideoEgg continues to make strides with its web video publishing service. The company is releasing an integration kit tomorrow that will make it easy for web site owners to add VideoEgg’s video publisher and player into their sites. This will make it easy for publishers to begin accepting video submissions from people – without the associated storage and bandwidth costs, since the video files live on VideoEgg’s servers.
Until now, people could only use VideoEgg, which… Continue Reading