VentureBeat

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,… 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… 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…. 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… 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…. 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…. 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… 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,… Continue Reading

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… Continue Reading

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,”… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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…. Continue Reading

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… 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… 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… 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,… Continue Reading

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… Continue Reading