VentureBeat

Once a year venture capitalist Heidi Roizen and her husband Dave Mohler open up their Woodside villa to host the SD Forum’s Visionary Awards honoring pioneers of Silicon Valley. Each time I attend, I’m mesmerized by the estate and its furnishings, from the Moroccan guest house with its old rifle collection to the Tuscan villa architecture with its zany mix of animal head trophies.

Upon walking up the long driveway into the foyer of the mansion, I was greeted by Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad and met with some of the night’s honorees: tech writer Steven Levy (who just moved from Newsweek to Wired), Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, New Enterprise Associates general partner Forest Baskett, and Diane Greene, founder of VMware. They were the latest to join the Visionary list for the group, which promotes tech entrepreneurship in the valley and has given out the awards for 11 years now.

This was one of those events where the who’s who of Silicon Valley shows up, though gray hair was fashionable since the list included a lot of past visionaries. San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed told the crowd they were welcome to set up their innovative companies, particularly cleantech firms, in his town.

Baskett, former chief technology officer at the once-high-flying graphics supercomputer company Silicon Graphics and an ex-Stanford professor who played a big role in getting MIPS Computer Systems and Sun Microsystems off the ground, said he was as enthused as ever about tech in the valley. Cleantech is his latest investing obsession. Read the rest of this entry »

Publisher Conde Nast is acquiring the technology blog Ars Technica, TechCrunch has learned. The site will be placed under the Wired Digital umbrella which includes both Wired and Reddit, two previous Conde Nast technology purchases.

TechCrunch has all the major details including that the price is thought to be in the $25 million range (the same range Conde Nast paid for Wired in 2006), and that all of Ars Technica’s current employees, including founders Ken Fisher and John Stokes, will be transitioning over with the company.

Ars Technica is another large site to leave online advertising network Federated Media (VentureBeat uses Federated Media for some of its advertising). This comes shortly after Federated Media raised $50 million to expand its services for its publishers. Conde Nast will be in charge of the site’s ads going forward.

In full disclosure, I had a brush up with Ars Technica on my personal blog earlier this week. I feel the site has been using some questionable practices with regards to some of its stories. Some have agreed with me (both publicly and privately), while others disagreed. Ars has denied knowingly doing anything wrong. It will be interesting (at least to me) to see if there are any editorial processes and site policies that change as a result of this move.

Wired Digital, the SF company that owns Wired magazine and Wired News, has acquired Reddit.com, a news site that lets its users select and rank web content

The purchase price is unknown, suggesting it wasn’t for much, but the Boston start-up was founded only last year, and was built on a mere $100,000 in funding. It is a competitor to San Francisco’s Digg, though is the lesser known.

Wired’s parent company, Condé Nast, has used Reddit technology to launch a beta site, Lipstick.com, focused on celebrity news. The company said it hopes the Reddit acquisition will bolster Condé Nast’s presence online.

Reddit’s four founders, based in Boston, will relocate to San Francisco. They received $100,000 funding from seed investor Paul Graham’s group, Y Combinator.

The four founders of Reddit are Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz, and Chris Slowe. TechCrunch says the company averages 70,000 daily unique visitors.