VentureBeat

updated

Four venture capital personnel moves:

Robert Theis, a venture capitalist who left Silicon Valley firm DCM last year after serving for eight years, has joined Scale Venture Partners, also in Silicon Valley, as managing director. Thies will focus on investment in “technology infrastructure and applications.” At DCM, Theis invested in companies PGP, Roamware, NeoPath (acquired by Cisco) and the now-public VanceInfo. We’re not certain why things didn’t work out at DCM (all sides say something different), but it’s true that DCM has focused more on investments in Asia of late, and a refitting was needed. Previously, Theis was an executive at New Era of Networks (NEON), and before that spent a decade at Sun Microsystems.

Erika Brown, a long-time reporter at Forbes covering venture capital, is leaving to join venture capital firm Matrix Partners‘ office in Silicon Valley, where she will be director of marketing and business development (see her Facebook message). She told me she’ll serve the firm in a number of roles, for example helping market portfolio companies, but also providing research on what companies to invest in, including due diligence. Brown, you’ll recall, is the reporter who puts together the Forbes Midas list of the top 100 investors (see most recent Midas List). Now the question is, who takes over her role? Who will draw the ire of the VCs who are left of the list, those who complained so vociferously each year to Brown.

Separately, Bob Lisbonne, a partner at Matrix, who was a key product manager during Netscape’s early days, is leaving the firm. Too bad to see one of the more geek-friendly VCs leaving the field. He’s known to still code occasionally. Among Lisbonne’s board positions are Blue Lane Technologies, Consera Software (acquired by Hewlett-Packard), Euclid Media, LucidEra, PostPath, Renkoo, TeaLeaf Technology and Xign. In a statement, he said: I intend to explore some new ideas, have fun writing software, and ultimately pursue one or more entrepreneurial endeavors. I’ll continue to work out of my office at Matrix, so all my contact info remains the same.

Christopher “Woody” Marshall, has left Trident Capital to joined Technology Crossover Ventures as a general partner in Palo Alto, Calif. Among the investments he managed at Trident were AccountNow, Advanced Payment Solutions, Bytemobile Inc., Merchant e-Solutions, MapQuest, SideStep and Xata. TCV is investing a huge $3 billion fund, raised last year.

Update: This just in, courtesy of PEHub: Cynthia Ringo has left VantagePoint Venture Partners, and is partner at JP Morgan spinout DBL Investors , which is raising its second fund. This becomes her third VC gig. Ringo has moved around a lot. Previously, she was CEO of CopperCoom. She led the failed Pluris. She was also executive at Madge Networks and Red Brick Systems. Before VantagePoint, she was at BluePrint Ventures.

Renkoo, a Redwood City start-up that has worked in secrecy for a year on a more interactive version of Evite’s event service, has launched.

Evite is the big player in this industry. Renkoo pitches itself as “Evite done right,” seeking to incorporate Web 2.0 features. It has been testing its product with a select group of users for months. Several other start-ups are in the invitation/event management race, including the trio in San Francisco: Skobee, Socializr and Timebridge, all at various levels of testing and development.

Renkoo, though, has taken the technology high-ground. The service lets you correspond with people in real time while arranging events, using an advanced AJAX technology called Comet. You register at the homepage, and then you can invite people (if they are not a member, they get an invite) and chat with them live as if you are in an instant messenger box. The experience is best at Renkoo’s web site, but users can communicate via Renkoo’s site itself, email, SMS or AIM, whatever they prefer. I tried it out. I had a firewall problem at the site, so used email (I did this by by going to the profile tab, selecting advanced notification preferences, and selecting “Deliver event responses to HTML email”).

The technology part is remarkable. I used Renkoo to arrange a meeting with Renkoo co-founders Joyce Park and Adam Rifkin at Prolific Oven at Palo Alto. I typed into a message box within my email, and didn’t need to go up and hit “send.” I simply hit the “respond to this invitation” tab below the message box, and Joyce and Rifkin got my messages immediately on their screen. See screenshots at bottom below (the first is of my side, using email, and the second is Joyce’s side, where she is using the Renkoo site).

After you’ve finished arranging an event, you can export it to your calendar in Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar.

As with trying out any new technology, Renkoo may take getting accustomed to. Little things, like getting in the habit of typing within the separate message box within email. Easy to do, but unexpected at first. Depending on your computer settings, including firewall, you may or may not get off to a quick start. Renkoo will be tinkering with its product going forward, and I’d like to see an easier way to see the full conversation chain through email instead of just the most recent response.

Finally, a word on Renkoo’s technology and backing: Joyce is a former lead engineer at Friendster, and a prolific coder. CEO Adam Rifkin was founder of KnowNow. Renkoo won $3 million in venture backing from big-name venture firm Matrix Partners. Matrix partner Bob Lisbonne was the VP of browser products while at Netscape. Joyce said she was impressed when he mentioned he can code in Ruby. He was also behind the move by Netscape to opensource the Mozilla browser. When she and Rifkin talked with investors, she was surprised, she said, by how few investors wanted to discuss the technology itself. Lisbonne was one of the few who did, she said.

Renkoo is a “Comet” application, which is an advancement on AJAX. It is one of three Comet commercial applications in existence, and notably, two of them are built by women (the other two are Meebo, built by Elaine Wherry, and Gtalk). You’re familiar with AJAX, popularized by Google Maps. You can scroll across those maps immediately, because the application has quietly fetched more data from Google’s server and updated your browser. Comet goes one step further, opening a persistent connection with the server as long as you stay on one page. There is a good description of Comet here.

Renkoo was built using the Dojo toolkit, backed by IBM, AOL and Sun. Other kits are Prototype and Yui.

Here is a partial screenshot of the email interface:

Here is a screenshot of the browser interface: