June 24, 2010, 7:06 am
From Julie Klein at VentureBeat:
Extreme Reach, a video advertising platform, has closed a $9 million second round of funding. The round, which was led by Village Ventures, included $7 million in equity and $2 million in term debt. Greycroft Partners and Long River Ventures also participated.
Based in Needham, Mass., Extreme Reach provides ad agencies, brand advertisers and media companies with a complete system for managing, delivering and tracking video ads. The company counts more than 12,500 media properties in its network and five of the largest American advertisers as clients. Read More »
June 24, 2010, 5:27 am
From Claire Cain Miller at Bits:
Some people post videos to YouTube and Facebook with the hope that they will go viral. But for many others, the idea of the whole world viewing a personal video is a nightmare.
VidMe, a new video site going live on Wednesday, is for the latter group. It lets people share videos privately with only a chosen group of friends; the videos cannot be forwarded or downloaded. Read More »
June 23, 2010, 3:11 pm
The billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn has been called a lot of things during his career of pressuring corporate boards and executives. On Wednesday, Sanjay Jha, the co-chief executive of Motorola, called Mr. Icahn “a force for good” at his company.
“Carl is seen as an agitator, but in this instance I think he’s agitated in the right ways,” Mr. Jha told Bloomberg News. “He’s pushed for us to think about our business in the right way from a balance sheet point of view, from a focus on businesses point of view.” Read More »
June 23, 2010, 7:01 am
Booz Allen Hamilton’s planned $300 million initial public offering, announced earlier this week, is good news for the Carlyle Group, which owns 80 percent of the firm, and the government contractor’s top executives, who own the rest.
But, The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein writes, taking Booz Allen public may be the company’s undoing. Read More »
June 23, 2010, 5:40 am
Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev visits Silicon Valley for the first time on Wednesday, eager to reinvent his country’s outmoded, oil-dependent economy — and lure talent and money from the high-tech capital, The Associated Press writes.
Two years into his presidency, the 44-year-old, tech-savvy Kremlin chief still lives in the shadow of his predecessor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, but that hasn’t stopped him from strenuously pursuing pet projects, the most grandiose of which is the creation of Russia’s own Silicon Valley outside Moscow. But to succeed, Mr. Medvedev knows he needs to attract some of the best minds and investors in the United States to a project that many Russian businessmen are already skeptical about. Read More »
June 23, 2010, 5:02 am
From Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat:
ReputationDefender, a Redwood City-based start-up aiming to help people manage their privacy and reputation in a world where more is being published and shared than ever before, raised $15 million in a third round of funding led by JAFCO Ventures.
Earlier investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers along with Bessemer Venture Partners tacked more funding as well. Read More »
June 22, 2010, 7:11 am
Opscode, the maker of the automated server infrastructure system Chef, has received $11 million in a second round of funding, VentureBeat reported.
The new round was led by Battery Ventures, with participation from previous backer Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The start-up raised $2.5 million in its first round.
Go to Article from VentureBeat »
Go to Press Release from Opscode »
June 22, 2010, 5:57 am
Telesp, the Brazilian phone company controlled by Spain’s Telefonica, has been offered around 30 billion reais ($17 billion) in financing to take over the wireless carrier Vivo, Reuters reported, citing a source with direct knowledge of the situation.
As many as five Brazilian banks offered the funds to Telesp after Telefonica said last month it would buy out Portugal Telecom’s stake in a joint venture that controls Vivo for $7.8 billion, the source told Reuters. A Telesp-Vivo merger could create the largest Brazilian telecommunications company. Read More »
June 22, 2010, 5:56 am
Rubicon Technology, the electronic materials provider, said Monday that its latest stock offering raised about $61.5 million after expenses.
The company sold about 2.2 million shares to the public at $30 each, The Associated Press reported. Selling stockholders offered another 834,000 shares, raising $23.7 million. Rubicon’s stock closed down $1.09, or 3.3 percent, at $31.82. The stock hit a 52-week high of $34.02 earlier in the day.
Go to Article from The Associated Press via The New York Times »
Go to Press Release from Rubicon »
June 22, 2010, 5:48 am
From Ashlee Vance at Bits:
Intel has reached a legal cease-fire with the Federal Trade Commission.
Late Monday afternoon, Intel issued a statement that said it would work on a possible settlement with the F.T.C. over a case filed last December. The commission’s complaint raised charges that Intel abused its position in the chip market and followed a string of similar complaints made by antitrust prosecutors worldwide. Read More »
June 22, 2010, 1:47 am
Update: Here’s a link to court filings from Elon Musk’s divorce proceeding. The documents were first reported on and uploaded to the Internet by VentureBeat last month before “going viral” by email around the West Coast. VentureBeat, a content partner of The New York Times, regularly follows Mr. Musk’s latest moves here.
“About four months ago, I ran out of cash,” Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and head of Tesla Motors, acknowledged in a divorce court filing that was widely circulated among the West Coast digital elite.
It was quite a revelation, one that laid bare an uncomfortable truth in the world of venture capital: high-tech entrepreneurs who look rich are often relatively cash-poor, at least next to their glittering images, The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in his latest DealBook column.
The revelations about Mr. Musk’s personal financial problems stunned many in the industry. Wall Street spent years courting him. The Energy Department had given Tesla $465 million in low-interest loans. The whispering among Mr. Musk’s detractors began almost immediately, Mr. Sorkin writes.
Read the column here, or after the jump. Read More »
June 21, 2010, 6:22 am
From The New York Times’s Anne Eisenberg, writing in her latest Novelties column:
Forget about desperate housewives. To witness true frustration, watch desperate PC users trying to type, send e-mail or work on a spreadsheet, only to be delayed by those pesky hourglass icons for seconds or even minutes until their computers finally respond.
Now Soluto, a company based in Tel Aviv, aims to help these PC owners with an unusual program intended to minimize irritating slowdowns. The software runs in the background on PCs, collecting data on delays in program responses and sending the information to company servers for analysis, said Tomer Dvir, a co-founder and the chief executive. Read More »
June 21, 2010, 2:15 am
Is this Silicon Valley or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?
Over the last 18 months or so, this question has become tougher to answer as a flood of products with names like Voldemort, Hadoop and Cassandra have appeared on the scene, Ashlee Vance reports in The New York Times.
They are part of a new wave of highly specialized technology — both software and hardware — built by and for Web titans like Facebook, Yahoo and Google to help them break data into bite-size chunks, and present their Web pages as quickly and cheaply as possible, even while grappling with increasing volumes of data. Facebook, for example, created Cassandra to store and search through all the messages in people’s in-boxes. Read More »
June 18, 2010, 6:29 am
Twitter is a hit in Japan, succeeding where other social networking imports like Facebook have foundered as millions ”mumble” — the translation of tweet — and give mini-blogging a distinctly Japanese flavor, The Associated Press reports.
The arrival of the Japanese language Twitter service in 2008 tapped into a greater sense of individuality in Japan, especially among younger people less accepting of the understatement and conformity their culture is usually associated with, analysts say. Read More »
June 18, 2010, 4:13 am
Facebook’s financial performance is stronger than previously believed, as the Internet social network’s explosive growth in users and advertisers boosted 2009 revenue to as much as $800 million, Reuters reported, citing two sources familiar with the situation.
The company also earned a solid net profit, in the tens of millions of dollars last year, one of the sources said. Read More »
