Some Texas Optimism for Tech Startups (3)
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Stacey Higginbotham (171)
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7 hours, 36 minutes
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I live in Texas, where during the tech bubble folks were walking around saying that it was nothing compared to the real estate crisis of the late 80s. So now seemed like a good time to chat with Austin Ventures, which has been investing in the state since 1979 and announced two funds worth a total of $900 million in September, a few days after the markets started to collapse. I spoke with general partner ...
Obama Campaigning on Xbox 360? (4)
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Wagner James Au (49)
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17 hours, 6 minutes
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This is either a brilliant Photoshop job, some canny viral political campaigning, or both: An Xbox 360 gamer playing Burnout Paradise spotted an Obama campaign billboard with a “Paid for by Obama for President” caption as he whizzed by in his turbocharged sports car, Game Politics is reporting. The site was unable to confirm the ad’s authenticity with Burnout publisher Electronic Arts; I’ve left messages with both EA and the Obama campaign and will update ...
Venture Firms Pull Back, But Not for Long (2)
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Stacey Higginbotham (171)
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1 day, 14 hours
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Venture firms are sounding the alarm over what this current downturn might mean for their portfolio companies — and it’s not pretty. While it’s true that great companies are built during downturns, it’s also true that plenty of entrepreneurs are going to be shut out of any sort of financing for the foreseeable future, all as their personal wealth dwindles and banks decline to offer home equity loans or other lines of credit. We’ve already ...
Ericsson Unveils Wind-Powered Cell Tower (2)
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Craig Rubens (32)
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1 day, 19 hours
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Telecommunications provider Ericsson is putting some wind power into its network with a new radio communications tower unveiled today. The Swedish telecom partnered with turbine maker Vertical Wind AB and Uppsala University to incorporate a vertical-axis wind turbine into the tower that houses radio base stations and antennas. The tower is now undergoing trials to see if the design will enable low-cost mobile communications to spread throughout remote regions with minimal environmental impact. The rig ...
Amazon Cuts Prices on S3 (3)
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Om Malik (393)
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2 days
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Amazon announced today that it will cut prices for its Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) offering on Nov. 1. The company is essentially offering people who use more storage significant volume discounts. For folks using up to 50 terabytes of storage, the price cuts don’t make much of a difference. In the U.S. they pay 15 cents per gigabyte; in Europe, 18 cents. If you go above 50 terabytes, the price declines by a penny ...
What You Can Learn from Sequoia Capital’s Doomsday Plans. - GigaOM (7)
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Om Malik (393)
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2 days, 1 hour
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Updated with the Sequoia powerpoint: Last night I reported on a special meeting held by Sequoia Capital for its portfolio companies, warning them about the fiscal hurricane that was going to hit them, and how they’d better figure out ways to survive what could be a big downturn. There were some gaps in the details about that meeting, but I have since been able to piece together the minutes and what folks there essentially said. ...
Venture Investment Likely to Fall Short in 2008 (3)
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Stacey Higginbotham (171)
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2 days, 15 hours
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In the last few days, venture firms have begun to realize they are not immune from the credit crunch. At the end of next week, official data will arrive that will likely bear that out. Judging by early numbers indicating $5.71 billion went into startups from July through September, the third-quarter venture capital data gathered by Thomson Reuters for PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association is likely to show a drop of of about ...
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Devlin D said:
Oh to be a tech startup in 2000 :)
Aluminum: Canary in the Tech Mine (4)
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Om Malik (393)
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2 days, 16 hours
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Many of us who live in Silicon Valley pay no heed to decidedly unsexy materials such as aluminum. Of course, they’ve long been integral to our economy — just look at the world’s largest aluminum company, Alcoa. It turned 120 years old on Oct. 1. A week later, however, the Pittsburgh-based company slashed its growth forecast and suspended its stock repurchasing program, battening down the hatches as the global credit crunch continues to hurt demand. ...
Sequoia Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley Is in Trouble - GigaOM (23)
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Om Malik (393)
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2 days, 19 hours
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Sequoia Capital, arguably the smartest venture capital investor in business, is sounding the alarm and asking its portfolio companies to buckle down for what could be the worst economic downturn of their relatively short lives. The fund organized a meeting yesterday where it invited entreprenuers/CEOs from its portfolio companies. The attendees were greeted by a cute image of a Grave Stone, with a message: R.I.P.: Good Times, my sources tell me. I was able to ...
Google’s Best Energy Bet: Organizing Energy Usage (6)
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Katie Fehrenbacher (60)
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3 days, 3 hours
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Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information — be it via search, email, online maps or mobile apps — but it could someday help you manage your daily energy consumption, too. At a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that as part of its recently announced collaboration with GE, the search engine giant is currently looking at designing tools to help consumers understand their energy ...
Sprint’s Xohm Network is Only Half Open (1)
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Stacey Higginbotham (171)
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3 days, 4 hours
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Today marks the formal launch of Sprint’s Xohm network, and celebrants are gathered in Baltimore to show off their new WiMAX-enabled gadgets. But after chatting with an executive from Lenovo, I wonder just how open Sprint’s network will be, and how that lack of true openness might slow the adoption of WiMAX. Lenovo is on hand showing of its five laptops designed for Sprint’s WiMAX network, including the super-sleek x300 that competes with the MacBook ...
Google Launches AdSense For Games (4)
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Om Malik (393)
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3 days, 13 hours
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Almost a year after we first reported about Google’s desire to bring AdSense to online games and ultimately dominating the game-related advertising business, the company today announced AdSense for games. We had thought that the advertising for games would go live in November 2007, but apparently even Google can’t move fast. Google first started talking about AdSense for Games at industry events last summer. Google has roped in game developers and publishers including Konami, Playfish, ...
Lijit Launches Publisher Ad Network (4)
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Om Malik (393)
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3 days, 15 hours
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Lijit, a two-year-old startup based in Boulder, Colo., today launched the beta version of its publisher advertising network, which will allow the company to sell contextual advertising against search conducted on blogs that use Lijit???s white-label search solution. In the future the company says it will allow publishers ??? mostly bloggers ??? to sell their own keyword-based contextual ads against their search results using Lijit ad-serving technology. Todd Vernon, CEO of the company, talked about ...
Broadband Bill Needs Signature and Funding (1)
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Stacey Higginbotham (171)
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3 days, 20 hours
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The recent bill dedicated to improving the nation’s broadband profile has passed the Senate — albeit with a few changes to render it less problematic for telecom companies. The modified version of the Broadband Data Improvement Act that is now before President Bush is aimed at gathering better data on actual broadband speeds offered to citizens, but is pretty weak when it comes to gathering detailed competition and broadband penetration data. The final version of ...
Why Digg Should Buy StumbleUpon (9)
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Om Malik (393)
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3 days, 21 hours
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From left: StumbleUpon Backers Brad O'Neill and Ron Conway with founder Garrett Camp. (Photo: Om Malik.) Over the past few weeks, speculation has surfaced that StumbleUpon, a social media utility that was acquired by eBay in April 2007 for around $75 million, was back on the market. But as TechCrunch, which first reported the story citing an unnamed source “with knowledge of the sale process,” noted late last week, eBay isn’t willing to lose money ...
Wholesale Internet Bandwidth Prices Keep Falling (6)
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Om Malik (393)
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4 days, 6 hours
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Sure it’s not like back in the early 2000s, when those crooks from Enron were driving the prices of bandwidth down into the ground, but even today prices on Internet bandwidth continue to fall. If you are a consumer, however, there’s a good chance you’re wondering what I’m talking about — after all, broadband service providers like Comcast and Time Warner are talking about putting the meter on the bandwidth they serve up to residential ...
Melodis Raises $7M for Midomi iPhone App (1)
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Liz Gannes (124)
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4 days, 19 hours
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In the same way that mobile access to Wikipedia has transformed stupid arguments, mobile song recognition apps are truly neat when you need to name that tune. While they’ve been around for a while (though they didn’t always work so well and sometimes they cost money), the interface of the iPhone and the prominence of Apple’s App Store has given them a big boost. Today, Shazam (where you can hold your phone up to a ...
Enomaly: An Open Source Cloud For the Enterprise (3)
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Stacey Higginbotham (171)
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5 days, 5 hours
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Enomaly is trying to sell big business on its open-source cloud management and provisioning software by renaming it and packaging it with enterprise-level support, a model popularized by Red Hat. The software, formerly known as Enomalism, will now use the Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform as its new moniker. The software sits between the servers and applications, allocating virtual resources to programs when they need them. Others offering similar management software include RightScale, Elastra and 3Tera. ...
We Have Completed $4.5 Million in New Funding (15)
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Om Malik (393)
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5 days, 5 hours
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From time to time, I have shared with you the steps we’re taking to build Giga Omni Media, the 27-month-old company behind this and the other publications that make up the GigaOM network. Today, I am thrilled to announce the start of our company’s next phase. We have just raised $4.5 million, led by new investor Alloy Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm with over $1 billion under management. True Ventures, our primary investors thus ...
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BillDeys said:
VC money going into a blog network? What else does GigaOm do?
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Igor Poltavskiy said:
"...27-month-old company..." - web's youth. :)
