Category: Tech news

We filmed this week’s Ask a VC on Tuesday, and I started out by asking Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital about the danger of venture capitalists investing in competitors. There was no ulterior motive on my part. It’s just a question I’ve seen coming up increasingly as dealmaking heats up and VCs invest across a bigger variety of company stages than ever before. And, I’d recently seen that Sabet did write a blog post on the topic.

Little did I know then the big drama that had been brewing between Spark and two competitive companies behind for months. Not investing in competitors of existing portfolio companies is great. Even better? Not offering one a term sheet after months of due diligence before you decide that they’re competitive.

TechCrunch has learned from three sources that Spark Capital reneged on a termsheet offered to a New York-based startup called Bnter, throwing the company into tumult and reportedly enraging its well-known angel investors who we’ve heard include Chris Dixon and Ron Conway.

According to three accounts, Spark principal Andrew Parker sought out Bnter’s founder Lauren Leto last December, impressed by the company’s beta messaging product and interested to invest. It was just a lean, two-person company at the time, and Leto had no immediate plans of fundraising. The company was gearing up for a big marketing push, and wanted to tap the market once it had better user feedback and growth. But when Spark– investors in such rock star companies as Twitter and Tumblr– came after Bnter, she and her partner were flattered. At the encouragement of existing investors and mentors, they took the train to Boston to pitch the partnership.

Spark loved it and negotiations continued for months. In March, the firm emailed her a termsheet, saying it wasn’t signed because the partner in question couldn’t get to a fax machine that moment, but said to consider it signed. Bnter was so star-struck by Spark, the company hadn’t widely pitched itself to other investors, but told the ones that it had talked to it’d be going with Spark.

Only then did it occur to the Spark team to check with Tumblr founder David Karp to make sure he wouldn’t view this as a competing company. From what we heard, neither Spark, Bnter nor the other angel investors had considered the two competitors, although there is some overlap with Bnter’s core service and the messaging part of Tumblr. But it’s hard to invest broadly in social media and not have small overlaps here and there.

According to sources, Karp was incensed, viewed them as clearly competitive and told Spark he wasn’t OK with the firm doing the deal. Fair enough. Whether anyone else agrees or not, Spark asked Karp his opinion and most ambitious entrepreneurs see their future markets as broader than they may look today. But what wasn’t fair was what Spark did next. The firm not only pulled the termsheet, but when existing Bnter investors cried foul, Spark refused to pay a $200,000 break up fee to help cover the expenses the lean company had started to take on as a result of having a signed term sheet and — it thought– $2 million on the way to its bank account. No one has argued Spark forced the company to take on those extra expenses and there’s a dispute about when the occurred, but the company clearly took them on thinking money was on the way.

The company had already hired an Android developer to get that version moving as quickly as possible– and now it was in a lurch. Some three months ago it was a hot, up-and-comer in the New York tech scene, backed by some of the biggest name angels in the business. It had no intention of fundraising this soon, but now that it had committed to the process and to growing the company more aggressively the rug had been ripped out from under it.

The company could find a way to cover the expenses: It has some deep pocketed angels and Leto has reportedly cut her salary to zero to help the make the company’s ends meet; she also has an existing profitable business that can help bootstrap Btner. The bigger fear is the stigma when it goes out to raise money of having a termsheet that a firm pulled. Raising money for a startup is like putting a house on the market: Just like sitting on the market for a long time makes people wonder what’s wrong with it, so too does a done deal that suddenly falls apart. We should note that no one has indicated that Spark pulled out for any reason other than Karp’s objections.

That’s why its incredibly rare that these things happen– particularly without a courtesy break up fee for the entrepreneur’s trouble. We polled a sample of VCs and some told us they’ve never seen this happen before, while others said they see these situations, at most, once a year, but almost always with a break-up fee paid out to the entrepreneur. This isn’t because of legal reasons, because a termsheet doesn’t legally bind investors to do the deal. And it’s not because VCs are altruistic. It’s because this is a small industry built around trust.

Sources say that Spark didn’t just hurt a tiny, two-person startup; it hurt the powerful investors behind that startup too. People close to the deal were simply agog that the firm wouldn’t offer to do anything to make the situation better– save offering to reimburse Leto for and legal costs and her train ticket to Boston.

We reached out to Bijan Sabet of Spark for comment, and he didn’t want to comment publicly aside from saying, ”We have a different interpretation of what happened and we wish the company well.”

It remains unclear exactly why Spark– a firm known for treating entrepreneurs well– acted this way, and there’s enough he-said-he-said behind the scenes that we may be missing some details. But entrepreneurs should take a lesson from what Bnter went through: The deal isn’t done until the money is in the bank.

There’s nothing like full disclosure during the negotiating process in an acquisition deal. LivingSocial acquired SocialMedia for just $3 million in stock, we reported earlier today. As part of the negotiating process they disclosed key financial information to SocialMedia to help that company understand the value of the stock they were receiving in the deal. That information is now in my inbox.

SociaMedia is getting around 545,000 shares of common stock of LivingSocial, valued at $3 million. That implies that there are approximately 520 million shares outstanding. At the recent Series E preferred price of $5.65 per share (which is what most people would use for valuation purposes), LivingSocial is a $2.9 billion company.

LivingSocial is no Groupon when it comes to revenue, but it’s doing just fine. February revenue was $50 million, says our source, and projected revenue for 2011 (assumed calendar) is a cool $1 billion. Our best guess on Groupon revenue in February was a little under $100 million, so it’s roughly twice the size of LivingSocial.

Like a Tripit for shopping, TechCrunch Disrupt alumnus Shwowp is opening to the public today, under a new name and after a complete site redesign and rebranding. Shwowp co-founder Tara Hunt tells me that the post launch feedback for Shwop’s original branding wasn’t good, but the tipping point was when the site won a “Worst Brand Name of 2010″ award from blog Eatmywords. Ouch.

But instead of getting down in the dumps or being stubborn, Hunt did what any founder committed to growing their business should do, she wrote a blog post inviting people to come up with new suggestions. While the survey brought in over 3000 pageviews and over 1200 suggestions, none of them were quite the right fit. Thankfully the original Eatmywords blogger Alexandra Watkins stepped in, and came up with the name Buyosphere which is sort of perfect, in a punny sort of way.

“I instantly envisioned the site as an ecosystem of people expressing their individual tastes,” says Hunt. The only problem is that the bootstrapped startup didn’t have the cash for the Buyosphere domain, which was being squatted on. Hunt wrote the site owner an email, explaining the (sob) story, “I was like, I have 500 bucks,” she said. Needless to say he took her offer.

Now the personal Buyosphere site profiles are called Buyographies, the data analysis of what gets bought is called Buyometrics, its new blog is called the Buyble and the search and product discovery is called Buycuriousness (Okay so I don’t know about that one, but Hunt has plenty of time to work out the kinks).

Users can easily add their products and stories (separated into “Haves” and “Wants”) via a Bookmarklet, forwarding an email with a purchase receipt or by clicking Have or Want on an item you see someone else post. You can follow users manually or find friends who are already on Buyosphere through Facebook and Twitter.

Users can also create collections or lists of items they have or want like “Dry Shampoos I’ve Tried,  “The Four Hour Body Toolkit” and “If I Had A Million $$” and share them with friends on Buyosphere, Facebook and Twitter. You can see a list of featured Buyographies, featured lists and products on the Buyosphere homepage.

Hunt tells me that Buyosphere is currently in its data gathering phase, and that the grand vision is to be like a Mint specifically for purchases. Hunt plans on using the data to provide recommendations to users, and because all the data is personal and based on you actual purchases, Buyosphere was the potential to do a way better job guessing what you like than cookie and web tracking software like Bynamite. iPhone and Android apps are also in the works.

Buyosphere is currently bootstrapped and looking for funding.

It’s time for Ask a VC, and this week Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital was back. We talked about whether it’s worth it for startups to launch at a conference like DEMO or Disrupt, the decision to turn a profitable lifestyle business into a venture-backed, cash-burning startup, how entrepreneurs in other countries can find US mentors and the value of MBAs.

In one of our more personal questions from a reader Daryn asks Sabet what he’d be doing now if he wasn’t a VC.

Tune in below for his answers.

Fast growing daily deal service LivingSocial, which just raised $400 million, has acquired long suffering social advertising network SocialMedia, we’ve confirmed. The price was just $3 million, all in LivingSocial stock. Unfortunately, the company had raised around $10 million from Charles River Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Naval Ravikant and Jeff Clavier.

SocialMedia’s biggest asset today is probably its domain name. But a couple of years ago the company was tearing it up. They were one of the first companies to create a Facebook ad network that used your friends’ pictures in the ads. 2008 revenue was $15 million, and 2009 revenue was on pace to hit $25 million. Facebook tried to acquire the company, says one source. SocialMedia declined, and shortly afterwards Facebook threatened legal action against them for privacy policy violations.

What’s most fascinating about the acquisition isn’t the soft landing that the company has pulled off. It’s LivingSocial’s financials and capitalization information, disclosed during the deal negotiations, that has now landed in my inbox. More on that in a follow up post.

Update: LivingSocial Financials Exposed: $2.9 Billion Valuation, $50 Million In Revenue Per Month

Longtime collaborators Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker are back together working on an ambitious new project, we’ve learned.

In 1999, Fanning and Parker introduced the world to Napster. Their music sharing service was absolutely culture changing and ushered in a new wave of excitement about the web. Now, over a decade later, they’re back at it. And the new project is nothing if not interesting. Think: Chatroulette — but done right.

We previously broke the news that Fanning had raised a small amount of money last year for the project. But we had basically no idea what it was. At the time, the name was “Supyo”, and that may still end up being the name. But we’re also hearing talk of using the name “Yo” or some other variation. (Note: supyo.com is clearly not their website, so don’t bother with it — try this one.)

Since then, other details have become more clear. That includes some big potential funding — and one of the investors is someone we know very well: Michael Arrington. More on that below.

Supyo is essentially a web-based video chat service that aims to connect like-minded people, we’ve learned. Again, it’s sort of like Chatroulette but without some of the problems that service faced.

Both Fanning and Parker were previously involved in Chatroulette, hoping to help founder Andrey Ternovskiy turn it into the next big thing. That never happened. But Fanning and Parker never gave up on the core concept.

Parker talked a bit about why he thinks “live” is the next big movement in social at last year’s Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe. “No one has nailed live,” he said at the time, noting that Chatroulette was the most interesting play in the space. He went on to say that live video was what he was spending most of his time thinking about these days.

While it was Fanning who initially started the work on Supyo, we hear that Parker has since been brought on as an executive, devoting a good chunk of his time to the project. (But it’s important to note that his main job remains being a partner with Founders Fund.) While Napster ended in a flurry of lawsuits, Fanning followed it up with Snowcap and Rupture which gained success and were eventually acquired. He also helped start Path, but hasn’t been involved in the day-to-day there in a while. Meanwhile Parker, of course, found massive success at Facebook.

While much has been made about Parker’s past antics (made most famous by a certain Academy Award-winning movie he was a character in), everything he touches basically turns to gold.

The rest of the details about Supyo are still pretty scarce. We know location is a big element of it, as are algorithms to match users up with the right chat partners — and to avoid the “penis problem” that Chatroulette had. There is still likely to be an anonymous component to it, but if you’re a jackass, people can mark you as such. And if enough do, you’ll be stuck talking only to other jackasses. Or so we hear.

It’s said to be a completely browser-based experience right now.

In terms of the funding, given Parker’s involvement, it should be no surprise that Founders Fund is said to be leading a big new round. They’re teaming with a bunch of angels to raise around $10 million $5 million, we’ve heard.

And then there’s that other aspect. In digging into this story, we heard that a man by the name of “Arrington” is involved. Yes, that one. When confronted, he squirmed for a bit but eventually acknowledged his involvement. In fact, he’s the only one willing to confirm involvement at this point, but even he won’t spill more juicy details yet.

Stay tuned for more, I’m sure.

Update: We previously stated that the team was raising around $10 million, we’ve now heard that it’s closer to $5 million and could be a little less — that’s still being worked out, sources say.

The company has also put up a temporary splash page at this URL.

Gmail is arguably the best web-based email client out there, but it’s far from perfect. Just navigating your inbox (particularly when it’s a big one) can be an exercise in frustration… and then there’s Gmail Search, which is just painful. Wait times of 30-40 seconds aren’t unheard of, to the point that it’s becoming the butt of jokes (what can you do in the time it takes to run a Gmail search?)

Enter Greplin, the Sequoia-funded startup that’s looking to search all of your online data from a single search box. Today the company is upgrading its Chrome browser extension to take that search box with you, and they’re starting with Gmail. Put another way: they’re finally making Gmail Search work well.

To get set up, you’ll first need to install the plugin and sign up for a Greplin account, then connect that account to your Gmail (and any other supported services you might use, like Facebook and Evernote). Next, log into your Gmail as usual and you’ll notice a subtle change: the search box will have a small, grayed-out magnifying glass. Click it, and you’ll activate Greplin search.

In my testing so far, Greplin search has bested the default results in almost every way. They’re faster (they take less than a second to pop up, as opposed to the 20+ seconds you can run into on Gmail). And once you’ve started searching, you’ll notice that tweaks to your query show up in real-time as you type each character, the same way they do on Google Instant. And it shows results for partial-word matches (“Tech” would match for both “Technology” and “TechCrunch”) — which Gmail doesn’t do. The one thing I noticed that Greplin doesn’t do yet is spelling correction, but partial matching is often more helpful, anyway.

This is Gmail search the way it should be.

Of course, there’s one possible issue for those of you who are concerned about your privacy — because Greplin needs to index your emails for quick searching, it has to actually store your messages. Most people probably don’t care about this, and the service has everything riding on its ability to keep your data secure, but it’s something to keep in mind.

I spoke to cofounder Daniel Gross and asked him how exactly Greplin could return these results so much faster than Google could. Gross said he didn’t have much insight into the way Google runs things, but points out that Greplin is focusing exclusively on search, while the Gmail team has to spread its attention across a much bigger product.

I also asked him how much delay there was before new email messages would appear in my Greplin index (which is an important factor when dealing with email). He urged me to take the ‘Greplin Challenge ‘and test it for myself. So I did — a message with 500k of attachments showed up in my search results within a second of receiving it. Not too shabby.

Greplin’s Chrome extension launched earlier this week, but this Gmail functionality is new — and it’s going to get even better. Gross didn’t give any specifics, but it sounds like Greplin users will be able to ‘replace’ search boxes on more services in the future.

Update: Also see CloudMagic, which also greatly improves Gmail search.

There is no question that Flipboard has an early lead in iPad news consumption. The company just raised a massive $50 million B round to cement that lead. This comes in between iPhone photo app Color raising a $41 million A round, and LivingSocial raising $400 million so that its founders and early investors could take half of that off the table. There is obviously a lot of venture money sloshing around, especially for high-quality companies and teams.

When investors offer startups a huge pile of cash at favorable terms, it is usually a good idea to take the money. And that’s exactly what Flipboard did. But does an iPad app company really need $50 million? And does taking too much money ever backfire? Flipboard is no lean startup.

Even if Flipboard wants to expand to other devices such as the iPhone, Android and so on, that doesn’t require that much cash. Maybe he needs all that money to build out an ad sales force (those are expensive). All of which begs a question which I asked Flipboard CEO Mike McCue last night on Twitter:

@erickschonfeld
Erick Schonfeld

@shervin @mmccue what do you need $50M for that you couldn't do with $20M?

about 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

That sparked a debate between us. McCue fired back a series of answers:

@mmccue
Mike McCue

@erickschonfeld @shervin considered that scenario seriously. I want to have plenty of runway left before we get to cf+ or new financing

about 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@mmccue
Mike McCue

@erickschonfeld @shervin also, this raise reduces risk of any unnatural forcing functions to generate cash which cld throw us off vision

about 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@mmccue
Mike McCue

@erickschonfeld @shervin finally, we will be insanely careful abt how we spend so we'll preserve options like doing small acquisitions,etc

about 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

McCue’s desire to avoid “unnatural functions to generate cash” strikes me as strange. That’s certainly a popular way to build startups: get consumers to fall in love with your product, then figure out how to charge for it later. But generating cash is one of the defining characteristics of every business. There is nothing unnatural about it.

@erickschonfeld
Erick Schonfeld

@mmccue @shervin there's nothing "unnatural" about companies that generate revenue.

about 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

McCue realizes this, and he had a good response. The $50 million gives him time to find teh best revenue model.

@mmccue
Mike McCue

@erickschonfeld @shervin of course not. The key is to try to give company enough runway to pull off big vision vs. retreat to survive.

about 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@mmccue
Mike McCue

@erickschonfeld @shervin in other words: not all revenue is created equal. Best to go after most valuable revenue vs easiest. Takes time.

about 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

And then Shervin Pishevar, who somehow got pulled into the debate, ended it by Erickrolling me:

@shervin
Shervin Pishevar

@erickschonfeld @mmccue I'll just leave this here: http://t.co/bgrRIZM 😉

about 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

Long time readers know how much we love MC Hammer around here. And the serendipity of having him perform at the end of TechCrunch DIsrupt last year, the day we were acquired by AOL, was wonderful. He’s a performer, an entrepreneur and one of the most empathetic and caring human beings I’ve ever met (He’s helped thousands of people in Oakland and around the world over the last two decades). Everyone smiles when they’re around Hammer.

As for me, if you’ve ever seen a 14 year old girl around Justin Bieber, I’m pretty much the same when Hammer’s around. Well, first I usually tell him I have some extra gold jewelry I’d like to convert into cash and if he knows anywhere that can do that for me (he’s a shareholder and spokesperson for Cash4Gold and takes a lot of much deserved ribbing for his commercials). But then I act like the 14 year old girl.

Even so, I can’t explain exactly why I’m so excited that the Oakland A’s are having MC Hammer bobblehead day in July (the image is a prototype that Hammer sent me, they don’t have the final product yet). Hammer was involved with the A’s long before he was famous, and his ties to the organization are still very strong today. It’s about time they gave him a bobblehead. 🙂

A long time ago Compete had a bobblehead made of me. It was a one of a kind, and a very cool gift. Somewhere along the line it broke during one of our office moves, but there’s still an empty place on the shelf for one. I’m going to put Hammer there.

See you at the game.

And, yeah, I’m in a weirdly good mood today. My phone suddenly works. Which is great. I just wish things could get done around here without a public whining session.

Fortune’s Dan Primack reports that the LivingSocial management and investors have pocketed about half of the $400 million in new VC money they raised at the beginning of the month, citing this SEC filing.

This cashing out early thing is not without precedent, in fact leader in the daily deals space Groupon pulled a similar endeavor during its DST round last April and in January, where it took $573 million off of the table after its $950 million round of funding, allowing founder Andrew Mason to solve what he called “the money problem” or the temptation to succumb to buyout offers (like Google’s 6 billion) because you feel like you need the money.

LivingSocial has raised a total of $632 million in funding from Steve Case, Grotech Ventures, US Venture Partners, Amazon, T.Rowe Price and others. I’ve contacted the company for more information and will update this post if it responds with anything useful.

Here is another chance to win a ticket to our first stop for Disrupt, which is taking place in New York City. We have almost narrowed down all of our guests and speakers and we promise you, you will not be disappointed. We’re going to announce a few very special guest speakers soon, but for now this free ticket is available and will go to one lucky winner. If you want to take a quick look at our speakers from last year’s Disrupt in New York City, you can view them here. A special congratulations to Emily Williams for winning last week’s giveaway.

As a reminder, Disrupt NYC will be from May 23rd to the 25th.

If you want this free ticket, all you have to do is follow the steps below.

1) Like our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

– Retweet this post (including the #TechCrunch hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below

The contest starts now and ends tomorrow, April 16th at 7:30pm PST.

Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above, choose at random, and contact the winner this weekend with more details. Anyone in the world is eligible.

Please note this giveaway is for 1 ticket only and does not include airfare or hotel.

Good luck 🙂

When I was growing up, games were played offline — whether it was Number Munchers on an Apple2GS, or Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo’s NES console. But, needless to say, that 8-bit world is miles behind us.

Like it has done to every other industry, the Web completely altered the course of gaming. It brought connectivity and scale to video games, allowing huge groups of people to play each other in a single game, simultaneously. Even so, most video game users continued to get their gaming offline; as is often the case, online adoption was mostly limited to geeks in solitude.

It really took the explosion in popularity of Zynga and Facebook games to bring swaths of casual gamers online. The draw of games like FarmVille obviously being the enhanced social features (and spamming). But, on the flip side of the coin, there are “premium” online games, which boast 3D graphics, a more immersive and interactive experience, and enable our strange fantasies through features like role-playing. There are many examples, but the most widely recognized would probably be World of Warcraft.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs as they’re affectionately known, like World of Warcraft, are inherently social and have been a staple of online gaming for over a decade. But, one online games developer, Trion Worlds, is adding a new spin to online gaming and is now attempting to put the icing on the social gameplay experience with its new World of Warcraft competitor, called Rift.

Rift is a game set in the fictional world of Telara, in which creatures of all shapes and sizes and from all planes of existence mash together. (Think Star Wars’ cantina scene.) Through physical rifts, monsters attack Telara’s mother cities and just act like monsters, really. Unsurprisingly, your mission is to stop the monsters. It’s not a particularly world-shaking idea, nor are the characters, but the execution is pretty amazing.

The key to Rift’s successful massive and synchronous gameplay experience begins with the fact that Trion’s games are server-based, meaning that the gameplay, characters, and interactions between players are housed in Trion’s server cloud. This allows the company to remodel less-played portions of the game or add more content on-the-fly.

And, in the case of Rift, Trion breaks its servers down by function, rather than by location, like most other games. Again, this means that one set of servers will handle non-player functions in the game’s world, another will process encounters with “bosses,” for example, and another will deal with functions directly involving the players’ characters. This means that processes can be started and stopped more quickly and easily, causing less lag and other glitches in gameplay. Trion can make changes to the game in realtime, right in front of players, Trion CEO Lars Buttler told me. That’s pretty cool.

But where Rift really sets itself apart is its integration of social media into gameplay. Rift allows you to Tweet, and create and share both pictures and videos from inside the game. In the in-game chat bar, you simply type “/tweet” and your text is posted to Twitter. You can capture screenshots and post them to Twitpic or Yfrog, or you can take video of what you’re playing and post it directly to YouTube.

Why would you want to take video of what you’re playing? Well, it allows you to make tutorials for other gamers, or to show off your mad skills — or your avatar’s crazy dance moves. And that, my friends, is priceless. I think.

Furthermore, Twitter, as Charlie Sheen so adequately demonstrated, is a tool for promotion — especially among brands and celebrities. And now for gamers. “Players have achievements and accomplishments in Rift’s game world, but we want to take that beyond the game world into the real world, so that friends and fans and followers can be a part of that as well”, Buttler said. “We want to allow gamers to become celebrities, in-game and in the real-world”.

And Rift is making a pretty serious splash; gamers are buying in. Prior to its launch in late February, over 1 million people created accounts and gamers have spent more than 2.5 billion minutes gallivanting around Telara. That’s nearly 42 hours per person. What’s more, since the game’s launch, users have sent over 600,000 Tweets. And more than 15,000 YouTube videos have been uploaded since video functionality was launched just over 10 days ago.

Not only is the online game developer trying to break down the barriers between gaming and the real world, it’s taking on other entertainment mediums as well. Building on the success of James Cameron’s Avatar, Trion is partnering with the Syfy Channel to create a TV show that is part fictional drama, part game. The project, tentatively called “One World”, will follow a group of main characters as they travel through an alien world. Their story will be concocted by screenwriters, but the battles that rage in different cities among competing factions will be determined by those playing the game online.

Previous attempts to meld video games with film and television have been less than well-received. But the project is audacious at the very least, and marks another innovative push into cross-genre, “next” entertainment. Even James Cameron was intrigued, telling the LA Times, “I think it’s great, the approach of it has a lot of promise — you’re getting real people to invest something in a character that populates the background … It’s almost like having an artificial intelligence at work behind the primary story but your audience is the A.I.”

On Thursday, Raj Atluru announced that he was stepping down as a managing director with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, where he served as a key cleantech investor since 2001. He will join a private equity group that invests in later-stage clean energy companies, Silver Lake Kraftwerk, which was formed earlier in 2011 by Silver Lake Partners and Soros Fund Management, led by Adam Grosser.

Atluru took board positions at six of DFJ’s cleantech portfolio companies and will maintain seats on some of these, according to a managing director at DFJ in Menlo Park, Josh Stein. He also noted:

“Silver Lake Kraftwerk addresses something of a gap in cleantech investing. Our cleantech investments at DFJ are generally early stage, say two to ten million series A to C rounds. When these companies start to scale they need big checks, on the order of fifty to $100 million, to sustain them. Raj will be on a very short list of people we call when some of our portfolio cleantech companies reach that point.

We’re not likely to fund a billion dollar plant. We will continue to do a broad range of cleantech deals but at that earlier stage. It is good to have another platform out there that can write those big checks, led by someone we know and who knows our portfolio. I am certain we will do deals together.”

Six of DFJ’s ten managing directors (not including Alturu) invest in cleantech companies also, and the fund did not make any major changes to personnel or its investment strategy as a result of Atluru’s move. DFJ’s cleantech investments include about 40 portfolio companies today, and a range of well-known brands in clean energy and consumer green technology: Good Guide, EnerNOC, Solar Junction, Tesla, BrightSource and Solar City among them.

There’s a good chance that your office or home is more tricked out, tech-wise, than the Oval Office. President Obama complained yesterday, in what the AP calls “off-the-cuff remarks,” that what the Oval Office lacks is a “really cool phone.” Can someone get the president a Droid or something?

We’ve known from some time now that Obama is a bit of a BlackBerry addict, but apparently his technological nous doesn’t transfer to the Oval Office. He expressed remorse at the lack of “fancy buttons and stuff.”

It’s like, come on! I’m the president here!

Read More

Companies like UStream, Livestream and even Google’s YouTube are making a business out of live-streaming professional events on the web. Another player has entered the space, but is taking a more calculated approach to the live-streaming space. NowLive specializes in high quality live-streaming of red carpet premieres, concerts, celebrity chats, and more.

NowLive, which was founded by studio and tech vets from Paramount, MGM, MySpace, and MoviePhone, is setting its sights on becoming the go-to live streaming platform for major events in the entertainment and music industry. The startup’s platform goes beyond just streaming video to the web and offers social streaming chat tools within its interface, ad units, and real-time interactive quizzes and polls. The company even offers a pop-up video-like information technology for livestreaming events on the web.

While the livestreaming space is competitive, the startup has been able to sign on a collection of impressive partners. Clients include Sony Pictures, Summit Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate, Dick Clark Productions, Showtime, Starz, Discovery Channel, and Weinstein Company.

This past week, NowLive powered the official live-stream of the Scream 4 premiere. And on Friday, the company is supporting Universal to stream the premiere of Fast 5 from Brazil. The Fast 5 livestream will also show in ten theaters across the U.S.