It’s technology awards season in Southern California, and Entretech, one of the many groups here helping out entrepreneurs and high tech companies, has named their finalists for their annual Entrepreneurship Award. The group just announced that Auditude, Desktop Factory, Prolacta Bioscience, Alelo Provision Interactive Technologies, Snap.com, LegalZoom, Oversee.net and Energy Innovations have been named as [...]

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Uncategorized by Benjamin Kuo

I’ve recently been serving as a judge for the Technology Council of Southern California’s 2007 Technology Industry Awards, and there’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve been hearing from many of the companies we have been talking to as part of the judging process. Many of the finalists for the award went through the Dot Com “nuclear [...]

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Uncategorized by Benjamin Kuo

InsiderPages.com, which started in Pasadena but moved up North last year, apparently is being acquired, according to TechCrunch. The firm moved to Redwood City  a little less than a year ago after $8.5M in northern California venture capital. InsiderPages started as a project at Idealab in 2004.

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Mergers and Acquisitions by Benjamin Kuo

Covering the high tech industry and startups on a day to day basis, I often run into entrepreneurs looking to attract the attention of venture capitalists with what they think is the “next great idea”. Usually, if it’s not the proverbial “napkin”, it’s maybe a few PowerPoint slides or a business plan. After interviewing lots [...]

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Startups, Venture Capital by Benjamin Kuo

The Technology Council of Southern California announced the finalists to the group’s 2007 Technology Industry Awards today. It’s a good group of companies and is fairly representative of the kinds of very high quality, high-tech companies Southern California is turning out. Though, saying that, I am on the judging committee and socalTECH is a sponsor [...]

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Uncategorized by Benjamin Kuo

CNET’s News.com is reporting that Microsoft is sizing up Los Angeles-based Revver, an online video sharing web site, as a potential acquisition target. The article also cited San Diego-based DivX as another potential acquirer. News.com also turned its attention yesterday to San Diego-based Veoh Networks, and issues over copyrighted material on the site. The firm [...]

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Mergers and Acquisitions, Startups by Benjamin Kuo

Tony Karrer, CTO of TechEmpower, recently started a new blog on being a CTO in Southern California. He has served as CTO of eHarmony, and talks in a recent post about the difficulty of finding good developers in Los Angeles. Also, another pointer to a blog that might be of interest to Southern California technology/business [...]

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Jobs, Startups by Benjamin Kuo

We posted an interview with Lawrence Ng of Oversee.net this morning on socalTECH. Oversee is an interesting firm which is a combination of lead generation and domain monetization, started by Lawrence shortly out of school–and which is now a $100M+ company. The firm hasn’t gotten lots of coverage (despite their success), however, The New York [...]

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Startups by Benjamin Kuo

Mark Averitt, a venture capitalists at Okapi Venture Capital, a venture capital fund in Orange County, just told me about his new blog covering the venture capital ecosystem in Orange County.  It will be good to get his perspectives and insight on the industry!

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Venture Capital by Benjamin Kuo

We’re lucky in Southern California to have quite a few prominent universities and research institutions, where good technology gets spun out into great firms. Among the startups I’ve spoken to here recently, which were first academic projects are: Alelo is developing tactical language training systems–based on a video game platform and language recognition– being used [...]

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Startups, Technology Transfer by Benjamin Kuo