Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Mazen Araabi, a venture capitalist at First Round Capital, has just put up a new blog. Until recently, Mazen was an MBA student at UCLA Anderson. He was also part of the founding team at MySpace, at ResponseBase, and was an early employee at Xdrive.com. He’s now up in the Bay Area (we’ll forgive him) but his blog should be an interesting read.

Rafat Ali has an interesting post (and photo) of George Lucas and Chad Hurley at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad this morning. Apparently George Lucas was telling Chad and Steve of YouTube to donate money to film schools like USC. (George Lucas went to USC, and last year he donated $175M to expand the USC’s School of Cinematic Arts).

The interesting theme here is that the cross-industry interaction between the technology industry and the film/media industry seems to be the norm now; I consistently see both technology heavyweights and film/entertainment industry schmoozing at industry conferences.

Locally, I’ve also noticed a renewed interest in looking at “new media” type deals, whether that is content, or technology closely related to the entertainment industry–I’ve talked to two venture funds recently (one with a small fund already raised, another currently in the midst of raising a fund) with a specific focus on the new media area.

Wired’s Epicenter blog picks up on an LA entrepreneur looking for their CTO on YouTube. An interesting article and interview with Ken McBride at Stamps.com by the New York Times on adoption of custom stamps; Ticketmaster buys a stake in a Chinese ticketing firm.

I posted a few days ago about the heavy trading of rumors on blog sites lately. The latest is an unsubstantiated rumor that Peter Adderton is out at Los Angeles MVNO Amp’d Mobile. For background, ValleyWag, the Silicon Valley “gossip” rag ran a piece yesterday claiming that Adderton is out as CEO at the firm; then, GigaOm chimed in with the rumor. Dan Primack at Private Equity Week speculates on the source and timeline of the rumor here.

I don’t know if Adderton is in or out, however I talk to many, many insiders in the industry here in Los Angeles who tell me that Amp’d Mobile is doing outstandingly well. People who know firsthand tell me that their subscription revenues are growing by leaps and bounds, along with the number of subscribers they have; plus their average monthly spend per subscriber is well above and beyond everyone else in the industry, driven in a great part by the content they are selling on their phones. The story I hear is a complete 180 degree story from a year ago, when the MVNO was struggling to gain momentum. 

One reason I think the rumors continue to dog Amp’d is Peter Adderton does not give interviews, and is very, very hesitant to speak to the press. I’ve spoken to Peter before and he’s just not interested in talking, due to the amount of negative press he’s received in the past.

(Disclaimer: socalTECH’s sponsors include Redpoint Ventures, one of Amp’d Mobile’s venture capital backers, along with a number of service providers who have Amp’d as a client).

BoingBoing today highlights an interesting program that looks to train computer programmers to become journalists, in a grant program which gives computer programmers a master degree in Journalism. Given the hand wringing over widespread cost cutting and layoffs in the newspaper industry (the latest being the San Francisco Chronicle), and with offshore outsourcing both reducing salaries and driving away college students from the software industry, it seems this is jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Both the journalism business and the computer software profession are undergoing huge structural changes here in the United States. Given both the journalists and computer programmers I talk to are equally concerned about their career future and opportunities in their respective fields, I wonder about the idea of combining the two.

Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington, in a post from very early this morning, says “Silicon Valley sucks“. Arrington says, in the post, titled “Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now” that:

It’s no longer about beautiful products and genius developers. It’s about the money and the status, and hot PR chicks and marketing departments.

Maybe Southern California hasn’t yet the same fevered pitch of venture capital funding that Silicon Valley has, but (with a few exceptions) most of the activity here has been remarkably less bubble-like than you would expect. Where a lot of the general frothiness in the market has been over new Internet services, it looks like to me that Southern California is still seeing a fairly broad spread of investments — biotech, software, semiconductors, and medical devices, along with consumer-facing services and some amount of content. Of the more fizzy investments, they are all smaller, angel-sized rounds — not bubble-era multi million dollar investments. Plus, the people getting funded here all seem to be serial entrepreneurs or with a very strong technical background.

Perhaps it’s because most of the Southern California investors went through the last bubble and have been more cautious; or perhaps being geographically isolated from Silicon Valley there’s less of a herd mentality. I also think that some portion of the deal flow in Southern California is expansion capital into later-stage firms, who cut their teeth in the grim economics post-boom, and are only now taking capital to expand. In any case, I haven’t seen the same PR frenzy and quite the craze here, despite the capital flowing into companies here…

In the ongoing debate over blog credibility, it seems like the past week or so has been heavy on the rumors, and pretty light on details. False rumors published on Engadget of a delay to Apple’s iPhone took a chunk out of Apple’s market cap last week, and although there were very few announcements, there were rumors that MySpace was acquiring Photobucket; rumors of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo (later denied by the company); rumors of Yahoo Acquiring Bebo; yet more rumors of Google acquiring Feedburner; just to mention a few of the myriad of rumors spreading around the blogosphere. Popular tech celebrity Guy Kawasaki even launched a (much panned) site totally focused on allowing people to post their own rumors.

Although some of these deals may actually happen, in reading about all of these rumors, I keep thinking back to the false Emulex earnings release back in 2000, which cause Emulex to lose $2.2B in market cap, and resulted in InternetWire renaming itself to Marketwire. In that case, a pseudo-trusted source (a press wire) was duped into sending out a bogus release; however, nowadays almost anyone with a blog and an audience can start their own rumor of an acquisition or merger. I wonder if the many rumors/repeated rumors and third hand news reports are doing more harm to the general credibility of bloggers than good?

The online advertising M&A frenzy is continuing unabated this morning, as Microsoft announced it is acquiring online ad firm aQuantive in a $6B deal. The deal comes one day after advertising firm WPP said it would acquire 24/7 Media for $649M in cash, and shortly after Google purchased Doubleclick in a $3.1B deal, and Yahoo purchased Right Media for $680M. The online advertising M&A frenzy has Westlake Village-based ValueClick seeing a brisk rally on Wall Street this morning.

Some interesting items for today: Google just added a Flash slideshow feature for the firm’s Picasa online web picture albums, and to show it off they’re posted a slideshow of their new Santa Monica offices. Plus, Luis Villalobos of the Tech Coast Angels gets his picture in the New York Times, along with an extensive writeup of the angel group. The article quotes Richard Morganstern, the president of the Los Angeles Chapter, as well as Kevin Scanlon, one of the group’s members, and also covers local startups Language Weaver, Xengaru Fund Foods, and Youmail.

The entire Silicon Valley press core is at Google today for the Google Searchology event, where they announced a number of new tools. Google has several of their tools live online now at Google Experimental, including a new timeline tool which shows your query on a timeline; keyboard shortcuts (for the geeks out there missing your command prompt, vi-style j/k navigation); and a new left hand search navigation. I’ll spare the details as every technology publication and blog in the world will be covering this today and tomorrow…