Linksys has been one of Southern California’s big success stories — bootstrapped by Victor Tsao, it was purchased by Cisco for $500M in 2003. Until now, the brand has continued as a separate product line over at Cisco, but there’s been some debate over whether or not to kill the brand name and just go [...]
Microsoft just purchased Santa Barbara’s AdECN this afternoon, as the online advertising M&A frenzy continues. If you’re interested in what AdECN’s ad exchange does, I spoke to William Urschel, the firm’s founder and CEO last August all about the company. It’s been a very, very busy July for acquisitions here in Southern California…
Business.com has finally been acquired, by Yellow Pages publisher R.H. Donnelley, in a deal worth $345M. The company has been rumored to be looking for a buyer since June, and was shopping a pricetag of between $300 and $400M for the company. I spoke with Jake Winebaum about the company earlier this year, on the [...]
Following the technology industry day to day, I’m often surprised by the natural ebb and flow of the amount of technology news you see. Usually, the beginnings of the week are fairly busy, with less news (except merger and acquisitions) showing up toward the end of the week. And, summer (usually) is lighter than the [...]
E&Y and VentureOne just released their quarterly venture capital results today for Q2, and Southern California again topped $1B in investments in the quarter; glancing at the results it looks like we’re still #2 in the nation in terms of venture capital activity, behind Silicon Valley. Dan Primack at PEHub has the spreadsheet breakdowns posted [...]
I’ve been fairly amused to watch an entire economy (bubble?) build in manufactured scarcity over the last few months, based on invitations to beta releases of Web 2.0 services. This week, it seems to be the currency of trade is Pownce and Ooma; a few months ago it was Joost; there seems to be a [...]
There was a recent post by Bill Burnham, one of the many venture capitalists blogging about the business, outlining some of the basic steps to raising venture capital. Users of our venture database have been doing this for years, but I thought it was worth pointing out item no. 3 in his list: 3. Go [...]
I’ve been hearing a few stories lately from employees of venture backed companies, who–despite having what looked like fairly good exits for their firms–really didn’t see much from their stock options. This comes on top of several widely publicized sales where even the founders walked away with almost nothing. I’ve also recently been hearing from [...]
Time just posted a list of their “Top 50″ websites for the year. The only Southern California site I spotted on the list was Veoh.com. Unfortunately, it seems like we had more companies making the “5 Worst Websites” list (to be exact, 3 out of the 5), including eHarmony.com, Evite.com, and MySpace.com.
“Networking” gets lots of lip service, in terms of how useful networking is in moving your business and startup forward. I’ve found that people rarely analyze and understand how to effectively network, and to make connections and go beyond just meeting people at random. A few years ago I met Dr. Elissa Grossman, a researcher [...]
Thoughts and commentary from Benjamin F. Kuo, publisher of socalTECH.com.
