The California Institute of Technology just announced today that its scientists have set a new record for sustained data transfer, showing how long distance, wide area links can be used for clustered supercomputing. The record 80+ Gbps sustained data transfer was demonstrated at the SuperComputing 2007 conference. According to Caltech: Multigigabit/s end-to-end network performance will [...]

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Technology by Benjamin Kuo

There’s a great article by Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing fame) in Informationweek, talking about how annoying/creepy co-workers (and the like) are the reason why social networking sites are so volatile. That’s the problem with Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. — there are lots of people, and reasons, you don’t want to be connected into a social network. [...]

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Social Networking by Benjamin Kuo

Here’s an interesting item: Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Scripps is trying to sell Shopzilla, which it purchased in June of 2005 for $525M. According to the Insider, Scripps is hoping to get somewhere between $500M and $600M for the company.

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Mergers and Acquisitions by Benjamin Kuo

This might be why: I recently began running my email through Google’s Gmail (in addition to at least two other layers of spam filtering), in an attempt to better filter the stream of email I am getting. You’ll note those 14,155 pieces of spam all are from the last two weeks of email, and don’t [...]

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Uncategorized by Benjamin Kuo

There’s been an interesting trend over the last year or two in Southern California, which is the emergence of a new class of companies focused on helping companies bridge the angel investment to venture capital gap. The gap — the sometimes difficulty hurdle of going from informal seed stage investors to the professionally  managed venture [...]

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Entrepreneurship by Benjamin Kuo

It’s Cyber Monday, which has traditionally been one of the busiest shopping day of the year for online retailers. comScore Media Metrix is predicting more than $700M in sales today, as people get back to the office, and apparently spend Monday shopping instead of working. Last year, Cyber Monday sales totaled $608M. Southern California companies [...]

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Uncategorized by Benjamin Kuo

Amy Quinn from the publication InsideCRM sent over this link of their recent list of the 20 Worst VC Investments of All Time, a ranking of venture funded companies which have crashed and burned. Topping the list is Amp’d Mobile; the only other So-Cal firm I can spot on the list is #11, eToys. Most [...]

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Uncategorized by Benjamin Kuo

Marc Averitt has a good post on “finders” — folks who help companies find capital — and how useful they are (or aren’t) in the venture capital area. Well worth a read. The majority of VCs I talk to will not fund deals from finders; and, most of the well regarded investment bankers will not [...]

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Entrepreneurship by Benjamin Kuo

I’ve been rather amused by the amount of coverage given recently to VMware, a Palo Alto-based company which makes system virtualization software. Their software is used by enterprise IT datacenters to consolidate the amount of hardware they are using for applications. For example, instead of buying six different PCs to run six different applications, you [...]

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Technology by Benjamin Kuo

Here’s an interesting blog post I ran across today:  Why Being Outside Silicon Valley is Good For Startups. In the post, Suzanne Dingwall Williams, a corporate lawyer and former VC in Canada, says: One of my clients has been on an acquisition spree in Silicon Valley this fall, gathering interesting perspectives between wheatgrass and soy [...]

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Venture Capital by Benjamin Kuo