I was struck this week by a huge rash of energy-related, venture funding deals in the last few weeks, all focused on some aspect smart metering or energy monitoring: Power Assure, Advanced Telemetry, CPower, eMeter, Hara, Control4, Tendril, EcoDog, and Optimum Energy (just to name a few). There’s been a theme going around the clean [...]
There’s been plenty of analysis and insight into today’s announcement by Yahoo that they are essentially cutting its efforts in the Web search space, and instead forging an alliance with Microsoft to supply all of the search technology for the online portal. (Unfortunately, also probably to great detriment to Yahoo’s Search Marketing operations down here [...]
I’m sure everyone’s seen Intel’s big advertising push “Our rock stars aren’t your rock stars“–comparing the firm’s technologists to celebrity rock stars. I was thinking about this recently in respect to Southern California–land of Michael Jackson—and its technology industry, and I find it interesting how Silicon Valley’s own list of “technology celebrities” compares to Southern [...]
The quarterly venture capital numbers are all in, and the conclusion is: nobody agrees on deal volume this quarter. Dow Jones VentureSource is reporting $5.27 billion in national VC deals, and $433M invested in Southern California for Q2 of 2009. Pwc/NVCA, using data from Thomson Reuters, is reporting $3.7 billion in national VC deals, and [...]
Great post by VC Fred Wilson on Startup Hotbed Inferiority Complex this morning. Fred was on a panel in Seattle last night, when the topic of “does it matter where your startup is located” — and a number of the panelists implied you will not be as successful as a company that is located in [...]
The folks at the upcoming Twiistup technology conference are continuing–in their own way–to try to bridge the entertainment and technology scene in Los Angeles, telling folks today that celebrity Brooke Burke (Dancing with the Stars/Wild On E!, etc.) will be one of the conference’s speakers. (Missing from their promo: Brooke’s partner at ModernMom.com, Lisa Rosenblatt, [...]
Add one more Southern California venture capitalist to the list of VC bloggers: Mark Suster, a venture capitalist at GRP Partners, is the latest SoCal venture capitalist writing on a regular basis on his blog. You can read more at bothsidesofthetable.com. Mark’s latest post is Twitter Observations. Mark just started posting in early June, but [...]
Some housekeeping: as expected, we’re not sending out our newsletter tomorrow in observance of the July 4th holiday. For those who are wondering, we pretty much follow the market holiday schedule for our newsletters. Our web updates will continue, if there is any significant news. Thanks!
Well, that’s a relief. Microsoft apparently is dropping its vomit ad, after lots of customers complained. For those who have so far been spared having to watch what has been billed the worst technology ad ever, be thankful. (For the squeamish, it involved a wife.. ummm, vomiting, repeatedly, and graphically, all over a husband after [...]
Overheard at one of the local networking groups last night, when I introduced a social media marketer to another, social-media savvy entrepreneur: “Really? How many followers do you have?” It might have just replaced “Oh, how many uniques do you get a month?” as the first question to ask a fellow entrepreneur…
Thoughts and commentary from Benjamin F. Kuo, publisher of socalTECH.com.
