Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Add our widget to your web page by going here and following the instructions.

Some examples:

Southern California venture deals:

San Diego Technology events:

Los Angeles (only) technology news:

Orange county news:

As many of you might know, we have had a LinkedIn group for socalTECH premium members for some time. We’ve recently decided to open up the group to anyone who is a fan or a part of the Southern California technology community. So if you’re interested, click in over to our LinkedIn Group for socalTECH. LinkedIn not your network? Then maybe check our our Facebook Group instead.

Welcome to the newest sponsor of socalTECH, Orix Venture Finance!

ORIX Venture Finance provides senior debt and equity side-by-side investments to mid- and late-stage companies with revenue run rates of $10MM or greater. For more info on the firm, go to their web site, or (even better) call Brian Weber at 949-798-6169.

Orix joins the growing list of sponsors who are helping to make our coverage of Southern California technology industry possible. Those sponsors include:

Binary Pulse Technology Marketing (www.binarypulse.com)

CBRE Richard Ellis (via Richard Abbitt) (www.cbre.com/richard.abbitt)

Clearstone Ventures (www.clearstone.com)

Costello and Sons Insurance (www.costelloandsons.com)

GetItStarted (www.getitstarted.com)

PricewaterhouseCoopers (www.pwcglobal.com)

Redpoint Ventures (www.redpoint.com)

Rustic Canyon Partners (www.rusticcanyon.com)

Safire Partners (www.safirepartners.com)

SVB Silicon Valley Bank(www.svb.com)

Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth (www.sycr.com)

Stubbs Alderton & Markiles LLP (www.biztechlaw.com)

Just in case anyone was wondering, yes, posting to the blog (and our news site) is slow and will be for the rest of the week, as I’m (sort of) on vacation (though, it does appear to be a slow news week, so you might not have noticed.)

Once again, I’d like to thank the many sponsors that make socalTECH possible:

• PricewaterhouseCoopers
• Redpoint Ventures
• SVB Silicon Valley Bank
• Costello and Sons Insurance
• CBRE - Richard Abbitt
• Stubbs Alderton Markiles LLP
• Clearstone Venture Partners
• Safire Partners
• Binary Pulse Technology Marketing
• Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth
• GetItStarted
• Rustic Canyon Partners

A lot of folks in Southern California use our calendar of high tech related events in planning out their week. A few folks have requested that we make it easier to find stuff in their neighborhood, so we’ve rolled out a filter by general location. We’ve always had the events color-coded, but now you can select a specific area (say, San Diego, or Los Angeles) and just get the events for those cities. This is still in beta so let us know if you run into any issues.

If your events aren’t showing up on the calendar, let us know. We’re trying to include all of the community-focused events and groups in the area, plus conferences being held in the region.

We’d like to welcome the newest sponsor of Rustic Canyon Partners, the newest sponsor of socalTECH.com. Rustic Canyon Partners is one of the largest venture capital firms based in Southern California, and also has offices in Silicon Valley and Seattle. The firm is an early stage venture capital firm that invests in what it describes as exceptional entrepreneurs building transformational companies.

Thanks to Rustic Canyon, and all of our sponsors, who make socalTECH.com possible!

It seems like at trendy day to add mapping features to find startups. We’ve been mapping out all the recent venture funding in Southern California since almost the advent of open Internet map services, but, we thought it would be fund to go ahead and extend that a bit to find neighboring companies in our subscription database. Simply go to any company, click on “Map” next to a company’s name, and we’ll show a map of all of that firm’s neighbors.

Use this to:

• Find other possible employers in the neighborhood
• Figure out potential companies to make a sales call to when you visit a neighborhood
• See how many startups are in your area

We’ll be enhancing this as we get requests. This mapping feature is only available to premium subscribers to our database of high tech companies, venture capital, and service providers in Southern California (and beyond), who pay just $24.95 a month to access what one of our subscribers told me recently was “the most useful Internet service out there, period.”

Welcome to our newest sponsor of socalTECH, GetItStarted (www.getitstarted.com)! GetItStarted is a provider of providing webinars, information, networking opportunities, legal documents, and other resources for entrepreneurs.

As most of you know, we maintain a fairly comprehensive calendar of Southern California technology events on our web site, where we try to list as many of the huge number of events that might be of interest to people in the high tech industry. I’ve recently become aware of a few groups which we haven’t been tracking, so if you run anything of particular interest to anyone in the tech industry (anything from business to technical areas), please put us on your mailing list or submit your events to us. On that same note, anyone hitting the calendar today should see a very significant speedup in loading the page (nothing like a little database magic to make things run faster).