Alastair Goldfisher

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Highway 12 Ventures in Boise, Idaho, joined the information superhighway and launched a blog on its website. At the time, Highway 12 GP Mark Solon credited Entrepreneur-in-Residence Tac Anderson (shown in the picturesque photo) for pushing the firm to start blogging. Anderson has led social media activities at Hewlett-Packard, and he is the founder of TechBoise, a website devoted to tracking the tech life in the capital city of the Gem State.

Every now and then I come across a funding announcement for a VC-backed company that reminds me of the late 1990s, when dot-coms all over the place were getting greased up with venture bucks and grinning with the promise of giving power to the people. Associated Content, which some might call a citizen journalism company, […]

The Wolverine State is not normally a powerhouse for venture capital, unlike the top-ranked Golden State of California. But things are lousy in Michigan, and not just because the Detroit Lions haven’t won a game since 2007. VC investments in the state plunged in the first quarter about 70% from the same quarter a year ago, according this month’s MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on Thomson Reuters data. In Michigan in Q1, 10 venture capital deals occurred in the first quarter, the same number as in the year-ago period. However, the total dollars invested fell from $28.2 million to $8.4 million.

Today is Earth Day, so it seems more than apt to take a look at the latest cleantech investments. hankfully, Rob Day has already done the dirty work for me (the guy doesn’t know how to properly take a vacation). The Q1 cleantech numbers are posted here. In line with overall investment activity, cleantech investing is down. In Q1, investment in cleantech dropped 84% drop from Q4, according to the MoneyTree Report released over the weekend from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters. The MoneyTree reported that cleantech deals dropped from $974 million in Q4 to $154 million last quarter, as deals as fell from 67 to 33.

Mark Solon, a general partner at Highway 12 Ventures in Boise, Idaho, sums up his firm’s social networking strategy in one sentence. “If you’re not on Facebook, Twitter and all the other social networking sites, communicating with your investors and entrepreneurs, then you’re going to be left behind,” he says. Such was the reason why on April 5, Highway 12 launched a blog on its website for Solon and his fellow GPs to regularly post their musings. Solon partly attributes the firm’s start of a blog to the hiring last year of Tac Anderson as an EIR. Anderson previously led social media activities at Hewlett-Packard. Solon also says

Earlier this week, Burnaby, B.C.-based Teradici Corp. announced it raised a $17 million Series C round from TELUS Ventures (the venture arm of TELUS), Alloy Ventures, GrowthWorks Capital, Skypoint Capital, BDC Venture Capital and Alta Berkeley Venture Partners. The company, which says it has now raised $51 million over three rounds of funding, develops chips to deliver a PC-like experience over a network, or what it calls PC-over-IP (PCoIP). The company has seen an uptick with the cloud computing trend. Samsung integrated Teradici's desktop portal processor directly into their PCoIP display earlier this year, and Teradici recently announced a partnership with VMware to develop a software implementation of PCoIP. One other fun fact I learned from the PR gal is that Alloy Ventures uses the technology in their offices and "thinks it's terrific." I emailed CEO Dan Cordingley to ask him a few questions about raising a big up round in this environment. Cordingley, a former general manager at Intel Corp., co-founded Teradici in 2004 with Dave Hobbs. Here’s the edited version of our conversation:

Scott Murphy still doesn’t know if he’s going to stay working as a VC or join the politico ranks. Murphy, a managing director at Advantage Capital Partners, was hoping voters in his upstate New York district would elect him as a representative to the state congress in a special election held yesterday. But the race is too close too call. As of this afternoon, Murphy, a Democrat and former software engineer, had about a 50-vote lead over his rival, James Tedisco, a veteran Republican assemblyman.

No foolin’, the exit markets for VC-backed companies are bad. Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association released exit numbers today, which you can view here. In the face of an economic downturn, there were zero venture-backed IPOs in the first quarter of 2009, marking the second consecutive quarter in which there were no new issues. Again, this is not an April Fools' Day prank. There has never before been any record of back-to-back quarters of no venture-backed IPOs.

As you can imagine, VC-backed Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive have been getting quite a lot of press lately. Tesla this week has unveiled its Model S, a 4-door sedan that, minus a $7,500 federal tax rebate, will cost about $50,000. The company, which counts Draper Fisher Jurvetson and VantangePoint Venture Partners as its investors, […]

Venture-backed LimeLife has bought the assets of TapaTap Inc. in what apparently amounts to a shutdown of VC-backed TapaTap. You can read the full story here, which has also posted Tuesday’s press release announcing the transaction by LimeLife. LimeLife is not hiring TapaTap’s seven employees, according to the news report. San Mateo, Calif.-based TapaTap, which developed Web applications for its women-oriented mobile sites, had raised more than $2.5 million from Gabriel Venture Partners since 2007. Menlo Park, Calif.-based LimeLife, which develops mobile phone games and lifestyle applications for women, has raised more than $26 million from U.S. Venture Partners, i-Hatch Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners, Core Capital Partners and Monitor Venture Management, according to Thomson Reuters.