Alexander Haislip

Unemployment may have hit the highest level in the last quarter century, but one company is working to keep shirts on the backs of laborers: Work ‘n Gear, a Weymouth, Mass.-based startup, raised $6.5 million from investors in a Series A financing, according to a regulatory filing. The company runs a chain of retail stores and an e-commerce website that sells clothing for working people, such as steel-toe boots, pants with re-enforced knee pads, chef’s hats, scrubs and lab coats. Work ‘n Gear carries such brands as Dickies, Carhartt and Nurse Mates in its more than 40 retail stores in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest.

Katie Fehrenbacher’s Earth2Tech blog is putting on an interesting conference that’s worth going to. The Green:Net event, on March 24 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Club, will cover topics around the confluence of information technology and cleantech. It’s an increasingly hot sector as data-related companies are starting to find their energy bills are becoming a […]

I've been writing a story for the Venture Capital Journal that has turned up a few interesting anecdotes about startups that are taking using the downturn to their advantage. I'm saving the details for our subscribers, but one CEO told me he was buying production equipment for pennies on the dollar from businesses that had gone bankrupt. Another told me that he'd snapped up all the best reasearchers that had been laid off when their companies hit bankruptcy. A third said he'd retrained his sales team to push the low-cost aspect of its product while he goes off to Washington to lobby for Federal subsidies. Any turkey can fly in a high enough wind and a recession is a terrible thing to waste. So what's your plan to dominate the downturn?

I thought IVP and Benchmark were crazy when they put $35 million into Twitter last month. I had tried out Twitter when it first came out and thought it was pretty lame and easy to ignore for several months at a time. But after the latest investment round, I decided to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt and found several interesting things. The network effect has finally kicked in and it doesn't feel like you're shouting in an empty room anymore. It's getting to be like that moment in time when somebody you knew from work invited you to be a friend on Facebook. I found it easy to add to the increasing cacophony.

Imagine an iTunes library that was totally free and available online at no cost. Sounds pretty good, right? Well that is Spotify, a startup Morten Lund tipped me off to a couple of years ago. I tried it out and liked it, but forgot all about its downloadable client when I had to format my hard-drive. TechCrunch recently reviewed the service. Now the service has been hacked and the email address, birth dates, gender, postal codes and billing receipt details were potentially exposed, the company says. Spotify has raised more than $20 million from Northzone Ventures and Creandum, according to data from Thomson Reuters (publisher of PEHub.com).

Gavin Christensen is in charge of a new program at vSpring Capital, which seeks to nudge universities into getting more involved in the commercialization of their technologies. The carrot is that vSpring will cut the universities in on the carried interest (i.e., investment profits). The effort is called Kickstart Fund, and is seeking to raise about $10 million for between 20 and 25 academic spinouts from Utah and New Mexico. I caught up with Christensen to ask him a few questions:

In downtown Los Angeles, the bus stops are sporting posters for an upcoming Nicholas Cage film called “Knowing” about a man who believes he is the first to know about the coming apocalypse and is tortured by being a modern day Cassandra. Catch a bus and ride several blocks to the Good Samaritan Hospital, walk […]

Marc Andreessen tells peHUB that he has launched a venture capital fund, alongside former Opsware executive Ben Horowitz. The pair have been co-investing as angels since 2007. Andreessen, who became synonymous with Internet success after co-founding Netscape, first spoke about his investing collaboration with Horowitz on the Charlie Rose Show last night. We followed up with him this morning, and he confirmed that the partnership is a venture capital fund. We’re still working to nail down more specific details. The firm registered with the California Secretary of State under the name Andreessen Horowitz in July 2008 and has taken an office on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, Calif.

Now you see through it, now you don’t. That’s the type of abracadabra that startup Soladigm is working to bring to office buildings with its switchable glass technology. Glass that can limit the amount of light that passes through it is attractive to green building makers, who look at the technology as a way to reduce the need for air conditioning. But costs have been prohibitive. A decade ago, a square-meter of panel made from switchable glass would have cost between $100 and $1,000, according to reports. That price has dropped considerably since then and is poised to go lower.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is aiming to raise an additional $1.25 billion for four of its recent funds, according to regulatory filings. The biggest markup will be to the firm’s Green Growth Fund, which will double to $1 billion if the firm hits its fundraising target. peHUB had originally broken news of the new fundraising effort last month. It is also aiming to raise an additional $250 million for its thirteenth fund, which would put that investment vehicle at $950 million. In addition to its two most recent funds, Kleiner Perkins is raising annex funds for its twelfth and eleventh funds as well. Those funds are targeted at $350 million and $150 million respectively.