Connie Loizos
MyRegistry.com just closed on a $2.7 million round of outside funding — not that its founder wants to talk about it, thank you very much. The company offers a straightforward proposition. Its easy-to-use platform invites customers to transform their favorite retail establishments into gift registry destinations. Want a Ralph Lauren cashmere blanket as a wedding […]
Today, the Kauffman Foundation published a controversial study titled “America’s Loss is the World’s Gain,” in which former tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa and several co-authors suggest that while the U.S. worries about nimble foreigners taking American jobs, smart immigrants are returning to their home countries in droves. It’s a trend that could ultimately hurt the U.S., […]
Just ran across this funny exchange between the CEO of a Ketchum, Idaho, startup, and Dan Levitan, managing partner of Maveron, the Seattle-based venture firm founded by Howard Schultz. The CEO, Scott Jordan, was scheduled to meet with Levitan earlier this month to talk about his company, which produces clothing with hidden pockets to store personal […]
Hard hit by Wall Street’s collapse, devauled public companies are proving too irresistible for VCs to ignore.
“We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in interest by venture capitalists in small cap issuers,” says Steve Fletcher, a managing director at GCA Savvian in San Francisco, who says his investment bank began receiving “many more calls” from VCs beginning in November and December.
“Especially in life sciences, biotechnology, and the IT space, we’ve seen a proliferation of venture firms, coming to us and saying, 'We’d love to see the PIPES you’re doing,” says Mark Weissman, vice president of equity capital markets at the investment bank Jeffries & Co. “We’ve done at least a dozen PIPE deals involving VCs in recent months.”
In the midst of a deepening financial crisis, media training may not be top of mind for most VCs and CEOs, but Vickie Jenkins, a media maven who has worked with dozens of companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, says it’s more important than ever to know what you’re going to say before you say it.
I just spoke with Jenkins, who spent 20 years as a radio morning news reporter, anchor and director in San Francisco before setting up her company, Performance Power Media Coaching, in 1999. Among other things, I asked her where CEOs tend to need the most help, how they can justify hiring her in today’s climate and what she charges.
James Hong has been laying low since he and cofounder Jim Young sold HotOrNot, a once wildly popular site that invited visitors to rate pictures of other people based on their (yes) hotness, and sold for $20 million last February to a Toronto-based company. Fast forward one year and Hong may be back in business. At […]
Last night, while President Obama made his address to the joint session of Congress, some lawmakers in the room were apparently less interested in hearing his plans than in providing their Twitter followers with mundane streams of consciousness.
As the Washington Post hilariously reports, Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) tweeted as Obama entered the chamber, "One doesn't want to sound snarky, but it is nice not to see Cheney up there."
"Capt Sully is here -- awesome!" typed Representative John Culberson (R-Tex.), who also live-streamed his breathless walk to the House floor for the speech using his camera phone and Qik, a Marc Andreessen-backed startup.
Today, at a two-day conference in Miami called the Future of Web Apps, the Virgin Group revealed that Virgin Air is working on a Facebook Connect implementation so passengers can visit Facebook in the air, including to see if any of their Facebook "friends" are also on the flight. Imagine the status updates. "I'm in the exit aisle right now." "Waiting for in-flight sandwich." "I smell like airplane bathroom."
For more details, click here.
In a newly published study involving 9,405 Taiwanese adolescents, researchers at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan found that those with symptoms of “Internet addiction” were more likely to claim that they’d hit, shoved or threatened someone in the past year. According to the research team, the symptoms include preoccupation with online activities, withdrawal-like symptoms, such as […]
I'd guess a few VCs and buyout pros wiped their brows after reading the latest report to conclude that index funds are the best place for investors to park their money. (PE funds escaped notice, while hedge funds and mutual funds were called out for their aggressive management fees -- expenses that often render outperformance meaningless.)
More here on the new study, whose author, Mark Kritzman, president and chief executive of Windham Capital Management of Boston, says in its pages that “it is very hard, if not impossible to justify active management for most individual, taxable investors, if their goal is to grow wealth.”