Connie Loizos
The world’s only rehab clinic for patients believed to be online gaming junkies soon may be out of business. The two-year-old Smith & Jones Centre, based in Amsterdam, has concluded that just 10% of gaming “addicts” suffer from actual addiction issues, and that the rest are merely outcasts who can be rehabilitated with some tender loving care from friends and family.
As clinic’s founder Keith Bakker said to the BBC: “The more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers - this is a social problem."
While much of the country was happily preparing to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with their families, Stacy Nicholas, the ex-wife of billionaire Broadcom co-founder Henry Nicholas, was suing to take control of her family's $600 million joint trust. Among her allegations are that Nicholas ordered his private investigators, who once dressed in gorilla masks, to follow her, and that he once said he was going to have her “whacked.”
The Orange County Register, which has been following the travails of Nicholas and Henry Samueli, Broadcom’s other co-founder, broke the news last week.
The suit is filled with the sort of shocking allegations that have become nearly synonymous with Nicholas, who was indicted in June
A former designer who last month lost his job at Seattle-based Entellium has filed suit, saying he was told that if he didn’t sign a document waiving away his rights to wages, he would lose his eligibility to COBRA health insurance benefits. The designer, Leif Jensen, says he was given just 30 minutes to make a decision.
As readers may recall, the software startup’s former CEO and CFO -- Paul Johnston and Parrish Jones -- were arrested in October and charged with having cooked the books in an effort to attract, and keep attracting, venture capital funding. Based partly on the perceived strength of its numbers, Entellium received financing totaling almost $50 million, nearly $19 million of which came from Ignition Partners. Entellium's other investors include Sigma Partners and Intel Capital.
Jensen says that just before Johnston and Parrish were charged with fraud, he and others were let go
Anyone who’s lived in or around Silicon Valley for some time knows, and probably likes, Alison Murdock, the affable former president of Dealmaker Media, which produces the Under the Radar conference series. Murdock left the firm last year to find and pursue some new interests, including, unexpectedly, a rock show that will both star venture […]
The holiday invitations have been rolling in over the past few weeks, and all of them look almost exactly like they did last year, and the year before that, and so on and so on. The angel investor network Band of Angels is having its typically lavish holiday party at the exclusive Menlo Circus Club […]
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’m asking readers who they’d nominate for the biggest turkey of the year award. On the LBO side, there are almost too many to count, beginning with TPG’s April decision to gamble on what was then the country’s largest savings and loan, Washington Mutual. WaMu, of course, abruptly collapsed in […]
Battery Ventures today is announcing that it has led a $100 million Series A investment in Pocket Communications Northeast — a telecom startup in a very crowded space, with many large competitors, including one that Battery itself funded over a 10-year period. It’s a hugely ambitious gamble, but one the firm expects to pay off, and quickly. Pocket Communications […]
Typically, when someone claims that they are pioneering a whole new business sector, they’re either exaggerating or lying outright. Not so with Paul Koenig and Mark Vogel, who seemingly are creating a new niche within the venture industry ecosystem — that of the shareholder representative. It’s more interesting than it sounds. Here’s how what they’re doing works: […]
Salesforce.com is holding a conference call about its third-quarter earnings in a bit. While figuring out where to click for the Webcast of that presentation, I just noticed that the company is hiring like gangbusters, everywhere in the world, and across the company: in HR, marketing, sales, IT, research and development, engineering; the list is endless.
Maybe Salesforce sees an opportunity to steal even more market share. New hires will be getting
Polaris Venture Partners is going public with Dog Patch Labs, an incubator it quietly began organizing in San Francisco in May. The effort aims to attract a “mixture of some great people” to its “cool loft space” along the city’s waterfront — so blogs Polaris general partner Mike Hirshland, who’s been splitting his time between his […]