Connie Loizos

Two more dot.com high-fliers were found guilty of securities fraud today — 67-year-old opera-loving Alberto Vilar, and 65-year-old Gary Tanaka, the pair who founded Amerindo Investment Advisors in 1985. As recently as 2005, Vilar was on Forbes’s list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, with a then-estimated net worth of just under a billion dollars. He […]

Earlier this month, London-based 3i Group said it was closing its Menlo Park office by year-end, as part of a move away from early-stage venture investing. A spokeswoman for the firm told peHUB that “3i will maintain a core North American team run from our New York office as we continue to believe that there […]

Diarmuid O’Connell has been vice president of corporate development at Tesla Motors since reading about the electric car company in a business magazine, and “dialing around” until he reached then-CEO Martin Eberhard. Prior to meeting with Eberhard and landing his job of three years, O’Connell worked as a mid-ranking chief of staff in the U.S. […]

Phil Sanderson, a managing director at IDG Ventures in San Francisco and a natural marketer, was recently wondering how to give the consumer companies in his portfolio a boost in these gloomy times. He struck on an idea: offering discounts on their products and services to venture capitalists. Not only could it drive sales, but […]

Nexit Ventures, a cross-stage venture capital firm with offices in Saratoga, Calif., Helsinki, and Stockholm, has raised 75 million Euros for a second fund to fuel mobile startups with transatlantic ambitions. The fund includes capital commitments from mobile giant Nokia, and Tapiola Group, a Finnish insurance and financial group and it’s already backed four startups: mobile TV […]

Newsweek has just published a piece about Tesla Motors, and it’s a compelling read — unless you’re CEO Elon Musk, or a customer who’s given the company a deposit, or any one of Tesla’s long list of investors, including VantagePoint Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Westly Group, Technology Partners, former eBay president Jeff Skoll, and Google […]

A123 Systems has been a technology darling almost since forming in 2001, thanks to its rechargeable, low weight, powerful, and, oh, yes, nonflammable, lithium-ion batteries. The Watertown, Mass.-based company has been amply rewarded for trouncing most of its predecessors, too. Just last month, General Electric gave it $30 million for a 9 percent stake in the company. […]

Sharesleuth.com describes itself as an “independent Web-based reporting aimed at exposing securities fraud and corporate chicanery... Call it journalism. Call it investigative blogging. Call it what you will.” We’ll call it "ironic," given that the SEC has just filed insider-trading charges against Sharesleuth’s main backer, tech billionaire Mark Cuban. The SEC alleges that Cuban sold his 6% stake in Canadian-based Internet search company Mamma.com in 2004, after being told by management that it was going to announce a PIPE financing. According to the SEC, Cuban, who has called PIPE financings “a huge red flag,” almost immediately

Qik, a startup that turns your mobile phone into a live video streaming device, is meeting with investors. So said Greylock Partners’ James Slavet during a recent panel discussion, adding that Qik was one of the most exciting video startups with which he has recently met. Slavet declined to comment on how much the Santa […]

In 2000, James Hong and Jim Young founded HotorNot, a site that almost immediately drew tens of thousands of good-humored, or else crazy, people, who posted pictures of themselves to be rated by strangers. It was a “between-jobs” kind of thing, as Hong told BusinessWeek back in 2000. Except HotorNot matured into a successful dating […]