Connie Loizos

From an entertaining piece in today’s Wall Street Journal titled “After the Plunge: Cellphone CPR,” reporter Sara Silver looks at the world of water-damaged phones, and how to (sometimes) resuscitate them.  In the story, Silver shines a light on the underreported but widespread practice of carrying one’s cell phone into the bathroom; regretfully, to prove […]

Jim Clark — the bespectacled 64-year-old billionaire cofounder Silicon Valley companies like Silicon Graphics and Netscape — is getting married a fourth time. This time, Mrs. Clark will be 28-year-old Kristy Hinze, a statuesque blonde who also hosts “Project Runway Australia.” The two have been dating for several years, since around the time Clark was wrapping […]

Guy Kawasaki, a founding partner of Garage Technology Ventures and a prolific writer (his seventh book, Reality Check, “drops” next week), is also a nice guy by pretty much everyone’s accounting. Kawasaki is refreshingly frank at times, too. Certainly, that’s been the case in a series of exchanges that he’s been having over the last couple of […]

Earlier today, I spoke with Jeff Lanctot, chief strategy officer for Razorfish, one of the world’s biggest interactive agencies, about advertisers’ mentality in the face of a prolonged downturn. Yahoo just laid off 10 percent of its workforce, and the bad news keeps coming. How are your clients reacting? Most are doing contingency planning. They’re very well aware of the economic turmoil we’re facing. They’re trying to figure out what the impact will be on their businesses specifically. As part of process, they’re doing scenario planning: if we cut here, what does it mean? If we cut there, how will that affect us? There’s a flight to

Has Facebook killed the widget or is it merely insisting on high standards for its users? The question received attention again this week, when serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer proclaimed Facebook’s platform dead, during a developers conference in Berlin. Rafer was speaking from his own experience. Last summer, he started Lookery, a San Francisco-based ad network […]

Last week, in the middle of a stomach-churning afternoon on Wall Street, I rang Mark Jensen, a partner and the National Director for the Venture Capital Services Group at Deloitte & Touche to see how his firm is faring. Jensen shared a few thoughts with me, including why despite the gloom that has enveloped Silicon Valley, he is filled with a kind of joyful anticipation. You’ve been in this industry since 1994. Where do you think we are on the spectrum of bad to worst? I think we’re at stage one. We’ve seen the meltdown, certainly in the financial services industry. Now the news we’re seeing today is that, okay, we really are in a recession. But this feels differently than anything I’ve seen before. I’m not suggesting we’re heading into the second Great Depression. But it’s comprehensive. This downturn involves the financial system, homeowners, and consumers. And when you think about the tech industry, you realize that a lot of products are sold into the consumer products market, whereas in previous downturns, most of the tech was being sold into other companies. It was focused on the information technology used by large enterprises. So you think tech companies are about to be walloped. Well, yes, as you start to look ahead, it looks like tech companies are going to be hit, and what you’re seeing is a complete tightening of the belts trying to get ready for it. You could say that we’re causing our own recession because no one is spending anything

In this environment, no investment looks particularly safe, so why not give into your egoistic impulses and finance an independent film? A growing cadre of tech execs and VCs has already jumped into the pool, and if you’re an accredited investor who’ll be in Northern California this Thursday night, the investment group FilmAngels will gladly get […]

  In its November issue, Portfolio magazine looks at which billionaires give away the most money relative to their net worth, and which give the least (ouch — and it includes Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer).  The magazine’s list, 50 billionaires long, isn’t perfect; many of the people featured haven’t publicly disclosed what they may or may not have […]

In an opaque market that has the world unsettled, Benchmark’s Bill Gurley has been doing his part to be more transparent. In early October, representing Benchmark, he authored a letter of advice to the founders Benchmark has backed, letting them know that while Benchmark remains supportive, it predicts a long and lumpy road. Gurley, a  […]

Evan Nisselson, the founder of Digital Railroad, a software and services company that creates applications designed to solve critical technical problems for creative professionals, just sent out the following message — in his Facebook “status update”: No longer Chairman of DRR… hopefully the company/members will land in good hands. sorry… Here’s hoping Nisselson had “friended” […]