Connie Loizos

Any new technology that promises users greater privacy online while making their lives easier would be a tantalizing prospect. Coming from an entrepreneur who has already sold two of his past companies, it proved irresistible to Fairhaven Capital. In fact, the Cambridge, Mass.-based venture firm so likes Ziptr — founded by serial entrepreneur Firdaus Bhathena […]

Six-year-old DLA Piper is in the news again today. Or, more accurately, its client, wood pellet salesman Paul Ceglia — the man who is suing Facebook for half the company — is in the news. The reason, of course: Facebook has just filed a document with the court that not only calls Ceglia an “egregious […]

When the manager of basketball star Shaquille O’Neal called Michael Downing one month ago out of the blue, the San Francisco entrepreneur was overcome with elation – and dread. O’Neal is a savvy social media adopter with nearly 4 million Twitter followers and more than 2 million Facebook fans. He also reads tech press, and he’d […]

It’s been an astonishingly long and bumpy ride, but finally, Wine.com is making a claim for the first time in its 13-year history: It’s profitable. That’s no small thing for CEO Rich Bergsund, who was installed at the head of the company in 2006 by the private equity firm Baker Capital. At the time, Baker had […]

Sonar.me didn’t win this week’s competitive TechCrunch Disrupt contest, but the company would make a plum prize for another organization: LinkedIn. The young, New York-based startup makes a mobile application that shows users who in a room they’re connected to on social media networks, then allows them to message those contacts. You can’t make it […]

Last October, when Brian Kennish read that Facebook was transmitting personal IDs to Internet tracking and advertising companies through popular Facebook applications, the Google engineer went home and spent the next 2.5 hours writing a browser extension that blocked Facebook Connect functionality. Kennish thought “50 people might use this thing,” but within two weeks, 50,000 […]

“Except in very narrow cases, where there’s breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time,” Eric Reis is telling me. “If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.”  Eric Ries speaks with confidence, likely because people seem to listen. In fact, he’s […]

Late yesterday morning, I grabbed coffee with Hipmunk cofounder Adam Goldstein. Hipmunk is a 10-month-old, 10-person, San Francisco-based startup whose travel search has won it the respect of the tech cognoscenti. They also comprise most of its users at this point. Hipmunk doesn’t release user numbers, but Goldstein said the service – which only recently […]

“I don’t think Facebook has peaked,” says Michael Birch, absently piling his trademark curtain of brown hair atop his head. “The point of saturation is often a lot further out” than many people assume, he says. “But what goes up must come down.” We are sitting in his San Francisco offices and Birch, best known […]

Earlier this afternoon, Scott Sweet, managing director of the research firm IPOboutique.com, told me that he’d already received more than 30 calls today. Tomorrow, he says, “it will be double that number – at least.” Sweet finds himself in great demand as observers contemplate the imminent IPO of LinkedIn, which raised its expected price range […]