Connie Loizos

Ira Ehrenpreis has waited a long time for his first win in the high-risk business of clean tech, and this week, it’s looking like he has it. After leading an investment in electric car maker Tesla Motors for Technology Ventures, Ehrenpreis has seen its pre-IPO stake of 3.51 percent transformed into $57.2 million, as of […]

ExactTarget, a little-known but powerful email marketing company with more than 600 employees and north of $100 million a year in revenues, closed on $145 million last year from investors including Battery Ventures and Technology Crossover Ventures. It’s looking like money well spent. Customers of ExactTarget have long used it to send out email coupon […]

It’s taken decades of designs, tens of filed patents, and, most critically, major advances in composite materials, but the flying car is here. Indeed, if you are a wealthy technophile who can afford its $195,00 price tag, you will no doubt be the envy of every James Bond fan who crosses your path. You will, […]

It’s official: Highly-hyped location-based startup Foursquare just closed on a $20 million round of funding at a $95 million pre-money valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with previous investors O’Reilly AlphaTech and Union Square Ventures also participating. Foursquare famously materialized from the vestiges of Dodgeball, a mobile service cofounded by Dennis Crowley, who sold the company to Google in 2005. When the search giant killed the service, Crowley, who'd logged roughly two years at Google, quit and quickly revived the idea. Today, the 18-month-old company employs 27 people and has attracted 1.7 million users. It’s also in a race against a growing number of location-based services, including those of Gowalla and Loopt, and soon to include Twitter and possibly Facebook. A few moments ago, I talked with Marc Andreessen about why his venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, was so hot on the deal despite all that competition, whether he or Ben Horowitz use FourSquare, and how he’ll reconcile his involvement with the startup with his role as a director at Facebook, which is widely believed to be developing its own location-based service. Read the Q&A after the jump...

Silicon Valley wants Tesla Motors to succeed for numerous reasons, including the lackluster IPO market of late and its potential to turn electric cars into the next, lucrative emerging technology. The country wants Tesla Motors to succeed, too. After all, the last U.S. car company to hold an IPO was Ford, in 1956. Yet in […]

If there's one thing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg might dread more than catching a clip of his famously sweat-drenched interview at the recent D8 Conference, it might be the debut of "The Social Network," the film based on the 2009 book Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook. I *think* he can stop worrying. The movie's newly released trailer is unintentionally hilarious. Even with the ridiculously talented Justin Timberlake starring as Sean Parker, I predict this one lands a place in the same pantheon of stinky movies that includes "Basic Instinct 2," and "Battlefield Earth." Watch it after the jump...

Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO and Republican candidate for governor of California, is trying to connect with young, Web savvy voters. But her new attack ad against her Democratic opponent, Jerry Brown, looks like major misstep toward that end. Fifty-one seconds into the sharply critical ad about Brown, the attorney general and former governor, a screenshot of him appears, […]

Earlier this week, research firm Inside Network published a fascinating new report that looks at the spending and usage patterns of the users who are driving the success of hugely profitable social games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Texas Hold’Em. This afternoon, I caught up with one of the report’s coauthors, Charles Hudson, to gather a little more detail about that study -- and what he found most surprising about its findings. How many people did you interview for your research and how did you find them? Going into it, we talked to a lot of developers about what tools they were using for customer acquisition. It turns out

With so much attention paid this year to Groupon and it’s reported valuation of north of $1 billion, numerous stories (including right here) have asked the question: is it Chicago’s time to shine? With regard to most startups, I don’t think so, but given real estate prices in the Windy City, I wish it were. Consider this 4,700-square-foot penthouse apartment whose 360-degree views, gourmet kitchen, steam room and more will be shown to prospective buyers on Saturday. Starting bids for the property? $600,000. Try finding that much real estate for less than a few million dollars in Northern California.

Facebook announced in April that it would begin integrating offers, such as Netflix trials, as a payment option for its new, universal virtual currency called Credits. Though Facebook initially announced plans to integrate the offers of two venture-backed monetization startups, TrialPay and PeanutLabs, Facebook has yet to make the PeanutLab’s offers available to users and competitors. Related or not, competitors in the space are beginning to cry foul over Facebook's relationship with TrialPay. One major bone of contention, claim two sources who asked not to be named, is that the process used to vet competitors to TrialPay was neither impartial nor clear. “They just asked [one of TrialPay’s competitors] to give [Facebook] a presentation on the company,” says one source familiar with the matter. “It turned out that the presentation was the equivalent of a [request for proposal, at the start of most bidding processes], but [the competing company] was never notified of that and in fact, their executives were told to skip over background about the company’s fraud protection and customer service.”