Connie Loizos

After much anticipation over the last couple of years, Twitter is finally announcing some money-making plans Tuesday morning, and they may disappoint industry watchers who were expecting some strategies as innovative as Twitter itself. As the New York Times is reporting tonight, the company’s ad program, called Promoted Tweets, “will show up when Twitter users search […]

Twitter cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone both “tweeted” when it came time to sell their homes last year, but the shout-outs didn’t translate into much of a bidding war for either, despite their massive followings (1,182,466 and 1,649,522, respectively). Last July, Stone tried selling his Berkeley home for $575,000; it sold for $550,000 in […]

If you’re looking for a way to capitalize on the so-called demise of traditional publishing, you might want to take a look at NewsLabs. The startup graduated from Y Combinator two weeks ago and tomorrow launches an interesting new content platform for journalists. Though the company has raised just a small seed round to get it through the next six months, it will shop for a “six figure” round in June or July, says its CEO, Paul Biggar, a computer science PhD who talked with me about the company.

It was just last June when SharesPost first went live, yet the 14-person, Santa Monica-based company is already an invaluable player in the tech industry, or so it seems at the moment. Sharespost, which connects private company shareholders with buyers via company-specific bulletin boards, has already registered 17,000 users and facilitated 70 deals with an […]

Thirty-three-year-old Travis Kalanick is part of a growing band in Silicon Valley: the entrepreneur-turned-angel investor. The serial entrepreneur last cofounded the file -sharing service Red Swoosh, which sold to Akamai in 2007 for $18.7 million plus an additional $5 million in incentives. The company had raised $1.5 million from August Capital, Crosslink Capital, Mark Cuban […]

Formed three years ago, the comedy video site Funny or Die has already pulled in close to $20 million from Sequoia Capital, HBO, and angel investors like Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway. As of earlier this year, the company, which combines original programming with user-generated content, was looking to raise even more, according to a source close to the company. Contacted yesterday, CEO Dick Glover declined to be interviewed about Funny or Die, emailing instead that the startup "is not looking for more funding.” Instead, he suggested that it’s about to start investing money. According to Glover, Funny or Die is setting up a “separate fund” for “other purposes.”

A federal appeals court today ruled that the FCC overreached two years ago, when it issued a cease and desist order against Comcast for deliberately slowing the Internet file transfers of BitTorrent users. Comcast ended the practice soon after, but the situation made clear that the FCC believed it had the legal right to mandate "Net neutrality." Today's ruling seemingly moves the debate over to Congress, which would have to grant the FCC the authority to regulate ISPs. A second possibility -- the “nuclear option,” as some are calling it-- would be for the FCC to reclassify broadband as a regulated service, reversing a decision made under the Bush Administration to classify broadband providers as an “information service” that are beyond the scope of the FCC’s power. Given that it already looks to be a grueling election year, the first scenario seems unlikely at this point -- unless something forces the hand of Congress. Understandably, VCs fear that such a “something” could be an ISP's favorable treatment of a strategic partner or other self-interested maneuver. “Imagine if Comcast decided once day that they didn’t want anyone else to allow voice over their network,” says Allan Leinwand, a venture partner at Panorama Capital. “Maybe they claim that Vonage somehow damages its bandwidth, despite that a packet is a packet.”

In a move to quell some of the controversy swirling around it of late, Yelp, the user-generated review site, is making some changes effective today. For starters, businesses who spend advertising dollars with Yelp will no longer be able to post their favorite review at the top of the site. Yelp is also including a […]

Unvarnished, a new site that invites people to “review” work colleagues, has raised $500,000 in VC funding, according to an email sent out by founder Peter Kazanjy. The San Francisco startup was looking to raise closer to $1 million, according to sources. Judging by the buzz that has surrounded Unvarnished since its debut last week, it may get there soon. While some employment attorneys at Wilson Sonsini seem baffled by the site -- telling the L.A. Times last week that it’s a “litigation nightmare” that begs the question “Who can I sue?” -- some venture capitalists and angel investors appear ready to gamble on the company as a back way into LinkedIn’s market space.

[POST UPDATE BELOW.] Last Wednesday, a number of outlets published fairly straightforward stories about the valuations of Twitter and Facebook, owing to reports — one about each company — that were made public the same morning. The reports were produced by Los Angeles-based SharesPost, a private equity marketplace that’s enabling employees at some hot, still-private […]