Connie Loizos

FreshGuide, a new coupon site that presents visitors with one exclusive daily offer to which they must respond within a limited timeframe, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Baseline Ventures, NBC Universal, Hatch Ventures and Ron Conway’s SV Angel fund. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company is something of a hybrid, combining the discounts of a coupon site like Retailmenot with the local business profiles of an email event guide like DailyCandy -- with a countdown clock worked into the mix.

There are some things that you just can’t express in 140 characters or less, so when Twitter cofounder Biz Stone sends out a note to bring users up to speed on the company, he does it via good old-fashioned email. This one just arrive in my inbox; the most interesting nugget is probably that developers have now created […]

Oh no you didn't, Topeka. According to the San Francisco Business Times, in a bid to lure Google and its ultrafast fiber-optic network to its fine city, Topeka, Kansas has renamed itself Google, Kansas for the month of March. According to the paper: William Bunten, Topeka’s mayor, signed a proclamation to that effect on Monday -- his signature was right below “Google, Kansas -- the capital city of fiber optics” but also beside the embossed seal that still reads “The capital city of Kansas: Topeka.” The story goes on to point out that Hot Springs, New Mexico, tried a similar stunt decades ago, changing its name to Truth or Consequences after the popular '50s radio quiz show. Unfortunately, in

ExactTarget this morning announced that it has acquired CoTweet, a customer relationship management tool that sprang up around Twitter in the fall of 2008. The deal is a natural match. Ten-year-old ExactTarget is a powerful email marketing company with more than 600 employees and revenues north of $100 million a year, but it hadn't yet delved into the world of real-time social media. The company, based in Indianapolis, is also sitting on tons of cash, having gathered around $155 million in VC funding from Battery Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Montagu Newhall Associates and Technology Crossover Ventures.

Beginning later today, entrepreneurs on the verge of raising seed-stage funding will be able to access open-source, stripped-down term sheets called Series Seed Documents. The documents -- authored by Fenwick & West attorney Ted Wang with input from Andreeesen Horowitz, First Round Capital, True Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Ron Conway, Mike Maples, and several other heavy-hitting seed investors -- are designed to make entrepreneurs’ first, small financing event as fast, efficient and cost-effective as possible. Andreessen tells me that the group wanted to produce an alternative to the gratuitously complex term sheets that are typically offered by venture capital firms, and that cost entrepreneurs who need to muddle through them too much in legal fees. (If the move happens to make most other venture firms look like financial bullies, well, maybe that's okay, too.)

If real-time Web startups prove to be the Next Big Thing, then Betaworks could become one of the hottest new media companies in a generation. If not, it's bye-bye, Betaworks. Such is the gamble Betaworks founders John Borthwick and Andy Weissman decided to take in the summer of 2007. At the time, Weissman was working as a VC at Dawntreader Ventures. Borthwick was the CEO of the photo-sharing site Fotolog. As Fotolog entered talks to be acquired by a French media company for $90 million, the old college friends --and, in the mid ‘90s, colleagues at AOL -- started fleshing out ideas. Borthwick and Weissman knew that Twitter was no passing fad, yet they were among the first to see that any number of new business possibilities could emerge from real-time social media. Enter Betaworks, a New York-based company that develops its own ideas, acquires companies and invests in nascent startups that it views as strategic to its ambitious vision of creating an empire of companies -- all of which are rooted in live social activities online.

Remember all those fun, wastefully expensive dot.com parties of the late ’90s? Nascent aussie music startup Guvera brought them to mind last week with its curiously extravagant launch party. Held at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York, the bash featured appearances by Alice Cooper, The Donnas, The Bravery, and Mos Def.  Also present? A 45-foot-tall ice sculpture of […]

In recent years, almost everything but venture capital has garnered Tom Perkins attention: the marriage to romance novelist Danielle Steel; the memoir afterward; Perkins’ role in having Carly Fiorina sacked as HP’s CEO and later elbowing the company’s chairman, Patricia Dunn, out the door. And of course, there’s the media’s fascination with Perkins’ lifestyle: from […]

All of two venture-backed startups have gone public this year, and both have been disappointments. Despite what seemed like an auspicious lead-up to its debut, Internet advertiser QuinStreet — advised by Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners, no less — wound up slashing its shares to $15 from $18, according to SEC filings. Those shares, which began […]

This weekend, renowned tech analyst Charlene Li was horrified to discover that her 9-year-old daughter had posted a conversation to Google Buzz, not realizing it was public -- or that someone with the handle “iorgyinbathrooms” was following her. Li immediately kicked her daughter off her Google account, then wrote a lengthy post about how dangerous Buzz can be for children in part because its privacy controls are so tricky to navigate. (Jessica Guynn of the L.A. Times talked with some privacy experts about the situation here.) Google was quick to get back to Li, explaining that Gmail’s terms of service don’t allow anyone under age 13 to have an account. It also told her that a “long list of improvements is on the way" and stressed that it's exploring new ways to ensure child safety (and open to suggestions). Li, who’d apparently