Connie Loizos

In the March/April issue of Technology Review magazine, writer James Surowiecki - who produces the brilliant “Financial Page” column for the New Yorker week after week -- tackles the question of what’s wrong with venture capital. Much of the piece is a rehash of points with which this audience is well-acquainted. Surowiecki persuasively argues, for example, that the still-overfunded industry’s woes are structural, not cyclical -- a matter with which both big venture firms and small ones are aware and likely to agree. (The big firms, of course, argue that overall, far fewer firms should exist -- and look just like they do. Meanwhile, small firms say the big firms are too fat and inefficient, given the ever-falling costs of runnng startups.) Yet Surowiecki makes an interesting newer observation, too. He suggests there are reasons for people outside the industry to care about how much money is sloshing around on the inside.

Poor Fluidigm has had more false starts than national health care reform. The South San Francisco biotech-equipment maker was originally slated to become the fourth venture-backed outfit to go public in 2008.  Then Lehman Brothers collapsed, pulling the U.S. economy with it; Fluidigm’s Nasdaq debut was postponed. Later, it was shelved. Now the company, which last year announced […]

Last week, snarky PleaseRobMe garnered attention for reporting when users of the location-based social network FourSquare were out and about. (PleaseRobMe pulls the locations from Twitter, which displays their check-in information, and broadcasts it under the flip heading “Recent Empty Homes.”) Now, in a smart advancement of the story, a UK-based insurance comparison site called Confused.com -- owned by car insurance giant Admiral Group -- suggests that as FourSquare and its ilk heighten the risk of homes getting burgled, insurance providers will react. “Criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their information gathering, even using Google Earth and Street View to plan their burglaries with military precision,” says Darren Black, the head of

Ever feel like you’re not absorbing as much as you should, particularly later in the day? It’s not your imagination, according to new research coming out of the University of California, Berkeley. According to the school’s findings, naps allow the brain to shift new information into its longer-term storage compartment, the prefrontal cortex, making room for even newer data in the hippocampus, where memories are first logged. The conclusions were drawn during a recent study of 39 young adults, who were evenly split into “nap” and “no nap” camps, then given some difficult learning tasks at noon. The 18 adults who fell into the “nap” group then took a 90-minute-long nap beginning at 2 p.m., while the rest were left to putter

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman may be the busiest man in Silicon Valley. Alhough he made former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner the CEO of his company last June, his role as executive board chairman is very much a full-time gig. Yet Hoffman now has a second job. Last November, he became a partner at Greylock Partners, which led LinkedIn’s Series B round. It’s no wonder Hoffman was recruited into venture capital. He's led an astonishingly successful career as an angel investor throughout the past decade. Among his dozens of investments, he bought stakes in Flickr, IronPort Systems and Last.fm -- sold to Yahoo for $35 million, to Cisco for $830 million and to CBS for $280 million, respectively. Hoffman, who typically invested between $25,000 and $75,000, also has the hottest portfolio on the planet right now. Not only does he presumably have a sizable chunk of LinkedIn -- expected to have a multibillion dollar IPO in the next couple of years --but he also owns pieces of Zynga; Facebook (which received its first check from Hoffman); and, through the sale of his portfolio company Mixer Labs, Twitter. Ultimately, the question isn't why Greylock pursued Hoffman; it's why he said yes.

For a 12-person startup, San Mateo-based Groovy Corp. is causing a fair bit of controversy in Silicon Valley. The reason? Groovy claims to have developed the capacity to do what has eluded all others -- truly real-time data relay through its proprietary in-memory relational database management system, called the SQL Switch. Truly real-time? Aren't startups like Twitter doing that already? Actually, no, says Groovy’s CEO, Joe Ward. “If you go to Ticketmaster, do you see the tickets disappearing as they are sold? You don't know if you've won or lost an auction on eBay until you've refreshed your page. Even on Twitter, you are seconds behind real time,” he says, calling it a “computer science problem that no one has really been able to solve.”

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis -- who launched the campaign against pay-to-pitch investment gatherings last fall -- has an announcement to make: Open Angel Forum is coming to both San Francisco and New York very soon. Kevin Rose of Digg and Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital will host the San Francisco event on March 4. Angels and entrepreneurs can apply to participate in the event here. The New York event will be held on April 8 and hosted by Brian Alvey, who cofounded Weblogs with Calacanis and now co-runs the publishing platform Crowd Fusion. Alvey will be joined by Charlie O’Donnell, founder of the career startup Path 101 and currently an entrepreneur-in-residence with First Round Capital.

It can be heartbreaking, being a native Clevelander. None of the city's sports teams have won a championship in my lifetime, and much older denizens could make the same claim. When I tell people that I grew up in Cleveland, I’m never told that it’s one of their favorite cities, or about how much they admire the splendor of the place. They grimace and say, “Oh, the Mistake on the Lake. I spent a week there for work once.” And so ends the conversation. As if these things weren't bad enough, now, in its third annual ranking of horrible places, Forbes has given Cleveland the ignominious distinction of “Most Miserable City in America,” a position it secured “thanks to its high unemployment, high taxes, lousy weather, corruption by public officials and crummy sports teams (Cavaliers of the NBA excepted).”

Stockbroker-turned-entrepreneur Howard Lindzon is leading what may be one of the most promising consumer startups to emerge in the last few years: StockTwits, a microblogging service with a voracious user base and huge ambitions to become the “Facebook of finance”– if it’s not acquired by a Schwab or Bloomberg along the way. The 15-person company, […]

This video is making the rounds, including at TechCrunch, which is referenced in the video. It’s just too funny not to repost. It’s a send-up of Owen Van Natta’s final hours as CEO of MySpace (one that Van Natta himself probably finds funny, if there’s any humor to be found in a situation like his). […]