Connie Loizos

Venture capitalist Adam Dell is already juggling a lot: he’s a GP with the Austin-based firms Steelpoint Capital Partners and Impact Venture Partners. He’s on the boards of a variety of companies, including Avelle, an accessories rental site that bills itself as the “the new Beg, Borrow or Steal.” He also teaches a class on business, technology and innovation at the Business School at Columbia University. There’s that famous billionaire brother to keep up relations with, too. And now, according to the New York Post, Dell, 40, may be parent to the soon-to-arrive baby of glamazon Padma Lakshmi. Lakshmi, 39, host of the Bravo show “Top Chef,” has been involved for years with buyout giant Teddy Forstmann. She is also famously the ex-wife of novelist Salman Rushdie.

For several years, Broadcom co-founder Henry Nicholas has been fighting charges that he conspired to commit accounting and securities fraud by backdating $2.2 billion in employee stock options, and that he distributed illegal drugs while with the company. Nicholas’ co-founder, Henry Samueli, also was dragged through the mud during the federal investigation into Broadcom’s backdating scandal, eventually pleading guilty to one count of lying to federal investigators. Yet today, in a dramatic reversal, their ongoing saga appears to have ended. U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, who has presided over the hearings of co-founders, today dismissed the narcotics case against Nicholas. Carney's decision comes six weeks after he threw out the securities fraud case against Nicholas and Samueli, who has since been reinstated as Broadcom's chief technology officer.

A friend just forwarded me a site that has nothing to do with venture capital, but it's too funny not to share. Called Unhappy Hipsters, you can visit it here to see what I mean. Sampling after the jump...

Do you sometimes feel like you can’t get enough of surveys suggesting that VCs are feeling newly confident about their line of work? Well, have I got good news for you. A new study by University of San Francisco Business School professor Mark Cannice says that Bay Area VCs are modestly more confident than they […]

Mangling the pronunciation of foreign languages is a longstanding American tradition, but many foreigners aren’t as blithely indifferent about their English-speaking skills. In fact, Alan Schwartz is betting that millions of young professionals abroad are keen to speak English as natively as possible. Enter his year-old Boston-area startup, EnglishCentral, an online language tutorial site that employs proprietary speech […]

This week, science writer and Wired columnist Clive Thompson writes “in praise of obscurity,” observing that in social media, there may very well be a point of having too many followers -- a number he ballparks at “a few thousand.” Thompson uses Maureen Evans, a poet, as an example. Evans built up an audience by tweeting recipes and poetic observations -- “this coffee tastes of peonies and the inner blades of fresh green grass,” she tweeted this morning. She loved the community that developed around her when it numbered 100 people -- even when it reached 3,000. Yet once Evans had amassed a stunning 13,000 followers, the conversation abruptly

It's hard to believe anyone would use the word “gyrate” to characterize anything relating to Bill Gates, yet a “spy” tells the New York Post that the Microsoft billionaire and philanthropist was dancing on a banquette earlier this week at an after-hours Sundance Film Festival party -- and that his security “rushed him out the back door at 2 a.m,” after awestruck onlookers began snapping photos. According to the Post, Gates also told its spy he'd come to the festival to meet Kristen Stewart, the young star of the blockbuster film “Twilight” and a newer film showing at Sundance called “The Runaways.” (Good to know he has a healthy sense of humor.)

Tens of millions of Americans plan to settle into the furniture and watch on TV as Superbowl XLIV kicks off in Miami less than two weeks from now. Liftopia cofounder Evan Reece would like them to hit the slopes instead. Minnesota Vikings fan? Head to Sierra-at-Tahoe for 20 percent off the typical lift prices. New […]

You might call 26-year-old Siqi Chen an accidental entrepreneur. The UC San Diego grad didn’t intend to be his own boss; he mostly wanted to do fun things for a cool Web development company. Indeed, after logging time at startups Webmetrics and Veoh Networks, Chen joined one of hottest startups to form in 2007, the San Francisco-based semantic search startup Powerset. (Most readers will recall that Powerset was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for $100 million.) Then a side venture, a Facebook game he began developing in late 2007 called "Friends for Sale," changed his life. Almost overnight, the game became one of Facebook’s most popular applications. Suddenly Chen had enough cash in his pocket to quit Powerset, and start his own company with pal and fellow Powerset engineer Alex Le. Today, Chen’s now two-year-old startup, Serious Business, has grown more serious than its tongue-in-cheek name implies. It is backed by $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, it's competing for an opportunity that analysts now place in the billions of dollars, and its profitable business is being threatened by aggressive startups like Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom, whose growth has far outpaced its own.

The Nielsen Company has just published some interesting data about how much time people spent on social media sites last year. You can check out the materials here; in the meantime, some of the more intersting findings include: * With 206.9 million unique visitors by December’s end, Facebook blew away every other global social networking destination. Nielsen estimates that 67% […]