Connie Loizos

“Hey, how’s everybody doing tonight? Great, great. You, in the front row, did you hear the one about the Greek and the Italian? How about the one about the on-demand cloud call center? See, five years ago, some college buddies and I started a Voice over IP consulting company and…” If you think that comedy clubs and entrepreneurial pitches don’t mix, 40-year-old Ami Kassar is proving you wrong twice a month, in both Philadelphia and LA, where since earlier this year, his events business has been attracting enough entrepreneurs, service professionals, and investors to fill the small clubs it rents. There is no stand-up comedy involved (except in my imagination). Rather, for between 90 seconds and a few minutes, budding and established entrepreneurs take the stage during open-mike nights to share their ideas, hoping to improve on them with the audience’s participation as well, sometimes, to entice an investor seated in the crowd.

Mike Alfred thinks Silicon Valley VCs are mostly clueless, and he plans to prove it with the help of some powerful financiers. Alfred, 28, is co-founder and chief executive of San Diego-based Brightscope, a two-year-old company focused on giving people tools to compare their company’s 401(k) plan to that of other similar companies. Brightscope -- the brainchild of Dan Weeks, a longtime Hewlett-Packard executive turned Brightscope cofounder and COO -- began its effort by using Department of Labor data to reconstruct and rate roughly 2,500 company-sponsored 401(k) plans according to 200 data inputs, including performance, plan cost, and hidden fees.

I haven’t subscribed to Fortune for a few years, mostly because I can’t find the time to read it anymore. Still, I’ve long enjoyed the work of columnist and humor writer Stanley Bing (outed several years ago as CBS’s corporate communications head Gil Schwartz). In fact, it's because I'm a fan that I was surprised to read his blog post this morning, titled “Forget Ponzi Schemes: Try Venture Capital!”

It’s not every blog that receives a testimonial in the form of a half haiku from Marc Andreessen. One notable exception is Futuristic Play, the two-year-old blog of viral marketing whiz Andrew Chen, about which Andreessen has written, “Marc read Andrew, good blog.” Andreessen isn’t alone. Chen has a small but powerful, and growing, following in Silicon Valley thanks to the smart essays he typically posts once or twice a week. Indeed, other fans include Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, who says at Chen's site that there's "no one who knows more about" the latest methods "for building and retaining Web 2.0 audiences" and Jared Kopf, the CEO and founder of ad network Adroll, who calls the blog "unmissable." Chen is capitalizing on the momentum, too. To wit, Chen, once an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures and previously the director of product marketing at the behavioral targeting startup Revenue Science (now Audience Science), is hard at work on his own “new stealth consumer Internet

Over the weekend, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington suggested that Lightspeed’s new $15 million investment in Ning -- whose online platform invites people to create their own social networks -- boils down to one word: Marketing. Lightspeed needed a sexy social networking startup to add to its portfolio, he wrote, adding: “Do they expect to see a big return on the investment? Almost certainly not. But they also haven’t put their money at extreme risk. They likely have a liquidation preference that lets them get their $15 million out of the company before others can take part of the pie. So effectively, they just bought themselves a bunch of marketing with their limited partners’ money…LPs [who] don’t really mind.”

Today, Zappos filed its S4 with the SEC and, as these things go, it’s pretty rife with interesting details. For example, reading the document, you can see that while net revenue for Zappos was $635 million last year, up 21 percent from 2007, its net income was just $10.8 million thanks to all those shoes […]

Benchmark has had plenty of success with IPOs in the past. Apparently, it’s pretty bullish on its chances of soon getting more companies across the line, too. According to the WSJ, the Sand Hill firm this week held a half-day seminar for 20 of its startups, featuring Intuit founder Bill Campbell, who discussed public company […]

As many readers already know, billionaire Jim Clark pretty much gave the Valley the heave-ho after cofounding Silicon Graphics, Netscape, MyCFO and some other companies during the go-go dot.com years a decade ago. Clark first headed to Florida to develop luxury condos in Miami, a move that he "wouldn't do again." He now spends a fair amount of his time in Sydney, Australia, where among his newest properties is an $8 milliion waterfront apartment that he and his Australian supermodel wife Kristy Hinze closed on this week, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Recently, Clark, who'd returned to the Valley to accept an award, emailed with the San Jose Mercury News about that period of his life, as well as what's right and not so right with the tech world today. He told reporter Scott Duke Harris that among the reasons he left California in 1999 was that he'd "tired of starting companies," as well as that he "didn't want to be a conventional venture capitalist because I have always held that occupation in low regard, even though some of my very good friends are VCs." The reason, he said: "They take too much ownership for what they bring to the business."

Shiv Singh is a vice president and the Global Social Media Lead for Razorfish, one of the world’s biggest interactive agencies and home to a long line of Fortune 500 clients, including Levis, McDonalds, Starwood Hotels and Victoria’s Secret. Yesterday, before Singh caught a plane out of his headquarters in New York, we discussed how Razorfish's customers are approaching the explosive growth of social media and the new class of influencers born of the boom. Singh also shared some of his most recent data discoveries with me, what new techniques companies are using to boost customer engagement across social media, and why he thinks Twitter has some growing up to do.

Since taking the helm of Yahoo in January, CEO Carol Bartz has been consolidating management of the company’s sundry product groups, shaving excess costs (including laying off 700 more employees in the second quarter), and otherwise directing resources to support those properties that have consistently performed the best, like Yahoo Mail. Indeed, just this morning, Yahoo unveiled a new homepage that is already receiving rave reviews for a revamped design that includes more personalized features, along with embedded widgets of third parties like Facebook and MySpace that will enable users to enjoy the Web without leaving Yahoo. Now, peHUB has learned from multiple sources that as part of Bartz’s drive to dismantle non-core assets, Yahoo is also trying to shed both HotJobs, which Yahoo acquired for $436 million in cash and stock back in 2001, and Yahoo Small Business, which helps customers get their small businesses online by providing them with everything from domain registration to site monitoring to promotional tools.