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greg@prologventures.com
Q2 looks better than Q1 -- prices were up and there were more up rounds -- but according to Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB), venture fundraising in Q2 declined.
Get the Fenwick & West doc after the jump...
The game company has laid off around 15 people, or 30 percent of its staff, VentureBeat reported yesterday. Smith & Tinker confirmed the layoffs in a statement to the blog, which said the company had "staffed aggressively early on to meet deadlines for launching our product online and at retail this year" and the layoffs are needed "to bring our organization to healthy operational size for the remainder of this year and 2010."
Smith & Tinker raised $29 million from several VCs in August, including the Foundry Group. Managing director Ryan McIntyre, who's also on Smith & Tinker's board, told me recently that the holiday season will be an important test for Smith & Tinker, because it will show how successful the company is at reaching a mass audience. Smith & Tinker's game -- Nanovor -- is played with a device called a Nanoscope that's sold in the toy aisles of mass market retailers like Target and is intended to appeal to boys ages 7 to 12 who like battling monsters.
For more on companies like Smith & Tinker -- which are creating games that find new ways to combine the physical and virtual worlds -- see my story in the December issue of Venture Capital Journal.
Amid the hype -- and hope -- that mergers and acquisitions are picking up again, this list from Collins Stewart has been circulating over the weekend.
Top acquirers -- Amazon, EBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Top acquisition candidates -- Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (!), Glam Media, Zillow, Digg, Yelp and several others, despite speculation that some of these companies, like Facebook, could also IPO.
The complete list, and the reasoning behind it, comes after the jump.
Backed by over $30 million in venture capital and a $6.25 million DoE grant, AltaRock Energy has been drilling in Northern California geysers to establish pathways to hot rock, which it wants to inject with water to capture heat that would generate electricity.
Yesterday, AltaRock suspended the project, citing "physical difficulties" in the drilling of its first well, "resulting from geologic anomalies particular to the formation underlying this well location." It claims to have not given up, instead saying that it's evaluating other locations for drilling with a reminder that it's filed 20 patents.