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The latest job title for the Winklevoss twins -- the Olympian duo made famous for their role in the founding of Facebook -- should come as little surprise. What, after all, do you do when you have more money than you know what to do with and you're just 30 years old?

Naturally, you become a venture capitalist. Or, in the case of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, just hang out a VC shingle and become Winklevoss Capital. Remember, these Harvard alums gave up their long legal battle with Mark Zuckerberg last June and agreed to a $65 million settlement. … Read more

Jumping on the philanthropic bandwagon that counts people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and others as members, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz says its leaders will give to charity at least half of their lifetime VC earnings.

According to a Wall Street Journal report today, the six Andreessen Horowitz general partners said their giving will begin right away.

The partners plan to donate $1 million immediately to six nonprofits in the Valley, including the Second Harvest Food Bank and The Shelter Network, which focuses on homelessness issues, according to the Journal. The partners are: Marc … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--There's a whole lot of mobile startups these days, but how many of them are actually, you know, mobile?

A company called Needle is, and if you'd wandered near South Park here today, you would have seen its so-called Mobile Contact Center -- essentially a huge RV -- parked on the street with several employees working away inside.

Ostensibly based in Salt Lake City, Needle contracts with retail partners to provide them experts to chat with end users. The idea is that there's likely no one better suited to explaining a product, or answering questions about … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO-- Building a freemium service? You might want to pay attention to this tidbit: The mobile bill-payment service PageOnce is dropping its $4.99 subscription fee and going to an a la carte model.

PageOnce CEO Guy Goldstein told me at the Future of Money conference that the company has been testing different price points for its paid service. While getting financial account data and seeing bills remains free, helping users pay bills is where the company makes money. To date, PageOnce has charged $4.99 a month for this. Starting in early May, the per-month fee will be … Read more

At the Mama Bear Family Technology conference, a series of practical talks from entrepreneurs tackling the family market yields solid advice.

The overriding theme: this market is big. Huge, even. Two trillion dollars, says Dave McClure, organizer of the conference. $250 billion, says Jody Sherman, of the family products site Ecomom. Either way, big.

Addressing this market is complex, speakers said. The consumers of the products aren't always the buyers. Parents buy for kids. But it's the grandparents who have most of the money. And teachers make a big difference as well. You need to sell to all … Read more

"Too many single white kids are getting funded," 500 Startups founder Dave McClure says. "We're missing a big f---ing market."

McClure is kicking off the MamaBear Family Tech Conference today in Mountain View, Calif., to attack that market. At the same time, he wants angel investing to open up. It's overrun by men, he says.

"There's no lack of female founders anymore," according to McClure. He says that about 20 percent of his portfolio companies are run by women. Many are addressing family markets, he says. There are also a number … Read more

Evernote, which makes a popular app for taking and keeping notes, has raised a $100 million round of funding led by Meritech, according to a Business Insider story.

The story reports that the funding round would value Evernote at $1 billion. TechCrunch counters that the round has not closed and that the numbers may end up being different. Everynote has raised $95.5 million to date in four venture rounds; the last was $50 million.

Evernote reports 20 million users of its product over several major computing platforms: Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, and others. The product is sold in … Read more

NEW YORK -- Today, more than 200 startups, most from the Big Apple, came together for the first NY Tech Day, their chance to show off their wares to a gathering of more than 1,000 press, investors, and members of the public.

While the companies' offerings were diverse and rather uneven, there were some that stood out, and CNET did its best to pull together a list of the best that were on display:

FoundIt FoundIt is a useful service with an analog approach. The idea is to help you recover lost belongings. By signing up, you receive a sheet of stickers, each with an ID number assigned to your FoundIt account. Affix a sticker to your phone, your wallet, or anything worth recovering, and the finder can contact FoundIt via a phone number or by entering your code number on FoundIt's Web site. FoundIt then notifies the owner via text message or e-mail that the item has been located.… Read more

Besides the 13 lucky engineers working at Instagram, another group lucked out when Mark Zuckerberg decided it would be a good idea to plunk down $1 billion to buy the company: the bankers charged with drumming up interest in Facebook's (presumably monster) IPO.

While the SEC has yet to bless Facebook's S-1, its lead bankers at Morgan Stanley are apparently already out there selling the story to big institutional investors to fill out what's known as the "order book" -- a commitment by mutual funds and other biggies to buy a certain number of shares. … Read more