mike

I've suggested before that Index Ventures could well be the "best venture firm in Europe." Index has one of the most interesting investment portfolios of any venture firm on the planet, having invested in companies like Skype, Openads, Oanda, DimDim, and others.

Today, Index became even more interesting, adding Michelangelo ("Mike") Volpi to its investment team as a partner based in London. Volpi was most recently the CEO of online video company Joost, but made his name as the mergers and acquisitions maestro at Cisco, where he oversaw 75 acquisitions.

Given Volpi's background as … Read more

Joost may be in for more bad news, as a report out of Great Britain says Mike Volpi, CEO of the video site, is a candidate to take over as chief executive of ITV.

ITV is a British public service network and a BBC competitor. British newspaper The Sunday Times reported that Volpi is among a small group of candidates scheduled to be interviewed over the next two weeks.

The report comes two months after CNET News reported that Joost was shopping itself to cable companies. One of the companies that made inquiries was Time Warner. Joost, created by the … Read more

The tech media recently started taking serious notice of Hadoop, an open-source project developed to processing huge amounts of data, and the coverage is growing every day. According to ITDatabase, 161 stories have been written about Hadoop in the last three months alone, including a veritable "coming out party" in The New York Times.

Hadoop is interesting because it's proven in use at large Web shops, cloud-oriented, open-source, and it solves two major computing problems: handling large amounts of data, and writing parallel programs for large numbers of computers. Hadoop clusters can scale up to tens or … Read more

Mike McCue was a bit choked up Wednesday after announcing he will leave Microsoft next month, two years after the software giant acquired Tellme Networks, where McCue was a founder and chief executive.

"It's kind of an unusual feeling to leave a company you've started," McCue said in a telephone interview, following a meeting with his staff. "It is a big change. There is no question about it. It was an emotional all-hands meeting."

McCue said that he wants to get back to "his entrepreneurial roots."

"I haven't really thought … Read more

Mike McCue isn't the only Tellme veteran who is leaving Microsoft. Also departing is McCue's fellow Tellme co-founder Angus Davis.

Davis told the troops of his departure at a recently concluded staff meeting.

"Just told my colleagues of 10 yrs I'm leaving company I founded," Davis said in a Twitter posting. "What a wonderful journey. Thank you, Tellme!"

The Tellme unit will become part of a "speech center of excellence" to be led by Zig Serafin, a 10-year Microsoft veteran. That unit will also include Microsoft's separate Speech Components Group. … Read more

Mike McCue, the former Netscape executive who led TellMe, plans to leave Microsoft in June, two years after his company was acquired by the software maker.

The Tellme unit will become part of a "speech center of excellence" to be led by Zig Serafin, a 10-year Microsoft veteran. That unit will also include Microsoft's separate Speech Components Group.

The new unit has about 400 employees, with three-quarters coming from Tellme and 100 from the speech components unit.

"Mike has been instrumental in making Tellme a core part of (Microsoft's) long-term speech strategy," the company … Read more

For insect-phobes, the only thing scarier than a big, hairy tarantula would be a big, hairy tarantula tricked out with brass gears and looking like it had crawled straight out of a sci-fi horror fest. But rest assured, this spider won't bite--or crawl over your face in the middle of the night. Nor will any of Mike Libby's other cybugs.

Libby, a Portland, Maine, artist, customizes real insect specimens with antique watch parts and other technological components, and the results are generally more cool than creepy. He has shown his work around the country, most recently at the … Read more

Research in Motion's co-CEOs might have dodged what could have been one of Canada's largest penalties ever imposed with a settlement agreement announced Wednesday.

RIM announced that the company as well as "certain of its officers and directors" (which we know to be CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazardis) has settled with the Ontario Securities Commission over an investigation into stock option backdating at RIM over the last decade. The OSC still has to approve the settlement at a hearing scheduled for tomorrow.

The amount of the settlement was not disclosed; it's up to the … Read more

For about an hour Saturday morning, Google listed every site on the Internet as potentially harmful to your computer. At first, Google blamed the problem on StopBadware.org but later had to eat crow. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, attributed the problem to "human error" and to a URL list provided by StopBadware.org. But about 30 minutes later, a blog posting on StopBadware.org disputed her explanation. An hour after that, Mayer posted Google's mea culpa. All of which raises the question of what some now describe as the &… Read more