insight

Venture funding hits two-year high in 2010

Private company research firm CB Insights today released a report that shows venture investment remains strong with $6.5 billion in funding taking place in the fourth quarter of 2010, a gain of roughly 12 percent over the third quarter of 2010.

Overall, 2010 saw $23.7 billion of funding into 2,792 deals representing 14 percent growth in funding and 13 percent growth in deals over 2009.

The report noted a few highlights:

New York outpaced Massachusetts for total number of deals in 2010 and is on a distinctly upward trend for the second half of the year while … Read more

Optimistic outlook for venture financing

Slated to be released this week, CB Insights Q3 2010 venture capital report shows that more venture-backed deals are happening, but at lower dollar volumes, with seed deals replacing the megadeals we saw in the first half of the year.

According to the report, seed deals (typically less than $1 million) represented just 1 percent of finance deals in the third quarter of 2009, but grew to 11 percent of deals in the third quarter of 2010. In light of the growth of seed finance deals, the median deal size for Series A deals grew to $3.4 million--a five-quarter … Read more

Venture capitalists tire of Twitter-y start-ups

New data from research firm CB Insights shows that venture capital firms have tired of pure-play Twitter start-ups as investment financing has dropped by half over the last year.

From June 2008 to May 2009, $21.6 million was invested by venture capitalists and angel investors into pure-play Twitter start-ups. In the June 2009 to May 2010, time frame, the investment funding dropped more than 50 percent to $10.4 million. The average amount invested also dropped dramatically from a nearly $2 million average round last year to just over $1 million more recently.

According to CB Insight's Anand … Read more

Google starts video series showcasing hot searches

Too bad This Week in Google was already taken.

Google announced plans Friday to produce a weekly video show called Google Beat, in which it will highlight the top search queries of the week as produced by Google Insights for Search and Google Trends. Gabriel Stricker, a Google representative, described the show as a weekly representative of the yearly Google Zeitgeist list that the company puts together toward the end of a calendar year, listing the most active search terms for that year.

It's a bit of a departure for Google: the format is basically a 90-second news/entertainment … Read more

Machinery maximizer

Machinery is expensive to purchase, operate, and maintain, so operators need to maximize their equipment's output as well as reduce its associated costs. FullFact's OEE Toolkit offers measurable improvements in productivity. It's based on Overall Equipment Effectiveness, an operating efficiency metric for machinery and similar processes that's common in lean manufacturing environments. OEE Toolkit collects a range of data and applies analyses that reveal hidden costs and capacity.

OEE Toolkit is an extensive software package that comes with considerable documentation, including PDF-based manuals, and links to online resources like the OEE Industry Standard site. Its database … Read more

Want venture capital? Come to California

Despite the fact that the state is constantly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, California remains at the top of the venture capital heap churning out the most deals with the most dollar volume in the second quarter of 2010.

A new report from private company research firm CB Insights reveals that California companies took more than 50 percent of total venture dollars in the second quarter with financings breaking the $3 billion funding mark and more than half of those funds going toward health care and Internet companies. In addition to California, two other states--Massachusetts and New York--accounted for … Read more

Venture investment rises in first quarter of 2010

Private company research firm CB Insights (formerly known as Chubby Brain) on Tuesday released new venture investment data for the first quarter of 2010. Overall, the news is very positive with strong growth in the number of deals from 687 in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 731 in the first quarter of 2010.

The first quarter of 2010 saw $5.9 billion invested across 731 deals, a marked increase over the year-ago quarter when $3.9 billion was invested across 483 deals. "The psychology and sentiment of entrepreneurs and venture capital investors continues to improve, albeit cautiously," the report concluded.

And while CB Insights notes that $5.9 billion remains far below quarterly levels seen before the '08-'09 recession, there is some belief (that I share) that "the VC asset class has perhaps reset at a lower but ultimately more sustainable and healthier level."

The fact that VCs are opening their collective wallets, even for smaller deals, is good news for both entrepreneurs and the economy as a whole. That said, there is still probably too much money still sitting on the sidelines.

What's interesting to note is the vast disparity in the number of deals by sector, where health care and Internet outpace all other categories by at least 3 to 1 in number of deals.

… Read more

More on the Toyota Prius

With Toyota's name all over TV and the news within the last couple of months, I figured it timely to show that not all things associated with Toyota are bad. In the specific case of the Toyota Prius, the Japanese manufacturer has honed and crafted a trendsetting, forward-thinking hybrid car that's gone from novelty to an almost universally accepted automobile. In yesterday's video we got a good sampling of the modern Prius' many notable features, but we didn't get a look at everything. And that's why I've got another clip on this very cool … Read more

Is IBM's Blue Insight a model for your private BI cloud?

There's been a general outcry lately about how vendor marketing organizations are abusing the cloud by force-fitting many new and existing products into the cloud computing mold.

Still, some cloud-like things actually do fit without the aid of a crow bar. A case in point is IBM's Smart Analytics Cloud.

The Smart Analytics Cloud is a solution set and reference model based on an IBM-internal Business Intelligence (BI) project code-named Blue Insight, which IBM claims to be the largest private cloud built to date. Blue insight has allowed IBM to eliminate multiple BI systems that were all performing … Read more