vc

Recent data from Chubby Brain identifies $102.49 million in total VC/angel investment divided among 17 iPhone application start-ups.

The iPhone is a great mini-computer and may be the next big gaming platform, but I'm still struggling to get the math to work in terms of what a typical VC expects as their return on investment.

Macworld's App Guide lists more than 58,000 apps available for download with more coming online every day, though it's not clear that downloads are equating to sustained revenue for developers.

But, developing an iPhone application still seems like a good business move, provided you can market effectively and not fall into the boom and bust cycle that many applications find themselves in. … Read more

Venture capitalists are the latest group showing more confidence in an economic recovery that will revive business, according to a quarterly survey released Thursday.

For the second quarter, the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index showed an uptick, hitting 3.37 on a 5-point scale, up from the previous quarter's mark of 3.03. This is the second consecutive rise since the index dropped to a five-year low in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Based on an ongoing survey of San Francisco Bay Area venture capitalists, the index measures their confidence level in the market for initial public offerings … Read more

Today: Windows 7 news, a new venture fund from the creator of the Mosaic browser, ABC goes live on Hulu, Toyota says yes to plug-in cars, and a short conversation about URL shortening services with CNET writer Stephen Shankland.

Today's stories:

Will Windows 7 be finalized next week?

IE market share plummeting! (Or is it?)

Marc Andreessen launches new venture fund

EMC raises bid for Data Domain

ABC content starts arriving on Hulu

Report: Toyota to mass produce plug-ins in 2012

Best Buy shifts into electric vehicles sales

Large Hadron Collider grid stress-tested… Read more

Since I started covering start-ups for Red Herring back in 1998, no venture capitalist has entertained me as much, or made me as envious, as Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He's of the few real dilettantes in the field, and he actually makes money from a studied lack of focus.

In comparison, most tech VCs, including titans like Vinod Khosla (at Kleiner Perkins) and Marc Andreessen, who just launched a new fund, focus on industry segments or coherent visions for certain markets. Khosla, for example, is a modern industrialist currently investing in companies attached to renewable energy or … Read more

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and co-founder of Opsware, and Ben Horowitz, also co-founder of Opsware, are launching on Monday a new venture fund, cleverly named Andreessen Horowitz (previous story). The fund's mission is financially broad but technologically narrow. Andreessen told me the $300 million fund will invest from $50,000 to $5 million in start-ups, which means it's part angel fund and part typical venture capital firm.

Technologically, Andreessen is keeping things in one wheelhouse: his. "We're ruling out products we don't understand," he says. So no clean tech, no energy start-ups, no … Read more

I recently asked Cloudera CEO Mike Olson how a commercial open-source company balances community and commerce.

When it comes to open source, this isn't Olson's first rodeo; in his past life he served as CEO of the open-source database company Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle in 2006. Olson understands the fragile balance that exists in open source; he's a firm believer that good community relations are critical for open-source companies. Case in point--since we last spoke, Cloudera launched the industry's first certification program for Hadoop and MapReduce, open source projects that support data intensive distributed applications.

Cloudera on Tuesday is expected to formally announce the closing of a $6 million series B funding round led by Greylock (whose past investments successes include Red Hat among many others).

Olson reports that fast growth in the business and rapid adoption of Hadoop/MapReduce drove heavy interest from investors. For Cloudera, apparently it's a buyer's market, so it decided to secure funding now to allow it to expand the business rapidly on all fronts.

So, with $11 million in the bank from top-tier VCs (Accel led the A round and participated in the B) along with individual investments from Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware), Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL), and Jeff Weiner (president of LinkedIn), Cloudera has successfully raised the smart money to compliment the big data all-star founding team from Google, Facebook, and Yahoo.

For a brief overview of Hadoop and Cloudera check out the video below. … Read more

The venture capital industry took another big hit in the first quarter of the year, according to new data from Dow Jones VentureSource.

Venture capitalists invested just $3.90 billion in U.S. companies during the quarter, a 50 percent decline from the almost $7.78 billion invested during the same quarter last year, according to VentureSource. In terms of actual venture deals, 477 were completed, well below the 706 completed last year and the lowest quarterly deal total since 1996.

Hit particularly hard was the information technology industry, which saw its lowest level of investment since 1997, with $1.… Read more

Venture capitalists have poured $3.2 billion into open-source companies since 1997, according to a new report from The 451 Group. It's about time we started delivering a return on that investment.

In some ways, of course, this $3.2 billion investment has already been repaid several times over. The Linux Foundation, for example, estimates that that the Linux kernel is worth $10.8 billion in free research and development, and a compelling argument has been made that open-source vendors have already saved customers $60 billion in license fees they'd normally be paying.

Indeed, if you expand beyond … Read more

While some entrepreneurs seek to protect their ideas with nondisclosure agreements, investor Mark Cuban has a different idea: open-source your business plan.

What does this mean? As Cuban explains, it means that start-ups should openly post their business plans online. Yes, this means that a competitor could take a plan and run with it, but given that the quality of execution often differs markedly from the quality of an idea, the risk may be lower than you think.

You must post your business plan here on my blog, where I expect other people can and will comment on it. I … Read more