Venture Capital

Green no longer just a fad in consumer tech

MENLO PARK, Calif.--The practice of playing up a company's green policies for show was the new black for the past few years. But now actually making and selling green products is what's hot because of its potential to put a business in the black.

At the 2008 Consumer Electronics Emerging Technologies Summit held here in Silicon Valley, venture capitalists, business consultants, entrepreneurs, and representatives of some of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world discussed the new wave of innovation in a rapidly commoditizing industry. It basically comes down to two words: energy efficiency.

And the … Read more

What Google, Yahoo, Microsoft look for when buying a start-up

Start-ups and venture capitalists often dream of the multimillion-dollar buyout, if not the lucrative IPO. So technology upstarts might perk up to hear the inside scoop from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft on their acquisitions.

On Saturday at the TieCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif., corporate development officers from the three Internet giants discussed their acquisition strategies on a panel with Tod Francis, managing director of Shasta Ventures. Sandeep Aggarwal, senior Internet research analyst at Collins Stewart, recapped the panel in a research note Monday.

From Google: The start-up needs to be ahead of Google's internal curve in a given … Read more

Amazon invests in Animoto

Amazon has invested an undisclosed amount in Animoto, a site that enables people to easily create videos from their photos and music.

This is the first big investor for Animoto. Previous funding has come from friends and family.

Animoto.com, which launched in August, has more than 160,000 registered users, with 7.5 percent of them paying a $30 annual fee to be able to create longer videos. The company also has a Facebook application, which launched in March and has more than 750,000 users.

The Amazon funding doesn't exactly come as a surprise given the links … Read more

Search engine Blekko gets more funding

Search engine Blekko, which is so stealthy it doesn't have a public Web site yet, has raised a second round of funding of $3 million, TechCrunch reported.

Last year, Blekko raised $2 million from Baseline Ventures and two ex-Googlers. They joined in this round, along with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, SoftTech VC and Western Technology Investment.

Blekko was founded by Rich Skrenta, who founded news aggregation site Topix and co-founded Netscape's Open Directory Project.

Veodia lands $8.3 million for video streaming

Internet video start-up Veodia said Monday that it raised $8.3 million in a first round of funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and the D.E. Shaw group, among others. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company said it plans to use the money to build up its software-as-a-service video technology and to hire new executives, which recently include former SAP technologist Etay Gafni.

Launched in 2007, Veodia sells software that lets universities, businesses, and individuals create video recordings with one click from a Web browser, eliminating many of the hassles associated with processing video online. Stanford University's Humanities Lab … Read more

Wind power company Noble files for public offering

Wind energy company Noble Environmental Power has filed to raise as much as $375 million in an initial public offering, according to a document with the Securities and Exchange Commission that was filed Thursday.

The Connecticut-based company, which plans to list its shares with the Nasdaq under the symbol "NEPI," operates in the booming wind power market. But the company will still have to brave a weak IPO market.

The 4-year-old Noble runs wind parks in New York state that generate about 282 megawatts of electricity; and later this year, it plans to open added parks in New … Read more

Steve Jurvetson: The constant search for disruption

Few people have played as big a role in recent tech booms and busts as Steve Jurvetson, managing director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park, Calif.

One of the leading venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, Jurvetson is best-known for his involvement in Hotmail, Interwoven, Kana, and more recently, Skype. He spends his spare time building and firing rockets of all sizes with his young son, and recently has financed a new movie, The Singing Revolution, about his parent's tiny home country of Estonia.

CNET News.com reporters Michael Kanellos and Carl-Gustav Linden recently sat down … Read more

Can SlideShare make PowerPoint sharing interesting?

Many people think PowerPoint is a reason for a nap. But an Internet start-up that helps people share slideshows online has got the attention of several prominent Silicon Valley investors.

On Thursday, San Francisco-based SlideShare will announce that it has landed a $3 million series A investment from venture capitalist Venrock and individuals including Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams and David McClure of 500 Hats. Venrock general partner David Siminoff, an early investor in Yahoo and eBay, will join the company's board.

The company's advisory board also includes Hal Varian, who's chief economist … Read more

Want a VC deal? Go fly a kiteboard

In Silicon Valley, where some of the best networking has taken place on a bike trek or the golf course, the hippest techies are now regularly out in the surf with a board, a kite, and a 75-foot-long tether.

For the uneducated (that's the rest of us), kiteboarding (or kite surfing) is the trendiest adrenaline-junkie sport among Valley venture capitalists and high-tech entrepreneurs. In fact, mention you're an amateur at a technology social function, and it could provide an entree to a conversation with the kite-savvy Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Second Life's Philip Rosedale, … Read more