Accel

In the social media era, even VCs need personal brands

Nobody wants to admit it, but building a personal brand is essential if you want to thrive in a business world dominated by social media. This is especially true for entrepreneurs and even venture capitalists who have only recently stepped out from the shadows and into the spotlight.

I became intrigued by the rising role of personal branding in the VC world by a New York Times article last week that discussed how more VC firms are hiring PR specialists to help brand their firms.

Here's a quick excerpt from that article:

"Now, Sand Hill Road in Silicon … Read more

Brightcove looks to raise $55 million in IPO

Facebook isn't the only one.

Brightcove today filed its amended S-1 with the SEC, setting the price range for shares of its upcoming IPO at $10 to $12. If its 5 million shares sell at the midpoint of its asking price, the company stands to raise around $55 million.

Brightcove is an 8-year-old online video distribution company that boasts 3,872 customers in more than 50 countries, but 66 percent of its $63.6 million in 2011 revenue came from the U.S. And despite its solid customer base, Brightcove also has a number of healthy competitors, including Castfire … Read more

Facebook's biggest winners look to rich payday

When Facebook goes public in a deal that could value the company at $100 billion, small fortunes will be made.

Here are some of the individuals and firms that stand to make the most from Facebook's IPO.

Mark Zuckerberg: He can now officially change his surname to Zuckerbucks. With his 28.2 percent ownership in Facebook, the paper wealth of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg now serves as an eternal rejoinder to the legion of armchair critics--and where are they now?--who thought that the then-22-year-old was bull goose loony for rejecting Yahoo's $1 billion buyout offer in 2006. … Read more

Sean Parker: Beware of 'wackos' on Facebook, other social media

TUCSON, Ariz.--Sean Parker, a co-founder of Napster and Facebook's first president, said the key thing that worries him about the growth of Facebook and the use of social networks essentially boils down to one word: wackos.

Parker's remarks came up during a conversation at Techonomy here about trade-offs between privacy and empowerment people throughout the world now make, due to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and technology in general.

"The tools can be used for good [or] for evil, and you sort of have to bet that better angels will prevail and will offset mischief," … Read more

Save spreadsheets and money with Accel

Accel Spreadsheet is part of SSuite Office, a freeware alternative to Microsoft Office. Accel is to SSuite as Excel is to Office, functioning equally well in both standalone and integrated mode. Accel can save files in Excel format as well as text, CSV, and native formats, making it widely compatible not only with Excel but also other spreadsheets and financial tools. While we could open and edit most of the Excel formatted files we created with Accel, the free tool couldn't access Excel files created in Office 2010. However, the capability to create files Excel can open is more … Read more

Shared storage in a 'shared nothing' environment

The computing industry is seeing dramatic growth in the use of "shared nothing" database architectures where each node functions independently of one another and is self-sufficient (Hadoop Distributed File System for example). For the sake of performance, contention among nodes for shared disk resources (SAN and NAS) is one of the things these architectures avoid by dedicating storage resources to each node, i.e. no shared disk.

While these computing architectures are best-known in the context of Web-based applications and development activities, they are no longer confined to the Web. EMC Greenplum, IBM Netezza, and ParAccel are all … Read more

Real's Glaser to join VC firm Accel

RealNetworks' founder and chairman Rob Glaser is becoming a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners.

Glaser said he'll be focusing on investment opportunities in the realms of digital and social media, and mobile services, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Glaser, who's been celebrated for his vision but criticized for what some say is a refusal to heed advice, left his role as CEO of RealNetworks this past January.

He remains chairman of the company, which was an early leader in streaming media but became an also-ran as entities such as YouTube and Apple's iTunes became digital … Read more

Lookout grabs $11 million in funding, adds execs

Accel Partners has been pretty busy handing over giant wads of dough to start-ups this week--and today is focusing its largess on San Francisco-based Lookout, a smartphone security provider.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture firm will be the lead investor in an $11 million Series B funding for Lookout, which offers solutions to protect phones from malware and viruses, back up and restore valuable data and help users find their phones in the event they are lost or stolen.

Accel Partner Ping Li will join the start-up's board.

Lookout currently works only on phones using Google Android, Research … Read more

Facebook's early VC feeding frenzy exposed

The fight to get a piece of Facebook early on was a brutally intense scramble among many well-moneyed venture capitalists and media executives, according to recently published excerpts from "The Facebook Effect," an upcoming book about the rise of the massive social network by Fortune magazine contributor David Kirkpatrick.

So intense, in fact, that a dilemma over which route to take reportedly left Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg crying on the floor of a Palo Alto restaurant's bathroom one evening in the spring of 2005.

"He was just crying his eyes out, bawling," Kirkpatrick … Read more

Which tech VCs get name-dropped the most?

Most people working in Silicon Valley can rattle off a list of influential venture capital firms and individual venture investors. But if you're wondering which of them are being the most actively discussed in the media, you'll find some interesting data available in a new report from ITMemos. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to ITDatabase, the parent company behind ITMemos.)

That Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Benchmark and Accel top the list of most quoted VC firms is not terribly surprising. However, Fred Wilson of New York's Union Square Ventures, a significantly smaller firm, tops the list as most … Read more