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Some time ago I listened to this lecture by Spencer Ante, on his book Creative Capital, and have been meaning to blog about it.
Q: When did the business model for VC take shape? In other words, when did people become convinced that money should be pooled specifically to invest in small companies developing products based on new technology? What were the first VC funds?
A: Ante claims the first VC fund was Georges Doriot's ARDC founded in 1946. Judging from the size of funds raised even 40 years later, it took a long time for investors controlling large pools of money (i.e., pension funds, endowments) to become convinced about the model.
Author: golf Page 7 of 22
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Biotechnology start-ups have long relied on grants from the National Institutes of Health to fund the research-and-development process for new drugs, medical devices and disease treatments. Every year, the agency is required by law to set aside 2.8 percent of its research budget — $650 million in 2009 — for small businesses and the commercialization of technologies developed at universities.
But when nearly $10 billion in stimulus funds went to the NIH, a last-minute change in the legislation exempted the agency from the requirement. That means the NIH does not have an obligation to reserve a portion of the money to small businesses. -
Since this is the time of year when we celebrate the founding of the United States as a nation on July 4, 1776 and since the Internet has become an ad-hoc nation of its own with over a billion citizens, it’s the perfect time to have a little fun and speculate about who the people of the Internet would choose if they could elect a leader.
Others have joked about this idea in the past. Now it’s time to get serious — or at least as serious as you can for a mock election. I’d like to nominate four candidates for the fictional office of President of the Internet. All four are very talented individuals that have a vision of where the Internet needs to go and each would lead the Internet into an even brighter future.
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A local teacher accidentally put pornography into a DVD that was meant to be filled with school memories from the past year, and nobody caught the error until after it was sent home, shocking parents and students alike.
Parents of students who attend Isabelle Jackson Elementary said that the woman is a good teacher, but just made a mistake that may become the most embarrassing moment of their life.
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Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is the culmination of nearly a year-long quest to build a browser for the next version of the web. And while it’s not perfect, it comes very, very close.
The open-source browser is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Originally envisioned as a quick follow-up to 2008’s release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla ended up packing in quite a few extra features into its flagship browser and spent months making sure that Firefox 3.5 was the fastest, most powerful Firefox yet. -
Last fall, executives from Oriental Trading Co. read a product review from a woman planning her autumn wedding complaining that her order of fall leaves didn’t look anything like the picture on the website. The execs went straight to the warehouse, pulled the product and compared for themselves. She was right — it didn’t look the same. The explanation: The company had recently switched vendors for that particular product, and the new vendor’s version wasn’t up to snuff. So the company pulled it.
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Entrepreneurs never really retire. They move on to their next project. Just ask Linda Remeschatis, 60, a former prosecutor in Madison, Wis., who turned her passion for local food and art into a second career. In 1998, at age 50, she left the public sector to launch her own E-commerce business, Wisconsinmade.com, an online food and gift store selling products made in her home state by local artisans. She now manages five employees and three regular consultants. Since the business doesn't have a physical storefront, most of the employees work remotely or on the ground floor of Remeschatis's home, overlooking the deer and birds in her backyard. It took Remeschatis six years to turn a profit selling cheese, chocolate, and art online, and she still makes less money than she did as an attorney, but she enjoys the work. "You don't mind it as much because you are doing it for yourself and for your family and to grow business for our artisans," she says. "And we get to taste-test."
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When Judge Denny Chin sentenced Bernard Madoff to 150 years in prison, he catapulted him into a small class of white collar criminals facing more than a century behind bars..
The sentence far exceeded those in some massive corporate fraud cases. WorldCom chief Bernie Ebbers was sentenced to 25 years, Enron Chief Executive Jeff Skilling got 24 years, and Adelphia Chief Financial Officer Timothy Rigas got 20 years, but that was later reduced to 17.
Other 100-year-plus sentences include:
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Users can preview two new Adobe products, Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4, starting today. Both programs aim to simplify the process of designing Web applications. Catalyst, which has never before been released to the public, is aimed at designers. Built to resemble Illustrator and other Adobe products, Catalyst allows a nonprogrammer to design working interfaces for Web applications. Builder, which updates a previous product called Flex Builder, is aimed at developers. Specifically, it's a tool for developers building Internet applications, and Adobe says that it has been improved to better handle data and to work easily with Catalyst.
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Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s answer to Apple’s App Store rolled out to a bumpy start, as the company’s debut of the Ovi Store was plagued with problems.
The over-the-air mobile content store was launched late Monday night, and users reported issues such as problems signing into their accounts, lack of applications, and overall sluggishness. -
Despite its use of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other standard Web coding, developers still need the tools from Palm in order to create official apps that can take advantage of the hardware.
Developers looking to create applications for the Palm Pre will have to wait awhile, as Palm said its software development kit likely won’t be available until the end of summer.
Palm intentionally built its webOS operating system to be developer-friendly, as it enables content makers to create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other standard Web coding. But these developers still need an SDK in order to create official apps that can take advantage of the hardware.
“We’ve been working very hard on the SDK and are eager to open access on a wider scale, but the software and the developer services to support it just aren’t ready yet,” Palm wrote on its developer blog. “Our goal is to make the SDK available to everyone by the end of summer.”
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When Apple unveiled its iPhone 3GS earlier this month, AT&T was noticeably absent from the list of providers that would provide tethering capabilities for the smartphone.
AT&T has since said that the technology, which allows users to connect their iPhones to a laptop and use the phone's network to connect to the Web, will eventually be available. But what if you want it right now?
Austrian blogger Benjamin Miller has posted a tethering workaround for the iPhone that will reportedly allow you to use the device to connect to the Web either via USB or Bluetooth.
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Google (NSDQ: GOOG) wants you to be able to take on Uma Thurman (a.k.a., The Bride from the "Kill Bill" movies) — and win. At least, as far as cleaning up your Gmail inbox is concerned. Starting today, Google has published a tutorial called "Become a Gmail Ninja." The goal? To become a master in the art of Nin-Gmail-su.
Someone over at Google is putting his/her 20% time to creative use. The Gmail Ninja guide is a collection of tips and tricks that can be used to save time, increase productivity and better manage email. Gmail organizes the lessons by how many emails you receive in a given day.
The breakdown goes something like this.
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Despite the skepticism of some in the investment community, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is still a big believer that a single application for handheld phones – be it a game, a utility, a social network or a productivity app – can be grown into a venture-scale business.
In fact, the venture firm known for being the most bullish on the prospects for independent developers may one day lift the $100 million cap on its year-old fund devoted to backing them, the iFund.
“We will exceed that cap,” said Matt Murphy, the Kleiner partner who oversees the iFund, to a room full of eager – if still unknown – app developers at the business school of Stanford University on Tuesday. -
At Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s developer conference last month, VP of engineering Vic Gundotra declared that “the Web has won” and suggested that emerging open Web standards such as HTML 5 have become the preferred platform to create Web applications, even graphically rich ones.
Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) begs to differ. Its Flash platform remains the de facto standard for rich Internet applications, and the company would be happy for that situation to continue. To make sure that happens, some from Adobe are expressing doubts about HTML 5.