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The Washington and Baltimore region was the nation’s fifth fastest-growing area for venture capital funding in the last decade, according to a report released Tuesday. In 2007, 180 Washington and Baltimore companies received nearly $1.3 billion in venture capital backing, the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association said. That number is up 130 percent from $558.24 million put into 105 companies in 1997. The report lists Timonium, Md.-based Grotech Capital Group and Chevy Chase-based New Enterprise Associates as the most active investors in the region. The top industries for investments around the region were software, life sciences and telecommunications.
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The rate of affluent US Internet user participation in online social networks increased dramatically to 60% in January 2008, from 27% in January 2007, according to The Luxury Institute’s latest WealthSurvey "The Wealthy and Web 2.0." "While some in the luxury industry are still debating e-commerce, search and banner ads, the majority of their customers have leaped into the online dialogue," said Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute. "Luxury needs to catch up quickly."
Category: Venture Capital Page 3 of 4
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A woman who claims the recording industry’s anti-music piracy campaign threatens and intimidates innocent people has filed a new complaint accusing record companies of racketeering, fraud and illegal spying.
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One of the great things about the Internet is the way people post reviews on just about anything you are considering trying, whether it is a movie, a new restaurant or the local florist. This also introduces one of the worst things about the Internet: trying to figure out which reviews to trust. Was that effusive praise written surreptitiously by the merchant? Was that anonymous online slam posted by a devious competitor? The dilemma might be unavoidable in this age of abundant user-generated content, when we have to be smarter about separating signals from noise. But a startup called RatePoint Inc. begs to differ. It wants to play referee, giving consumers more clarity into a business’ reputation and protecting the business from unwarranted blights on its credibility.
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The U.S. Presidential race has reached a critical juncture. The Republicans have a confirmed nominee in John McCain; as for the Democrats, Hillary Clinton has bounced back, while Barack Obama retains a marginal lead in terms of delegates. How the presidential race evolves will be shaped in part by the increasingly worrisome state of the U.S. economy. Consumer prices are rising, oil has crossed $103 a barrel and gold is nudging $1,000 an ounce — suggesting that the economy could be entering a phase of 1970s-style stagflation. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, however, told Congress last week that he doesn’t anticipate stagflation, and he continues to indicate his willingness to keep cutting interest rates. What lies ahead for the U.S. and world economies? Knowledge@Wharton discussed these questions and more with finance professor Jeremy Siegel, author of The Future for Investors.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeDUeIBomzM&rel=1&border=0]
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Last month I talked about blogging platforms and the value blogging can bring to ecommerce sites. When a website makes the decision to begin a blog and decides upon a blogging platform, it will then have to decide who will blog and how often. Time allotted to blogging is also a relative issue, as is subject matter. So why bother at all? Relative to static ecommerce sites, search engines consider blogs more real and trusted because blogs tend to have fresh content and there is a less financial, more informational link between a blog and its readers. An ecommerce site should take advantage of this tendency by adding a blog to augment the overall site.
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Google is launching Web-based collaboration software that aims to make it easy for groups to share and edit materials such as documents, photos, video and spreadsheets on a single site. Easy enough, Google hopes, to make selling software applications to enterprises a bit harder for the likes of IBM and Microsoft.
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It’s called "Google hacking" – a slick data-mining technique used by the Internet’s cops and crooks alike to unearth sensitive material mistakenly posted to public Web sites. And it’s just gotten easier, thanks to a program that automates what has typically been painstaking manual labor. The program’s authors say they hope it will "screw a large Internet search engine and make the Web a safer place."
Should entrepreneurs worry about the loyalties of their lawyers? That is the question posed in a recent article on TheFunded.com, and to be honest, it is a fair question.
Most venture financings have closing legal expenses in the mid-five figures, and I know of Series B deals where the closing expenses have approached a quarter million dollars (yes, you heard me right… $250,000). At the end of the day, these expenses are ultimately paid for by investors. In addition, within local venture ecosystems, the venture lawyers obviously do many deals with the venture capitalists in their area over the course of time. These factors certainly create the potential for major conflicts of interest, and according to many entrepreneurs, the conflicts of interest are real.
My team has always had the benefit of terrific legal counsel, and we haven’t personally struggled with this issue. However, if you honestly assess the dynamics of the venture relationships as well as the economics of where and how corporate lawyers get paid, you will have to agree that entrepreneurs probably should be keeping a close eye on your lawyers.
As I mentioned, there was a terrific post on this subject at TheFunded.com – Venture Legal: A Conflict of Interest and a Complicated Mess. The author of this post hit the issue right on the nail.
Over the last few years, I have presented to dozens of venture capital firms while fundraising, and inevitably, the venture capital investor always asks you what valuation you are looking for. This reminds me of that job interview question we have all been asked… "What are your biggest weaknesses?" There really isn’t a right answer, but there sure are a lot of bad answers.
Stu Phillips does a nice job of explaining how to answer this important VC question on his blog, Soaring on Ridgelift.
One hint… Don’t answer the question!
Well, there is actually more to that conclusion, but you can read the details in Stu’s blog post, The Valuation Trap.
Nice post Stu!
Core Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that has invested in a number communications infrastructure companies particularly focused on the IP and VoIP, announced its participation in a $20 million round of funding for Gaithersburg, MD-based NextPoint™ Networks, Inc.
According to the investment announcement , NextPoint will be the result of the recently announced merger between NexTone Communications Inc., a software-centric session border controller and session management provider, and Reef Point Systems, Inc., a mobile access universal convergence gateway provider. In addition to Core Capital, other investors in this round include the round lead investor, One Equity Partners, the private equity arm of JP Morgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), as well as American Capital Strategies (NASDAQ:ACAS), Jerusalem Venture Partners, Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE:SFE) and Summerhill Venture Partners.
Read more about Core Capital Partners >>
Read more about NextPoint >>
Good morning everyone! If you know me well, you know that I am a voracious reader of anything and everything that I believe is interesting or useful either personally or professionally. My colleagues will attest to the fact that their Inbox usually has at least one article that I have recent found that might be useful for them or buySAFE. 🙂
Today, I have been catching-up on my reading list, and I thought I would share with you a few articles that I found interesting. Hopefully, you will some of the info interesting as well.
Steve