The MIT Enterprise Forum has an annual program called Venture Capital Outlook. If you are in Colorado, you can see a 40 minute digital presentation of this from MIT/Cambridge and a panel of Boston-area VC’s followed by a live panel of Colorado VCs discussing the same questions, namely the trends from 2006 and what they see happening in 2007.
The Colorado–based VCs (in the flesh rather than digitally rendered) are:
- Jason Mendelson, Mobius Venture Capital
- Catharine Merigold, Vista Ventures
- Kyle Lefkoff, Boulder Ventures
- Chris Scoggins, Sequel Venture Partners
Paul Kedrosky has an excellent summary of Mark Gilbert’s theories of modern finance using the two cow metaphor. He ends with his own special version for the venture capital industry.
Dash, the start-up offering the first car navigation device designed to be permanently linked to the Internet, has raised $25 million in a second round of funding.
The Mountain View Dash will launch its device in the Bay Area in late April, and nationally this fall, goes up against a host of other market incumbents, none aspiring to be as continuously connected to the Internet.
These other players are Garmin, TomTom and...
the campaign for net neutrality has transcended logic, manuevering instead to prevail upon Congress with an emotional appeal to the voters. If we are silent, if we dont stand up for Internet Freedom, warns Hollywood star Alyssa Milano, corporations will take away our right to [...]
The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent. The Harvard Crimson reported yesterday that the university is about to name as its new president Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard’s Corporation, which is likely to recommend Faust to the university’s [...]
“Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism,” Hart explains. “Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious [...]
Seems like this will be the content-filtering week: the YouTube-DMI deal, the Bolt-GoFish-UMG deal, and now this: MySpace has started a pilot program aimed at detecting copyrighted video content by using the audio on videos to identify and track them....UMG also sued MySpace.
This digital fingerprinting technology licensed was from Audible Magic. MySpace said it maintains a database of fingerprints uploaded by content owners. The blocking of unauthorized
Some more grist for the mill being operated by those who point to YouTubes willingness to id misused copyrighted content for partners but not for other rights holders ... In this latest deal, YouTube gains access to more 4,000 hours of video content including I Spy , Gumby and music. In return, reports the WSJ, distributor Digital Music Group will share revenue from ads on pages with its content.
That, as the WSJ points out, is a bit of a change because so far YouTube has kept ads off the player pages. The Google subsidiary also promises eventually to use its still-in-the-works filtering technology to identify songs to which DMG holds or controls
In a multi-layered developing story, Universal Music Group is hashing out the final details of a settlement with youth site Bolt.com, after filing a lawsuit last year in October, reports NYT. The company, in an effort to bring up money for this, has sold itself to video search and aggregation site GoFish, for about $30 mi
From our site MocoNews.net: Youre reading it here first: Moderati, the U.S. mobile content retailer and application distributor, owned till now by Japanese content giant Faith Inc, has been bought out by Santa Monica-based digital media company Bellrock Media. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed officially, but we have confirmed from our sources that the deal is valued in the mid double-digit millions, which makes it amongst the bigger mobile content
Update: MTV Networks will announce layoff details Monday, according to a Viacom insider. The source disputed the number in the NY Post report detailed below. The number is closer to 250, the source told me. MTVs plans are expected to be announced by Monday afternoon.
-----------------
MTV Networks might cut up to 500 jobs by next week as dictated from parent Viacom, the NY Post reported on Sunday. The layoff order is from Viacoms trio of managers, Chairman Sumner Redstone, CEO Philippe Dauman and CFO Thomas D
Shanda has given up any remnant hopes of taking over Chinese internet portal Sina, and has sold a 7.4 percent stake in Sina. The four million Sina shares, sold to Citgroup, has net Shanda about $130 million. It will continue to hold about 2.1 million shares of Sina, or about 3.9 percent of the company.
Shanda and its CEO Chen Tianqiaos investment vehicle, Skyline Media Limited, acquired stakes in Sina worth $230 million between January 12 and February 10 in 2005, for a combined stake of 19.5 percent, but Sina adopted a poison pill, so Sha
Fairfax, Australias second-biggest newspaper publisher, has reported its half-yearly results, and it earnings declined 2.7 percent on weak ad demand in its major markets. Earnings fell to A$121.4 million in the six months ended Dec. 31, from A$124.8 a year ago...A gain of A$13.2 million from the sale of the companys stake in Carsales.com.au helped increase net income 19 percent to A$142.2 million.
Its online unit increased earnings by 42 percent to A$15.6 million in the half, from A$11 million a year earlier. The companys online bu
We missed this small acquisition earlier in the month: UK-based specialist information company Electric Word, publisher of SportBusiness, has bought ArkSports, a specialist conference, research and news business in the sport and technology sector, for about $175K. ArkSports runs SportandTechnology news and info website, among other things.
ArkSports reported a loss after tax and dividends of $23K on turnover of $153K in the year to March 31, 2006. More info in the
Updated: Whoa...things are changing fast. It looks like the deal talks are still dragging on, and mid-week is the drop-dead decision date for AdScape. If done, it will be at a much lower price that hinted below.
Original post: We reported last month on Googles serious talks with AdScape Media, the in-game advertising firm, in an attempt to buy it and enter the lucrative market. Now, the talks have hit a dead-end snag and possibly fallen through, according to our sources, and Google is moving on with its own
In NYC on Thursday, I was at the DeSilva & Phillips-organized Dealmakers summit at The Pierre, where as part of the program I interviewed Tom Phillips, the director of print ads at Google. As magazine mavens know well, Tom has a storied career, as the publisher and one of the three co-founders of Spy magazine...the other two being Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter. Having worked under the droll-prince of New York Kurt in my days at Inside.com, I was curious about Tom, who people told me was famously stiff as well, and wondered whether I could get enough info out of him in the 30-minute interview. It was a tough task, and I tried...and it ended up be
At SIIA Summit the week before in NYC, a panel about the M&A activity in the content industry.
Moderator
Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief, Red Herring
Panelists
Rene Benedetto, Principal, Halyard Capital
Steve Fadem, President, Relegence
Lex Miron, Executive Director, Interactive Media, CIBC World Markets
Will Porteus, General Partner, RRE Ventures
Justin Sadrian, Managing Director, Technology, Media and Telecommunications, Warburg Pincus
Below is the the full video of the panel, courtesy of ScribeMedia (RSS readers
