Update: Dave Winer clarifies that RSS Investors have just announced a $100M, and "only" raised $20M:

John Palfrey, executive director at Berkman Center (where I used to work), announces a new venture capital fund that focuses on investments in "tagging, RSS, OPML, search, social software, and related next-gen standards." According to Jim Moore, another former colleague of mine and JP’s partner, they have raised $20 million from Ritchie Capital, and plan to raise another $80 million.

I first saw the news on Bill Flitter Pheedo’s blog and then saw this piece from Tom Forenski:   We’re off to the races…the first RSS focused VC fund is announced–$100m. I had heard about the formation of this fund, but was not too sure as to its stage of advancement. Well, they closed on … Read more »

Joe Kraus has a thoughtful post:  It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur, in which he rightly points out that the startup costs of a software startup have dramatically dropped. He cites the example of JotSpot vs. Excite in terms of investment required to move from the idea to the initial product: $100K vs. $3M, a 30X difference.

Why ?

Hardware is 100X cheaper: Cheap Intel boxes vs. Sun gear Infrastructure software is free: LAMP vs. Solaris and super expensive development tools (was that $5,000 or $14,000 a pop for the Sun compiler ? can’t remember) Access to Global Labor markets: elance.com rules SEM changes everything: you can economically launch multiple campaigns and adapt them almost in real-time – and engage with your audience through blogs and forums.

My own, focusing more on consumer Internet startups (eh, that’s what I do after all):

Advertising dollars are shifting online: search … Read more »

Dave Hills is the CEO of LookSmart, and prior to that he ran About.com and 24×7 RealMedia. He sees Vertical Search as the next logical step, everyone agrees about it – but there is no clear definition of what it actually is.

His thesis is that it does not matter per se as to whether you are big or small, and the community of users you are targetting – and the advertisers you will be working with. LookSmart is in transition, moving from a generic search position into the vertical space.

Definition: Vertical search is about "Providing essential (versus exhaustive) search content and related tools for people who have a passion, need or repetitive task". Bringing together the two types of search:

Broad search – need-based without knowledge or opinion of where to find information, products or services; consumer needs to cast a wide net Vertical search – still need-based, but the consumer has knowledge and needs … Read more »

Following the post of my buddy Rodrigo, and the rather acid comment I left there, I thought that I should spend some more time trying out Odeo. My initial 5 minutes on the product two days ago led me to think that it was a lot of hype and not much functionality – especially given that the podcast production bit is not available yet (more power to Eric Rice and audioblog.com).

I decided to try Odeo on my Tablet PC, which is running Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10. Because of the automatic synchronization of WM10 playlists with my "scoblephone", the SMT5600, Odeo performs similarly to other iPodder implementations – except for the tagging aspect.The social networking functionality (i.e the ability to connect to friends and see what their subscriptions are) is definitely not straightforward to use, since I had to guess the usernames that my usual contacts (Ross, David,…) … Read more »

The first panel of the SDForum Vertical Search conference will see four Tier 1 VC firms express their views on the space.Because we’ll have less than one hour for this panel, I thought that I would provide some background on my panelists on this blog. It is therefore my privilege to introduce:

Theresia Ranzetta, Accel PartnersTheresia has been with Accel Partners since 1999. She focuses primarily on software investments with specific interest in security, technology-enabled series and consumer oriented technologies. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Aceva Technologie, Andale, CRS Retail Systems, ForeScout, Interlace Systems, Imperva, Jasper Design Automation. She also led Accel’s investments in  LetsTalk and PeopleSupport (PSPT) and was part of the team responsible for investing in Walmart.com  (WMT).Theresia has worked in the computer and communications industries since the late-1980′s as an entrepreneur, consultant and venture investor. Prior to joining Accel Partners, she was founding Vice President of Business Development & Sales at Release … Read more »

In one of his landmark posts, Bill Burnham dissected SEC filings and other publicly available information to tell us Just How Much Did VCs Pocket On Google?

I recommend the reading to anyone interested in understanding VC exits, and to some extent, how profits are split in VC partnerships – unequally so.

As a reminder, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital invested $12.5M each in Google in 1999, for about 24M shares. Both funds have distributed a majority of these shares to their own investors, otherwise their investment would be worth $7.1B (at today’s closing price).

Because of the distributions of shares at "lower prices", Bill estimated the value of KP’s investment at $4.3B, i.e a multiple of 344x in 6 years. This is the number that will be used to calculate the performance of their $500M fund IX (?), which was returned multiple times with just … Read more »

Just a few days before we all gather in Santa Clara (CA), at the Networking Center for the SDForum Vertical Search conference. We expect between 150 and 200 participants, even though many people seem to register at the very last minute and we might well exceed that number. So please help spread the word, mention the conference to people interested in the Vertical Search market, and help us build a solid foundation for a Search SIG.

Quick update regarding the program:

We are delighted to announce that our keynote speaker will be David Hills, the CEO of LookSmart. LookSmart has made a strategic move to enter the vertical search market recently, and it will be interesting to hear David’s comments on the industry. We have had a few changes in the line-up, but we have a fantastic roster of 35 speakers and moderators. We need to thank everyone for their flexibility in dealing with last … Read more »

I have often mentioned Meiosys in my talks on European Venture Capital as a model of European technology company that had developed a strong IP and product suite "over there" in Toulouse, France – financed by French and German capital, and then "flipped" to become a Delaware company,  and hired a US CEO.

The exit is also "by the book" for a European company: the company has been acquired by IBM this morning for an undisclosed amount. Employees in the Palo Alto office will be moving to Menlo Park with their newly distributed IBM laptops, in a remarkably speedy integration.

Meiosys had raised a total of $16M from Partech, Siparex, Cisco Systems, Credit Lyonnais Private Equity , Alven, Baytech Venture Capital and Wellington Partners. The last round was a $7.5M series D that closed last September. They had developed a very interesting Linux clustering technology that enables the pooling and virtualization of servers, enabling increased resource … Read more »

Just got an email from Six Apart announcing that as a TypePad user, I now had the option of displaying ads on my blog in a custom typelist. It is actually not a surprise since the deal was sealed and announced last November.

Bloggers have been using Google or Yahoo ads on their blog for the longest time, and the most heavily read have been making some money. So what I am missing here is why would I need to upgrade to the Pro version of TypePad in order to use that functionality which is otherwise available to me "for free" ?

The ad revenue is credited against the monthly cost of the TypePad Pro subscription ($15). Which means basically that one needs to have roughly 20,000 page views (at a 50c CPM) in order to make up the difference between a Plus and a Pro subscription, or 30,000 page views between … Read more »

The Attention panel was moderated by Steve Gillmor (ZDNet, Gillmor Gang and Gillmor Daily) and involved Glenn Reid (FiveAcross); Doree Duncan Seligmann (Avaya); David Sifry (Technorati) and Linda Stone (Ex-Microsoft and Apple). The stated subject is:

Attention is one immutably scarce quantity in a world of increasing abundance. As everything becomes connected, and connectivity becomes increasingly widespread, the challenge in no longer getting more information, but getting less. We need tools, systems, and practices to help us cope with information overload. Fortunately, advances in this area are coming from several directions, ranging from communications systems to search-based technologies for managing and organizing information.

Linda Stone kicked-off the panel by a quick introduction. She cornered about ten years ago the term "Continuous Partial Attention" – which means that we stretch our attention to cope with a primary interest (discussion, conference, this panel) whilst browsing around for secondary interest – just to make sure we do … Read more »

John Seely Brown (aka JSB) is addressing the audience on the topic of his latest book: The Only Sustainable Edge. I have just started reading it, and it really looks interesting. Below are notes I jot down during his talk.

JSB’s main point is that companies need to leverage the capabilities of their suppliers, and innovate at the network level – including suppliers’ own innovation.

He mentions a few examples:

Toyota picks up suppliers on costs and cost structures, as opposed to prices. The company has developed a world class excellence on cost management which allows them to understand at a deep level the production costs of each of their suppliers/partners and help them optimize these. They also expect suppliers to contribute their own innovation on materials, parts and processes to optimize the way Toyota’s requirements will be met.Any Toyota employee can shutdown an entire production line when a fault is detected. This allows process engineers to … Read more »

A number of posts have been written about Wondir, the cool real-time Q&A engine that allows one to field questions on a wide range of topics, and get members of the community to answer them.They have recently added the ability to integrate the Wonder ticker/question interface in a TypeList, in order to mimic the search box that has become so familiar on blogs.

I have also suggested to Allen Searls, the Community VP of the company, that it could be fun to have a VC category for people to ask technical questions, related to financing, terms, etc. Sort of an interactive extension of Brad Feld’s excellent series on financing terms.

And here it is.

Anyone wanting wants to grab the HTML to add a Q&A module to their blog can visit this page if they use TypePad and this page if they don’t. And set the category to “99” to … Read more »