ExactTarget this morning announced that it has acquired CoTweet, a customer relationship management tool that sprang up around Twitter in the fall of 2008. The deal is a natural match. Ten-year-old ExactTarget is a powerful email marketing company with more than 600 employees and revenues north of $100 million a year, but it hadn't yet delved into the world of real-time social media. The company, based in Indianapolis, is also sitting on tons of cash, having gathered around $155 million in VC funding from Battery Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Montagu Newhall Associates and Technology Crossover Ventures.
3 min read · 02 March 2010
Beginning later today, entrepreneurs on the verge of raising seed-stage funding will be able to access open-source, stripped-down term sheets called Series Seed Documents. The documents -- authored by Fenwick & West attorney Ted Wang with input from Andreeesen Horowitz, First Round Capital, True Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Ron Conway, Mike Maples, and several other heavy-hitting seed investors -- are designed to make entrepreneurs’ first, small financing event as fast, efficient and cost-effective as possible. Andreessen tells me that the group wanted to produce an alternative to the gratuitously complex term sheets that are typically offered by venture capital firms, and that cost entrepreneurs who need to muddle through them too much in legal fees. (If the move happens to make most other venture firms look like financial bullies, well, maybe that's okay, too.)
4 min read · 01 March 2010
If real-time Web startups prove to be the Next Big Thing, then Betaworks could become one of the hottest new media companies in a generation. If not, it's bye-bye, Betaworks. Such is the gamble Betaworks founders John Borthwick and Andy Weissman decided to take in the summer of 2007. At the time, Weissman was working as a VC at Dawntreader Ventures. Borthwick was the CEO of the photo-sharing site Fotolog. As Fotolog entered talks to be acquired by a French media company for $90 million, the old college friends --and, in the mid ‘90s, colleagues at AOL -- started fleshing out ideas. Borthwick and Weissman knew that Twitter was no passing fad, yet they were among the first to see that any number of new business possibilities could emerge from real-time social media. Enter Betaworks, a New York-based company that develops its own ideas, acquires companies and invests in nascent startups that it views as strategic to its ambitious vision of creating an empire of companies -- all of which are rooted in live social activities online.
6 min read · 28 February 2010
2 min read · 26 February 2010
2 min read · 25 February 2010
3 min read · 24 February 2010
This weekend, renowned tech analyst Charlene Li was horrified to discover that her 9-year-old daughter had posted a conversation to Google Buzz, not realizing it was public -- or that someone with the handle “iorgyinbathrooms” was following her. Li immediately kicked her daughter off her Google account, then wrote a lengthy post about how dangerous Buzz can be for children in part because its privacy controls are so tricky to navigate. (Jessica Guynn of the L.A. Times talked with some privacy experts about the situation here.) Google was quick to get back to Li, explaining that Gmail’s terms of service don’t allow anyone under age 13 to have an account. It also told her that a “long list of improvements is on the way" and stressed that it's exploring new ways to ensure child safety (and open to suggestions). Li, who’d apparently
2 min read · 23 February 2010
In the March/April issue of Technology Review magazine, writer James Surowiecki - who produces the brilliant “Financial Page” column for the New Yorker week after week -- tackles the question of what’s wrong with venture capital. Much of the piece is a rehash of points with which this audience is well-acquainted. Surowiecki persuasively argues, for example, that the still-overfunded industry’s woes are structural, not cyclical -- a matter with which both big venture firms and small ones are aware and likely to agree. (The big firms, of course, argue that overall, far fewer firms should exist -- and look just like they do. Meanwhile, small firms say the big firms are too fat and inefficient, given the ever-falling costs of runnng startups.) Yet Surowiecki makes an interesting newer observation, too. He suggests there are reasons for people outside the industry to care about how much money is sloshing around on the inside.
3 min read · 23 February 2010
2 min read · 23 February 2010
Last week, snarky PleaseRobMe garnered attention for reporting when users of the location-based social network FourSquare were out and about. (PleaseRobMe pulls the locations from Twitter, which displays their check-in information, and broadcasts it under the flip heading “Recent Empty Homes.”) Now, in a smart advancement of the story, a UK-based insurance comparison site called Confused.com -- owned by car insurance giant Admiral Group -- suggests that as FourSquare and its ilk heighten the risk of homes getting burgled, insurance providers will react. “Criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their information gathering, even using Google Earth and Street View to plan their burglaries with military precision,” says Darren Black, the head of
1 min read · 22 February 2010
