Ever feel like you’re not absorbing as much as you should, particularly later in the day? It’s not your imagination, according to new research coming out of the University of California, Berkeley. According to the school’s findings, naps allow the brain to shift new information into its longer-term storage compartment, the prefrontal cortex, making room for even newer data in the hippocampus, where memories are first logged. The conclusions were drawn during a recent study of 39 young adults, who were evenly split into “nap” and “no nap” camps, then given some difficult learning tasks at noon. The 18 adults who fell into the “nap” group then took a 90-minute-long nap beginning at 2 p.m., while the rest were left to putter
1 min read · 22 February 2010
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman may be the busiest man in Silicon Valley. Alhough he made former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner the CEO of his company last June, his role as executive board chairman is very much a full-time gig. Yet Hoffman now has a second job. Last November, he became a partner at Greylock Partners, which led LinkedIn’s Series B round. It’s no wonder Hoffman was recruited into venture capital. He's led an astonishingly successful career as an angel investor throughout the past decade. Among his dozens of investments, he bought stakes in Flickr, IronPort Systems and Last.fm -- sold to Yahoo for $35 million, to Cisco for $830 million and to CBS for $280 million, respectively. Hoffman, who typically invested between $25,000 and $75,000, also has the hottest portfolio on the planet right now. Not only does he presumably have a sizable chunk of LinkedIn -- expected to have a multibillion dollar IPO in the next couple of years --but he also owns pieces of Zynga; Facebook (which received its first check from Hoffman); and, through the sale of his portfolio company Mixer Labs, Twitter. Ultimately, the question isn't why Greylock pursued Hoffman; it's why he said yes.
5 min read · 21 February 2010
For a 12-person startup, San Mateo-based Groovy Corp. is causing a fair bit of controversy in Silicon Valley. The reason? Groovy claims to have developed the capacity to do what has eluded all others -- truly real-time data relay through its proprietary in-memory relational database management system, called the SQL Switch. Truly real-time? Aren't startups like Twitter doing that already? Actually, no, says Groovy’s CEO, Joe Ward. “If you go to Ticketmaster, do you see the tickets disappearing as they are sold? You don't know if you've won or lost an auction on eBay until you've refreshed your page. Even on Twitter, you are seconds behind real time,” he says, calling it a “computer science problem that no one has really been able to solve.”
3 min read · 19 February 2010
Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis -- who launched the campaign against pay-to-pitch investment gatherings last fall -- has an announcement to make: Open Angel Forum is coming to both San Francisco and New York very soon. Kevin Rose of Digg and Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital will host the San Francisco event on March 4. Angels and entrepreneurs can apply to participate in the event here. The New York event will be held on April 8 and hosted by Brian Alvey, who cofounded Weblogs with Calacanis and now co-runs the publishing platform Crowd Fusion. Alvey will be joined by Charlie O’Donnell, founder of the career startup Path 101 and currently an entrepreneur-in-residence with First Round Capital.
2 min read · 18 February 2010
It can be heartbreaking, being a native Clevelander. None of the city's sports teams have won a championship in my lifetime, and much older denizens could make the same claim. When I tell people that I grew up in Cleveland, I’m never told that it’s one of their favorite cities, or about how much they admire the splendor of the place. They grimace and say, “Oh, the Mistake on the Lake. I spent a week there for work once.” And so ends the conversation. As if these things weren't bad enough, now, in its third annual ranking of horrible places, Forbes has given Cleveland the ignominious distinction of “Most Miserable City in America,” a position it secured “thanks to its high unemployment, high taxes, lousy weather, corruption by public officials and crummy sports teams (Cavaliers of the NBA excepted).”
2 min read · 18 February 2010
3 min read · 17 February 2010
1 min read · 16 February 2010
Infertility affects nearly all of us, either directly or through our friends and family. And growing numbers of people are doing something about it. In 2007, according to the CDC, 430 fertility clinics in operation performed 142,415 Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) procedures, in which eggs are surgically removed from a woman’s ovaries, combined with sperm in a laboratory, and returned to her body or donated to a surrogate.
3 min read · 16 February 2010
At 33, Roy Bahat is leading IGN Entertainment, a division of News Corp's digital media business that one former insider estimates accounts for roughly $120 million in revenues. It’s a big job for a young guy. According to the Web metrics company Quantcast, IGN.com, a gaming information site, is visited by 23 million people each month, while IGN’s second biggest property, Askmen.com, gets 13 million visitors monthly. In the last couple of years, IGN has also branched out into other areas, including original video, digital distribution, and online gaming. As a division of a group within News Corp. that’s not faring terribly well, Bahat is also in a challenging spot.
5 min read · 12 February 2010
2 min read · 12 February 2010
