Archive for February, 2006
Funding News: Friendster
February 28th, 2006 • 2 comments Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology, Venture Capital
Friendster, the company which spurned a $30 million acquisition bid for $13 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins (nice new site BTW!), has landed some more cash. Their last round of funding was back in 2003 so they’ve been at it for quite some time now. No word (yet) about who the funders were or how much the funding was for. Based on how their business has been doing though, I suspect (but have no proof, mind you) it was a down round for the company. Pretty unfortunate story since they had word-of-mouth going for them and basically defined the category. I think their downfall was that they lacked a really good ongoing story as well as a clear path to profitability.
Startup: Podcast Ready - Part 2
February 27th, 2006 • 3 comments Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology
Okay, so I made a lot of fun at the folks over at Podcast Ready for the fairly lame flash intro on their site. To their credit, they dropped it and added much more useful information on the site. Still, it was (and is) pretty cryptic and I couldn’t figure out what they actually did or built. But with the attention that they’ve already received, having cryptic information on their site is better than a silly countdown timer.
This Qualifies as Journalism? - Part 2
February 25th, 2006 • The Press
After writing my last piece on this, I thought I’d wait a little bit to see my trackback show up on BusinessWeek’s site. Well, a day has gone by now and it hasn’t shown up. So either a) someone needs to approve the trackback/comment for it to appear and hasn’t or b) they are preventing my trackback/comment from appearing because it is critical of what is written. In either case, this is poor form. BusinessWeek’s whole online publishing/blog system needs to be totally revamped and moved out of the mentality of traditional publishing and into the mentality of Internet publishing. As of now, scoop from places like alarm:clock and Slashdot is way more relevant and insightful.
Funding News: JBoss Inc.
February 25th, 2006 • 2 comments Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology, Venture Capital
JBoss has recently been subject to much speculation that it was going to be acquired by Oracle for a hefty pricetag (between $200 and $400 million). Well apparently, that isn’t in the cards. They just recently bought their German service partner, Objectone.
Now, the news you won’t read anywhere else. My sources tell me that JBoss has raised their second round of funding. I don’t yet know for how much or from who but their previous round was back in 2004. That round was for $10 million from Matrix Partners, Accel Partners, Intel Capital, and Bain Capital. Clearly with all the hype around JBoss right now, this round is likely hefty with the same participants, if not more.
This Qualifies as Journalism?
February 24th, 2006 • 2 comments Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, The Press, Venture Capital
I’ve been harsh in the past with journalists not checking their facts and leaving in blatent errors in their articles. Now I’ve found something obvious, not blatent, in the online arm of a magazine. I thought the blog section of BusinessWeek would be pretty interesting and to some extent it has been. I noticed a new posting about a “stealth” startup which was supposedly funded by Granite Ventures. The posting names the company as “mxPlay” and tries to tie it to a Sourceforge project called “mxplay”. Clearly, they must be the same thing since the names are the same and therefore the author (Justin Hibbard) speculates that “mxPlay” the company is perhaps building an open-source music player. Makes sense. Until you actually look at what the Sourceforge project is about. Yes, it is a music player of sorts (actually a mod player is what it looks like) for old Atari platforms. That’s right. The claim here is that a VC is funding open source development for a program that is originally for a long dead platform. Makes perfect sense, right? Yeah, no.
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