Source: thenextweb.com via Rachid on Pinterest
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
With $55M, Search Engine Blekko takes on Google
Search engine Blekko has raised $30 million in new funding Yandex, MLC Private Equity, and existing investors U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Capital and PivotNorth Capital (Ashton Kutcher is also a previous investor). This brings Blekko’s total funding to $55 million. Yandex’s CEO Arkady Volozh will join Blekko’s board.
Blekko launched last year as the shiny new search engine that wanted to take on Google.
Blekko is a search company founded by Rich Skrenta and his core team
from previous company Topix and Netscape’s Open Directory. Blekko was
founded halfway through 2007 and has already earned itself an angel
round from Baseline Ventures and two ex-Googlers
The search engine differentiates itself from Google by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere. Blekko offers unique query refinement tools to human editors called Slashtags (i.e. /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs) to filter results to what you are looking for (you can read our full review of the platform here).
Earlier this year the search company expanded its efforts to eliminate spam from search results and banned pages from well-known content farms as well as blockingpages from 1.1 million domains that were generating spam. The company has also signed partnerships with Topix, fellow search engine DuckDuckGo and recipe search engine Foodily.
Blekko has also integrated social data into results, as well as Facebook comments. The company also considering integrating Twitter data into results as well.
Volozh says of Blekko: “We love blekko and think it’s a great product – a quality search engine that organically combines search algorithms with expert opinions. We believe the outlook for this approach is strong and that the blekko team is poised to make it a success.”
“Yandex is a partner and investor that shares our mission of making search the best experience it can be,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of blekko. “Having access to one of the world’s top pools of search talent and the fantastic products they have built will help us grow blekko in the U.S.”
The search engine currently indexes approximately 3.5 billion URLs, which pales in comparison to Bing and Google, which are both over 15 billion. But one of the key advantages to using Blekko is that it is such a thorough spam blocker.
courtesy: techcrunch
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Why Los Angeles Will Outpace Silicon Valley As The Tech Startup Capital
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2008 from San Francisco, I wasn’t very excited about the move because I’m a technologist and moving away from the tech hub of the world to the land of Botox seemed like a really bad career move. I assumed that the people of Los Angeles were disingenuous, attention whores and didn’t know anything about technology.
My husband coerced me into moving to SoCal because he would rather get a tattoo of Tinkerbell than rent an over-priced faux-loft in San Francisco. He asserted that the Web 2.0 or tech startup people do the same thing day after day, go to the same bars, the same coffee shops and work on products that aren’t discernible from a pet rock, and are geared toward the same 100 bot followed Twitter celebrities that are stuck together with gorilla glue on a postage stamp. ...read more here: Why Los Angeles Will Outpace Silicon Valley As The Tech Startup Capital - Forbes
Friday, February 17, 2012
IPO Bill to Open up capital markets for Small Business
This legislation provides a regulatory on-ramp for emerging growth companies seeking to go public on the U.S. market and allows these companies to better communicate with potential investors pre- and post-IPO. The NVCA has long supported this bill - as well as the Senate version, S. 1933, and we expressed this support jointly with the NYSE in a letter to the HFSC Chairman Bachus and Ranking Member Frank, sent yesterday. Of particular note, we applaud the bipartisan approach and leadership shown during the Committee process by Congressmen Stephen Fincher (R-TN) and John Carney (D-DE) on the bill, which was reflected in the nearly unanimous vote of approval. We remain extremely encouraged by the strong and growing bipartisan support for this bill and hope the full House will quickly add its weight behind this measure.
As mentioned, S. 1933, introduced by Senators Schumer (D-NY), Toomey, (R-PA) Warner (D-VA) and Crapo (R-ID) is under consideration by the Senate Banking Committee. We hope that yesterday's strong action will encourage that committee to also move forward expeditiously.
As the venture-backed IPO market remains slow in terms of volume in 2012, we believe that these bills will encourage more companies to pursue an IPO without sacrificing investor safety or confidence. We will keep you apprised of all developments here at NVCAccess.
IPO Bill HR 3606 Passes House Committee
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Report Tallies $7.7 Billion In SoCal IT Exits In 2011
A new report released today tallies up $7.7 billion in IT exits in 2011, the highest since 2000, for Southern California IT firms. The report--compiled by Ocean Road Partners--included both venture-backed and self-financed information technology companies. According to the report, the biggest exit during 2011 was for Greent Dot, which provided liquidity of $2 billion for its pre-IPO investors, the highest of any exit since 2000. The exit was the eighth highest in the database, according to Ocean Road Partners. Green Dot's backers included Sequoia Capital, Total Technology Ventures, and the Tech Coast Angels.
Compared with 2010, the report found an increase of 296 percent over exits in 2010, when $2.6 billion in liquidity was generated in the sector. Both years were well above 2009, which had a low of only $475M in exits. During 2011, the analysis identified 73 exits by companies, with an average value of approximately $106M. Among other major 2011 exits listed were Riot Games ($400 million) and HauteLook ($270 million). The report also tallied six companies having IPOs, the most since 2005; those firms included RealD, Cornerstone OnDemand, Demand Media, ReachLocal and Inphi Corp.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
[VIDEO] The Ultimate Herd - Big Data overtakes Social Media
With the filing of the Facebook IPO, it looks like the social media space is maturing. Now comes the question: who is going to deal with all this data that social media is generating? how are we going to measure the live reaction of consumers to events? A whole slew of new startups are tackling three new areas:- “Big Data”, which involves ramping up the processing power of sorting through mountains of consumer data.
- “Machine-to-Machine” communications. These new technologies include sensors on home fuel tanks that can signal to oil-delivery companies when they need refilling.
- “Internet of Things”, Internet-connected devices that collect data and communicate with other physical devices.
"Big Data" development relies on the constantly dropping costs of hardware and storage. But processing power to run this data on simultaneous or live basis is a whole new discipline that scientists, mathematicians and programmers are innovating in with new algorythms.
"Machine-to-Machine" relies on the advent of communicating devices and robotics. This can start from a simple chip on a product and move all the way to sophisticated robots that can execute a complex emergency process.
"Internet of Things" can be considered a subset of the previous category, however due to its broad base of consumers on the internet, it is starting to become its own category.
Where are we going with this? is this transparency going to take our lives to a whole new level of "The Herd Mentality"? we are certainly going in that direction, and rapidly...
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