from Silicon Alley Insider by Peter Kafka
Most of the original investors re-upped for this round: Union Square Ventures, Milestone Ventures, Village Ventures, George Crowley, John Seely Brown, Esther Dyson and John Borthwick. We're confirming whether Marc Andreessen, who invested in the first round, participated in this one.
Related: outside.in Launches Neighborhood News Widget
Brooklyn Bonkers About Blogging
Highly popular Industrial Rock Band Nine Inch Nails have announced that as of today they are free agents, and will not be using the services of a record company in the future.
Nine Inch Nail's Trent Reznor wrote on the NIN site that the writing is on the wall for the traditional music distribution model, saying that the music business has radically mutated from one thing to something inherently very different today and that "it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as i see fit and appropriate."
It's expected that Nine Inch Nails next album will follow on from Radiohead's Rainbows and be released directly to the public.
I think Gizmodo hits it right on the head when they write:
If two of the biggest acts in the industry can see the digital writing on the wall and totally embrace it—that the old way of doing business is broken—why can't the labels? What Radiohead and NIN are showing is that the business model "of the future" feared by entrenched interests isn't arriving some time in the horizon. It's touching down now.
See also Michael's take on the music industry here.
The round was led by Rho Ventures, with original investors Galleon Crossover Fund VantagePoint Venture Partners also participating.
ReachLocal offers a local-focused search marketing product that targets SMBs. ReachLocal offers campaign management for online advertising on major services including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, and also provides campaign specific site building and click tracking to customers.
For what is basically a SEM firm, the valuation is staggering; however despite the direct to buyer model of advertising options such as Google Adwords there is a growing market for middle-man services such as ReachLocal. There will be many people in the SEM business who will be re-evaluating their company valuations following ReachLocal's new round of funding, and I'd suggest that many of them may be sitting on a lot more value than they had previously thought.
(in part via LA Times)
Online measurement firm BigChampagne has generated a "biggest movers" chart for us, which tracks which songs have had the biggest week-to-week increases on file-sharing networks. We've published it after the jump. Note that it doesn't correlate at all to CD sales, because people who buy CDs aren't buying them because there's one good song on them. But if there's more than one good song on them, they tend to do very well. That's why we're confident that Gorilla Zoe, who we'd never heard of prior to today, will be selling a lot of copies of his album Welcome To The Zoo in the coming weeks. The album, released by Warner Music Group (WMG), has two fast-moving songs on the BigChampagne chart.
Related: Big Music "Wins" Trial Against Song-Stealer; Industry Still Screwed
Cavoukian argues that privacy and security are not zero-sum, that privacy is just as important in the "post-9/11 world" as it was before, and that you don't need to give up one to get the other. She addresses specific privacy-protection computer science techniques, and cites Kim Cameron's wonderful Seven Laws of Identity (I wish Kim would approach trusted computing with the same skepticism that he brought to identity issues, but that doesn't take away from his excellent work there).
There's something incredibly refreshing about hearing a high-ranking government official say things like, "Privacy is integral to freedom. You cannot have a free and democratic society without privacy. When a state morphs from a democracy into a totalitarian regime, the first thread to unravel is privacy." Link (via /.)
CEO Aaron Patzer reports to us that, in just the past three weeks, Mint has already helped organize more than $2 billion worth of people's personal financial accounts, and identified more than $40 million in potential savings for those members. (Mint helps you find better interest rates on bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial products). Interest in the site spiked right after TC40. At one point, Mint was signing up a new member every five seconds. Not bad for a service from a previously-unknown startup that asks for access to all of your private financial data, including your bank and credit-card accounts.
Apparently, getting consumers to give up that level of privacy, has not been an issue so far. (The old axiom is true: people really will do anything to save a buck). Now comes the hard part. Getting all those people to keep coming back past the initial stage of curiosity.
Update: I asked Mint CEO Patzer for some more details on how many people are using Mint, and he responded with the following data. Keep in mind, this is only 18 days worth of data and thus should be treated as extremely preliminary (these are early adopters, so they may be more likely to embrace such a service and use it more often than a mainstream user):
—That $2 billion is spread across 50,000 registered users.
—About 70 percent (or 35,000) have come back more than once.
—Those who have been in the system at least a week (including beta testers), visit Mint.com 2-3 times a week.
—About 10 percent (or 5,000) come to the site every day.
—And 10 percent have signed up for mobile alerts.
(See also his comments below about the lengths Mint goes to secure customer data).
According to the unconfirmed rumblings, Facebook is working on expanding their interface. Musical artists will now have special pages with integrated widgets for promoting band events. The upcoming iTunes widget will allow users to sample and even eventually buy music through Facebook (in support beyond the current iLike software). iPod owners who use Facebook will surely take glee in this new integration, but honestly, many of us avoid MySpace like the plague because it's full of a bunch of losers with crappy bands. Now all those losers with crappy bands are going to set up pages on Facebook, find their way into our networks and infiltrate our clean social networking. Not that we're paranoid or anything. [paidContent via macworld]
The personal information, Microsoft said, will be stored in a secure, encrypted database. Its privacy controls, the company said, are set entirely by the individual, including what information goes in and who gets to see it. The HealthVault searches are conducted anonymously, Microsoft said, and will not be linked to any personal information in a HealthVault personal health record.Microsoft's secured a few major partners in the health industry (with more to come, they hope) who will be able to zap your blood pressure or cholesterol level right into HealthVault during your checkup. You willing to entrust the big MS with your medical records? Let us know in the comments.
Most greentech watchers have lost their sense of wonder over the fact that pond scum, a.k.a. algae, could be one of the most efficient ways to make biofuels for our cars. These tiny chemical factories can turn sunlight and nutrients into fuel with an efficiency unrivaled by traditional crops, all while using the CO2 that would otherwise go into the atmosphere. It seems almost impossibly promising, which is one reason that a host of companies working with algae, including Solazyme, GreenFuel, GreenShift, and Inventure Chemical have all received funding in the past year.
Of course, there are also host of problems (VCs might call them opportunities) involved in actually creating energy from algae. These problems mimic those of agriculture: there is a constant trade-off between the yield and the amount of money required to invest in the “crops’”production. The two culture methods — open and closed pond systems — each have their pros and cons. In the open system, the algae grow in what are essentially just ponds. It’s cheap, but keeping out “weed” organisms is difficult. Closed pond systems, on the other hand, work more like greenhouses. They are expensive to construct but it’s much easier to regulate the growing conditions.
Today’s startup profiles look at two algae-to-biofuel companies, Live Fuels and Solix Biofuels. When it comes to both culture systems and funding, the two have taken divergent approaches, but they aim to have the same end product: biocrude (or as Live Fuels calls it, “supercrude”). Instead of attempting to convert algae directly into ethanol or biodiesel, these companies are attempting to create green crude that could be fed directly through the nation’s current refinery system. If it works, the technology would require fewer changes to the nation’s energy infrastructure than other biofuel approaches currently out there.
Company: Live Fuels Hometown: Menlo Park, Calif. Founder: Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones Financing: $10 million In Their Corner: Quercus Trust, Sandia National Labs Product: Biocrude CoreTech: Open-pond algae bioreactors Commercialization: 2010
Company: Solix Biofuels Hometown: Fort Collins, Colo. Founder: Jim Sears Financing: NA In Their Corner: Colorado State University Product: Biocrude CoreTech: Closed-pond algae bioreactors Commercialization: 2009?
Live Fuels has received $10 million in financing from the Quercus Trust, David Gelbaum’s well-known environmental funding group. The company believes that driving down costs is paramount to pushing out their technology, so they are taking the open-pond approach to algae culturing. A major component of the group’s core technology is the cultivation of an open-pond ecology that keeps high-value algae producing while preventing unwanted natural competitors from taking over. Working with scientists from Sandia National Labs, Live intends to be price competitive with crude oil.
Solix Biofuels is a venture that consists of private entrepreneurs Jim Sears and Doug Henston, Colorado State professor Bryan Wilson, and Colorado State University itself. Working to refine and scale Sears’ original bioreactor design, the group has called on the resources of CSU’s Engine and Energy Conversion Laboratory in constructing a working prototype of the closed-tank bioreactor. Simply put, the system grows algae in cheap plastic tubes, which keep out unwanted algae while keeping capital costs low.
The company has said that construction will begin this year on its first, large-scale bioreactor at the New Belgian Brewery in Fort Collins, Colo., where waste CO2 produced in the making of delicious beers like our personal favorite, Fat Tire, will be used to feed the algae. Solix eventually plans to license its technology, a process the company believes will speed its product to market without the huge capital investment necessary to build its own plants.
Algae is the most promising biofuel “crop” on a per-acre basis, but the technical hurdles involved in finding (or bioengineering) the right oil-producing algae, the right nutrient mix, the right culturing system, and the right business model mean that scale production of any type of fuel from algae is probably a long way off. Still, it’s going to be an exciting bout to watch as all these startups move through the various stages of funding and start to turn these ideas into factories and fuel.
DeputyDog has compiled a list of some of the most interesting elevators in the world. And among them is this Bailong elevator in China.
This controversial 326 metre high elevator takes you up the side of one of the many enormous cliffs in zhangjiajie, china - the lower 1/3 running from a cavern through the rock, the top 2/3 rising outside to the summit - and is the highest and heaviest outdoor elevator in the world. the elevator has an uncertain future due to the potential harm caused to the surrounding landscape.
See our recent coverage of Nirvanix, a U.S. based S3 competitor as well.
Posts
