Mission Creek

from The Wannabe Venture Capitalist

New Companies:
- Smalltown launches and has $3mm from Formative Ventures
- Coghead launches: allows for easy online application building

Fundings:
- AirPlay secures $14mm series B: merging mobile gaming and live TV
- Ripe Digital receives a $32mm series B: on demand TV
- Cellfish Media raises $50mm: pioneer in original mobile content creation
- LeadPoint Secures $2mm series C: online leads exchange
- Procore Technologies raises over $2mm series B: software-as-a-service for construction projects
- SolFocus completes a $32mm series A: solar cells
- Amyris gets $20mm: developing alternative fuel
- Indian local search engine Guruji.com gets $7mm from Sequoia
- Practical Instruments raises $8mm: solar energy
- PopSugar takes ~$5mm series A from Sequoia

Here is an interesting post about the political process.  Imagine in private commerce, if companies could slip unrelated license terms or conditions in unrelated agreements.  This is another example of how the system is broken.

from cnet.com 

President Bush just signed into law a bill slapping more restrictions on online gambling. The odd thing, though, is that at his press conference on Friday, Bush mentioned neither gambling nor the Internet.

That’s because the restrictions were buried in Section 801 of a massive port security bill, which had nothing to do with the Internet and became one of those must-pass-before-November-7th political gambits of which Congress becomes so enamored in election years.

If this happened only rarely, perhaps we could forgive our elected representatives for gluing unrelated amendments onto a proposal that’s destined to become law. (With a tight election just weeks away, how many politicians have the mettle to vote against “port security?”)

full story here 

It sounds funny to me that the regulators are just discussing the danger that this represents.

from reuters.com

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - High-tech crooks are hijacking online brokerage accounts using spyware and operating from remote locations, sometimes in Eastern Europe, U.S. market regulators said on Friday.

The computer “incursions” are a growing problem, said Walter Ricciardi, deputy enforcement director at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

“It’s something we’re very concerned about,” he said in remarks at a legal conference in Washington.

full story here

My personal take is that Friendster does not have much relevance today, their community has little added value as far as social networks are concerned.

originally nytimes.com

JONATHAN ABRAMS was in a spot. He could take the safe bet and accept the $30 million that Google was offering him for Friendster, the social networking Web start-up he began only a year earlier, in 2002. Saying yes to Google would provide a quick and stunning payout for relatively little work and instantly place the Friendster Web site in front of hundreds of millions of users across the globe.

full story here