VentureBeat |
- Ask the accountant: What taxes will I owe on restricted stock?
- Second time’s a charm: FriendFinder files to go public again
- Verizon’s 4G HTC Thunderbolt available today for $250
- Ngmoco’s We Rule logs 3 billion minutes of game play in one year
- Cyber security investments gain momentum with rising threats
- U.S. immigrant smartphone owners drive video calls
- Deals & More: Just-Eat gobbles up $48M for takeout meals
- Want to hang onto your best talent? Try the unexpected
- Why Retrevo thinks it can outsell Amazon.com
- Atari will launch big online game Tera from Korean developer
- Movie special effects shop The Foundry is sold
- Mobile headset maker Jawbone raises $49M
- Nuclear crisis doesn’t panic cleantech investors
- Heyzap lets users “check-in” to Android games
- Angry Birds’ Vesterbacka: Tablets are killing console games (video)
| Ask the accountant: What taxes will I owe on restricted stock? Posted: 17 Mar 2011 09:00 AM PDT This series is brought to you by TurboTax Home & Business Edition – Guides You to Your Biggest Tax Refund. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity. TurboTax had no involvement in the content of this post.
We passed the question on to Steve Henley, national tax practice leader at , the seventh largest accounting provider in the U.S. Here’s his answer:
From now through April 15, VentureBeat will be taking your tax and accounting questions and getting you expert answers. You can send us a question by email, leave one in the comments below, or reach us by Twitter or on Facebook or Quora. Our sponsor encourages you to read these related links. VentureBeat had no input in the selection of these stories.
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| Second time’s a charm: FriendFinder files to go public again Posted: 17 Mar 2011 08:15 AM PDT
The company plans to use the proceeds to pay back part of its debt. The company initially attempted to go public in 2008, aiming to raise $460 million, and later reducing that amount to between $200 and $240 million, but its plans were eventually sidelined due to a weak market. According to the company, "based on market conditions, it has chosen not to proceed with its planned initial public offering at this time until market conditions improve." The company is owned by Penthouse, which purchased it in 2007 for approximately $400 million. Based in Florida, the FriendFinder Network was founded in 1996 by Andrew Conr. Including all of the websites, the company has a total worldwide membership of more than 100 million people. Companies: FriendFinder
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| Verizon’s 4G HTC Thunderbolt available today for $250 Posted: 17 Mar 2011 07:41 AM PDT
First expected around late February, the Thunderbolt was delayed for weeks without explanation by Verizon. One potential reason could have been trouble with the phone's battery life, which reportedly was getting around two to three hours of juice for testers, Engadget reported. The Thunderbolt is HTC's Verizon spin on its popular Evo 4G phone on Sprint. This time around though, it will be packing support for Verizon's LTE 4G network, instead of Sprint's WiMax 4G network. It's somewhat fitting that Verizon's first 4G phone would resemble the Evo, which was Sprint's first 4G device. The phone sports the same 4.3-inch display as the Evo, as well as a slightly newer 1 gigahertz Qualcomm processor. It ships with Android 2.2 and, being a flagship HTC device, runs the company's Sense 2.0 user interface. The Thunderbolt has about 50 percent more RAM than the EVO, 768 megabytes versus 512 megabytes, which should make it a little zippier in day-to-day use. It also sports an 8 megapixel camera with HD video recording capabilities — though I hope it's a higher quality camera than the Evo's. Laptop Magazine describes the Thunderbolt's 4G speeds as "freakin fast." The phone saw download speeds between 4Mbps and 13.8Mbps, or somewhere between two and seven times faster than Verizon's typical 3G speeds. If the phone's $250 price sounds too high, you can also find it for less at online retailers. Amazon, which currently has the Thunderbolt backordered, was offering it for $180 earlier today. It's also available for $199 at the wireless reseller Wirefly.
Companies: HTC, Verizon Wireless
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| Ngmoco’s We Rule logs 3 billion minutes of game play in one year Posted: 17 Mar 2011 07:00 AM PDT
To be sure, We Rule’s success isn’t anywhere near as big Angry Birds, which has been downloaded 100 million times and generates 200 million minutes of game play a day and which could hit Ngmoco’s one-year level of 3 billion minutes in just 15 days. And the game is just one of more than three dozen published by Ngmoco. But We Rule’s survival for more than a year in the cutthroat App Store marketplace — where there are 52,984 active games and 114 new ones per day — is a big achievement and it shows that it’s possible to create a new entertainment franchise on the iPhone as a constantly updated service. But We Rule’s success was likely one of the reasons that Japan’s DeNA bought San Francisco-based Ngmoco for up to $403 million last summer. With We Rule, Ngmoco figured out how to create a virtual economy that paid off in a way similar to that of games such as FarmVille on Facebook. As in FarmVille, players can raise crops. But they can also complete quests, trade with neighboring realms, and interact with castles, peasants, pirates, and dragons.
As a measure of engagement, players have played more than 480 million sessions, with average session length of one hour, says Clive Downie, vice president of marketing at Ngmoco. Players have gone on more than 1.2 million quests and have an average of 27 friends each. Players have banded together to do more than 82 million social jobs. Ngmoco has a team that delivers twice-weekly additions to the game which players can download as updates. There are now more than 300 ways to customize a kingdom. And there are 19 million Ruby groves, and 1.3 million dragon lairs in the game. To celebrate the one-year anniversary, Ngmoco is going to offer new features and promotions, including a new gifting feature. In the coming months, Ngmoco will expand the game to Android mobile devices. “We’re constantly at work serving the community,” Downie said. “We curate the environment on an hourly basis.” People: Clive Downie
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| Cyber security investments gain momentum with rising threats Posted: 17 Mar 2011 06:00 AM PDT
That was the message for security entrepreneurs and investors from a group of venture capitalists and security experts at today’s Information Technology Security Forum at Stanford University. They said that cyber security’s hot segments include protecting mobile devices and cloud services from new kinds of ever-evolving threats. (Critical vulnerabilities were found in Adobe products just this week). And the emerging threats can only be dealt with by combining the forces of governments, law enforcement, big companies, start-ups and venture capitalists. “This is one of the very hot areas of innovation where investors are actively deploying capital,” said Bob Ackerman (pictured top, right) managing director of Allegis Capital. “If you look at the $15 billion in exits, or more than 20 percent of the venture capital exits, in the last year, you can see that it’s also an area where the returns are good.” The event drew around 300 people and it was the fifth annual gathering that brings together security technologists and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley with policy makers from Washington D.C. The government and big corporations are often the main customers for innovative new technologies in the security sector and those customers want more technology faster, said Jim Pflaging, director and managing principal of the Security Innovation Network, which stages the forum. As with a year ago, the group’s purpose is to reduce the friction that startup companies face in dealing with government agencies.
In the meantime, the number of IPOs declined from 4 in 2007 to none in 2010. In fact, many of the acquisitions were mega-deals where public companies were taken private. Intel, for instance, bought McAfee for $7.68 billion last year and HP bought ArcSight for $1.6 billion. Symantec bought security divisions of Verisign for $1.3 billion. Overall, IDC expects the security tech market to grow at a 14 percent compound annual growth rate to $82 billion in 2012. And Forrester says that security now accounts for 14 percent of the information technology spending, compared to 8.2 percent in 2007. While the ecosystem is healthy and recovering from the recession, it’s not a get-rich quick sector. That’s OK with Alberto Yepez (pictured top left), managing director at Trident Capital. By comparison, he said that cleantech has suffered from the boom and bust cycle that came with fad investing in the past few years. The current boom in social networking investments has made it harder to hire people in Silicon Valley, since engineers think they can get richer in social than in security. “You will always find sectors that are the latest shiny new object,” Ackerman said. “At some point, it stops being a good investment.” Since security has fundamentally strong revenues behind it as a sector, it has more going for it than the sectors that the boom-and-bust herd investors are going after. Still, security itself has some shiny sectors that are drawing more attention. The social networking craze has driven more interest in digital authentication and protecting a consumer’s identity, which are security technology problems at the core, said Asheem Chandna, partner at Greylock Partners. The big trends also include the bigger burdens of complying with security and privacy laws. Companies also have to deal with advanced new threats such as the Stuxnet virus, which is believed to have taken out some of Iran’s nuclear equipment. Customers are buying security technologies to comply with laws and lower costs, or to deal with rapidly changing threats in real-time. Because of the changing threats, the new security technologies have to offer real-time analytics, predictive capabilities, intelligence, and the ability to sift through masses of data. Big corporations from Boeing to Verizon are buying security companies so that they can integrate them into their everyday enterprise computing infrastructure. Lewis Kussmaul said that the acquirers include defense contractors, storage companies, security firms, software makers and even chip/hardware companies such as Intel. Sarah Friar, managing director at Goldman Sachs, estimates that the top 10 tech companies alone have more than $250 billion in cash that they can use on acquisitions. The recession knocked security tech valuations lower and the strategic investors stayed out of the market as they were laying off employees. But in the recovery, those strategic companies such as Cisco and Hewlett-Packard are back in the market. And the cybercriminals didn’t take any time off during the tough times. Government institutions are now attacked 6 million times a day. The Operation Aurora attack, which originated from China, broke into not only Google’s security infrastructure, but also the computers of more than 2,500 organizations and companies. The need for security technology is growing. Cloud computing and mobile investments have taken off. Lookout Mobile Security raised $19.5 million in December to protect mobile phones from viruses, while Endgame Systems raised $29 million to secure the cloud against malware. If investments like those pay off, then the group of security-focused VCs will likely continue to investing in the security technology start-ups for a long time to come. Companies: Allegis Capital, America’s Growth Capital, Cisco, Greylock Partners, Hewlett Packard, IDC, Intel, Lookout Mobile Systems, McAfee, Trident Capital People: Alberto Yepez, Asheem Chandna, Bob Ackerman, Jim Pflaging, Maria Lewis Kussmaul
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| U.S. immigrant smartphone owners drive video calls Posted: 17 Mar 2011 06:00 AM PDT
The survey suggests that roughly five million immigrants have placed video phone calls with PCs or smartphones, according to Rebtel, the world’s second-largest mobile internet calling company. That’s a sizable sample and it makes sense, considering the distance that separates immigrants and their loved ones. It also means that video call marketers would do well to target this demographic group in the future. Normally, you wouldn’t consider immigrant populations to be the prime adopters of new technologies. The survey was based on responses from 1,340 immigrants living in the U.S., a small sample of the roughly 38 million people in the demographic group. About 24 percent of them said they owned a smartphone and used a video calling service on their PC or phone.
The sexes had very different results in the survey. Skype was the No. 1 choice for 74 percent of immigrant women, while it was the No. 1 choice for only 42 percent of men. Rebtel believes that Skype’s heavy branding with Oprah Winfrey’s TV show — where Oprah does live video calls with some of her guests using Skype — could explain the difference. Only 21 percent of those polled said they would pay a monthly fee to make video calls. Men were 1.5 times as likely to pay a fee than women, with 22 percent of males and only 14 percent of females saying they would pay a fee. Of the immigrants in the study, those hailing from Cuba, Ethiopia, France, Ghana, India, Israel, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines and the United Kingdom ranked Skype as their preferred video calling application of choice. The study was conducted in November and released today.
People: Oprah Winfrey
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| Deals & More: Just-Eat gobbles up $48M for takeout meals Posted: 17 Mar 2011 06:00 AM PDT Today’s funding announcements include services for ordering food, buying gifts and getting advice from doctors:
GoLocal grabs $2M for personalized gifts: GoLocal, parent company of San Francisco-based gift site Giftly, has raised a first round of funding, according to a filing with the SEC. Founded by the first employee at social search engine Aardvark, the site lets users deliver gift cards for any store or stores through email or Facebook. Rather than redeeming a physical gift card at the store, recipients pay as usual, then get a refund from Giftly after using the gift. Doximity gets $10.8M to connect doctors via mobile: The developer of a communications platform for physicians has raised a first round of funding from Emergence Capital Partners and InterWest Partners. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company, started by the founders of health software maker Epocrates, allows doctors to quickly collaborate using mobile devices for patient referrals. More than 7,000 doctors are currently using the company’s free mobile app. Conference Hound lands $135K for global conference directory: The San Francisco-based startup has raised a round of seed funding from angel investors for its free, searchable web and mobile platform. The service, which the company says is a resource for conference attendees and organizers alike, has more than 45,000 global conference listings and is integrated with social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter. Companies: Aardvark, Conference Hound, Doximity, Emergence Capital Partners, Epocrates, Giftly, GoLocal, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Interwest Partners, Just-Eat, linkedin, Redpoint Ventures, Twitter
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| Want to hang onto your best talent? Try the unexpected Posted: 17 Mar 2011 07:00 AM PDT (Editor’s note: Tony Hartl is the founder Planet Tan and author of “Selling Sunshine: 75 Tips, Tools and Tactics for Becoming a Wildly Successful Entrepreneur”. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.) There are a lot of ways to celebrate a company anniversary: You can go the traditional route with cake and punch. You can rent out a restaurant and have an open bar. Or you can simply give people the day off. But those things have inherent shortfalls—employees come to expect them, and that means they won't value the occasion, leading to more disappointment than excitement when you don't "meet expectations." So when it came time to celebrate our 12th anniversary at Planet Tan, I showed my appreciation to employees and our members in a unique way. I called a meeting with my store managers and office staff. In my hands, I held a stainless steel briefcase. I told my staff how much it meant to me that they had stayed on for so many years and shared with them what a valuable part of the company they were. I placed the briefcase onto the podium and opened it. The room was silent as the staff caught a glimpse of $100 dollar bills stacked inside. I called up one of my store managers, Jason, who had been with me for 10 years. One by one, I handed him ten crisp $100 bills. It became a legend at Planet Tan: that day, I handed out $18,000 of my own money to 18 of my employees. I hadn't taken it out of the company, because I didn't want it to impact our financial statements. I hadn't added it to their paychecks because I didn't want them to be taxed on it. I took the 18K out of my own personal savings and gave it to my employees to show my appreciation for their loyalty. I was reinforcing the significance of 12 years in business. I handed out cash across the pyramid, including one member of our maintenance staff who had been with us for many years. The energy created by these types of gift and other unique celebrations is palpable. It cements the idea in staff members' minds that the company is succeeding, that you care about them, and that they have your heartfelt thanks for the time they've given to the company. What you reward in your business will be reinforced, and you can create stories and legends within your organization that reinforce the company's values. At the same time, you can give employees opportunities to be proud of the jobs that they do. When we celebrated occasions in my company, we took care to make it truly memorable. We chartered a jet to eat at Emeril's Restaurant in New Orleans, then to the House of Blues for front-row seats at a BB King concert. We gave away trips to Cancun and Jamaica as prizes for increased sales. In whatever you decide to do, the important point is to be sure to surprise and delight your staff. Make sure that you show what you value through your celebrations—and not through Christmas bonuses that your staff could come to expect (and which could cause resentment if you did not give them out). It should be something new and different and surprising, and if done right, it will always result in an adrenaline surge in energy channeled for your company. In the long term, keeping your celebrations fresh and unexpected will help you to retain your best talent. It might even convert them to evangelists among their friends, helping you lure high quality employees. Whatever you value most, align all conversations and communications and incentives around what you're trying to achieve. Channel all your energies toward that. There were other incentives toward tenure which we used, such as subsidized tuition, health insurance, increased vacation time, even a 30-day paid sabbatical at their seventh year. The longer team members stayed with us, the more they were appreciated, and it kept the best performers from looking elsewhere.
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| Why Retrevo thinks it can outsell Amazon.com Posted: 17 Mar 2011 06:00 AM PDT
Consumer-electronics review site Retrevo today launched a marketplace that combines e-commerce and research for tech shopping. It’s aiming to simplify shopping for electronics — and muscle in on the $35 billion business of helping consumers decide what to buy and the most convenient way to buy it, cofounder Manish Rathi told VentureBeat. Retrevo’s software, which it calls a recommendation engine, currently processes 100 million data points across 1 million products every day to provide users with a “Value Map,” or a way to look and compare products based on more than just price. The company said it is aiming primarily at consumers that buy electronics via big-box retailers or e-commerce supersites. In other words, Retrevo’s main competitors are Best Buy, Walmart and Amazon.com. Are these guys crazy? Perhaps. But Retrevo claims the new service will use the same kind of technology that IBM used to power its Watson supercomputer to a resounding wins against human contestants in the Jeopardy quiz show to guide people to the right consumer electronics. That sounds impressive, but from a more detailed description of the technology behind Retrevo given to EETimes, it’s not clear that Retrevo is doing anything more than using generic, commonplace artificial-intelligence technologies running on off-the-shelf servers with Intel processors and tarting up its marketing by associating itself with IBM’s Watson efforts. Regardless, the company claims that using artificial intelligence makes its reviews more reliable and easily applicable to a specific user’s needs — versus the user reviews on Amazon.com whose accuracy and relevance are sometimes difficult to assess. It’s hard to argue with Amazon.com’s results, however. By letting shoppers rate reviews on whether they found them useful to a purchasing decision, Amazon.com generates an additional $2.7 billion in revenue, a 2009 study found. Retrevo’s e-commerce platform will feature a “Do Not Add To Cart” button on products that Retrevo’s A.I. deems “undesirable.” The button is intended to prevent buyer’s remorse and educate people about products that may better suit their needs. Rathi said he is confident the company’s new offering will be a credible competitor because no one has the technology to help people decide what to buy, and do it at scale, reviewing virtually every product in the market, every day. "As we enter into the e-commerce space with our marketplace, our goal is to 'Sell' without 'Selling out,' maintaining our unbiased recommendations, and only offering recommended products for sale,” said Rathi. “This is a bold move for a startup like Retrevo, but we are uniquely positioned to unite content and commerce to give our users a better shopping experience.” One limitation to that experience: Retrevo is not stocking any items itself. Instead, it is referring shoppers to other retailers. To date, it has only signed up 10 relatively minor retailers like eForCity and SF Planet, and says it is talks with larger retailers like Target and J&R. To date, Retrevo has received two rounds of funding, for a total of $12 million. Its last round consisted of $8 million raised in March of 2008. Companies: Amazon, IBM, Retrevo, walmart best buy, Watson People: manish rathi
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| Atari will launch big online game Tera from Korean developer Posted: 17 Mar 2011 05:30 AM PDT
In one sense, that’s not a big deal as there were scores of massively multiplayer online fantasy games such as Tera commissioned in recent years by game companies that wanted to unseat the market leader, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. But the unique thing about Tera is that it actually looks like it’s going to hit the market. That means that the multibillion-dollar MMO market could get a lot more competitive this year. The game has been in the works since 2009, when Seattle-based En Masse Entertainment was formed as a division of Bluehole Studio, a South Korean online game company. The company has game veterans from big game companies such as Blizzard Entertainment, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, ArenaNet and NCsoft. Its founder is Jae-Heon Yang, former chief technology officer at South Korea’s NCsoft. Bluehole is developing the game and En Masse is co-producing it. Atari, through its acquired Cryptic Studios division in Los Gatos, Calif., has had a history of launching and operating MMO games such as Star Trek Online and Champions Online. The games get relatively small audiences, but they generate tidy profits on an ongoing basis. Tera is not unlike Trion Worlds’ Rift as a fantasy role-playing game whose mission is to take down World of Warcraft. Tera hopes to do so with modern 3D graphics that look better on a state-of the-art machine and more visceral combat and action, where player skill — not just experience or stats — makes a difference in success or failure. Rift launched in early March and is doing reasonably well, as far as we can tell. The game has gotten an average review score of 83 out of 100 on Metacritic (an aggregator of review scores), based on just a dozen reviews. But the fact that World of Warcraft has some major challengers (not to mention Electronic Arts’ upcoming Star Wars The Old Republic) means that innovation will be more important than ever in 2011. Companies: Blizzard Entertainment, Bluehole Studio, En Masse Entertainment, Trion Worlds People: Jae-Heon Yang
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| Movie special effects shop The Foundry is sold Posted: 16 Mar 2011 06:41 PM PDT
Making a movie involving digital visual effects is a complicated and technically sophisticated business. In fact, the visual rendering farms used for movies like Happy Feet or Lord of the Rings rank among the top 500 supercomputing centers in the world. Each film sequence combining live action and visual effects involves a huge number of visual elements that must be integrated into a final, polished product. The Foundry's software creates rough combinations of these elements (a process called compositing) in a visual representation that can then be refined by dozens of artists. The video below shows some work created using Nuke, The Foundry's core compositing product. I talked to Mike Chalfen, a partner at Advent Venture Partners, The Foundry’s main investors, about the deal. He contends that this deal is a validation of the firm’s growth investment strategy. Growth investment means investing in a business that has a proven business model and technology and is usually already profitable but wants to expand. Venture capitalists tend to invest in newer products and markets. Advent only invested in The Foundry 2 years ago. Chalfen told me that The Foundry is a typical growth equity deal. The company makes complex products which are hard to replicate and that there was a pent-up sales demand that was not being satisfied. The Foundry’s revenue more than doubled in 2010. I asked Chalfen about the growth equity investment climate in Europe. He told me that he is feeling bullish about the tech market in Europe and that it has become less important where a company is based. According to Chalfen, in the U.S. massive tech companies are created very rapidly, but it is often easier to find truly differentiated companies in Europe. However, he is of the opinion that too many European founders fall in love with their technology at the expense of the business aspect. A marriage of European technology and American business savvy could be a match made in heaven. . Companies: The Foundry
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| Mobile headset maker Jawbone raises $49M Posted: 16 Mar 2011 04:34 PM PDT
The amount is one of the biggest raised by a mobile hardware company, but San Francisco-based Jawbone has always been ambitious. You could say that “over-engineering” a headset has gotten Jawbone pretty far. The company makes wireless Bluetooth headsets for cell phones, but its latest devices are more like motion-sensitive computers that you wear in your ear. The funding means that the company isn’t yet done beefing up the ordinary headset into something cool. As you can tell from the image below, Jawbone is selling a “mobile lifestyle” to discerning consumers. The company (formerly Aliph) has launched several generations of its smart Bluetooth headsets and has pretty much turned the latest Jawbone Era device into a connected app platform whose features can be updated over time. It also provides caller identification by verbally telling you the name of who is calling you. To date, the company has raised $100 million.
Jawbone billed its headset as sounding even better than listening directly to a phone. The better sound came from having three microphones built into the device. It also had a sensor that felt the movement of your jawbone and correlated that with your speech. Digital signal processing took the data, stripped out the noise, and then reproduced the sound. The noise was stripped out even when the user wasn’t talking. Jawbone said the speech turned out more intelligible, letting you hear the difference between a "p" sound and a "b" sound. The company followed up with a smaller version in 2008. The third-generation headset, the Jawbone Prime, arrived in April, 2009, and the fourth-generation Icon (pictured above) model debuted in January 2010 with a web site where you could customize the device. The most recent version was the Jawbone Era with motion-sensing controls, multiple processors, and a free voice communication service. All of these models have relied on a noise-cancellation technology dubbed Noise Assassin. And the Jawbone models became the best-selling Bluetooth headsets at retailers such as Verizon Wireless and Best Buy. The company's surveys showed four out of five people preferred using Jawbone with a phone over using only a cellphone itself. Jawbone said the money will be used to help it expand worldwide and keep coming up with new products, including new categories of products where it doesn’t participate now. The Jawbone Jambox wireless speaker is an example of the company’s move into a new but related category, as is its Jawbone Thoughts voice-driven communication service. Ben Horowitz, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will take a seat on Jawbone’s board. He said Jawbone’s products bring smartphones and tablets to life and that chief executive Hosain Rahman is the thought leader in the industry. Rahman said the future of consumer tech is about “unlocking the full potential of the mobile lifestyle.” He added, “Now that mobile is our new hub, our vision is to create ways for people to get the most out of those experiences.” People: Ben Horowitz, Hosain Rahman
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| Nuclear crisis doesn’t panic cleantech investors Posted: 16 Mar 2011 03:37 PM PDT
Fears of a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan sparked a new wave of criticism of nuclear energy — and a rally in clean-energy stocks on Monday. But that interest quickly waned as stocks in the sector dropped back from that day’s highs as the stock market experienced a broad sell-off. And that brief surge of interest never touched the private investment community, because venture capitalists typically focus on longer-term plays, said Steve Minnihan, a partner at Lux Research, a firm which specializes in cleantech. "I haven’t heard anything from my clients or from the companies that we speak to in terms of interest in solar and wind power," Minnihan said. Any sustained increase in interest probably won't be felt for the next six to nine months, said Micah Myers, a managing partner with venture-capital firm Claremont Creek Capital. That's because the energy sector’s investment cycle is typically longer than other venture investments, he said. Alternative energy sources have suffered from a lack of capital to finance projects, but that may ease as a result of the crisis in Japan. "It’s a huge tragedy, but it’s only gonna give a tailwind to alternative energy technologies," Myers said. "There will be more of a willingness to put capital to work in solar and wind." U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the fuel rods in one of the nuclear reactors in the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan had experienced a partial meltdown in a statement today. As of this afternoon, the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (TEPCO) was attempting to restore power to the nuclear plants in order to cool the nuclear reactors and prevent a full-scale meltdown. The U.S. government has also urged any U.S. citizens within 50 miles of the reactor to evacuate the area. While major natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina caused a huge outpouring of public support and aid funding, they didn't move the needle much on technology, said David Mann, chief of staff at Khosla Ventures — a venture-capital investment firm well known for its backing of cleantech companies. The events in Japan led to a tremendous amount of misinformation spreading among the public at large — but not the investment and scientific community, Minnihan said. "I do think there will be a public backlash against [nuclear power]," Minnihan said. "I don’t think there will be a backlash around the scientific … community — the nuclear plant was designed with the appropriate safety mechanisms, just no one had foreseen this scale of a disaster." And it’s not like there are many private investment opportunities in nuclear today, Mann said. Khosla Ventures is an investor in TerraPower, a company that specializes in nuclear reactors called Travelling Wave Reactors that are powered by depleted uranium. But Khosla, known for bold and risky bets across a wide range of cleantech opportunities, may be a fringe case. Nuclear power typically takes a long time to reach the commercial market after the company is founded, Mann said — longer than a typical venture capitalist’s investment time horizon.
Damage from the 9.0-magnitude quake that struck off the northeast coast of Japan and spawned a massive tsunami far exceeded what nuclear plants are built to withstand. The quake cut off power to the plants, and the tsunami that followed the earthquake destroyed diesel-powered generators that were providing backup power to the plant. That meant clean water was no longer pumping into the reactor to keep the fuel rods cool, causing them to overheat. The Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office, which loans money to clean technology companies that produce clean energy, will continue funding nuclear power programs as part of its efforts to promote clean energy production, the office's executive director Jonathan Silver said at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco today. So the impact of the Japanese nuclear fiasco on U.S. policy might even be negligible — especially after President Barack Obama and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu lobbied hard to bring nuclear power to the forefront as a potential alternative to fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. While the immediate pop in interest might have already faded, there's still an opportunity for clean technology startups to capitalize on the good will that will come from Japan's nuclear crisis. The backlash against nuclear power will open up a hole that startups like Harvest Power, an alternative energy provider that converts waste into natural gas, can fill, said Ajit Nazre, a managing partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Companies: Harvest Power, TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power Corporation
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| Heyzap lets users “check-in” to Android games Posted: 16 Mar 2011 02:29 PM PDT
With the network, users can check into the system and tell their friends what games they are playing at any given moment, said Jude Gomila, co-founder of San Francisco-based Heyzap.
“The next time you play Angry Birds, you can check in and find out what games your friends are playing or what they have played lately,” Gomila said. That helps friends start a conversation about games, making the games more social. It also helps friends discover new games from people they know and trust, much like they do on Facebook, Gomila said, by viewing the news feed section of the user interface. Heyzap has been running an alpha test on the new, free Android app, and it has already hit 250,000 check-ins on 3,000 different Android games. An iPhone app is coming soon. The app is the first move into the mobile space for Heyzap, which started as a platform for playing and monetizing Flash games on the web. On the web, Heyzap has more than 1.6 million users for its social gaming platform. Now it will make it easy for those users to go mobile. Once a user checks in, he or she can share information with friends on Facebook, Twiter and Heyzap’s own network. Right now, Heyzap wants the technology to spread fast and so isn’t monetizing the app. The company’s core business is monetizing just fine and allows Heyzap to experiment and invest in new platforms in pursuit of a larger user base, Gomila said. Once it has the user base, it will figure out how to monetize. Heyzap’s check-in app makes it easier for apps to go viral, or to spread much faster than they otherwise might. It also allows users to establish a community on mobile phone networks. They can check in and look up the latest tips from users playing the same game, for instance. They can also make comments or win badges via social actions. Heyzap’s software developer kit has been integrated into 20 of the biggest games on Android, including the top five game Bubble Buster, X Construction, Wheelz, Slot Machine and Plumber. It takes about five minutes for a developer to integrate the Heyzap technology into a game. Heyzap has 17 employees and has raised $3 million from investors including Union Square Ventures. Gomila and Immad Akhund founded the company in September, 2008. Right now, there are no competing apps that show which game you’re playing. But potential rivals include start-ups such as Scoreloop, OpenFeint and DeNA’s Ngmoco.
Companies: Heyzap People: Immad Akhund, Jude Gomila
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| Angry Birds’ Vesterbacka: Tablets are killing console games (video) Posted: 16 Mar 2011 02:23 PM PDT
Vesterbacka spoke at a mobile gaming panel that I moderated on Sunday at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin. His company, Rovio, has become the big success story in mobile gaming, with more than 100 downloads of Angry Birds and a recent $42 million round of funding from Accel Partners. Vesterbacka said this success reflects a larger trend:
Tero Ojanpera, who leads services and developer experience at Nokia, was also on the panel, and he kicked off the discussion by talking about what Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft means for developers. You can see an edited version of the discussion in the two videos below. (Vesterbacka’s comments on consoles begin about at about the 10 minute point in part one.)
People: Peter Vesterbacka, Tero Ojanpera
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The only clean-technology plays that would be affected by the nuclear disaster in Japan would be Japan’s own clean-technology investment community. TEPCO, which owns the nuclear reactors, is also a big proponent of smart-grid technology that uses software and real-time data to distribute power across the country's power grid. Smart-grid technology is seen as one of the major innovations in clean technology that will drive the costs of distributing power down and make it more efficient. That would inevitably take a hit as TEPCO covers costs of damage from the crisis.
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Frequent VentureBeat readers already know that Peter Vesterbacka, who leads business development at the company behind mobile gaming hit Angry Birds, 
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