Are Venture Capitalists going to lose their shirts on Twitter?Some historical perspective on the immense bet Venture Capitalists have made:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/09/30/where-twitter-ranks-in-vc-history/
This article shows how the odds are against this investment returning funds to investors. Because Twitter falls into the zone of “VC insanity” Tulip-bulb style investing, circa the 1999 Nasdaq bubble.
Business School Seniors in the School of Business at California Polytechnic University (San Luis Obispo CA; “Cal Poly”) enrolled in “Business 454″ are tackling the pre-launch planning for a new digital media production firm which will launch in January 2010 as “StartupTrek.TV”
The 36 business school seniors in the Orfalea School of business will gain hands-on experience working in a tech startup company, as it plans a high-profile launch on the web, in advance of developing cable and broadcast television content relationships.
These six start-ups pitched at AlwaysOn 2009:
This start-up provides a socially-enable “Application Store” for major web properties, including Sprint, European Telcos.
A start-up with a slick iPhone application for browsing train and transit schedules by voice command.
uTest co-founder and CEO Doron Reuveni interviews with Startup Trek about his fast-growing company during a break at the AlwaysOn 2009 conference. uTest is a venture capital funded startup based in Boston, MA which has invented a “crowdsourced” testing model for mobile device applications.
<h2>At the AlwaysOn conference opening evening sessions, Michael Moe, Co-founder and CEO of NeXtAdvisors, interviewed Bill Campbell, one of silicon valley’s most respected startup advisors</h2>
Startup Trek will be at the Stanford Alumni Center next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week for our second annual coverage of Tony Perkins’ Always On Venture Capital “Summit at Stanford” with Tony Perkins. The conference features many promising tech startups, along with panel sessions and debates about key trends impacting venture capital funded startups, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs across the tech spectrum.
This panel session was moderated by Elizabeth Tinkham, Global Lead Consultant at Accenture with the topic being:
The panelists were:
Mount Shasta, taken from the StartupTrek bus June 31 2009
StartupTrek is on the road interviewing tech startup entrepreneurs in the largest cities (and tech startup innovation clusters) in the Pacific Northwest: Portland Oregon; Seattle and Spokane Washington; and Boise Idaho.
We’ll be back in the Portland and Seattle Metro areas interviewing tech startups and growth companies next week – July 23-25. We interview startups, investors, city officials, scientists, etc across all tech sectors. Including web 2.0, mobile, semiconductors, routing and switching, enterprise software and networks, telecommunications, gaming, medical devices, and biotechnology / genetics startups.
Just before departing Silicon Valley in late June we interviewed two very early-stage startups in silicon valley:
Both firms are seeking early-stage Angel capital investments; we’ll have videos of those interviews online shortly.
450 Angel investors, VC’s, entrepreneurs, and business people attended today’s fourth annual “Launch Silicon Valley” in the conference center on Microsoft’s Mountain View, CA campus. As was the case last year, 30 tech startup companies were selected from almost 500 that applied to present.
Here is a 29-photo gallery from the event, along with a bit of commentary:
In this Networld+Interop trade show interview I visit with Ryan Woodings, founder and ‘Chief Geek’ at MetaGeek of Boise, Idaho. MetaGeek is an impressively bootstrapped wireless instrumentation startup founded by former Cypress Semiconductor employees in Boise Idaho. They have created a product line of innovative, impressive, low-cost, portable “micro spectrum analyzers” for use on the Wi-Fi and cellular ISM (Instrumentation, Scientific, and Medical) bands at 900MHz, 2.5 and 5GHz unlicensed Microwave spectrum.