Startup Trek Television, Inc. announced and completed another (November 10 > Dec 8, 2009) “Innovation in the Western USA” Tour:
We video interviewed startups in each city. This was our schedule:
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.
Fusion IO, of Salt Lake City has raised $48M in venture financing to develop next generation, Flash memory based “solid state server drive” io subsystems.
As a Fusion IO co-founder explains in this interview on the opening day of N+I Las Vegas (in Startup City), hard disk drive technology has not kept up with “Moore’s Law” which has defined the pace of innovation in semiconductors, especially memory, dsp, and processors for 40 years. Today it takes roughly 500 hard disk drives to keep up with a state of the art “quad quad” (16) core Pentium-based server. But fusion-io’s flash (semiconductor) based memory systems can keep up with the same server processor array, because it has no moving parts.
In this spectacular demo, a single FusionIO memory array delivers 1,000 HD video streams (about 4Mbps each) onto a “video wall”. The wall consists of sixteen 40″ LCD’s, each displaying 1000/16 = 62 separate HD video streams. With this setup, you could watch ALL of the Comcast channels (and then some) — at the same time!
It was my opportunity on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 to present a cutting-edge collegiate, socially-enabled web 2.0 application to students in the Orfalea School of Business at California Polytechnic (“Cal Poly”) in San Luis Obispo. Professor Jeffrey Danes of the Orfalea School of Business invited me into his entrepreneurial marketing class, the third in a four-course sequence. I described the business and technology strategy of a web startup that I’ve been helping out over the past year, to the 45 business school seniors enrolled in the “Entrepreneurship” program.
The Tech Startup Gets Funded
Delved into the question of what types of startups are attracting funding, and why.
What types of startups are getting funded? Consumer? Technology? Social? Wireless? or what?
What are the most attractive markets; 5 million free members to the next Flickr, or the Fortune 500?
Today Apple went beyond opening up the iPhone to software developers with the expected software developer kit (SDK).
They also announced MS-Exchange Compatibility by licensing ActiveSync technology from Microsoft.
The third major component of this announcement was provided by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, who announced the establishment of a $100M “iFund”, dedicated to companies developing iPhone compatible software.