Pentalum, an innovative Israeli wind power company, just closed a $9M venture financing round from Cedar Fund, Evergreen Venture Partners, and an as-yet unnamed US fund. Pentalum is interesting both because it’s a great company with a really interesting technology and offering, and because it’s an interesting reminder that great VC cleantech opportunities can exist [...]
Tagged Cleantech, Israel, Pentalum, Wind EnergyTrench-vision is my term for the negative effects of a very positive thing. As someone who spends most of my waking hours meeting entrepreneurs, I can say there are few things as impressive as a company that has bootstrapped its way from idea to revenues. Companies that are able to bootstrap benefit from a number [...]
Tagged Venture CapitalRecently, I’ve found myself in a series of meetings in both the Silicon Valley and in Israel with technologists, media people, and venture capitalists – all of whom seem to be equally despondent about the state of the online advertising start-up. The online advertising industry is in the final stages of consolidation, they argue, technology [...]
Tagged Internet, Online AdvertisingA few days ago, a video from the always-entertaining Gary Vaynerchuk caught my eye. The video is of a talk Vaynerchuk gave back in October at The Booksmith, a San Francisco bookshop. The entire hour-long talk is worth watching, but the first twenty minutes are enough to get the point across. Vaynerchuk rose to fame [...]
Tagged Boxee, foxytunes, Gary Vaynerchuk, Internet, online musicYesterday, I attended the Microsoft ThinkNext event in Tel Aviv, key-noted by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Technology Architect. Today, I am at a very well-organized micro-conference on mobile advertising, hosted by the Israel Mobile Association. Though they took place only a few kilometers apart, they could have been on two different planets, and that got [...]
Tagged Internet, Israel, microsoft, Mobile, Software, TechnologyThe Wall Street Journal offered extensive coverage today of Google’s decision back in February to exit the off-line radio advertising business. This isn’t the first time one of Google’s many growth initiatives has failed to achieve the hoped-for results, nor does this particular failure expose a fatal flaw in Google’s extraordinarily scalable business model. It [...]
Tagged Comscore, Dunnhumby, Google, Homescan, Internet, Nielsen, Online Advertising, Technology, yahooOne of the most painful aspects of working in the VC world is witnessing great start-ups with great teams struggle to raise capital. Sometimes, decisions made two or three years previously can come back to haunt a start-up as it tries to raise additional capital – and, all too often, those mistakes have to do [...]
Tagged Finance, Venture CapitalLast week, T-Mobile Germany made some waves by banning Skype for the iPhone. Some might read this as a long overdue reassertion of operator power, but I disagree. A few months ago, I learned from a reliable source that a major operator was deliberately not shipping a very popular mobile phone model that they knew [...]
Tagged Internet, Mobile, wifiI woke up this morning to a post on TechCrunch about an impending Google acquisition of Twitter. Jeff Pulver, a Twitter investor, offered his perspective on his blog, and Ouriel Ohayon wrote it up as well. It’s become very clear that Twitter is a runaway success. There are lots of reasons for this, but I [...]
Tagged Google, Internet, microsoft, twitter, wix, yahooA friend of mine sent me this blog post by Rafe Needleman about TimeBridge, an Israeli start-up backed by Mayfield and Norwest Venture Partners. TimeBridge offers a solution for meeting scheduling that integrates nicely with Outlook and Google Calendar. It allows users to share calendar information with each other and easily schedule meetings. I’ve downloaded, [...]
Tagged media, Online Advertising, TimeBridge