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Archive for 2008

As automakers dropped their latest batch of awful sales numbers on the market on Tuesday, reinforcing the gloom spreading across the economy, the troubles confronting American workers seemed to intensify.

Plummeting home prices have in recent months eliminated jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, from bankers and real estate agents to construction workers and furniture manufacturers. Tighter lending standards imposed by banks in the wake of huge mortgage losses have made it hard for many Americans to secure credit — the lifeblood of expansion in recent years — crimping the appetite of consumers, whose spending amounts to 70 percent of the economy.

Read the complete article at NY Times here

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Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest providers of funding for U.S. home mortgages, closed at their lowest levels since 1992 on concern the companies need to raise more capital amid larger-than-expected losses. Corporate “federal agency” debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by the companies also plummeted relative to government debt as investors thinned positions, analysts said

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Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch recently posted a good article on the state of venture financing.

There were no venture-backed IPOs in the second quarter, and M&A deals are down. The last time there were no VC-backed IPOs in a quarter was in 1978. The liquidity drought for venture-backed startups is so bleak that the National Venture Capital Association is calling it a “crisis.” Last quarter there were only 5 IPOs that brought in a piddling $283 million. That compares to 43 IPOs during the first half of 2007 that brought in $6.3 billion.

Click here to read the full article on Techcrunch.

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Here is an interesting observation from by Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital. His blog, Redeye VC is a good source for frontline observations on funding.

“A pre-launch, stealth-mode company just closes a seed round of funding. Three weeks go by, and the news of the company’s funding starts appearing in VentureBeat, PEHub, and Venturewire. The story is then picked up by mainstream tech bloggers and press. The CEO starts getting phone calls from journalists. I then receive frantic, angry phone calls and emails from the CEO that go something like this: “Dude! Did you announce the funding? We wanted to stay under the radar…”

Click here for some interesting viewpoints.

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Online communities have for quite some time been on everyone´s lips. Second Life and it´s creator Linden Labs have shown that a virtual economy can generate cash. Another one that recently reached a major milestone is Habbo Hotel. as they moved beyond 100 million avatars created, it does represent a solid business case.

Stardoll, Age of conan, WoW and other MMORPG communities keep pushing their products out and generate tons of cash. My wonder is if the online devices like iPhone will start make the heavy graphics environment look good enough on the device. As the networks keep expanding its capacities, and devices gets richer – it is only a matter of time before someone makes it happens.

Read more at Mashable here

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