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Archive for the ‘Investments’ Category

Yahoo to lay off 2,000 employees

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Distressed IP, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, internet, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , on April 4, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Yahoo is laying off 2,000 employees as new CEO Scott Thompson sweeps out jobs that don’t fit into his plans for turning around the beleaguered Internet company.

The cuts announced Wednesday represent about 14 percent of the 14,100 workers employed by Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

The company estimated it will save about $375 million annually after the layoffs are completed later this year.

Workers losing their jobs will be notified Wednesday. Some of the affected employees will stay on for an unspecified period of time to finish various projects, according to Yahoo.

The housecleaning marks Yahoo’s sixth mass layoff in the past four years under three different CEOs. This one will inflict the deepest cuts yet, eclipsing a cost-cutting spree that laid off 1,500 workers in late 2008 as Yahoo tried to cope with the Great Recession.

Thompson is making his move three months after Yahoo lured him away from his previous job running eBay Inc.’s online payment service, PayPal.

The layoffs “are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require,” Thompson said in a statement.

“We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities,” he said. “Our goal is to get back to our core purpose — putting our users and advertisers first — and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal.”

Yahoo shares rose 12 cents to $15.30 in morning trading.”

Read more here.

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Get a Wealth of Financial Information with YoBucko -Financial Information for Generation Y

Posted in Business models, Investments, YoBucko on March 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Get a Wealth of Financial Information with YoBucko

YoBucko

Eric Bell wants his company to become the trusted source of financial information for Generation Y. With information on saving money, managing debt, and investing for the future YoBucko just might be it.

Young people are going online more often to shop for financial services, but there isn’t a single place where they can learn about money and shop for financial services that target their needs. Plenty of companies out there are creating financial tools like Mint or HelloWallet, but who is the Suze Orman for young adults?

YoBucko is a personal finance guide with a wealth of information. Users can sign up for free to gain access to financial education on everything from paying off student loans to investing in a mutual fund. Through easy-to-comprehend articles and surprisingly interesting videos, users get a ton of advice on how to manage their money. YoBucko even offers tools like net worth worksheets and over a dozen financial calculators to help users plan and save. The best part about the site is the Ask YoBucko feature, which helps users get to the bottom of tricky financial questions.

Founder and CEO Bell has a passion for finance – that’s right, for finance. “I love helping people learn about managing their money,” he told me in an interview.  “It’s kind of a weird interest for a 28-year old, but it is something I’ve been doing since I started an organization to teach young people about investing in college.”

After spending a few years in New York and Washington, D.C. at the Citi Private Bank, Bell decided to pursue this passion for financial education full-time by starting YoBucko. He’s learned a lot in the last eighteen months.

According to Bell, entrepreneurs should never assume people want their product. “If there is one thing I’ve learned, it is that assumptions of market potential are simply that – assumptions,” he said. Bell believes assumptions were made to be tested. “Rather than spending all of your time and money building something people don’t want (or use), build a simple prototype or version one, test it, and validate your assumptions before investing more money or time.”

Bell also advises against going it alone:

This has been one of the hardest things for my company – finding partners.  If you are a solo entrepreneur, like me, you can go a little crazy sometimes because you lock yourself in the basement and work twenty four hours a day.  Eventually, you start to forget that other people go through this too and you don’t have to do everything by yourself.  I’d recommend finding a partner to bring in from the beginning, and if you cannot, find organizations like Tech Cocktail or a local incubator where you can connect with other entrepreneurs.  One of the best things I’ve done yet is joining NVTC’s FastTrac program.

Finally, Bell likens entrepreneurship to a rollercoaster and suggests entrepreneurs prepare themselves for the ride.

Running a startup comes with a lot of highs and lows.  If you aren’t  prepared or don’t love what you do, it is easy to call it quits.  Make sure to have money set aside to cover your expenses for twice as long as you think you’ll need, and assume that it will take as much money as you plan for.  Also, if you have a spouse or partner, make sure they understand that they are going to take the ride with you.  Perhaps setting some reasonable expectations up front would be a good idea.

Bell sees a bright future for his company. “YoBucko has the potential to help a lot of young people get their financial lives started out on the right foot,” he said. “If we are able to provide reliable financial information in a way that young people relate to, it has the potential to educate and equip them with the knowledge and tools they need for lifelong financial success.”

YoBucko is one of our featured startups at the Tech Cocktail DC Winter Mixer tonight.

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Reclaiming Your Online Privacy Posted – try Spotflux

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Gerbsman Partners, Inetellectual Property, Investments, Market research, New Atlantic Ventures, SpotFlux, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »

HuffPost Social Reading  by John Backus Managing Partner, New Atlantic Ventures 

Reclaiming Your Online Privacy Posted

Face it. Everything you do online is visible to someone and can be used without your approval or agreement. You leave details of your online activity in your browser, on your desktop, in your smartphone. All the while, companies, your employer, advertisers and the government are picking up those traces, and piecing them together to make a more perfect profile of – you!

If you aren’t scared now about what organizations know about you, you should be.

Companies have a voracious appetite for your information. The more they know about you, the more they can charge advertisers to micro-target you. The most recent and worrisome real world example is happening as you read this — Google! They just changed their privacy policy, under the faux auspices of “simplicity across sites” to be able to track the content of the emails you write and receive in Gmail, what you search for on Google, what you watch on YouTube, and where you are looking to go on Google Maps. And that goldmine of data wasn’t enough for them. In addition, they specifically and intentionally bypassed Safari’s private browsing mode on your iPhone and iPad to learn more about you.

And, Apple let application developers exploit a flaw in iOS to see all of the contacts in your address book.

Facebook settled with the FTC last fall over its own questionable privacy policies and is now rumored (though they deny it) to be tracking the contents of your text messages from their smart phone app. “Like” something on a website? Facebook knows exactly what you were looking at. Think of every “Like” button on a web page as a Facebook cookie. And remind your friends that “Like” is simply a sneaky way for you to give more personal, valuable information to Facebook.

Your employer knows everything you do at work. They archive your emails – and the court has ruled that company emails are company property — not personal property — and that employees should not have an expectation of privacy when using company resources. Employers also know every website you visit, what pages you see, and how long you spend on each site. You have no privacy when you are working in the office, out of the office but online on your company’s VPN, or doing anything on your company-provided smartphone, tablet or laptop. What you say and where you go belongs to your employer.

Advertisers have an insatiable appetite for user-specific information. Let me share my personal story (and you can try this yourself) Using Firefox, I went to preferences, privacy, and clicked on the underlined text that says “remove individual cookies.” I was taken to a box that showed all of the cookies on my machine. I had over 1000 cookies, most advertiser-related. AND, I use Adblockplus, Betterprivacy, and had checked the privacy box titled “Tell websites I do not want to be tracked.” The same thing happens with Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari. Scary. With much fanfare last month, the Government announced the “Do Not Track” browser button, which 400 companies have agreed to honor. Don’t be fooled. This provides limited privacy at best — and only from specific types of advertising, and only certain advertisers have agreed to use it.

Governments want to know more about you as well. The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report entitled Patterns of Misconduct, which outlined the FBI’s ongoing violation of our Fourth Amendment rights. If not for an aggressive, last-minute online campaign by an unofficial coalition of Internet freedom fighters, Congress was about to pass the SOPA legislation (Stop Online Privacy Act), which would have allowed (and perhaps in some cases required) the government and ISPs to inspect the contents of every packet of information sent across their networks. And Europe isn’t far behind with SOPA’s ugly cousin, ACTA, (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) which entrepreneurs in the EU have just started fighting against.

What can you do to reclaim your privacy? There is only one thing to do:

Go invisible. That’s why our venture firm invested in Spotflux. Started by two Internet freedom fighters that have more than a decade of experience solving large-scale security challenges, Spotflux is a free privacy application for consumers, which works by encrypting your Web connection. It downloads in less than a minute on any Windows or Mac computer, anywhere in the world. Spotflux ran a beta test and in less than a year, attracted 100,000 users in 121 countries. It launches globally today.

Spotflux encrypts everything that leaves your desktop, pushes the data through their privacy-scrubbing service, and sends it along. To a website, you are not you — you are Spotflux. And you are invisible unless you choose to login to a website, like your bank, Google, Twitter or Facebook. Even then, companies only know what you do on their site. When you log out, they don’t see where you are on other sites. Better yet, Spotflux’s HTTPS security means no one can eavesdrop on your conversation over a public Wi-Fi connection. And you can surf just as freely overseas as you do in the U.S. Want more? Spotflux also strips out annoying ads and injects real-time malware detection into your browser. Consumers, policy makers and activists are fighting the privacy issue hard but they often face a daunting and cumbersome process. It shouldn’t have to be this way, which is why we think Spotflux is on to something.

Weigh in here with your own privacy horror stories and what you think can be done to reclaim our lost privacy online. Follow John Backus on Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/jcbackus

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Cisco’s Bold Networking Start-Up

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, internet, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 17, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

Three of Cisco’s top engineers with a strong record in building some of the company’s most important products are in negotiations to create a new type of network switch for data centers, according to people with knowledge of the talks.

The product they are discussing, called Insiemi, would be designed to work in high-end computer centers that use “software-defined networking.” This type of data center, increasingly used in cloud computing, typically carries out much of its computing with cheaper off-the-shelf semiconductors, while complex software handles tasks that were previously done using expensive machines full of custom semiconductors.

Cisco is known for such custom network switches and routers, which have a high profit margin. It is facing competition from new companies like Arista Networks, which use commodity silicon for very fast switching, and Nicira, which uses software-based network virtualization to cut down on data center manpower.

In a recent call with journalists, John Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive, said the company had “reinvented” itself and was now a big believer in software-defined networking. Insiemi could be a networking product that would bridge the custom and commodity worlds for Cisco.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Chambers declined to comment on Insiemi. “We do not discuss our plans or internal investments,” he said. People with knowledge of the matter say discussions about Insiemi are expected to be completed in the next few weeks, and if successful are likely to be announced in the late spring.

Insiemi could be one of the great face-offs in enterprise computing. Two of Arista’s founders, Andreas von Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton, sold an earlier company to Cisco. They are also both billionaires, thanks to early investments in Google. Arista’s chief executive, Jayshree Ullal, is a former chief engineering director at Cisco. The three Cisco engineers involved in Insiemi, Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, and Luca Cafiero, are also wealthy, thanks to their work inside companies they led, which were hatched inside Cisco, financed largely by Cisco and then purchased by Cisco.

Cisco’s use of so-called spin-in projects, the opposite of the more typical business process of spinning a technology out from a company in order to create a new venture, have been controversial in the past.

While Cisco is guaranteed a product that fits well inside its overall technology plans, Cisco’s internal morale can be challenged. The spin in is seen as a kind of star system of top engineers, who work on a what, essentially, is going to be a Cisco device, earning a payout several times their normal Cisco salary. Ms. Ullal, who declined to comment on Insiemi, was a critic of spin ins while at Cisco.

The three men involved in Insiemi had their first spin in about a decade ago with Andiamo Systems, a storage networking company. The second, Nuova Systems, made a fast switch that could handle lots of different types of computing tasks in big data centers.

Nuova was purchased by Cisco in 2008 for a total of as much as $678 million, following an initial investment of $70 million for an 80 percent stake. Nuova’s core technology, the Nexus switch, has become an important part of Cisco’s product line.

Insiemi, like the names of the other companies, is Italian, the native language of Mr. Cafiero and Mr. Mazzola. Andiamo means “let’s go.” Nuova means “new.” Insiemi translates as “collection” or “assembly,” in the sense of orchestration.

Read more here.

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What Demandware IPO says about Wall Street & tech IPOs

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Economy, internet, Investments, IPO news, Market research, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“Demandware who? Yeah, that is exactly what I thought. However, a tweet from financial and venture industry observer Dan Primack alerted me to the initial public offering of this Burlington, Mass.-based e-commerce platform provider that sells its services to folks like Barneys, Crocs and Tory Burch. The IPO has priced at $16 a share which values the company at $448 million. The company is raising $88 million.”

The company lost money on mere a $56 million in 2011 revenue, a sign that Wall Street is ready to punt on even marginal technology IPOs — so expect more of those to follow in coming months. Jim Cramer on CNBC’s Mad Money show said that one should not confuse a “trade with an investment.” In other words, buy at the time of IPO and then flip it. Buying later is a sucker’s bet. About Demandware, Cramer said, that if the stock priced below $15 it is good. “Anything more than that and there might not be enough juice to merit buying,” he said. Oops!”

Read more articles here.

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