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Posts Tagged ‘funding’

Facebook accept investment, pull back IPO plans

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 27, 2009| 1 Comment »

Facebook avoid the IPO and steam ahead with expansion plans. It is not your average valuation we are talking about – $10B is quite a accomplishment. Please find earlier Facebook articles here; Facebook turned down funding at $8B, Few IPO candidates, Rapid growth and several more here.

Here is a story from Read Write Web.

“After we saw some rumors about this over the weekend, Facebook today confirmed that it will receive a $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies (DST), one of the leading Internet investment groups in Eastern Europe. This investment puts Facebook’s valuation at $10 billion. DST also plans to offer to purchase at least $100 million in Facebook common stock from existing shareholders.

According to Facebook‘s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, roughly 70% of the company’s users are now outside of the U.S., so cooperating with an international investment firm seemed to make sense in order to bring a global perspective to Facebook’s operations. DST will not get a seat on Facebook’s board, however.”

It continues…

“Digital Sky Technologies is a major player in Eastern Europe, and with Mail.ru, Forticom, and vKontakte among its assets, the company claims to account for over 70 percent of all all page views on the Russian-speaking Internet. Interestingly, DST (mostly through its investment in Forticom) also owns interests in a number of social networks like one.lt and Odnoklassniki.ru.

This deal also fits in well with other rumors about Facebook trying to raise capital to allow its employees to cash out some of their options. Just two weeks ago, our colleagues at VentureBeat reported that Facebook’s current investors “found it a stretch to supply the full amount of capital” that would be needed to provide Facebook with enough money to allow it to buy out roughly 15 million common shares at around $10 each.”

Zuckerberg commented this deal on the pressconference by saying…

“The company does not have any immediate plans for the cash it will receive from DST. Zuckerberg was also asked about a possible IPO, but according to Facebook’s CEO, an IPO is not on the “immediate horizon.”

Being asked about Microsoft’s investment in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation, Zuckerberg mostly sidestepped the issue, but stressed that this investment was part of a larger partnership at the top of the bubble and that he thinks that $10 billion valuation is “fair” and that he “feels good” about it.

Given the nature of the call, there was not a lot of focus on specific features, but Zuckerberg did confirm that Facebook is testing out a video chat feature. Our friends at All Facebook spotted references to this in Facebook’s code two weeks ago.”

Read the full article here.

Other sources for this topic include: TrolleyBlog, The Next Web, PEHub, Northloop,

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Java Appstore in the works

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Investments, Java, Market research, mobile 2.0, Sun Microsystems, Wireless, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 22, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Building on the trend of Apple, Nokia and others – Sun makes the move into a independent Appstore deployment. As Apple has shown that it is a viable business model, it only makes sense – end-users like to shop around, and are willing to pay for smaller apps. As Google Android starting to make its way into mobile phones, and Nokia “opened” up Symbian – the end-user community developer trend will create a business eco-system worth spending some research on. The project is codenamed Vector but will likely be called “Java Store” after its official launch.

Here is some quotes from Jonathan Schwartz by way of Washington Post.

“Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism. Over time, developers will bid for position on our storefront, and the relationships won’t be exclusive (as they have been for search). As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution – but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. That’s clearly a lot of traffic, and will position the Java App Store as having just about the world’s largest audience.”

“The store will be for all Java devices. Initially, the PC desktop will get the most attention from developers and customers, but there’s plenty of Java-enabled phones and developers will be pleased to have another distribution channel, especially one with the power of Sun behind it.”

Read the full article here. Read Jonathan Schwartz blog entry here.

Other bloggers covering this topic include: OStatic, Mobile Marketing Watch, Mobile Blogs, IndicThreads.

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VC fundraising dropped 21 percent in 2008

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on February 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Fundraising by U.S. venture capital firms declined 21.4 percent in 2008, a new report has found, driven down by a sharp decline in the fourth quarter as the global financial crisis throttled the industry that bankrolls much of Silicon Valley’s innovation.

The report, issued Monday by the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters, found that $27.9 billion was raised in 211 funds in 2008, compared with $35.5 billion in 247 funds in 2007. Fundraising in the fourth quarter totaled $3.37 billion, down more than $5 billion from the previous quarter and nearly $8.3 billion less than the amount raised in the fourth quarter of 2007.

The news was by no means unexpected. VCs and their limited partner investors — pension funds, university endowments and other large financial institutions — have all embraced a more conservative strategy in the uncertain economy. Industry analysts expect the pace of fundraising and deal-making to remain relatively slow through at least the first half of 2009.

Read the full article here

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The Death of Stealth Mode

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on July 7, 2008| Leave a Comment »

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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