I’ve come across quite a few Santa Claus imposters in my time. Most of them were easy to spot: there’s the funky smell that has more in common with aftershave than cookies; the squeaky voice that would make any reindeer snicker; or, most often, the fake beard that looks like a giant cotton ball and droops in all the wrong places.
We’ve talked a lot about Diaspora, the open-source Facebook-alternative, in recent months. One of the reasons for that is the massive success they had raising money on the crowdsourced fund-raising site, Kickstarter. The project raised over $200,000 from nearly 6,500 backers in just 39 days. Now a new project has already blown that tally out of the water: an iPod nano-based multi-touch wristwatch.
RockYou founder and CEO Lance Tokuda is no longer leading the company, we’ve confirmed. Tokuda helped found RockYou back in 2005, and led it through several funding rounds totalling nearly $130 million. The change comes at a critical time in RockYou’s life, as the company attempts to reinvent itself and bounce back from substantial layoffs.
David Hornik of August Capital has bailed me out in a short week by hopping into the Ask a VC chair that I neglected to book in advance. The timing wasn’t planned, but it’s appropriate. The first time I ever interviewed Hornik, I was still at BusinessWeek and when I asked him to send a headshot he emailed one over where he was dressed like some sort of pilgrim. It was clear back then he was not going to be your average blue-shirt-and-khaki-wearing VC.
Palo Alto, Calif. - Venture capital firm Accel Partners has
sold 17% of its stake in Facebook for $516 million, giving the company a $35
billion valuation, Vator.tv reported, citing sources. Buyers of the shares are
said to include a range of private equity funds, possibly including Technology
Crossover Ventures or Andreessen Horowitz. Read the rest of this entry »
Smartdate announced a 2 million round in February of this year so that you could stop poking and start actually dating the friends of your Facebook friends. But now the company is kicking it up a notch and announcing that it’s raised an additional 3.5 million with the fonders of PriceMinster, Pierre Kosciuscko-Morizet and Pierre Krings. Oh, and just in case you forgot, French Ebay competitor PriceMinister went to Rakuten in June for 200 million (about $250 million) so maybe that’s why the founders have a bit of cash to spare.
