Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, called the service’s recent attacks a sign of its significance in a PBS interview that airs Thursday.
“You are not a target until you become popular,” he said, after PBS’s Tavis Smiley commented that the denial-of-service attacks were a “backhanded compliment.”
It was the beginning of the online revolution, in 1993.
Being able to secure venture-capital financing in the recession is something of an achievement. But getting that money now appears to be coming at a cost.
According to a new survey from law firm Fenwick & West, the terms of venture financing in the first quarter of 2009 were heavily dominated by “down” rounds–industry jargon for saying that companies are getting much lower valuations than they previously commanded.
Yesterday, New York-based start-up incubator Betaworks raised $2 million in funding for its URL-shortener project, Bit.ly, and spun it out as an independent company.
Though U.K. start-ups PopJam and Huddle may be doing relatively well, everything else I’ve heard from British Web company founders since I got to town has been terrifyingly negative. But I’ve realised that, for an expert in dot-com failure, the recession is a seller’s market.
While former eBay CEO Meg Whitman mulls a run for the Republican nomination for governor of California, eBay Chairman and founder and venture investor Pierre Omidyar has cropped up in a SEC filing listed as an executive for a secretive start-up officially known as Peer News Inc. but operating a service under the name Ginx.
When the chief executives of the Big Three automakers went to Washington, D.C. with tin cups in hand asking for a $25 billion government bailout, they triggered public outrage when it was revealed they’d flown in on luxury private jets.
Today the tech/business press was filled with stories about how Google has settled the lawsuits from authors and publishers over its book scanning project. Google is paying $125 million, and will be changing some of how its book search system works.
All tech start-ups need just a few ingredients to germinate: sophisticated money; first-rate technology universities; and a few template successes (a Google or a Facebook, and so on) to encourage founders to get off their duffs.
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