It’s unseasonably warm in San Francisco. But is top Valley investor Marc Andreessen planning for winter? PEHub’s Dan Primack reports that Andreessen’s venture-capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is raising a $650 million fund , little more than a year after it raised its first $300 million fund. Andreessen’s timing is excellent. His firm beat fierce rivals and would-be acquirers to back Foursquare, the fast-growing location-based service, in a $20 million round. Another portfolio company, Skype, just filed to go public, after Andreessen negotiated a complex deal to spin the company out of eBay (where Andreessen is a board member). He’s also on the board of Facebook and an advisor to Twitter. In short, he has a hot hand right now.
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Andreessen Horowitz hitting up investors for a cool $650 million: report
Someday, it may be better to be in the virtual goods business than the real goods business. PlaySpan is demonstrating that as it announces today that it has raised $18 million from Vodaphone and SoftBank for its virtual good and monetization platform
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PlaySpan raises $18M from Vodaphone and SoftBank for virtual goods platform
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Overall U.S. console game sales shrank 1 percent in July, continuing a weak trend that has persisted for much of the year.
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Console game sales shrink slightly in July, but StarCraft II makes PC game sales soar
Financial information management software firm Convoke Systems announced late Sunday that it has raised a $5.5 million Series B round of financing from Flybridge Capital and QED Investors. After closing the round Thursday, the day after the U.S. financial reform bill was signed into law, Convoke Systems is looking to help creditors keep track of all the necessary data required to collect on consumer debts. The problem Convoke is hoping to solve: A large number of consumers are defaulting on their debts due to the recession. Credit card companies sell the debt to collection agencies, which then try to collect on the debt. Lost or incomplete paperwork often times making it difficult to verify debts, often making collection difficult or impossible.
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Convoke Systems raises $5.5 million to help creditors collect debt
Microsoft may be preparing to announce a new round of layoffs as early as tomorrow, according to TechFlash , which cited knowledgeable unnamed sources.
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Are new layoffs coming at Microsoft?
Global chip sales continued to recover in May with sales up 4.5 percent from April and 47.6 percent from a year ago, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association .
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Global chip sales rise 47.6 percent from a year ago as electronics sales recover
Sometimes, the path to startup success takes a sharp turn. In January 2009, VentureBeat wrote about Skydeck , an all-in-one mobile phone productivity service that offered caller ID, human-written transcriptions from voicemail to text, and Web-based management of the whole thing. In May of last year, I updated the story with news of Skydeck’s free, Google-powered transcription service for people unwilling to pay for the company’s human transcribers. But yesterday, CEO Jason Devitt visited VentureBeat’s office to tell us about the company’s new name and new business focus
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Skydeck CEO reinvents company as Mr. Number
Bailout Wars 1.1.4 Category: Games Price: $.99 -> Free, Version: 1.1.4 ( iTunes ) Description: For a limited time, this game is available for free as part of Gameloft’s 10th Anniversary Happy Hour! Grab it quickly; this opportunity only lasts for 2 hours! From May 10th to May 21st, Gameloft will be offering you 10 of our best games for free in celebration of our 10th birthday. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/gameloft to know which games will be free and when you can download them.
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Price Drop: Bailout Wars (Games)
Apple once again takes a top slot in this year’s Millward Brown Optimor BrandZ Top100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking, beating down Microsoft to land in third place (up from sixth last year), nestling snugly behind Google (number one) and second-place IBM. “Technology brands demonstrated their pervasiveness in our daily lives,” wrote the brand researchers. “Google leads as the Most Valuable Global Brand worth $114 billion. IBM was second at $86 billion, an increase of 30 percent. In third place, Apple’s brand value grew by 32 percent and is now worth $83 billion, Microsoft was fourth with a value of $76 billion.” Reflecting Apple CEO, Steve Jobs’ previous mantra that Apple’s decision to continue to invest while markets are in decline is the way to build competitive advantage, Joanna Seddon, CEO of Millward Brown Optimor, says, “In the past, many companies were quick to cut their marketing spend during a down economy.
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Apple brand more valuable than Microsoft latest branding survey shows
Samsung is launching a 2.5-inch hard disk drive today that can store 640 gigabytes of data. That’s no big deal in the grand scheme of things — we expect little improvements like this as the five major hard disk drive makers battle for market share — but it’s worth noting that this fast mobile drive holds more than 500 two-hour movies in a standard definition format. Or, if you prefer, about 50 high-definition movies. Back in 1991, a 2.5-inch hard disk drive could hold 100 megabytes of data . The new drive, dubbed the Spinpoint MP4, spins its two disks at 7,200 revolutions per minute. While slight advances in technology don’t impress us much, it’s awesome to look at the progress over time.
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Samsung lets you store 500 movies on a laptop hard drive