Alastair Goldfisher

Last night, San Francisco-based Prezi did its best to bring back the good ol’ days of the late 1990s, when companies needed little excuse to throw a tech party. The company held a bash for about 50 people at the Bubble Lounge in San Francisco in which it announced its latest product, called Prezi Meeting. The […]

There’s been lots of buzz this week about Facebook’s debut of Places, its location-based feature that allows your friends to tag you when they check-in to a place. The feature has, naturally, brought up concerns about privacy, as Connie already wrote about. But this is nothing new for Facebook, which now has more than half […]

A startup entrepreneur should only raise money if they have a really good reason to and they have plans to use the cash. That was one of the takeaways from last night’s FailChat, a gathering of entrepreneurs and investors, held at the pariSoma loft in San Francisco. The idea behind the event is that many […]

In years, or perhaps months, to come, A VC somewhere is gonna pop a Champagne cork to celebrate his or her first, huge exit. That VC most likely could be one of the 10 up-and-coming venture capitalists featured in the August 2010 issue of Venture Capital Journal. The “Hot Prospects,” age 35 and under, are […]

The .co domain rolls out today (July 20) as a replacement URL for .com. And startup execs and investors, such as Tim Draper, among others, are tickled pink that new tech companies will have a range of credible and easily recognizable domain names that fit their online business or branding needs. As one person said […]

Early this morning, Lucid Imagination wrapped up a $10 million Series B funding round from Granite Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Walden International, bringing its total amount of capital raised to $16 million. I spoke to CEO Erik Gries yesterday about the deal, and he declined to state the valuation, but he was pleased as punch […]

A lot of ideas are bandied about in coffee shop, and then forgotten. But Mark Bowles and his business partners took their recycling brainchild, which they came up with while consuming caffeinated drinks in a Starbucks, and put it into action. As Bowles recalls, the derivation for ecoATM began in late 2008 at a Starbucks in Del Mar, Calif., where he met daily for two months with Michael Librizzi and Pieter van Rooyen. Bowles, who previously co-founded Staccato Communications and a host of other tech startups, according to his LinkedIn profile, says the three of them together have launched numerous companies over the past 20 years in the wireless, mobile and chip industries. “We would sip coffee and contemplate ideas for our next venture. Surrounding us at other tables were other groups of unemployed techies who also were carefully scheming their next moves in the wavering economy of 2008,” Bowles says.

VC-backed RingCentral was started on a shoestring, with institutional investors arriving relatively late in the game, according to founder and CEO Vlad Shmunis. The Russian-born Shmunis previously founded RingZero Systems in 1992 to sell desktop telecommunications software. RingZero then shipped 25 million units worldwide before it was acquired by Motorola in 1998. A year later, Shmunis spun out part of the business to form RingCentral and has since raised about $24 million in VC funding from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

The latest VC to join the ranks of speakers at TEDx Silicon Valley on Dec. 12 at Stanford University is Peter Thiel. Thiel--who's known for co-founding PayPal, the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management and the venture firm The Foundrs Fund--however will not be discussing his investment philosophy. Chances are, he also won't talk about the New York Post, which last week wrote that Clarium is in danger of posting its second consecutive annual loss. Instead, Thiel, who sits on the board of Facebook and several other companies and is rated a master by the United States Chess Federation, according to his bio, plans to talk about the Singularity Institute, an organization he funds to research artificial intelligence.