Alexander Haislip

Just chewing through analyst predictions for the mobile social networking space—an area VCs have not been shy about investing in: There’s less of a browsing component to mobile phone access of social networks. Mobile users spend an average of seven minutes a week accessing networks, compared to 47 minutes for PC users, according to Gartner. […]

Connie reported on RFID maker Alien Technologies’ $40 million round with a great deal of skepticism last month, but the round is almost done, according to a regulatory filing. The company has closed $32.9 million of its proposed “Series 1 Preferred Stock Financing” round from 113 investors, documents show. The company will also fork over […]

Google is planning to launch a VC arm, or so reports The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources claiming to have been briefed on company’s plans. (Dow Jones, publisher of WSJ, and Thomson Reuters, publisher of PEHub, compete in some markets.) Google spokesperson Andrew Pederson says the company “does not comment on market rumor or […]

VCs have put tons of cash into Web 2.0 applications targeted at big businesses, assuming that these companies would be the heir to the legacy of enterprise software. But big company executives haven’t been satisfied with what they’ve been getting from these companies. In fact, only about one in five leading executives is actually pleased […]

U.S. Venture Partners has closed $625 million for its 10th fund as it continues to pursue an aggressive investment pace. The firm’s latest fund, USVP X, is slightly larger than the $600 million vehicle it raised in 2004, but smaller than the $1 billion it raised during the dot-com boom. The firm has done 37 […]

I’ve been reading Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age” on a recommendation by one of my journalism buddies. There’s a lot of interesting material in the book, ranging from predictions of what the nanotech-enabled world would look like to sociological deconstruction. But the one thing that really pricked my mind was a discussion of what made […]

Rob Day has come up with a great way to evaluate the question I posed earlier this week about the risk-reward scenario for large “venture capital” investments to fund growth in solar companies: create a market! You libertarians will love this: Rob has worked with Intrade, a marketplace for binary futures contracts, to start buying […]

Sex toy maker JimmyJane raised $6.3M from a group of investors, including little known hedge fund Palo Alto Investors JimmyJane, a startup looking to become the Montblanc of vibrating sex toys, raised $6.3 million in a Series D round from a group of investors that includes technology hedge fund Palo Alto Investors and a limited […]

Thin-film solar company OptiSolar raised another $77.8 million from investors, regulatory filings show. This is in addition to the $132 million the company raised in April. I couldn’t get a hold of the company via telephone this afternoon, but I imagine the money will primarily go to finance the solar power production plants the company […]

Thomson Reuters is sending me down the coast to live in Los Angeles and cover the intersection of money and technology for the Venture Capital Journal and I’m leaving Saturday. It’s easy to see Los Angeles as a place to go for new media. Who in Silicon Valley hasn’t heard the “Digital Hollywood” pitch before? […]