Connie Loizos

I just had a frothy cappuccino with Evert Jaap Lugt, also known as “EJ,” in San Francisco’s South Park. Lugt is the Dutch CEO of Rotterdam-based Nimbuzz, one of hundreds of startups offering free mobile VoIP services, along with IM, group chat, and loads of other services that work across different communities and companies like […]

A longtime angel and the founder of publicly traded computer networking company Excelan, Kanwal Rekhi has spent the last two years raising a U.S.-based India-focused venture fund, one he says will close at year end with roughly $125 million in commitments. (The firm he spearheads, Inventus Capital Partners, is nearly halfway there, having raised $50 […]

If you’re feeling masochistic this morning, you might consider checking out this video about “Silicon Valley life,” premised on renown blogger Robert Scoble as sex symbol, owing to his blog ranking. (Scoble, who was probably busily filming himself when this clip was made, even gets a cuddly stand-in.) Trust me, you will hate yourself for […]

If you’re over the age of 30, you know that before there was MySpace or Facebook, there was “virtual community” theGlobe.com, founded in 1994 by then 20-year-old Cornell classmates Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman. The site, where people were invited to share interests like relationships and movies via chat rooms, was hard to miss. Like […]

Recently, I’ve been hearing about an interesting new trend: secondary players meeting with the employees of aging venture-backed startups to buy up their equity. Turns out that like lot of VCs, startup teams are more than ready for some liquidity at this point, and they’re doing something about it. Craig Sherman, the CEO of online […]

Is it just me, or does it look like poor Woody Benson of Prism VentureWorks is being held captive somewhere at the Almaty airport in this (really awkward and unenlightening) interview? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P38kqNq9HVM home=true]

Today, Project Better Place founder and CEO Shai Agassi will testify before Congress, in a hearing titled “$4 Gasoline and Fuel Economy: Auto Industry at a Crossroads.” If, like me, you’re interested in what he has to say, you might want to tune into C-SPAN at 1:30 EST. As most readers will know, last year, […]

I’m working a piece about the Israeli venture capital scene, and just came across a new service by the IVC Research Centre, a unit of the Israel Venture Association; it’s a scorecard that tracks which funds are raising capital, how much they’re trying to raise, how they’re progressing in their objectives, and so on. It’s […]

For seven years, Ken Miller was responsible for risk and fraud management at PayPal. Today, Miller is CEO of 19-month-old Anchor Intelligence in Mountain View, a third party to about 50 or so ad networks that pay Anchor (known as FraudWall until late last year) to analyze its Web traffic and identify cases of click […]

Silicon Valley has seen more than its share of self-involved entrepreneurs over the years, but Gurbaksh Chahal, the 26-year-old founder of ad network BlueLithium, is beginning to make the lot of them look like amateurs. Even before selling BlueLithium to Yahoo last fall for a stunning $300 million, Chahal was driving a Bentley around town, […]