Joanna Glasner

The inbox, used appropriately, can be one of the most successful productivity tools of all time.  For most of us, however, it ends up being a huge time sink. That was one of the findings of Victoria Bellotti of Xerox Parc, who combines backgrounds in psychology and human-computer interaction to study how people are actually […]

The widely watched battle between Jeopardy-playing supercomputer Watson and two of the game show’s human champions this week directed national attention to the otherwise relatively obscure corner of the programming world known as natural language processing. But while the limelight was fixed mostly on Watson’s creator, IBM, it’s clear Big Blue isn’t the only one […]

“In the first six weeks of 2011 alone, we witnessed a greater volume of secondary transactions in venture-backed companies than in all of 2010–which was itself a record year.” That was the sentence, pulled from an upcoming release by partners at secondary firm Millennium Technology Value Partners, that caught my attention. The twelve-year-old firm, which […]

It’s hard to go to any networking event in Silicon Valley these days without hearing some self-dubbed expert on social media marketing holding court on the wonders of YouTube and Facebook as customer acquisition channels. But seek out examples of companies that have generated documented revenue for a consumer product using those channels, and the […]

There are plenty of venture capitalists who blog. But Larry Cheng appears to have carved out a more specific niche: blogging about VCs who blog and who reads them. This week, the Volition Capital managing partner published the fourth edition of the Venture Capital Blog Directory – a list of the most widely read venture […]

Secondary markets were on a tear in 2010, with transactions volumes up 79% year-over-year to total $22.1 billion. Factors fueling the upturn include an increase in secondary buyers, higher asset prices, greater activity among sellers in restructuring their portfolios, and an uptick in capital calls that added pressure for liquidity. The year-in-review and forecast report […]

It was pretty much a given that Indian private equity investment would be up in 2010, as it was way down in the jittery deal-making climate of 2009. But just how far up is pretty impressive. According data published today by India-based Venture Intelligence, private equity investments in India almost doubled in 2010 from year-ago […]

Perhaps no other investment theme sparks as much enthusiasm from healthcare investors as personalized medicine. Combining advances in computer processing with breakthroughs in gene sequencing and analysis, the sector offers sophisticated diagnostics that will determine not just an individual’s risk profile for a particular disease – but the optimal personalized therapy to treat it. Naturally, […]

Uncertainties around health care reform and the complexities of medical reimbursement weighed heavily on the business models of most presenting companies at this week’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. Not so, however, for Kythera Biopharmaceuticals, a Calabasas, Calif.-based developer of cosmetic treatments that took the stage yesterday to talk up prospects for what it sees as […]

Klout – the developer of a social media reach measurement tool best known for declaring pop singer Justin Bieber more influential than Barack Obama – has just raised $8.5 million in a new funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. The three-year-old company will use the money to improve its algorithms, increasing the number of services used to crunch its scores. Currently, the site principally analyzes Twitter and Facebook data to come up with scores to measure the size of someone’s engaged audience, the likelihood their content will generate a response, and the level of influence of their followers. Who comes out on top? Recent Klout Scores, on a scale of 1 to 100, show 16-year-old tween heartthrob Bieber with the highest score at 100, well ahead of Barack Obama, at 87, who also trails Lady Gaga, at 91. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean Klout is saying Bieber and Gaga are more powerful. No one’s expecting them to hammer out the next nuclear disarmament treaty. But when it comes to Twitter followers, retweets, Facebook views and other measurements of social media clout, their status is indisputable.