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Today’s a witching day for Tribune Co.  After months of waiting the shareholders of the media giant will converge on Chicago to issue their votes of Yay or Nay on Sam Zell’s $8.4b leveraged buyout. As much as the deal should be a foregone conclusion, there’s enough uncertainty to make for a crazy day… even with shareholder approval almost assured. 

Leading the charge of trouble is the company’s growing debt.   Tribune already borrowed $7b to buy back shares as part of the deal.  It is obligated to repay $1.5b of that within two years.  The company will also borrow more than $4b more to buy out additional shares. 

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While the theories of technology convergence lend themselves toward the marriage of the set-top box and the TV, the stand alone TV peripheral isn’t ready to go away.  Just the opposite, from Apple TV to efforts from Cisco and Motorola to Tivo, the set-top box continues to try and reinvent itself as its own model for a convergence device.

Entering the fray with a Hollywood caliber entrance (in the form of a substantial new financing) is Building B, a year old company founded by former semiconductor entrepreneur and Harvard professor Buno Pati and Chaired by Phil Wise, the former CTO of Sony of America.

Building B hasn’t gone far beyond cryptic descriptions and buzzwords in public description of their stealth startup and in-development hardware but they have convinced investors there’s substance behind their speech.  In a first round, just closed, the company has secured $17.5m

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Exabre, parent company of the U.K. based music discovery and recommendation service The Filter has closed a $5m investment round from Eden Ventures and music icon, Peter Gabriel via his company The Real World Group.

The Filter provides a content-recommendation software product that (once installed) indexes a user’s music library and recommends related titles that may be of interest.   In concept, though not necessarily method of recommendation, it’s similar to Pandora and Last.fm (which was acquired by CBS). 

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“It’s rough out there. Anyone who tries to say otherwise has never taken money from a venture capitalist or candy from a child” Anonymous.

Not long ago, out having a drink with some friends, I was treated to the unsolicited rants of a stranger at the bar. He was an entrepreneur and he was vocally unhappy with the direction his investors were trying to drive the company he helped found.  He was just making conversation but listening to his unsolicited rant inspired this unsolicited reply.

VC’s aren’t saints (and some are indeed sharks) but they sometimes get a bad rap because, like movie studio executives, talent agents, and publishers, they sit in a position where their job requires them to evaluate an idea’s odds of success, and the decision they come to in that evaluation effectively positions them as a toll collector on one dreamer’s bridge to success.  Click to Read More

Venture investors tend to move in swarms, feeding off the hot trend and collective buzz.  Casual gaming remains the buzzword du jour in the gaming industry and therefore, not surprisingly,is also hot spot for funding activity.

Kongregate, a San Francisco based startup founded in 2006, is the latest to gain funding. The company has closed a $5m Series A financing led by Greylock.

The marketplace for Casual Games is not hot without reason. According to statistics from comScore, one in four Internet users worldwide, or a total of nearly 217 million people, play online games. Click to Read More

Last week, on August 8th,  when Blockbuster acquired Movielink, the purchase price for the transaction was widely reported to be a steal at an amount less than $50m and maybe even less than  $20m.  How low a price, or how much less than those numbers, however, was unclear at the time.  

Today, just how much of a bargain Blockbuster got came to light.  According to  Blockbuster’s official 8-k filing, the purchase price (less adjustments for cash and working capital) was a tiny $6.6m.

That’s an off–the–back–of–the–truck, fire–sale get–it–off–my–hands kind of bargain price; Click to Read More

Monday, Sonicbids, a Boston company focused on trying to connect musicians and promoters raised its first round of venture capital; a $4.5m round from Edison Venture Fund.  Sonicbids is focused on one of the biggest challenges of a new creative effort: audience discovery and connection. 

Arguably, the most trying step of any new venture is the initial marketing; the discovery phase where a project begins to seek its audience.   Whether it’s a blog, a website, a new product, or a new book, absent deep pockets for marketing expense, the process is usually an exercise in patience and frustration.  After months of toil, someone labors to find their viewers, their listeners, the readers –  the audience who will give their product or creation life outside the author’s domain.

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