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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

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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Yesterday, NBC announced the planned launch of Didja, an  “All Ads, All the time” Internet video site.   In the press announcement introducing the new site, it was noted Didja would not launch until some time in early 2008.  That schedule was set to insure the much larger YouTube targeting Internet video joint venture between News Corporation and NBC would launch first.

Today, that joint venture (which was announced in March and is still referred to as New Co) received an added shot of working capital.    Providence Equity Partners, a media-centric investment company based in Rhode Island, confirmed they’d take a ten percent stake in the joint venture for $100m.

That investment sets the pre-money valuation for the as yet unlaunched effort at a staggering $1b.   It’s an enormous number for a company that does not yet have its product on the market. Click to Read More

Most people are familiar with the cliché: if at first you don’t succeed, try try again. What happens, though, if it at first you did succeed? Does practice make perfect?  Do you still try again?

Eric Baker seems to think so.   In 2004, Mr. Baker walked away from then rapidly growing secondary ticket marketplace StubHub (of which he was co-founder).  Seeking opportunity and adventure, he packed his bags and,  in 2005, moved across the Atlantic and in London, started Viagogo, a similar ticket reseller aimed at capturing the European marketplace.

StubHub sold to eBay last January for  about $310m, making Eric, who reportedly held 10 percent of the company, a sizable windfall.  That, however, didn’t slow him down or stifle his ambitions. Click to Read More

Venture capital is often the oxygen that gives life to early stage startups.  It’s the money that funds research and development; the money that pays salaries before a company becomes cash flow positive.  Accordingly, metrics which show the performance of the venture industry are often a useful barometer for the rate of entrepreneurship and state of new industries, not to mention a broader indicator of economic optimism.

Earlier this week Ernst & Young and Dow Jones’ VentureOne released their summary survey of U.S. Venture Capital Investments through the second quarter of 2007.  The numbers were generally good.  They show investments continuing their rebound from their 2003 low point.

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Outside of a small microcosm, the phrase “social network” tends to bring to mind a short list of names usually led by MySpace and Facebook, and for those whose memory spans back to buzzword bingo from a few years ago, Friendster too. 

Beyond the two biggest names, and the first to break the ground, there are also hundreds of other sites that offer similar features and fall under similar classification.  Some of these sites target specialty niches like sports fans at particular universities (Fsurules.com) others are more multi-national in focus (Bebo).

San Francisco based Hi5 is among the larger social network sites beyond MySpace and Facebook.  And according to a report published yesterday on Venture Beat, they’ve raised $20m in a private financing Click to Read More

In 1999, going against the days trends, two Stanford undergraduate engineering students took aim at cell phone technology instead of focusing on the Internet.   With money from family, and a lot of persistence, they started a company called Aliph. 

Over the next five years, Alex Asseily and Hosain Rahman hired sound engineering experts and engineers and toiled in an effort to build a better mobile headset. The original plan was to license the technology they developed but along the way plans shifted.   In 2004 Aliph released their Jawbone headsets to critical acclaim.

The headset, which has been optimized by DARPA to improve communication clarity in hostile conditions, brings together a combination of sensors that recognize speech from ambient noise.  Using highly directional microphones and a bevy of signal processing technology, along with a chipset from Cambridge Silicon Radio, the earpieces aim to improve the inconsistent sound quality common to mobile headsets; and by most tests, they achieve their goal.    The Jawbone also has a novel feature: not only does it tune out background noise; it also adjusts the speaker volume relative to the environment. So next time a Harley rumbles past you on the highway, you may not miss an important part of your call.

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