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Business Wire (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bling Nation®, a mobile payments provider, announced today it has secured $20 million in Series B funding. The round was led by new investor Balderton Capital, with additional funds raised primarily from existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, who led the company’s Series A financing round. In connection with the transaction, Bling Nation...
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Business Wire (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Link_A_Media Devices Corporation, a leader in data recovery and transport technologies for storage devices, secured $18 million series C funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners, a new investor in the company, led the funding round. Other key investors are ITOCHU Technology Ventures, Keynote Ventures, SunAmerica Ventures and several strategic partners. The funding...
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 10/31/2009
Worlds In Motion has a good summary of my panel today from the Virtual Goods Summit, where leaders in Asian and Western virtual goods social networks shared what lessons they had learned.
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Payment News (Free subscription) | 10/14/2009
PayPal has announced that a panel of leading venture capitalists will discuss "breakthrough opportunities in payments" available to entrepreneurs at the upcoming PayPal X Innovate 2009 developer conference in San Francisco on Nov. 3-4. Moderated by GigaOm blogger Om Malik, the panel will include Brian Ascher from Venrock, Roger Lee from Battery Ventures, Eric O'Brien from Lightspeed Venture...
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 10/09/2009
I’m speaking at the Virtual Goods Summit on Oct 29-30th. I’m moderating an all star panel including Min Kim from Nexon, David Wallerstein from Tencent, Bill Wang from Perfect World and Dai Watanabe from DeNa. Between them, these four companies generate around $1bn in annual revenues through virtual goods sales. So we should be able [...]
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 09/30/2009
This is the third year that I’ve tracked my birthday greetings as they have moved from private channels to public channels, primarily facebook. As I noted previously, in 2007 and 2008; Social networks have changed the dynamic – it isn’t enough to wish someone a happy birthday, but it is also important to be SEEN to [...]
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 09/25/2009
I’ve noted in the past that the four core competences of ad networks are: Aggregating Inventory Aggregating Data Targeting Sales Better targeting has historically been one core area of competition for ad networks, especially those focused on direct response advertising. However, as Anand Rajaraman (co-founder of Kosmix, a Lightspeed portfolio company) points out, more data usually beats better...
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 09/24/2009
Andrew Chen has a guest post from Gambit that breaks down who is buying virtual goods and how much they are buying. The summary is that while teens spend substantially less per capita than people older than 20, they more than make up for it in volume. Read the whole thing and see the pretty [...]
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 09/24/2009
Virtual World News has some notes from my keynote today at the Engage Expo Virtual Goods conference
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 09/14/2009
The Economist notes that the pornography industry is going through hard times: Most of the industry consists of small private production companies whose numbers are secret, but Mark Kernes, an editor at Adult Video News, a trade magazine, estimates that the American industry had some $6 billion in revenues in 2007, before the recession, mostly in [...]
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 09/11/2009
Clayton Christensen introduced the concept of disruptive innovation in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Summarizes Wikipedia: Disruptive technology and disruptive innovation are terms used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different [...]
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 09/10/2009
One of the most exciting trends in e-commerce over the last couple of years has been the trend towards “shopping as entertainment”. Traditionally e-commerce has been a chore type activity. Customers know what they are looking for (a digital camera, a new laptop) and are looking for the best product and best price with a [...]
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 09/04/2009
Facebook says that more than 30m people update their status at least once per day. So there are at least 30m status updates a day, and likely some multiple of that – perhaps in the order of 45-60m status updates. Tweespeed suggests that there are around 1m tweets per hour on average over the last week, [...]
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 09/02/2009
Last month I raised some concerns that the government could make monetization even harder for online ad networks and publishers through limiting their ability to do behavioral targeting. The pressure to do so is rising as the WSJ reports: On Tuesday, 10 major privacy groups plan to demand new privacy legislation from Congress regarding online behavioral [...]
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Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (Free subscription) | 09/01/2009
One of the great stories of Silicon Valley is how Josh Hannah and Jack Herrick bought eHow’s assets at a distressed price after the company went out of business, turned it around with a very low cost model and sold it to Demand Media two years later for a big profit. As Wikipedia notes: eHow.com was [...]
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