Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Game startups raised $600.5 million in 2009, down 36 percent | VentureBeat

Game startups raised $600.5 million in 2009, down 36 percent | VentureBeat

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Joyent Secures Funding From Intel Capital

One of the deals I worked on while at Intel Capital:

November 17, 2009

Sausalito, CA, November 17, 2009 – Joyent, Inc., a pioneer in cloud computing technology, today announced that it received an infusion of funding from Intel Capital. Joyent will use the funding to accelerate its product development, sales & marketing and for increased global expansion.

“Cloud computing technologies play a crucial role in allowing companies to scale their data center infrastructure to meet performance and TCO requirements,” said Lisa Lambert, managing director of Intel Capital. “Joyent’s approach to flexible and cost-effective cloud control and cloud development set it apart and provides measureable performance advantages versus the competition in this fast growing sector.”

Industry analyst Gartner Group recently predicted that the market for cloud computing services will exceed $14 billion by 2014. Revenue growth in cloud computing topped 17% from 2008 to 2009.

“In architecting our solution, we took a unique approach,” said Joyent CEO David Young. “Joyent has developed its own data center virtualization technology that creates a flexible multi-tenant cloud. As a result, Joyent’s technology delivers more than 70 percent utilization, which is eight times more than industry averages, and produces unprecedented performance, security and savings. That’s why we have been growing so strongly and have achieved profitability.”

The value of Joyent’s solutions is reflected in the industry-leading cost savings reported by its customers.

“By deploying our infrastructure on Joyent, Gilt Groupe spends less than one percent of revenue on its total infrastructure investment,” said Mike Bryzek, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Gilt Groupe. “We know based on Gartner findings that this is more than 70 percent better than the average company.”

Joyent’s growth can also be attributed to its strong performance metrics and security. In benchmarks published earlier this year, Joyent demonstrated that MySQL runs three times faster and Wordpress handles 20 times more requests per second on Joyent than on Amazon’s EC2. Joyent has also readily passed Fortune 500 InfoSec security reviews.

Commenting on the investment, David Young, CEO of Joyent stated, “Cloud computing is experiencing strong growth and market adoption. We are thrilled with Intel Capital’s investment. It allows us to build on the success we have generated in the last five years.”

About Intel Capital
Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, home, mobility, health, consumer Internet, semiconductor manufacturing and cleantech. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$9.5 billion in over 1,050 companies in 47 countries. In that timeframe, 175 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and 241 were acquired or participated in a merger. In 2008, Intel Capital invested about US$1.59 billion in 169 investments with approximately 62 percent of funds (excluding Clearwire) invested outside North America. For more information on Intel Capital and its differentiated advantages, visit www.intelcapital.com.

About Joyent, Inc.

Joyent provides the most comprehensive cloud solution available today. It starts with an enterprise class foundation of virtual appliances deployed in an ecosystem of the highest-grade networking, routing, load balancing and persistent storage. In addition, Joyent offers powerful software to manage your cloud (Cloud Control) and a dynamic software development platform that auto-scales. Joyent’s unique architecture and custom OS distribution supports high performance virtualization that produces significant cost-savings, improved performance, data center utilization (70%) and security. Companies running on Joyent have reported saving more than 70% when compared with Gartner’s industry averages. Joyent was founded in 2004 and supports thousands of customers worldwide including ABC Disney, CNN, The Gap, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo. For more information, visit www.joyent.com.

Monday, November 2, 2009

LSU Virtual Worlds Keynote 2009

Webvolution, 3dLA model

Social Gold: How to Launch your own Currency

Interesting...

IBM's use of virtual worlds - Roo Reynolds' presentation at Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Virtual Currency And Monetizing Social Media

Forecasts and others..good

What's The ROI? Virtual Worlds Introduction

Good data points, Gartner cycle etc.

Virtual Worlds in Asia

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Managing a Virtual Economy

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

How to Drive Engagement & Revenue with Virtual Goods

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Music As A Virtual Good VGSummit08

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Social Games Anytime Anywhere

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Lessons learned from SNS games at PopCap

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Social Gaming and Virtual Goods

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Engage 2009 Virtual Goods Panel

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Top 10 Social Gaming Metrics

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Intel Capital Announces Five Cleantech Investments

Reinforces Commitment to Accelerate Adoption of Energy Efficiency Technologies

SAN FRANCISCO, July 29, 2009 – Today at the Technology Innovation Summit, Intel Capital, Intel Corporation's global investment organization, reaffirmed its dedication to foster clean technology innovation with the announcement of five cleantech investments. The deals, which total approximately $10 million and span two continents, include first-time investment in U.S.-based CPower (demand response and energy efficiency) as well as follow-on investments in Ireland-based Powervation (digital power control) and U.S.-based companies Convey Computer (energy efficient high performance computing), Grid Net (smart meter infrastructure) and iControl (home automation and monitoring).

"Intel Capital has made a significant commitment to invest in the cleantech sector in recognition of the increasing need for alternative energy production and advanced energy management and utilization solutions," said Arvind Sodhani, president of Intel Capital and Intel executive vice president. "The global nature of these five investments demonstrates our focus on accelerating cleantech innovation, emphasizing Intel Capital's unique strength as a global, stage agnostic investor."


"These investments share synergies focused on accelerating adoption of Smart Grid technologies, fostering energy efficiency and performance in ways that benefit consumers of electricity and power utilities as well as complement Intel's strategic objectives," said Steve Eichenlaub, managing director of platform technologies, cleantech and digital health, Intel Capital. "Each investment underlies Intel Capital's commitment to invest in cutting edge technologies and support our expanding portfolio of cleantech-related companies."

Details on the five new investments include:
CPower (New York) delivers targeted energy management services and solutions that enable companies to optimize their facilities and operations through energy reduction initiatives and earn market payments for those reductions. As an industry pioneer that has grown into one of the largest energy management and demand response firms in North America, CPower combines an understanding of energy management technologies, energy markets and the daily challenges of facility operators to maximize the value of energy sustainability. This is Intel Capital's initial funding of CPower.
Grid Net (San Francisco) is a pioneer in providing the network operating system and management control plane for the Smart Grid. PolicyNet*, Grid Net's standards-based management platform for all networked transmission, distribution and generation smart grid devices, provides cost-effective rapid deployment and management that leverages 4G broadband networks. Grid Net's Series C funding round includes Intel Capital's third investment.

Powervation (Limerick, Ireland) provides digital power controllers for server, desktop computing and communications platforms that deliver capabilities in automatic configuration and self stabilization. These devices speed design time and enable system stability as other power supply components age, leading to higher energy efficiency at the system level, faster time-to-market and lower overall system costs. Intel Capital co-led Powervation's Series A funding round and this is its second investment in the company.

Convey Computer (Richardson, Texas) offers high-performance computing (HPC) solutions which aim to dramatically reduce energy consumption and boost performance. Convey's HC-1* solution tightly integrates advanced existing off-the-shelf hardware – namely an Intel® Xeon® processor and Field Programmable Gate Arrays – with compiler technology that minimizes the programming challenges that have long withheld the potential of reconfigurable hardware. Convey's Series B funding round includes the second investment by Intel Capital.

iControl (Palo Alto, Calif.) provides an IP-based platform that delivers monitored home security, remote home monitoring and home and energy management capabilities to security and broadband providers, enabling them to deliver enhanced, value-added services to their new and existing customers. iControl's Series C funding round includes a follow-on investment by Intel Capital.
Intel Capital is focused on actively seeking and structuring investments in companies worldwide that are producing products and services in a variety of "green" areas such as energy efficiency, alternative power generation and storage, transportation and materials, with particular emphasis in support of Intel's Open Energy Initiative, helping foster standards-based, interoperable solutions.

These five investments all support efforts within Intel to drive energy-efficient performance across Intel's value chain. Intel Capital invested in and works with CPower, Grid Net and iControl as part of its Smart Energy efforts that focus on utilizing Intel® Architecture solutions and industry standards to improve performance, speed deployment and enhance security in large-scale deployments. Intel supports Powervation as part of its relentless efforts to improve the performance per watt of Intel Architecture platforms across multiple user segments. Additionally, Convey Computer complements Intel's HPC efforts, distinctively augmenting Intel Architecture platforms to further boost both performance and energy efficiency across multiple target industries such as energy, transportation, financial services and healthcare.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! (Startonomics SF 2008)

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Gigaom's Structure 2009 videos

Here's the link to watch the archive of Gigaom's Structure 2009 conference. Click on the WatchNow link at the top left.

http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/

Sunday, May 10, 2009

OpSource SaaS Smmit 2009 Presentations

OpSource has uploaded the presentations at SaaS Summit 2009.
You can see them here under presentations tab

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Conferences

Here's a list of conferences/panel discussions cloncluded recently with links to watch the videoarchieve:

1. O'Reilly ETech2009
2. Demo 2009
3. TIE Silicon Valley speakers -- The videos have very poor sound qualty - I hope they'll do a better job in recording future events!
4. A conversation with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google