SiliconBeat

For those of you thinking the IPO market is going to come roaring back this year, think again.

I just saw the post from Techcrunch yesterday that Yelp was on the verge of taking a $50 million investment from Elevation Partners. This comes after the failed acquisition talks with Google. Here’s what’s interesting:

“The size of the round is in the $50 million range, but includes both a primary investment component as well as a secondary offering for long time employees. These deals are now being referred to as ‘DST deals,’ since DST first invested in Facebook in May 2009 at a $10 billion valuation and later funded employee buyouts at a $6.5 billion valuation. They did a similar deal with Zynga.”

In other words, part of the investment will allow long-time employees to cash out options. Same deal with Facebook and Zynga. But why? Read the rest of this entry »

I spent last Friday night at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco watching the Crunchies. The third annual version of the tech award show was co-hosted by three leading high-tech blogs: GigaOm, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. According to the official Cruchies description, the show aims to “recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.” You can read a nice overview of the event and after-party by Jessica Guynn of the Los Angeles Times.

It was an entertaining, if low budget, affair. In fact, the casual nature of the show in such a fancy space was quite charming. There were corporate jugglers providing entertainment and the reliably funny Richter Scales served up a nice glee-club style spoof (see video above).

You can check out the award winners here. But the mix of nominees and winners left a muddy impression of the event. What, exactly, is the point of the Crunchies? Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington revealed that he had received hundreds of documents about Twitter sent by someone who had hacked into the company’s system. Arrington said he planned to post some documents related to Twitter’s business. This set off a firestorm of debate about the ethics. With Arrington posting a follow up to his original post here.

I was truly amazed at the overwhelmingly negative feedback from the TechCrunch community about his decision. You can see the harshness continue on Twitter here.

I posted my own thoughts in the comment section, which I’m re-posting here: Read the rest of this entry »

I attended an intriguing dinner in Woodside last night.

The dinner was ostensibly to promote a new wireless router being launched by FON, a Spanish company. The router — dubbed the Fonera 2.0 — is somewhat interesting, adding some neat features that most comparable devices don’t have, such as the ability to upload files to the Internet while your computer is turned off and the ability to offer — and make money off of — a public hot spot without granting the hoi polloi access to files on you home network.

But the dinner was much more interesting for who attended than the product that inspired it. The guest list was a notable cross section of the digerati and tech blogosphere. Among those present: Tech Crunch founder Michael Arrington; Scobleizer’s Robert Scoble; Ryan Block, a former editor at Engadget and more recently the founder of Gdgt, a new tech “community” site; Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a marketing manager at the social networking company; Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager; and Jeff Clavier, founder and managing partner of SoftTech VC.
Read the rest of this entry »

From The Mary Tyler Moore show to The Daily Show, Hollywood has long seen the entertainment possibilities in news reporting. Not so journalists who tended to take themselves and their profession very seriously. They proudly drew the line between “real journalism” and infotainment. But the collapse of traditional business models and the rise of online platforms like blogs, Facebook and Twitter is changing that.

When the news itself fails to provide personalities, tension, drama and conflict, journalists are stepping up to the plate.

Take last week: Report of a rumor that Twitter was in talks with Google quickly devolved into a highly entertaining smack session between All Things Digital (also known as AllThingsD), which is owned by the Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch, a leading technology blog.

TechCrunch set things off with a story that Google and Twitter were in advanced talks. AllThingsD, whose co-founder, Kara Swisher reported that TechCrunch’s report “isn’t accurate in any way.”

Erick Schonfeld, a co-editor of TechCrunch who was formerly an editor-at-large at Time Warner’s now defunct Business 2.0 magazine, woke up, read Kara Swisher’s post and got angry. The following is the transcript of their Twitter conversation.

7:12 a.m. Erick to everyone. “According to @karaswisher, a rumor is not true until she reports it and nobody is allowed to mention it without checking with her first.

7:13 a.m. Kara to Erick: “@erickschonfeld pls. get some thicker skin, erick. your report is inaccurate.”

7:16 a.m. Kara has an additional thought: “@erickschonfeld besides, I do not publish rumors. We report stuff that is accurate. and you obviously don’t check with me first.”

7:19 a.m. Kara adds: “@erickschonfeld But make it about me and not the accuracy of the reporting, by all means! That could work.”

7:20 a.m. Erick to Kara: “Is it inaccurate, or are you just going negative about the headline? We’ll see.”

7:24 a.m. Kara, who has the advantage of being a speedier typist (and a quicker wit) responds to Erick: “@erickschonfeld You wrote an attention-grabbing post that my sources say is inaccurate. You keep changing that report.”

7:25 a.m. Kara adds: “@erickschonfeld Your piece was designed for maximum look-at-me impact and it calls out for further reporting obviously.”

7:26 a.m. Kara continues: “@erickschonfeld We will see. But Google and Twitter are not engaged in ‘late-stage’ acquisition talks as you asserted, say my sources.”

7:25 Erick to Kara, defensively: “@karaswisher next time you should check with our sources.”

7:26 a.m. Kara: “@erickschonfeld I think I will stick with my sources.”

7:30 a.m. Kara tries to make up: “@erickschonfeld If TC ends up being right, I obviously would say so. but I am sticking with my reporting esp since yours keeps changing.”

7:32 a.m. Erick makes a joke: “@karaswisher I actually love what you’ve done with your hair.”

7:35 a.m. Kara: “@erickschonfeld now, that was accurate! (and funny). When you come to D, you can give me fashion tips.”

7:38 Erick makes the mistake of reopening the subject: “@karaswisher Well, yes, it does call out for more reporting. At this point it is a ‘heck of a rumor,’ like we say in the 1st sentence.”

7:47 a.m. Erick can’t help himself: “@karaswisher you really should read beyond the headline. That’s where all good bits are.”

7:49 Kara: “@erickschonfeld oh, the heck of a rumor cavaet! I guess it was that loud declaratory hedline that threw me.”

7:52 Kara continues: “@erickschonfeld I read beyond the hedline. Those were the good bits? Also, so many hedges, I felt like I was in an English garden.”

7:52 Kara: “@erickschonfeld The worst part of all this growling is that I think I still need to take you to lunch.”

7:54 Erick can’t let go: “@karaswisher as we say in our update, the talks may indeed be early stage. You are getting hung up on that.”

7:55 Erick tries and fails to get the the last word. “@karaswisher that is true because I was right about Bebo getting acquired :)”

7:57 Kara, who has been reporting while tweeting to Erick and multiple others, has some additional information. “@erickschonfeld it is marissa mayer working on a biz product deal.”

7:58 Kara adds: “@erickschonfeld you had wrong price, wrong acquirer as I recall and I noted that in piece. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…”

7:59 Kara contines: “@erickschonfeld didn’t we have THAT argument a year ago? I will still take you to lunch, as Rupe would want it that way.”

8:00 a.m. Kara tries for the last word. “@erickschonfeld seriously, I am going to sleep. It’ll muss my hair, so come over with the blow dryer around 11 am.”

8:06 a.m. Erick, still defending his Bebo reporting: “@karaswisher it was a well-sourced rumor that Bebo got bought. We didn’t know who. Then we found out and did another post unfolding story.”

8:06 a.m. Erick reads Kara’s last note: “@karaswisher yes please go to sleep so I can actually get some work done.”

Tech blog impresario Michael Arrington is very happy with the terms of his new office lease in downtown Palo Alto. A softening in Silicon Valley’s commercial real estate finally enabled the digital media enterpreneur to move his growing TechCrunch empire out of his home in Atheron, where he was being threatened with legal action.

How soft has the market gotten? Arrington describes “the wholesale destruction of the office rental market in Silicon Valley.”

But Phil Mahoney, with the commercial real estate firm Cornish & Carey, says the market may resemble a marshmellow but it is far from melting. Mahoney told the Mercury News there is a 15 percent vacancy rate in Class A commercial real estate versus 30 percent in the post-dot-com economic apocalypse. And, unlike, previous cycles of boom and bust, the industry managed not to overbuild. He says the upshot is that Class A space is still renting at roughly what it did in 2006.

I recently had a chance to meet and talk with Loic Le Meur, the entrepreneur behind Seesmic. So I was sorry to hear that he had to lay off seven of his employees on Friday.

But in true Web 2.0 style, Le Meur announced the news publicly on his blog. And he even used his own video service to discuss the news:

Tough times. Tough decisions.also read my blog post http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/10/tough-times-tou.html Read the rest of this entry »

I spent some time at TechCrunch50 last week after profiling founder Michael Arrington. My colleague, Troy Wolverton, made the trek to San Diego for DEMOfall08. Check out his take here and here.

The rivalry between these two shows created some heat in the past couple weeks with some wondering whether all of this was good for the entrepreneurs who were supposed to be on display at these shows.

So I wanted to offer one other thought from someone who attended Demo this year. Sudha Jamthe, an entrepreneur and social media consultant, said that this year’s Demo show was the best in years. And she wonders whether the competition from TechCrunch gave Demo more focus and energy.

In an e-mail, she wrote:

“I am back from demofall and wanted to send a personal note as I think you are one person who can see my mixture of excitement for startups and the emotions from the conference audience.

I launched my first startup at demo in 2000 and knew it was unique but could not articulate it except for logical factors liked Vcs, media and corp dev folks come there but I got it this time.

Its the focus on the entrepreneurs and the energy they bring to the conference.

I tried to capture some of the audience tempo with my flip camera, there were many cool companies.

At the closing dinner one person started it and all 72 entrepreneurs spontaneously decided to take 6 sec to explain their loyalty to demo. I managed to grab Chris Shipley’s cell and do a Qik stream of it here.

Entrepreneurs have taken a risk by choosing demo vs tc50 and so it showed when they felt they had a successful launch experience. I think TC50 has helped revive demo and bring everyone together with pointed laser-like focus on the entrepreneurs.”

In what must be an absolute coincidence, two of the Web’s most vital technology sites unveiled redesigns this week: CNET and TechCrunch. Read the rest of this entry »