Over the weekend, news broke that Telefonica was killing Jajah. While the news created a lot of consternation, the reality is that both parties got what they needed from the $207 million deal. Investors made money and Telefonica got something else.
Innovation in energy and transportation is still emerging from the startup world, it’s just quieter and mostly not coming from the VC community.
Startup says it can keep an eye on both your internal IT and your SaaS providers to pinpoint problems fast.
Startup says its visualization tool is an easier way to see all AWS resources associated with a given application and will use its new money to advertise that feature.
We have co-opted seed funds. You know, Y Combinator, that was completely our money. We have secret handshakes with a whole bunch of people. Very dangerous, because word gets out that so-and-so’s money is Sequoia’s money, that would not be a good thing.
This is complete warfare. You have to have the Green Berets in the back line, you have to take the frontal approach, you have to do seeds, you have to do investments. You have to be willing to risk things, otherwise somebody else will put you out of business.
[Instagram] sold completely prematurely. A billion dollars sounded great to the founders. Imagine what Instagram could be. It could be the next Facebook on the mobile phone.”
Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital shares his thoughts on the VC business.
The enterprise IT market is undergoing a radical shift thanks to cloud computing. On-demand computing has added agility but also increased complexity, and Okta, a startup that helps track who can access what corporate assets, has raised $25 million to bring identity management into the future.
UPDATED: Color is not shutting down, said a company spokesman, contrary to a report earlier today that Color was “winding down” its business. Color has gotten its share of criticism after a failed launch and $41 million in funding.
In a move aimed primarily at users of its textbooks, iPad publisher Inkling is making all of its titles available for the iPhone. The company’s interactive ebook publishing platform, Habitat, now works for iPhone as well.
Gig listings startup Songkick has started its expansion into broader music services, with a new feature called Tourbox that lets bands manage and promote their live dates across the web, through integrations with the likes of YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud and Bandcamp.
Investors may not be so keen to put money into solar manufacturing these days, but they are pumping quite a bit of money into the solar retail sector. Sunrun is benefitting from this investor sentiment and announced Wednesday that it’s raised a $60 million in equity.
