Vinod Khosla's Entry Into New York City

Image via Wikipedia

AllThingsD: Khosla Wins the Bidding War for GroupMe, New York’s Startup of the Moment GroupMe, a New York startup that lets users send group text messages to to their cell phones, didn’t exist in April. Now it’s worth about $35 million..... Original investors including First Round Capital, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, who put some $850,000 into the company earlier this year, are all slated to invest again. ..... a bidding war for the right to fund GroupMe broke out in the past few weeks. The company ended up with multiple term sheets to pick from before signing with Khosla Monday. ..... GroupMe works on any run of the mill “dumbphone”, and part of the company’s pitch is that salt of the earth folks (Church groups! Hunters!) have been using it since it opened up in August. ..... Hecht and Martocci left jobs at very red-hot startups — Tumblr and Gilt Groupe, respectively ..... The two formally hatched their plan at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Hack Day event in May. .... what investors are really hoping for, at least right now, is that GroupMe follows the same trajectory of another zero-to-hero New York startup — Foursquare. It’s worth nothing that Khosla tried very hard to fund that company’s last round, but missed out.

Larry Ellison Cracks Me Up

Image via CrunchBaseReuters: Oracle enlists private eyes to find HP CEO

Oracle Corp has hired private investigators to track down Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker, believing testimony by the former SAP chief will help its efforts to claim about $4 billion in damages for software theft .... Oracle has subpoenaed Apotheker -- who began his job only last Monday -- but HP has refused to accept the subpoena, saying the U.S. software corporation is trying to harass him. .... their new chief, whose appointment surprised Wall Street and Silicon Valley ..... Oracle and Europe's top software maker are engaged in a legal battle that has transfixed Silicon Valley ...... Apotheker's lawyers at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher also 
Image via CrunchBaserefused to accept the subpoena. If he is overseas, Oracle will be unable to serve him and have to await his arrival in California

I can see the point behind the lawsuit. SAP admitted guilt a long time ago. And I can see why Apothepo needs to be deposed. I guess I even see the point in hiring detectives. But it does get quite dramatic at that point. That hiring detectives part is signature Larry Ellison.

The Idea Of A Social Browser

Image via CrunchBaseIt's an idea but my hunch says - pun intended - this might not take off. This is like Maradona returning to World Cup Soccer and Argentina losing big earlier this past summer. There is a part of Marc Andreesen that feels that Netscape should have perhaps attained a Google like glory but did not because Microsoft played unfair. ("Life is unfair." -JFK)

Boxee, The Name

Image via CrunchBaseThere is just something about the name Boxee that bothers me, has always bothered me. It is that the name is too boxee, it reminds me of a box of some shape, size. And that is not a great image in my mind. The idea should be to get rid of boxes. I might have liked the name boxit, as in box up that TV, bury it in this box, you don't need it. Liberation.

The Yipit Iterations, Pivots And Turnaround

Image via CrunchBaseI first visited Vin Vacanti's blog perhaps a year and a half ago. We might have exchanged an email: hello! Back then his blog looked like it got updated once every few months. I had never met him. It was the depth of the recession. Although to a startup that has not made it yet, can look like the curtain is down for no explainable reason.

Event At Hunch: Gender Talk (4)

Image via WikipediaSo I was at this event at the Hunch offices. Chris Dixon was hunched over a computer. Gosh, this was a while back. Grrls In Tech? No, this was Change The Ratio, a different gang.

"I wear the same outfit every day," Fred Wilson said.

Vinod Khosla: For Profit Poverty Alleviation

Image by brettwayn via Flickr

New York Times: Sun Co-Founder Uses Capitalism to Help Poor: commercial entities can better help people in poverty than most nonprofit charitable organizations .... an increasingly popular school of thought: businesses, not governments or nonprofit groups, should lead the effort to eradicate global poverty..... Rich Indians “are more into temple building and things like that” ..... moneymaking versions had grown much faster and reached many more needy borrowers. ..... He said he wanted to help create a new generation of companies like SKS, which started lending as a commercial company in 2006. It now has 6.8 million customers and a loan portfolio of 43 billion rupees ($940 million)..... CashPor, a nonprofit Indian lender to which Mr. Khosla has also given money, has 417,000 borrowers and a portfolio of 2.7 billion rupees ($58 million) even though it started operations in 1996. ..... Besides growing faster, SKS, India’s largest microfinance company, has become a stock market darling. The company floated its shares on India’s stock exchanges in mid-August, and they have risen 40 percent since then. .... Khosla’s 6 percent stake in SKS is worth about $120 million, about 37 times what he invested in the firm in 2006 and 2007 ..... Khosla said it might take at least a year to set up his new venture fund. ..... these “social enterprises,” as they are sometimes known, cannot be solely relied upon to address the many entrenched causes of poverty. ..... “I am relatively negative on most N.G.O.’s and their effectiveness,” he said. “I am not negative on their intentions.”

I have admired Larry Ellison over the years. The guy's biography reads like fascinating. Now I have found a dude who is less dramatic, but not less towering. Khosla speaks to me. He came to America as an international student
Image by ptufts via Flickr like I did. He thinks of where he came from. The idea is not to go back, but to take back, to give back, to do. His clean energy drive over the years has been about all those cars he sees crowding the roads in China and India over the next 50 years.

Vin Vacanti On That Techie Cofounder

Image via CrunchBaseVin Vacanti of Yipit, one of the hottest tech startups in New York City - not long back the not so hot, not so funded, but always promising tech startup - has produced a series of rather insightful blog posts on a topic that I have seen more early stage entrepreneurs in town struggle with than probably any other. The search for that techie cofounder beats the search for funding.

Askalo: Do You Know Your City?

Image via Wikipediahttp://www.askalo.com

Over 1,000 cities, 38 countries, 5 languages. Askalo is a web community. It is a platform. It is local. Ask questions. Share tips about your city. The Q&A format - Quora comes to mind - seems to be the latest craze in social. And Askalo brings that to city discovery.

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it..... TechCrunch: Quora Has The Magic: Benchmark Invests at $86 Million Valuation ...... GigaOm: Former Facebook CTO Launches Quora, Competes with Yahoo Answers, Aardvark, Hunch

James Blake: Limit To Your Love

(Via David Noel)

Google, Please Don't Be Evil

Image via Wikipedia“[A] Nicaraguan military commander, using Google Maps as his guide, brought his troops into Costa Rica. He insists that he was just following what Google Maps said, and that he never intended to go into the neighboring country. Yet… the report also notes that there was a Costa Rican flag there, which the Nicaraguans took down and replaced with their own flag. You would think, at that point, that everyone involved might double check to make sure they were on the right side of the border. After raising their own flag, the Nicaraguans apparently set up camp, cleaned up a nearby river (nice of them) and then dumped sediment into Costa Rican territory (not so nice of them).”

— Nicaragua Accidentally Invades Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps (Via Matt Lehrer)

Ben Horowitz: Hip Hop Mogul

Ben: As Kanye says, hip hop is 1/2 what you say and 1/2 how you say it, so I put the tracks up on the blog http://bhorowitz.com
Me: @bhorowitz The hip hop quotes make your blog stand out and gets me to keep coming back. Although the posts are also good.

MapCrunch: Random Places

Image via Wikipediahttp://www.mapcrunch.com

This site is so cool. It taps into the Google Street View database to show you random pictures from all over the world - I just saw one from Antarctica - and it is quite a feeling. In some ways this feels better than Google Earth, although Google Earth is an experience of its own.

You hit the N key on your keyboard and the next picture shows up, and next, and next.

You can view pictures by continent or country. Not all countries are available yet, but that's okay. I will wait.

And there is the obligatory slideshow option. And, of course, full screen mode.

Bon Voyage.