More than a million Facebook users have voted against Facebook's latest redesign, which displays an unreadable spew of friends' status updates on the homepage. A flack says the company is "listening carefully." Yeah, right!
The feedback on Facebook's new look, which emphasizes a stream of Twitter-like status updates, is almost universally, howlingly negative. Why isn't CEO Mark Zuckerberg listening to users? Because he doesn't have to, he's told employees.
Those who can't do, teach. Second Life, the most overhyped virtual world, has been abandoned even by its most fervent journalistic promoters, like Reuters and Wired. It's now pitching itself as an online schoolhouse.
No money? No problem! Twitter doesn't have any actual revenues, but venture capitalists have poured another $35 million into its coffers, valuing the text-update service for hipster oversharers at $230 million.
Virtual worlds are endlessly mutable. As are the wildly implausible schemes their boosters concoct for making money off them. The latest idea Linden Lab has for Second Life: Profit, in some vague, unspecified way, from the world's free 3D design tools. The perpetually gullible BusinessWeek bought this story,…
Salesforce.com spent $31.5 million on August 4 to acquire San Francisco-based call center software company InStranet. It's Salesforce.com's largest acquisition ever. Careful with the champagne, though.InStranet went through its third round of funding way back in 2001, when it raised $14.7 million at a $50 million…
Shall we all pretend to be shocked by a new study that shows that the venture-capital industry is overwhelmingly — no, disgustingly white and male? A National Venture Capital Association survey found that 88 percent of general partners — the people who can actually greenlight an investment at a firm — are white, and…
Facebook's vice president of product management, is reportedly leaving the company to join Benchmark Capital. Two possible interpretations leap to mind: Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO recently hired away from Google, is pushing out, one by one, the executives closest to Zuckerberg, leaving him increasingly…
Venture capital has a talent problem. (Some wags might say the problem is a complete lack of talent, but not this one.) The difficulty: Potential hires are either too junior, and hence useless as anything but a startup-hunting associate, or too senior to be brought in as anything but a full partner, a process which…
How awesome is the private-equity business? Private-jet awesome. That's the message that Bertram Capital vice president Michael Chang likely hoped to send to friends when he posted an album of photos to Facebook from his firm's trip to Cabo San Lucas. Slightly less awesome reality: Bertram had to borrow the jet from…
Benchmark Capital's second-generation VC Peter Fenton has put his San Francisco home on the market. The 2,621 square-foot, four-level, cedar-shingled manse has gorgeous bay views and is being offered for $5 million, just a little over the appraised value — though you'll have to spend to repair what's been done to…
As a business, Second Life is a bust. As a technology, the virtual world is a joke. Using snake-oil metaphors to describe it would seem an injustice against toxic cure-alls — were that not Second Life's new marketing peg. The autistic and near-autistic with Asperger's syndrome are flocking to Second Life to learn…
AOL's new social network Bebo is based in San Francisco, but it does most of its business in Europe. So it's fitting that Benchmark Capital's spun-off European wing — Balderton Capital, led by Irishman Barry Maloney — took home the $140 million jackpot. Maloney and his partners sold the firm's entire 15.7 stake in…
With its 15 percent share, Balderton Capital cashed out big on Sun's $1 billion MySQL acquisition yesterday. But Benchmark, from which Balderton was spun off, took an even bigger risk on open source back when doing so seemed more than a little crazy."When we first invested in Red Hat it was thought to be totally…
An anonymous post about Benchmark Capital on VC-bashing site TheFunded.com piqued our curiosity. Titled "Don't Play with Women", it's a pretty damning claim:
The rehabilitation of Nirav Tolia is not just complete — it is, at long last, confirmed. The cofounder of Epinions, though tarred by old controversies, will announce tomorrow morning that he has, indeed, landed a long-rumored spot at Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence. (Back in March, Valleywag…
The European arm of famed VC firm Benchmark breaks off, changes name to Balderton Capital. [VentureBeat]
Loan site Prosper wants everyone to know it's no Zopa. When Valley venture blog alarm:clock asked why Benchmark Capital invested in two competing loan companies, Prosper whipped up a little chart showing what it's got that its UK counterpart doesn't: collection agency options, public listings, whiter teeth and…
