The Oregonian reported last week that Enuclia furloughed 20 of their employees after a prospective investor backed out of a financing deal.
Monthly Archive for May, 2007
Portland startup SplashCast announced support for a platform that enables companies and developers to build applications for the Facebook website, giving Facebook users the ability to upload and remix videos, photos, and music into personal channels that then stream from their Facebook pages.
The Portland Business Journal reported last week that Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham has joined startup AboutUs.
A recent Boston Business Journal article argues that many angel investors are shifting to later-stage, lower risk deals.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that California faces a shortage of college-educated workers that could slow
its economic growth, says a research institute that highlights two possible
fixes – encouraging more residents to finish college while letting employers
import more brainpower from abroad.
According to a Denver Post article, TechStars was created to mentor 10 startup companies for the summer.
The Business Journal reported last week that Scott Kveton, formerly Director of the OSU Open Source Lab, has left OpenID company JanRain where he had been CEO. The JanRain website states that Michael Graves is the interim Chief Executive of JanRain.
Previously Graves was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for JanRain.
Graves was the founder of Signio, a payment services company purchased
by VeriSign in 2000 for $700 million. More recently Graves held the
position of Chief Technology Officer of the VIS Division at VeriSign,
Inc.
The NASVF looked at pre-money valuations for seed deals over the past 7 years, and found that right around $2 million has been the fairly consistent typical number. Later round pre-money value has varied quite a lot, but not seed-level.
Cnet news reported that at the Clean Energy Venture Summit, VC Maurice Gunderson claimed that government incentives are appropriate for clean energy, but the problem is that they "draw a lot of capital into marginal companies,"
or what he called me-too companies.
In a recent paper, Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School argues that Universities should take a broader view
of their role in technology transfer. He claims that University technology transfer
ought to have as its goal maximizing the social impact of technology,
not merely maximizing the university’s licensing revenue.

