Finance

Matt Marshall, editor and CEO of VentureBeat, the authoritative technology and finance blog, is gearing up for his first year as co-producer of DEMO, the 20-year-old tech conference. 

With news of a dramatic write-down and loss at News Corp, one academic says that the company's poor performance and reception on Wall Street can be laid at the feet of founder Rupert Murdoch who operates with "emotional bias." 

Mukesh Chatter is an engineer and serial entrepreneur, known for building the router company Nextabit and selling to Lucent in 1999 for $900 million.  He says the current economic downturn is an opportunity for innovators to find the inefficiencies in business and create new opportunities.

The BBC sat down with Bill and Melinda Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for a 14-minute video interview today, during which the couple discussed foreign aid and the economy.

Motionbox, the New York-based video sharing site which has a subscription model, has gotten a third venture round of $6 million, Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch reported tonight.  Along with the investment is a management shake-up with Chris O’Brien assuming the title of Chairman and Josh Grotstein becoming CEO.  A little over a year ago, Chris […]

Comedy site JibJab has raised $7.5 million in Series C funding from investors including Overbrook Entertainment and Sony Pictures, Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch reported. Andy interviewed JibJab CEO Greg Spiridellis at the TimeWarner Politics ’08 Summit in October about politics and comedy on the web, and I republished the interview today.

Peter Kafka, who debuted his daily blog MediaMemo on AllThingsD in October, writes today that the ad recession will last at least another year — making it the longest ad recession since The Depression. Which is, well, depressing. At our marathon filming day at the Mogoulus studio in Soho earlier this month, Peter described the […]

The search solution Kosmix has raised $20 million in a funding round led by TimeWarner, the company announced today–an impressive feat in today’s economic climate. Andy interviewed Kosmix Co-founder Anand Rajaraman in New York earlier this year, and I republished the interview here.

ExtendMedia has raised an additional venture round of $10 million, Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee confirms tonight. News of the funding was first reported by peHUB. In October of 2007, I interviewed CEO Keith Kocho. He speaks about the ScanDisk project, which has since been canceled.   I’ve republished the interview here. — Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

The Huffington Post has raised an additional $25 million in venture funding, according to a report this morning by Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.  In a subsequent post, she reports that the Huff Post has formally announced the news. In January, I interviewed Huff Post investor and board member Eric Hippeau of SoftBank about the value […]

Boxee, a home media networking solution provider (for an explanation read these posts by MG Siegler at VentureBeat and Robin Wauters at TechCrunch) has closed its first financing round with $4 million from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.  Earlier this year, we interviewed CEO Avner Ronen about the company.  In the segment, he shows […]

Late yesterday, Google announced that it is putting text advertising onto Google Finance, the financial news and portfolio/stock tracking site. Google is putting considerable resources into the site and plans to expand it globally, according to an interview with Google’s R.J. Pittman we did in July.  R.J. indicated in the interview that Google will likely […]

With the IPO window effectively shut, the most viable exit scenario for venture-backed online video companies is a sale to an established media concern.  So what do acquirers want?  According to CNN.com general manager K.C. Estenson, while CNN has a huge audience, it needs verticals–audiences within particular categories.  He made his comments at the Beet.TV […]

Sure the IPO market has been shut for some time and the prospects don’t look good, but it’s still a bit of jolt to read that one of the industry’s most respected venture capitalist tells The Deal’s TechConfidential that he is not planning for IPO exits for his 24 companies.  Here’s what he says: "We […]

Personal finance web application Mint, last year’s TechCrunch40 winner, leaves beta today with a slew of new features under its belt, including investment tracking and flexible budget sheets, Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch reports. He writes that Mint registrations have gone up 100 percent over the last few weeks due to the financial crisis.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As nearly a thousand technologists from around the world gathered this week on the MIT campus for Technology Review’s annual EmTech conference to learn about emerging technologies and to celebrate the young innovators, the mood was decidedly muted, with the precarious global financial situation clearly on the mind of many.

As we watch the carnage on Wall Street, we wonder about how the venture capital community, the lifeblood of technology start-ups, is going to fare.  This afternoon I was over at the New York Times to interview Vikas Bajaj about the turmoil on Wall Street.  Vikas and Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote the story in today’s […]

Greed and the expectation of the level of high returns enjoyed during the stock market boom of the late nineties has powered the excess in the credit markets which have lead to the current financial crisis, says Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal.