Silicon Valley Archives - Page 4 of 4

BUILD Entrepreneurship Program To Honor Reid Hoffman At Gala Tonight

Reid Hoffman (photo: Crunchbase_

The BUILD Entrepreneurship Program was established in 1999 with a goal of propelling disengaged high school students academically through entrepreneurship. Build started in Silicon Valley. It’s a four year college prep program that helps high school students develop, build and run their own small businesses. The program currently serves 1,000 students and has expanded to Oakland, the San Francisco Peninsula and Washington DC. It was initially funded by Franklin “Pitch” Johnson and his wife Catherine.

Tonight at a gala dinner and award reception at the computer history museum in Mountain View California, build will honor Linked In co-founder Reid Hoffman with it’s coveted “Pitch Prize” named after Johnson. Last year’s recipient, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, will present the honor to Hoffman.

More after the break
Read More…

The Forgiving Valley: Path Puts Privacy Issue Behind Them Takes Another Round At A $250 Million Valuation

Yesterday we brought you the story of how some folks are out for blood against New York deals start up Sqoot. They misspoke and came off sexist, not once but twice. While opponents of sqoot are begging anyone that will listen to stop supporting their start up over saying that women would be at their hackathon serving beer, Path the social media network started by Facebook Alum Dave Morin, had a much more severe issue and just got another round of funding.

Although I truly feel that privacy is in the hands of the user and that if you are that worried about your privacy than you should stay off the net, Path did something far worse than Sqoot. They uploaded the complete contents of users address books to their own private servers.

More after the break
Read More…

Another Day, Another Possible Black Mark On Pinterest

Another day, another possible black mark on Pinterest. The site that has been marked in the past with Link Baiting, Spam issues, and copyright infringement maybe up to it one more time. Business Insider is reporting that “VC’s” are trying to get a new round of investment valued for the company at around $1 billion dollars. There is just one problem with that, everyone they’ve called to talk to has denied it with no known knowledge of a new round. Nor does Pinterest “want” to raise a new round of funding as of yet they claim. This is also a company that still has no business model for revenue yet as their past one with links didn’t work out.

What they are hearing is VC’s are trying to bribe and are showing up uninvited to Pinterest in hopes of starting those talks.

Could it be a rogue investor trying to drum up more interest as one of the original investors as either bringing more money in or a possible exit plan? Or could it just be that Pinterest is trying to drum up hopes of another round, so that hopefully someone buys them out instead.

Source: Business Insider

Startup Spotlight: Los Angeles Based Incubators

For years, Silicon Valley has been the first thought when someone says Startups and Incubators, however Los Angeles is trying to change that. In this Start-Up Spotlight, we’ll be featuring three LA Based Startup Incubators trying to change that. While Los Angeles may be famous for Hollywood, Crips and Scientology, companies such as MySpace, Helio, and Picasa have all started here as well.

Nibletz: What’s That Small Crunching Sound? Get My Start Up Featured

Nibletz was launched in the summer of 2011. We’ve been here ever since and have seen some phenomenal growth as of late. What’s a niblet? It’s a small crunchy byte from the tech and startup scene.

We’re here to bring you news and news bytes from around the startup and tech world. You’ll see stories here from the hot startup pockets like Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Silicon Beach and other places that don’t have Silicon in the name like the GigCity (Chattanooga), New Orleans, Austin, Syracuse, London, Berlin and more.

In these economic times more and more people are trying to find security in themselves and taking their ideas to the next level. Many fail, while many succeed and we’ll continue to bring you those stories from start-ups next door and start-ups across the globe. If it’s interesting, we’ll run it and the editorial team at Nibletz finds many things interesting.

We love to talk to people and want to hear about your startup so if you have a startup or know of an interesting startup send us an email at startup@nibletz.com we also like talking to people on the phone and we have a bad ass phone number for that (202)-NIBLETZ (2O2) 642-5389 it’s real easy to remember.

Another great thing about Nibletz is that we want our readers to understand the news and the lingo in and outside of the valley so you won’t find stories that are backed by old Silicon Valley urban legends. We’ll source stories from everywhere.

We read TechCrunch and PandoDaily, well Daily so we won’t do a lot of regurgitating from those sites, keep visiting them as well. But make sure you add nibletz.com to your RSS reader and drop us a line or a phone call.

If you’re not sure if you have startup news or you know you’ve got some cool tech tip for us send that email to tips@nibletz.com oh and our phone number again is (202)-NIBLETZ (2O2) 642-5389

Pinterest to be already valued at $500 million

Pinterest, the social pinning website that has been public less than two months is to be valued at $500 million, so says private financial data companyPrivCo. Little back story first before we go into why this is what will be proven as the Tech company that causes the bubble to burst in Silicone Valley.

Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

More after the break…

Surprise Surprise: Greg Kumparak Joins Pando Daily

Greg Kamparak photo: Kamparak's Google+

The exodus at AOL owned TechCrunch continues. Earlier this week it was leaked that TechCrunch’s mobile editor, Greg Kumparak, was leaving TechCrunch. At the time Kumparak announced his departure he didn’t say he was going, but of course the obvious place was PandoDaily.

PandoDaily is the new start up focused site that was started by former TechCrunch editor Sarah Lacy. Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund led an angel round for the new site that was over 2.5 million dollars.

Lacy announced a couple of weeks ago that PandoDaily was holding monthly meet ups. The first of which was tonight. Arrington was the featured guest and had a fireside chat with Lacy. It was also announced that Kumparak was joining the PandoDaily team tonight.

More after the break
Read More…

Audience Files For $75 Million Dollar IPO

In the age of billion dollar IPO’s, Paul Allen backed Audience, a microprocessor company based in Silicon Valley, has filed for an initial public offering to the beat of $75 million dollars.

In their S1 filing Audience said “Our products enable a more consistent voice and audio experience, regardless of the use case or surrounding noise environment.” Audience will be traded on the NASDAQ with the ticker symbol ADNC.

Although they aren’t as well know as Qualcomm, Intel, Texas Instruments or NVIDIA, Audience claims that they have sold 135 million mobile and tablet processors to OEM’s like Samsung and HTC and carriers as large as AT&T and DoCoMo. Audience’s first processor went on the market in 2008 and was announced at the CTIA mobile show that year.

source: VB