The best news since 2000 in venture and IT

1. Google showed strong revenue growth -- 27%, from a high base -- and huge positive cash flow

 2. LivingSocial  Expects $1 Billion In Revenue This Year

3. Hulu On Track To Generate $500 Million In Revenue This Year

4.Groupon's sales in 2010 were around $750 million, but it is expected to book $3 to $4 billion this year, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. It has been valued as high as $25 billion.

5. Funding for social, gaming triples to $875M
LivingSocial, Beyond Oblivion, OnLive, TidalTV and Lockerz top the list of biggest consumer rounds


Here are the five largest rounds raised by consumer information service companies:


Hungry Machine, the company behind daily deals site LivingSocial, raised $200 million in new funding from existing investors Amazon and Lightspeed Venture Partners along with some new participants. The number reported in the media a couple weeks ago was actually $400 million, but the extra $200 million went toward share repurchasing, a Dow Jones representative tells me. Since it’s capital used to purchase shares from existing shareholders, the firm doesn’t count it towards new funding. (Washington, D.C.)
Digital music marketplace Beyond Oblivion raised a $77 million round led by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (New York, N.Y.)
OnLive, provider of an on-demand game service, raised $40 million from smartphone maker HTC. (Palo Alto, Calif.)
Video advertising optimization company TidalTV raised $30 million led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from Comcast Interactive Capital and Valhalla Partners. (Baltimore, Md.)
Social commerce site Lockerz also raised $30 million--of a planned $45 million--from Liberty Media Corporation and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (Seattle, Wash.)

As evident in the four of the rounds above, it’s not just VCs and an ocean of angels pouring tons of extra funding into companies these days, but also major corporations like Amazon, News Corp., HTC and Comcast.

“Large deals for capital-intense industries -- such as renewable energy, healthcare and information technology -- drove the investment increase in the first quarter,” noted Jessica Canning, global research director for Dow Jones VentureSource. “Venture capitalists, however, were not the only investors giving venture-backed companies sizable cash infusions. With acquisition prices on the rise, corporations are more inclined to invest and they funded three of the 10 largest deals confirmed during the quarter.”

In total, corporations, venture capital firms, angels and the rest invested $6.4 billion in 661 deals for U.S.-based venture companies during Q1 2011, according to Dow Jones VentureSource, a 35 percent rise in investment and five percent decrease in deals when compared with the same quarter last year. The median amount for a round rose to $5 million, a slight increase from $4.4 million a year ago, but about the same as the 2009 figure.

Investment deals in the healthcare sector raised $1.6 billion over 148 deals, a 21 percent increase in capital but a six percent drop in deals. IT companies raised $1.6 billion over 212 deals, a 16 percent increase in capital and 10 percent increase in deals. And energy companies raised $742 million over 33 deals, nearly doubling capital invested in Q1 2010.

Statistic data about vc largest quarter since 2001

Walmart buys social media startup Kosmix for $300 million

Kosmix runs a social media platform that organizes content by topic. 

There's actually two big reasons for the acquisition, with the second one most important:

• Team. Kosmix was founded by the team that started Junglee, one of the first price comparison search engines, which was acquired by Amazon. The company will form the basis of a newly formed WalmartLabs division. So to work on innovative projects Walmart is getting entrepreneurs with a great track-record and knowledge of online commerce and social media, which makes tons of sense. But the biggest reason is...
  
• Social commerce is becoming a reality. People have been talking about "social commerce" since people have been talking about "social", but it's fast becoming a reality.

Venture market 2011 - the strongest quarter since 2007

In 2011 the first quarter was the strongest since 2007.

VC-backed IPOs raising an average of $98.3 million.

109 venture-backed companies were acquired.

More about venture business - on
venture market #1 blog

Facebook - Google: +1

The Google new service +1 let users vote on search results, then will use the votes as a factor in ranking results.
Users will need a Google Profile to use +1. Once they've created that profile, contacts are built from sources like the user's Gmail contact list and people they follow on Google Reader.
Users can see which friends and contacts they're sharing recommendations with by using the "Social Circle And Content" tab in their Google Dashboard.
The service has been rumored for several months now, and is apparently only one of many efforts underway at the company to add a social layer to its services to help compete against Facebook. Some of those efforts were apparently slowed by political infighting toward the end of 2012, but product chief Vic Gundotra took charge of this particular initiative.

Guess who else would like to do the same thing with ads across the web given the social data that they have? Yep — Facebook.
At the same time, Google has had many failures in the social space. And they realized that with +1, they couldn’t afford to have some big hyped-up launch once again. So they’re purposely taking it slow. There will be no +1 buttons for publishers at launch that will be blanketed across the web (but you better believe they’re coming). There will be no toolbar that spreads across other Google properties (that may be coming). There will be no mobile app or aspect (that is likely coming as well). The feature itself will roll out slowly and will at first be an opt-in one found in Google’s search experiments area.
But make no mistake, this is a massive Google project. And eventually it will hit all users — and not just those logged into their Google accounts. Down the line, Google can envision this +1 data influencing search results across the board, Cutts says. That’s what we call “downplaying” — assuming people use it, the social data is very likely to be the key ingredient to the future of Google Search.

Read more:

http://znacomstva.blogspot.com/2011/03/google-vs-facebook.html

Startups opportunities

The current imbalance in the supply and demand for venture capital is creating opportunities for V.C. funds.

New limited partner commitments to venture capital funds have dwindled in recent years. This scarcity of capital has created its own Darwinian effect, with a new breed of start-ups flourishing as a result of innovation rather than capital-induced growth. As these companies mature, however, many of them are looking to venture capitalists for the money and expertise to realize their potential.
Last year, limited partner commitments to venture capital slowed to about $12 billion, the lowest level since 2003. In addition to concerns about venture capital returns, many limited partners are still constrained because of liquidity issues from the recent global financial crisis. As a result, many venture capital firms have shut down and others have raised smaller funds.

As a result, today is a great environment for venture capitalists to invest in businesses that have matured beyond the seed stage — companies that have typically grown to at least $1 million to $5 million in revenue and are expanding rapidly. And because of the shortage of available venture capital, their valuations are often compelling.

http://znacomstva.blogspot.com/2011/03/tips-for-rasing-capital.html

How social is changing internet

"It used to be that backlinked sites had some kind of authority. It was some kind of a signal that there was value in what you were doing," said Saad Khan, partner at CMEA Capital, in a recent phone chat. "The world is changing in such a way that authority on the web is being expressed in a new way: people are the new authority."

Khan explained what he calls "like-rank": the idea that authority comes from people through expressions like retweets, likes, and other social signals

"I actually think the whole way we navigate the Web and see authority on the Web is going to be fundamentally altered," he added.

This, Khan believes, is why pretty soon, the concept of an algorithmically determined "page rank" will be meaningless. Relevance will not be determined by one organization, but by the legions of voices on the Web.

That is why social network raise HUGE investment like LivingSocial
-500 mln. dollars
http://znacomstva.blogspot.com/2011/03/huge-investment-in-social.html

Edward Mushinsky predicts new mega-bubble

New bubble in Emergent Markets - due to new economic order
http://znacomstva.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-economic-order.html