Startups

Nobody wants to admit it, but building a personal brand is essential if you want to thrive in a business world dominated by social media. This is especially true for entrepreneurs and even venture capitalists who have only recently stepped out from the shadows and into the spotlight.

I became intrigued by the rising role of personal branding in the VC world by a New York Times article last week that discussed how more VC firms are hiring PR specialists to help brand their firms.

Here's a quick excerpt from that article:

"Now, Sand Hill Road in Silicon … Read more

Pitching your startup idea to investors, journalists, and random people on the street is a rite of passage for all entrepreneurs. You have to convince hundreds (if not millions) of people that you're building something worthwhile and that they should get on board.

Most pitches fall flat though (the best VCs invest in perhaps 1 percent of the startups that pitch them), and it's often because of simple problems that could've been avoided. Nervous entrepreneurs stray from their story, and arrogant entrepreneurs demand unreasonable valuations and then get laughed out of the room by top-tier angels.

Here … Read more

Developers eager to be among the first to create applications for Leap Motion's new gesture control system think it could be used to auto-translate sign language.

That was among the details the company released this morning about the initial round of requests from developers to design tools that work with the Leap -- technology that lets users control what's on their computers with hundredth of a millimeter accuracy with nothing more than their fingers or their hands.

The San Francisco company said that in the two months since pulling back the wraps on the Leap, more than 26,… Read more

Never mind the slew of economic concerns -- hell, make that catastrophic concerns -- hanging over the world. Silicon Valley is riding high. And no venture firm is leading the charge harder than Andreessen Horowitz.

The company started three years ago this month by longtime business partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (first Netscape, then LoudCloud and Opsware). They've since raised $2.7 billion and have backed 150 companies, including newly-public Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, as well as hot private companies such as Pinterest and AirBnb. Earlier this month, Andreessen Horowitz made a $100 million bet on GitHub, a … Read more

Andy Miller, Apple's former VP of mobile advertising, is joining Leap Motion as the company's president and chief operating officer starting in August.

Miller will be responsible for guiding the motion-control software and hardware company's growth, including business development, growing the executive team, and leading the development of the Leap application discovery store, according to a press release.

"I've been fortunate to work with some of the most influential figures and companies in the technology industry, and I'm as excited about the Leap as I've ever been about a technology," Miller said … Read more

Digg's painful downfall has finally hit rock bottom. Does that mean Digg can only go up now?

As you've probably heard, the once-mighty social news Web site has sold to Betaworks for a paltry $500,000. The total price of the acquisition was around $16 million, if you include The Washington Post's acquisition of the team and LinkedIn's acquisition of the patents.

That price is still a far cry from the $200 million that Google was ready to spend to acquire Digg in 2008. And those numbers seem paltry in comparison with the billion dollar deals … Read more

Facebook knows who you are, who your friends are, what you like, and where you live. And still the ads suck. Google, on the other hand, gives you ads based only on what you're searching on, and its ads rock.

Can Google's ad performance be brought to Facebook and other social sites? Jeffrey Davitz is trying to do that with his startup, Solariat. The idea, he says, "is to take the Google model of responding to intention and place it in the context of social networks."

Davitz confirms that Facebook can help an advertiser find very … Read more

Hard-core gamers like a challenge. Just ask gaming business veteran Julie Uhrman.

Uhrman wants to disrupt the gaming industry with an affordable console called Ouya, a name she hopes will become the battle cry of game developers. Her company is soliciting developers to help build an open ecosystem of games on Android, essentially bringing the openness of mobile games back to the TV set.

"It's very ambitious -- it's hardware, it's software, it's building an ecosystem," Uhrman said.

But Uhrman said she believes her team has what it takes to challenge the status quo. … Read more

Geeks love GitHub, an online tool for organizing programming projects and communicating about them. And now GitHub-the-company, which has been bootstrapped so far, is getting a $100 million input from Andreessen Horowitz. It's the venture company's largest investment to date.

GitHub is the online interface for Git, a fine-grained tool for managing software development. Git was created by Linus Torvalds.

GitHub was designed to organize open-source projects but can be, and is, used for all types of projects. The service is free for open-source users, but makes money by selling licenses for commercial and corporate use. Enterprise buyers … Read more