Bringing Sand Hill Road to cyberspace
July 26, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
For years, the world of venture capital largely has been shrouded in a veil of secrecy. Introductions were made in person over coffee or cocktails, startups were pitched on a physical whiteboard, and deals were sealed with handshakes and eye contact. Even as websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn brought a lot of both casual and professional social interactions into cyberspace, venture funding was still done largely offline. But in the past 18 months, one website has started to change all of that — in a big way.
AngelList started in February 2010 as a simple email list to alert wealthy angel investors to the tech industry’s hot and interesting startups. Since then, the tool has grown at warp speed: It is now a full-fledged social networking site that brings together investors of all sizes with a wide variety of companies looking for funding. Earlier this month I sat down with AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant to get a look at how the site has grown and where it’s going from here.
The facts and figures Ravikant revealed in our conversation were pretty impressive: AngelList now has 2,300 investors and more than 10,000 companies with registered profiles on the site. The network has directly facilitated between 400 and 600 startup fundraises, and is currently helping with an average of one to two fund raises per day.
The AngelList website now has a number of features reminiscent of social networking or online dating sites, to allow both investors and startups to present their best selves — and separate the signal from the noise when looking for new partners. (Click image to enlarge. One more screenshot is included at the bottom of this post):
The size of AngelList’s community is even more impressive when you take into account that not just anybody is allowed in. “Curation is very important. We keep out the bad actors, and we remove people from the site if they get negative reviews, if they’re people who are just kicking tires or running pay to pitch forums,” Ravikant said. “We’ve removed companies if we couldn’t verify the claims they made about who has already invested in them. And there are also a lot of good companies we can’t send out on AngelList at all. We can’t help everybody.”
The site almost became too popular earlier this spring, Ravikant said. AngelList started to dial back its growth purposefully, partially in response to criticism that the site was helping to foster an overly exuberant angel funding environment. “Actually in February our volume was just insane. We were getting 40 to 60 companies trying to join per day. There was definitely a seed stage frenzy, and we felt the quality was slipping,” he said. “We deliberately locked the site down, we raised the bar and lowered the volume.”
AngelList has no near-term plans to start generating revenue through ads or imposing commissions on the deals it helps facilitate. Ravikant has funded the site’s development with personal money from himself and his co-founder Babak Nivi and an investment from the Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit focused on fostering entrepreneurship. Although I could see AngelList emerging as a logical acquisition for a number of social networking sites such as LinkedIn or larger media companies, Ravikant maintains that he’s not focusing on longer-term strategies at the moment. “We’re still figuring it out, and we’re not in any kind of rush,” he said. After all, if they need fresh funding, they probably know where to go to find it.
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US regulations standing in the way of Netflix-Facebook integration
July 26, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
Molly McHughJuly 25, 2011
Netflix will introduce Facebook integration this year — but US users will have to wait to see if a privacy law is amended first.
It’s no secret that there’s something brewing between Netflix and Facebook. The subscription media service’s CEO Reid Hastings joined Facebook’s board just last month amid rumors of an impending Netflix integration, and a new multimedia dashboard for the site. Combine that with Netflix’s social networking aspirations and Facebook’s less than subtle comments about working with industry heavyweights to integrate new features into the site, and we can all see where things are headed. Or rather, would be heading.
According to Netflix’s second quarter briefing to investors, Facebook integration–which shares what you’re watching with your friends–will launch this year for Canadian and South American users only because of US privacy regulations. The Video Privacy Protection Act prevents a company from making someone’s viewing habits public without his or her written and exclusive permission.
The bill became law 1988 back when people actually rented movies from brick-and-mortar stores, when a Supreme Court nominee’s rentals were published in a newspaper–it is obviously an important privacy protection. It prevents stores from holding onto your rental history for more than year, or police from obtaining that information without a warrant or court order. There used to exist some confusion as to whether the Video Privacy Protection Act extended to DVD and video game rentals, but the 2010 decision in the Lane v. Facebook, Inc case found it did.
Lane v. Facebook was a lawsuit filed in response to the Facebook Beacon program, which published user information with permissions. Included in this were Blockbuster as well as Gamefly rental history, which provided personally identifiable information to Facebook that they were not authorized to. The Beacon program was shut down in 2009 and Facebook created a multimillion dollar fund to protect user privacy.
Thankfully for the future of an effective Netflix-Facebook partnership in the US, there might be a loophole. A new bill has been introduced and if it passes, Netflix rental information could be broadcast on Facebook as long as users were given clear chances to opt-out. “A bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced a simple clarification, HR2471, which says when and how a user can give such permission. We’re hoping HR2471 passes, enabling us to offer our Facebook integration to our US subscribers who desire it,” Netflix explains.
While it’s now clear that sharing your Netflix activity via Facebook is likely on the horizon, we’re more curious about a fully-featured Netflix client integrated into the site. The Skype chat client Facebook introduced last month was a necessary and helpful update, although somewhat overhyped. Now we’re just twiddling our thumbs in anticipation of Spotify and Netflix applications packaged into the site.
More About: Facebook, Facebook media dashboard, facebook privacy, Internet privacy, Movies, Netflix, privacy, Spotify, Video Privacy Protection Act
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