Archive for July, 2009

Posted on July 21, 2009 - by Nate

VC Funding Picks up in Q2, 2009

Good news came in today: Venture Capital funds are now trading at mid-1990’s levels. The report I just read stated the following: 

Venture capital dollars going to startups in the U.S. stabilized in the second quarter at $3.7 billion, according to the latest MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. The venture money invested in the quarter is still only about half of what it was a year ago (when it was $7.2 billion in the second quarter of 2008), but is 15 percent above the low point in the first quarter of 2009 (when it was $3.5 billion). All in all, VC investments are trending at mid-1990s levels, which isn’t such a bad thing.

This could be an indication of a recovery, or a false summitt on our way back. Either way, it’s a bright spot at the moment. 

Posted on July 20, 2009 - by Nate

Harvard on the Fritz?

I was listening to NPR and apparently Harvard University is on feeling the pressure caused by the economic issues we’re facing. In the last couple of years the schools endowment, which is the largest of any college in the nation, has decreased from $37 billion to $26 billion. A big part of the rapid decline in the pot is due to the $4 billion + in spending that took place to ad 6.2 million square feet more to the campus’ facilities–something that is very interesting given the fact that the number of students has not changed in the last several years. 

Sad also is the fact that unlike a regular financial institution, Harvard cannot dump their tenured faculty to cut expenditures. Also, it looks as though the university is not intending on cutting scholarships either, something they feel strongly about to still give the middle class an opportunity at a Harvard education. My personal thoughts are that the university did what everyone else did during the boom: they over-extended themselves. 

Posted on July 16, 2009 - by Nate

Sex Sells Even if You’re Not Selling it Directly

I pay attention to about 300 online feeds, some of them news others just blogs of interest. One site I follow is SEOmoz.org. Sam Niccolls posted an interesting article today that was quite distrubing. It spoke of how, as it would seem, top ranked sites are targeting pornographic keywords to increase pagerank and revenue. Super sad. Because sites like TechCrunch make their revenue from advertising click-throughs, and because those click-throughs come via the sheer mass of searches done for explicit keywords, it’s easy to see how they may be motivated to regularly target such terms.

Sad to say the least.