Derwent Capital Markets has just opened their doors and is stating that they are the first social media based hedge fund. Derwent has a £25 million hedge fund and they are looking primarily for social media investments.
StockTwits and Chart.ly seem like the ideal startups for Derwent, so it will be interesting to see if they are able to close any significant deals.
Yandex the very popular Russian search engine has just launched their own startup investment program, Yandex.Factory. The program offers funding opportunities to Russian and international projects.
The investment program will focus on seed and early stage investments of up to hundreds of thousands US dollars.
“Yandex is growing fast. We are full of ideas, but it’s not always easy to do everything at once. If we spot a young, talented team of like-minded people doing interesting and relevant things on the market, we are eager to support them in all possible ways, including financing. We feel it is important that the industry keeps growing and we have an opportunity to make sure it does,” says Ksenia Yolkina, Project Manager of Yandex.Factory.
To join the Yandex.Factory program, startup teams in Russia or the CIS can present their projects at the company’s traditional open-doors event, Yandex.Start. International teams can send their application at ventures@yandex-team.ru. To learn more about the Yandex.Factory program, please visit the program’s web page.
It was rumoured that Twitter has received a $450 million investment from JP Morgan Chase for a 10% share of their company. It turns out that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is denying the rumours.
Stone told Reuters that the reports were “made up”, but did admit to discussions with Facebook “a couple of years ago … (but) nothing formal since and it’s mostly rumors all the time”.
JP Morgan is in the market for investing in social media startups, because recently they raised a $1.22 billion fund to do just that. There isnt an investment in Twitter at the moment, but it would make sense for JP Morgan to invest very soon. biz stone
Andreessen Horowitz has just invested $80 million in Twitter by the way of secondary markets. The news, reported by All Things D, is a surprising development considering that Twitter just closed a $200 million round of funding in December led by the senior firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Andreessen Horowitz did not participate in the round. That round put Twitter’s valuation at $3.7 billion.
With Twitter now estimated to be worth $4 billion, Andeessen Horowitz’s $80 million stock buy equates to roughly 2% of Twitter.
The WSJ is reporting that HTC has invested $40 million into streaming video game company OnLive. Does that mean that we will soon be seeing games on the OnLive cloud transfer onto phones also? Or could we see the HTC brand move onto more than just phones?
SEC filing has shown that Sequoia Capital has raised a new $1.3 billion fund. Sequoia Capital plans on using the fund to continue the firm’s focus on investment in early and growth stage technology companies in the U.S. and expand its investment efforts in those same sorts of early stage companies in China.
Sequoia has been an investor in some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies – Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube.
If there’s one corporation that can make a business venture a success, it’s Google. If your company is lucky enough to be taken under its wing then you know your in for success. Or at least a ton of money.
A bunch of ex-Google employees founded a service called Ardvark which allows users to ask people for information and post questions. It was originally developed as a mobile-only app but has recently launched a website version.
They have just received a huge offer from Google amounting to $30 million dollars. Despite all the benefits that an investment from Google would bring to Ardvark the original creators are left with a dilemma. Clearly the project has promise if Google are showing interest, so they may like to roll the dice on this one and refuse to sell hoping for more money in the long run. But then if it’s a flop they could be $30 million down and looking rather foolish indeed.
Other investors and bidders are said to be making offers. To be honest, I can’t see them holding out much longer. That much outside pressure and money dangled in front of them must be swaying debates in the conference room.
For the first ever time Flickr has teamed up with a photo printing service for its users to use. Snapfish (owned by HP) will be Flickr’s preferred photo printing service and will be integrated with Twitter to make it easier for the users to export their pictures – and thus make it the preferred service of the users.
At the minute, users have to upload their pictures to an independent printer of their choice. However, because they’ll be able to export whole albums, photo streams etc… at the click of a mouse I can certainly see this being a promising endeavour for SnapFish. However, they will have to give some of their profits back to Flickr obviously – but because they’re available in 22 countries they’ll definitely be turning a profit this year.
Yahoo!, who own Flickr, have come under fire in recent times due to their management of the brand and the controversial decision to include video on the photography site (this has led to several online groups against videos on Flickr being founded). However, they still have over 4 billion photographs on the site and it’s growing by 100 million each month, so SnapFish won’t be complaining.
Internet radio has taken off in the last few years. This is because more and more people are using smart-phones and using laptops on the go. Not to mention the fact that you can listen to your favourite radio station whilst holidaying in Australia or backpacking through Europe. Then, along came Internet based radio. This meant that there was no traditional radio station (ie. On a radio) for a particular company – it solely exists on the internet.
Pandora became one of the biggest streaming high quality music and advertisements across the web. Now, they have secured a massive investment from Greylock Partners of around $35 million dollars!
Currently, Pandora plays advertisements in order to make ends meet. Now, after securing this investment there is talk of charging listeners who tune in for over 40 hours every month 99c or an annual premium of $39 for unlimited listening and elimination of all the advertisements.
“New funds will be used toward the continued growth and development of Pandora” said Pandora.
It’s a good move to. Now that people are ditching podcasts more and more in search of radio – investing now would be wise. And when media players and internet speeds improve – internet TV would be no shock appearance.
