Twitter Acquires Summize
Our portfolio company Twitter announced today that it has acquired a company called Summize.
We have known the Summize team and have followed their progress for the past year. Summize has developed a real time search engine for conversational media (i.e. blogs, twitter) and more recently has focused exclusively on Twitter search.
We are excited about the combination and believe that is an excellent pairing of teams and technology that will benefit the shareholders of both companies.
We have been eager to work with the Summize team and their investors and will now have the opportunity to do so through our investment in Twitter.
July 15, 2008, By Fred Wilson
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| Tags: acquisition summize twitter
Twitter Raises A Second Round Of Funding
Our portfolio company Twitter announced today that they have closed a second round of financing, led by Spark Capital and including Jeff Bezos' investment entity Bezos Expeditions. Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage, another existing investor, also participated in the round.
We remain very excited by the power of marrying communications and social media in the form of small microblog messages shared between friends and followers. Twitter will use the financing to shore up its infrastructure which is the number one priority of the company right now.
June 24, 2008, By Fred Wilson
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| Tags: financing microblogging twitter
Internet for Everyone
This morning Union Square Ventures endorsed an initiative called Internet for Everyone. This group does not sponsor specific policies or legislation. Rather, it hopes to build broad popular support for a few basic principles, that hopefully will guide policy choices over the next few years.
Internet for Everyone's principles are:
Access: We agree that every home and business in America must have access to a high-speed, world class communications infrastructure.Choice: We agree that every consumer must enjoy real choice of high-speed Internet providers to achieve lower prices and higher speeds.
Openness: We agree that every Internet user should have the right to freedom of speech and commerce online in an open market without gatekeepers or discrimination.
Innovation: We agree that the Internet should continue to create good jobs, foster entrepreneurship, spread new ideas and serve as a leading engine of economic growth.
We support this initiative because we believe decentralized, open innovation is not only good social policy, it is critical to our business. We invest in the applications layer of the Internet. Every company in our portfolio depends on open access to consumers. Open access, the ability to put something out there on the Web without asking anyone for permission, is a key driver of innovation on the Web.
In the last five years, the United States has slipped from 4th to 15th place globally in broadband penetration. It should be no surprise that venture capitalists are studying South Korea, where 8 megabits is only an average connection, for insights into multi-player gaming, streaming video, or the digitization of the home. We also find ourselves looking to Japan and Europe, where the wireless networks are more open to innovation, for clues to what will be next in mobile computing.
The United States created the Internet. Our entrepreneurial culture is well suited to creating value at the applications layer on the Web. An infrastructure characterized by Access, Choice, Openness, and Innovation will help make sure we realize that potential.
June 24, 2008, By Brad Burnham
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| Tags: broadband everyone for internet
Call for Topics
Charlie O'Donnell and I will be moderating a three hour startup workshop at NYC Web 2.0 Expo in September. There is a lot we could talk about from getting started to hiring to fundraising. But rather than just pick the topics ourselves based on what we think might be interesting, we figured we should find out ahead of time what folks really want to hear about. So please use the comments to suggest questions, topics and even guest speakers (three hours is a long time and we will vary the format including break out sessions).
June 17, 2008, By Albert Wenger
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| Tags: 20 expo web workshop
And Then There Were Five
Back in February, we posted here that we were looking to hire an analyst. We asked anyone who was interested in the position to leave a comment. We received 164 comments and then worked through all of them to find a small group we could actually meet and interview. It was a long process that had a few fits and starts, but we are pleased to announce that we have finally hired our new analyst.
His name is Eric Friedman, and he may be known to many of you as the force behind the Marketing.FM blog. In addition to being an active and excellent blogger, Eric has spent the past couple years at Reprise Media as an Account Manager specializing in SEM, SEO, and Social Media services.
We know that search and social media marketing is the cheapest and best form of marketing for our portfolio companies that there is. And, we've never had an expert in house. Now we do.
So, now Union Square Ventures investment team is five people: Brad, Albert, Andrew, Eric, and me. It's still small enough to fit around the table in Brad's office which happens most mornings. But, big enough to handle the ton of interesting things that are coming at us every day. It feels just right.
Please welcome Eric to the Union Square Ventures team.
June 10, 2008, By Fred Wilson
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| Tags: analyst eric marketingfm search sem seo socialmedia team