Tag Archives : Ron Conway

Some VCs are getting an early Valentine’s Day gift fromTheFunded, the site where CEOs rate venture capitalists and their firms. Below you will find the top-ranked individual VCs, as determined by their ratings in 2009. What makes this ranking particularly useful to entrepreneurs is that it is ratings by other CEOs, often CEOs who have had direct dealings with the VCs they are rating. While this is still a popularity contest of sorts (for instance, the rankings are not based on individual investment returns), presumably CEOs are smart enough to take investment performance into account. [...]

Once the iPad SDK is released, many developers will be in a mad rush to create apps optimized for Apple’s tablet device. Already, developers are flocking to update their apps with the new iPhone SDK optimized for the iPad. But it’s not only the developers of games and apps who are participating in this gold rush. Motally, a startup that provides analytics on mobile devices, is launching the extension of their user-action tracking services for mobile web and apps to include content developed on Apple’s iPad. Their analytics will automatically work for iPhone apps accessed on the device [...]

Square, the startup that is making mobile payments for the iPhone, just announced it’s full list of angel investors. Kevin Rose announced his involvement in a video demo (embedded below) he did a few days ago, but until now it wasn’t known who else was involved. The full list includes: Marissa Mayer from Google, Dennis Crowley from Foursquare, Kevin Rose from Digg, Ron Conway, Biz Stone of Twitter, Joshua Schachter, Shawn Fanning (who’s starting a new venture with Dave Morin), Zachary Bogue, Andrew Rasiej, Greg Yaitanes, Jean-David Blanc, David Lee, Esther Dyson, Robin Chan, [...]

Kakai, an incredibly secretive Santa Clara, Calif., company (even though it has more than 40 employees already), has raised $50,000 of a targeted $100,000 round of options, warrants and securities, according to a filing with the SEC. A past TechCrunch story on the company suggests that it is building a fancy new electronic reader, and an old job listing mentioned something about a Linux-based consumer electronics product. But even more clues can be stripped from its recent (Jan. 11) call for a senior visual designer: Kakai is in search of a talented senior visual designer to join the user experience [...]

Blippy, a site where users can share and discuss their shopping habits, just raised $1.6 million in seed funding. What’s really impressive isn’t the size of the round, but rather the roster of investors, which includes famed venture firm Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures (where Blippy was incubated), prolific angel investor Ron Conway, Mahalo founder Jason Calcanis, Hot or Not co-founder James Hong, and Textmarks chief executive Ariel Poler. Most appropriately, given the occasional media description of Blippy as a Twitter for your credit card, Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams [...]

We held the Crunchies awards on Friday in San Francisco — the awards that honor the year’s highest achievers in technology. The awards were co-hosted by TechCrunch, GigaOm, and VentureBeat, who also selected the nominees. But the ultimate winners were chosen by the readers who voted at the Crunchies website. Here’s a list of the nominees, with the winners highlighted. You can see Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Best Overall Startup winner Facebook, receiving his award and a bottle of Vitamin water (don’t ask me, I was in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show) from [...]

This year’s third annual Crunchies Awards have just concluded, and we’re happy to say that it was an overwhelming success. For those that weren’t watching, we’ve included the list of nominees and winners below. Our most sincere congratulations to the winners and to all of the nominees as well. It was an incredibly tight race for many of the categories, and it’s safe to say that everyone on this list is at the top of their field. We’d like to take a moment to point out Facebook’s win for “Best Overall Startup Or Product”, which marks the third [...]