Insight into the VC World

I just came across a blog written by Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital which I found to be very interesting.

First Round Capital has quite an interesting portfolio of companies including the winner of Tech Crunch 40 Mint Software that I had previously mentioned. It looks like Mint has done it again with winning the Financial Innovation (FINOVATE) Award.

Of course that got me side-tracked into reading more on these innovative companies that have secured VC funding to see what I can learn.

Chris Fralic is also a partner in First Round Capital and he too has an interesting blog called nothing to say. What got me side-tracked there is an interesting post on LinkedIn vs. Facebook, which leads to David Pogue's take on the subject of LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn profile but have not really gotten around to doing much with it unlike Facebook where I have invested (or wasted) just a bit more time.

Innovation in Technology Helping to Fund School Projects in the U.S.

Innovation in technology can be used to make people very rich. On the other hand it can also do some great things as seen on the donerschoose.org site. This site is a great implementation of how technology can be used to raise money for projects in schools.

The teachers submit the projects they would like funding for and people can donate money for these projects. The details posted for project tell you which school (in the United States) the project is for, the classroom details such as the ages of the students and of course the total cost for implementing the project.

The site even has a Blogger Challenge which is ongoing until October 31th to determine who can raise the most money in their project. The following awards are also being given:

1. Six Apart - Is sponsoring an award for the bloggers who help the greatest number of students during the Blogger Challenge.


2. Yahoo - The blogger who motivates the most readers to participate in the Blogger Challenge will get lunch with Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang.


3. Google - Is going to reward the winning bloggers with exactly what they gave to DonorsChoose, students, and teachers: traffic. They will post links to the winners’ blogs here, and a $500 gift certificate for each winner to spend on DonorsChoose.

It's a pity that site is only for U.S. projects and only seems to support donations from the U.S., since I tried to make a donation and create a challenge but the registration form only allows U.S. addresses. I guess that has something to do with the fact that they issue tax deductions. I guess I won't be having lunch with Jerry Yang anytime soon.

Those of you are in the U.S. and want to enter the challenge or support a school should pay the site a visit.

I'm featured on the front page of the mEgo.com web site

Wow. On September 25th, 2007 I received an email from Ariel McNicol, one of the founders of mEgo to say that thay have featured my blog on their home page. It is kinda cool to see the link to my blog there - especially since I just start blogging again. It is very interesting to see the opportunities that beta testing a software can bring. I never thought it could bring more traffic to my blog and from my statistics the traffic to my blog has definitely increased. I guess that is the magic of the Internet.

How did this happen?
I installed the mEgo application in Facebook and on my blog (see the column on the right) and I am beta testing it.

What is mEgo?
It is an interesting widget that lets you post info about yourself once to each location and then you can update the info centrally (on their web site) and have it propagate to where the widget is installed automatically. No longer do you have to update several profiles about yourself. Do it once and then forget it. It stores info on various topics such as looks, personality, feeds - all the questions you are often asked to complete on every web site you have an account with. It keeps all the datad accesible from the widget which looks like an animated graphice installed in your web page.

Another interesting aspect to this widget is that when you log into your account at mEgo, you can also track the statistics of where your mEgo is being accessed from.