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First, the market uncertainty has compelled firms that were planning to raise a fund in late 2008 or early 2009 to hold back on fundraising efforts until economic conditions improve and institutional investors can recommit with confidence. The second and less obvious reason is that many venture capital firms raised money in the last two years and are focused on deploying those funds With some notable exceptions, we can expect this slower pace to continue well into 2009.

During the fourth quarter, venture capitalists launched 33 follow-on funds and 10 new funds, resulting in a 3-to-1 ratio for follow-on to new funds. That compares with a 2-to-1 ratio during the same period a year ago.

Hey buddy, can you spare a dime?

Venture capital for IT companies fell 40 percent to $2.18 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with the same period a year ago, according to VentureSource.

Venture capitalists put a virtual lock on their funding during the fourth quarter, doling out a mere $3.4 billion, according to a report released Monday by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association.

Such doom and gloom also engulfs venture capital spending as it relates to the tech industry, which posted its worst fourth-quarter performance in a decade, according to a recent report by VentureSource.

The meager performance pales in comparison to the $11.7 billion distributed to start-ups a year ago during the same period. That’s a decline of 71 percent. Funding is down nearly 60 percent from the previous quarter.

Mark Heesen, NVCA president, said in a statement:

The drop in venture capital fundraising activity in the fourth quarter is not surprising for two reasons.

commentary

The problem with such reasoning is that the same could be said of any software vendor (perhaps minus the monopoly power). Microsoft already supports its products for a very long time, and expecting customers at some point to move to the latest and greatest (and more cost effectively supported) is not a bad policy. Any vendor should be hoping the TCF loses on this one.

How? Well, as the TCF reasons, since most buyers would prefer XP, as demonstrated by their installing XP even after buying a Vista-enabled computer, forcing them to buy Vista in the first place is tantamount to an exercise of monopoly power.

According to The Register, the “Taiwanese Consumer Foundation…claims [Microsoft] is effectively using its monopoly to force sales of Vista.”

Microsoft, for its part, had better pray
Windows 7 comes without the complaints that Vista has delivered. Two bad product releases in a row? Even Microsoft may not be able to survive that.

A screen shot of one of the shows offered at Logoonline.com

“This is the kind of content that has only been available at art houses,” Sherman said. “But the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) audience, can now check out content that has never been available to them nationally.”

Sherman said the site reflects Viacom’s “super niche” strategy, which is about delivering content to very small markets in addition to the big ones.

Some of the full-episode shows that can be found at Logoonline.com are Big Gay Sketch, Noah’s Arc, and Outlaugh Festival on Wisecrack. Documentaries include Elephant in the Room and The Two Cubas.

There are also short clips, news, and music.

Execs at MTV Networks say the best way to distribute media over the Web is to “go an inch wide but a mile deep.”

(Credit:
MTV Networks)

Logo’s digital cable channel launched three years ago and is now available in 32 million homes in 25 markets.

Instead of one central Web destination, Viacom-owned MTV Networks is building hundreds of sites around its content. An example of that strategy can be found at Logo, the unit that serves the gay and lesbian community.

Logo launched a new video hub on Wednesday that Lisa Sherman, Logo’s general manager, said will feature 3,000 ad-supported clips and be the largest central library of videos for the gay and lesbian audience.

A Facebook spokesman said the company would look into the bug.

A new hole in Facebook allows members to see the fan pages of people on the networking site who they aren’t friends with, an outside researcher revealed on Friday.

“It’s a simple logic error,” said Byron Ng, a Vancouver, Canada-based computer technician whose hobby is researching holes in social networks and other sites.

Earlier this week Facebook fixed a vulnerability that allowed people to see the photos of Facebook members they weren’t friends with through the mobile site.

All a would-be spy has to do is go to anyone’s profile page, click on the “Info” tab and hover the mouse over the “see all” hot link at the top right of the list of fan pages. The URL for the fan pages appears at the bottom of the Web page and can be cut and pasted into a new window. Replacing the serial number of the user in the URL with the serial number of a target user (which anyone can find) will then take you to that user’s fan page.

For instance, Zuckerberg is publicly listed among the fans of the Barack Obama page, but someone would normally have to look for him on all the fan pages on the site in order to compile comprehensive list like the one displayed on his profile page.

(Credit:
Facebook)

Testing a new vulnerability, CNET News was able to see this private page showing the entire list of restaurants, politicians, and musicians that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a fan of.

In verifying the hole, CNET News–signing onto the site as someone who is not a designated “friend” of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg–was still able to see that he is a fan of Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, Green Day, Nirvana, Central Park, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Apple Students.

“By becoming a fan of a page, users have chosen to publicly affiliate themselves with the brand, band, cause, or figure represented by the page,” the spokesman said in a statement via e-mail. “We’re concerned with any behavior that users may not anticipate, even when it involves public information, and we are currently evaluating this bug.”

Click on the image to enlarge.

(Credit:
Intel)

In May we will ask for stockholder approval of a stock option exchange program. Under the program, employees will be given the opportunity to exchange previously granted, “underwater” options for a smaller number of new options at the market price on the date of exchange. This exchange is based upon a “value for value” program which we believe has a good chance of receiving stockholder approval.

Intel on Monday told employees that it would reprice its employee stock options.

Intel shareholders will vote on the company’s repricing proposal at its annual meeting May 20.

Here are a few details provided by Intel CEO Paul Otellini in a memo to employees:

In a regulatory filing, Intel detailed plans to reprice stock options at a lower price, similar to what Google did. In addition, Intel said that it would freeze salaries of senior executives in 2009. But stock option grants are unaffected.

You can find all the details on Intel’s plans, including employee and manager FAQs, in the SEC documents.

Meanwhile, Intel also disclosed its executive compensation for 2008. Here’s a look at the proxy table:

And.

Intel is granting all eligible employees a special, onetime stock award that will have the same composition as the Focal stock grant you will receive this year. In effect, this doubles the grant size you would have otherwise been awarded.

This was originally posted at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

Forbes reported late Tuesday that Apple has agreed to purchase the company for a middling $278 million, quoting Apple spokesman Steve Dowling as confirming the deal. PA Semi made its debut a few years back designing low-power chips based on Apple’s old friend, the Power architecture.

Apple has reportedly made a rare acquisition, snapping up low-power chip company PA Semi one day before reporting its quarterly earnings.

Still, Forbes says the negotiations were led by Apple CEO Steve Jobs with the aim of putting PA Semi’s PWRficient processors at the heart of the iPhone and future iPods, citing a source close to PA Semi. If that’s true, Forbes is correct in noting this is a huge blow for Intel’s Atom project, but I’m skeptical in these early hours as to Apple’s eventual plans for the company and its employees.

PA Semi’s chips are based on IBM’s Power architecture. The iPhone uses a Samsung chip based on ARM’s instruction set. It would seem quite a stretch that after just a year, Apple would find it necessary to port the iPhone’s OS X operating system over to Power based on some supposed failing with ARM’s low-power road map. If Apple was going to make any kind of porting move, it would have been much more logical–if not a slam dunk–for the company to embrace Intel’s low-power Atom processors based on the same x86 instruction set used by the
Mac, given its existing relationship with Intel.

It’s not clear what Apple might have in mind for PA Semi. I’d doubt Apple plans to get into the chip design game anytime soon, although having low-power chip experts on board would only help any company eyeing the next generation of mobile computing as clearly as Apple is doing at the moment. Forbes intimates that Apple is planning to put PA Semi’s chips in the
iPhone, which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever at first glance.

iVisit Teleport's feature-rich app manages to avoid distraction.

The simplest way to think about iVisit Teleport is as a P2P social network that lets you call, chat, video conference, and transfer multimedia for up to 8 contacts at a time. You sign up for an account and can start adding any contact who has also registered with the service. Conferencing starts when you enter a room, after which you have an array of controls to launch multimedia sharing functions with a one-button click; that is, tap or click the interface to chat, start a video conference using the phone’s camera as the lens, send a file, and see a buddy’s GPS location on a map.

I’m looking at a cell phone screen and four faces are looking back. It’s CTIA 2008, the biggest wireless and cell phone trade show of the year, and the CEO of iVisit, a multiparty video conferencing app for PCs, Macs, and mobile phones, is demoing the product, iVisit Teleport. I must say, the slick, feature-rich app looks pretty cool on Orang Diamaleh’s large-screen smartphone.

I like the glossy black interface, which packs in a lot of features without making the app feel overcrowded. The video quality wasn’t too shabby either, and definitely an improvement over other video software I’ve seen, but a lot of that input will depend on the capabilities of the phone itself. On mobile phones, iVisit Teleport supports 120×160, 320×240 video. It will be interesting to see how iVisit Teleport plays out on an actual conference call when the app’s beta release goes live in April on Windows Mobile phones, and if the pricing will appeal more to consumers or small businesses. In the meantime, anyone can pre-register for the iVisit Teleport private beta or iVisit desktop for Windows and
Mac.

According to a blog called Joeygadget, “The key things to look for when buying a new Xbox 360 with the Jasper chipset is a manufacturing date (MFR) as early as 2008-08-06, Lot 8031 and up, and Team CSON.”

For its part, Microsoft wouldn’t say whether any Jasper Xboxes were on the market yet. “We are constantly updating internal components on our consoles,” the company told CNET News, “and therefore will not comment on details of specific components or manufacturing processes.”

For
Xbox 360 users, the so-called red ring of death is a worst-case scenario that can cause nightmares about total system failure and the inability to play any more Halo 3.

All along, the problem has been blamed on the Xbox’s original motherboard, a poorly designed piece of electronics that in many cases simply wasn’t up to the rigors that users put the machine through. But there had been indications that help was on the way in the form of an all-new motherboard, at once smaller, more efficient, less likely to overheat and less expensive, known as “Jasper.”

And this is important since, with Microsoft’s recent price reductions for the Xbox–the “Arcade” version of the console is now available for $199–it is likely that there will be large numbers of new buyers, especially this holiday season. Unless, that is, the economic situation holds buyers back.

Either way, it sounds like the era of the red ring of death, at least for new buyers, could well be drawing to a close.

Microsoft has attempted to handle the problems–and last year extended the warranty for the machine, leading some to feel that, at the very least, they would be covered if they got the three red rings around their console’s power button that indicate total hardware crash.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Actually, Takahashi poses the question of whether Xbox fans will go for the new machines. But I’m not sure why anyone would rather not have an Xbox with the new motherboard instead of one that could blow up–not literally, of course–at any time.

Update (12:57 p.m.): The story now reflects Microsoft’s response to a request for comment.

My question is, will the Xboxes with the new motherboard have a smaller power supply than the ugly behemoth that came with the original machine?

Since the introduction of the console, in late 2005, some users have suffered through a well-documented series of quality control problems and some have endured system failures on machine after machine after machine.

Another site, the Xbox 360 DVD Drive Database, reports there is no “substantial evidence that it’s out yet.”

The ‘red ring of death’ is the last thing any Xbox 360 user wants to see, as it indicates massive system failure.

Now, according to Xbox expert Dean Takahashi at Venture Beat, Jasper-infused Xboxes are finally being spotted out there in the wilds of the marketplace. And presumably, fans of the platform are singing hosannas at the prospect that maybe, finally, some of their brethren might be able to boot up Gears of War without fear of doom.

To be sure, those whose original model Xboxes haven’t crashed don’t really have a choice, and I don’t see hordes of owners of the console rushing out to buy a new one. But if you’ve been holding off on buying one, and find that you have a choice, what would hold you back?

The company’s pitch for the mobile computing and embedded market is just that–that its x86-based SoCs will be able to take advantage of a host of existing software and that developers will be able to more easily create software for those devices using familiar tools. The EP80579 family is based on a Pentium M design, the forerunner to the Core Duo chips.

Intel’s first system-on-a-chip designed around the x86 instruction set is ready for the world.

Intel has made so-called SoCs before during its days with the XScale architecture, but after ditching that division in 2006 it reorganized its embedded and mobile efforts around the Atom processor, a low-power chip that can run all the same software as a regular Core 2 Duo chip.

Later this year, Intel plans to introduce Canmore for home entertainment boxes, and sometime late next year or early in 2010 it intends to release Moorestown, an SoC that might allow the company to break into the smartphone market. The Atom processor out in the market right now isn’t a true SoC because it doesn’t have all the components like a memory controller, graphics system, and other important hardware units integrated into the chip.

The company is planning to announce the catchily-titled EP80579 chips Thursday for its customers building storage and networking equipment. The chips themselves aren’t the most exciting products Intel has ever released, but they are the first step in the company’s new strategy for making small power-efficient products that have all the components you need on a single chip.

The outcry against Comcast has been so strong, that the company said it would work with peer-to-peer companies BitTorrent and Pando Networks to find new ways to manage its traffic. And in March, it said that it would move to a protocol agnostic network management solution by the end of the year. And in June it began testing a network management system that will slow down during times of congestion for heavy bandwidth users regardless of the application they are using.

“Although we’re competitors with Comcast, this understanding helps our two companies work together to balance the needs of network management with consumers’ ability to freely access the services, applications and content of their choice,” Louis Mamakos, Vonage Chief Technology Officer, said in a statement.

Last year, Comcast was discovered slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. At first the company denied it was filtering traffic. Then it admitted it had slowed down some types of traffic to manage congestion on its network. Net Neutrality proponents and consumer advocates were outraged and feared Comcast’s actions were attempts to control content flowing over its network.

The Comcast/Vonage alliance follows other similar announcements made with other Internet companies, as the cable operator tries to convince customers that it’s not looking to kill competitive services that run over its network.

“This collaboration with Vonage, and our outreach to many key participants in the Internet community, demonstrate that we are committed to provide network management solutions that benefit consumers and competition” Tony Werner, Comcast Chief Technology Officer, said in a statement.

Talk about an odd couple. Cable giant Comcast said Wednesday that it will work with Vonage to help ensure Vonage’s Internet phone service works well over its broadband network.

But what makes the alliance with Vonage interesting is that Vonage is a direct competitor to Comcast. Vonage sells a voice over IP phone service that competes directly with Comcast’s own VoIP phone service.