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Silicon Valley angel investor Mike Maples Jr., known for his early investments in Digg and Twitter, announced recently that his firm Maples Investments has rebranded as FLOODGATE in an effort to fulfill his experiment of becoming a "super angel" firm. The term "super angel" mostly speaks for itself: instead of carefully picking a few select companies to invest in each year, super angels broadly place more money in a larger number of early-stage startups.

Over the last few months, as data has been released by the National Venture Capital Association, we have spoken about how the venture capital industry struggled in 2009. Though things appear to be returning to normal, 2009 was still a tough year for both VC investments and fund raising. Investor Seth Levine offered his opinion Monday on where he thinks the industry is headed and raised some interesting points on how VC firms will be funded in the future - an issue which could impact the way startups get funding.

While the government in Washington slowly inches their way toward a bill to create jobs for Americans, tech corporations and venture capital firms across the nation are teaming up in a private sector effort to create more companies and more jobs in the tech space. Led by Intel, the Invest in America Alliance, consisting of 17 companies and 24 VC firms, announced Tuesday that it has pledged to provide $3.5 billion in tech startup funding and jobs for over 10,000 new grads in the next two years.

With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort.

In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston - one of the very first venture capital firms.
In 1957, the ARDC invested $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation, a company founded by two former Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers working on transistor-based computing. The ARDC was later able to turn around and sell their investment for $450 million, quite possibly the best return on an investment ever at that point.

The first quarter of 2010 could see a higher number of investments by venture capital firms than the fourth quarter of 2009, according to figures from new reports by the National Venture Capital Association and information and data services company ChubbyBrain.

Data from a report relased by the NVCA yesterday shows that the fourth quarter of 2009 saw a growth of $1.7 billion in venture funds over the previous quarter, similar to numbers seen from Q4 2008 to Q1 2009. Data released today by ChubbyBrain shows that following the earlier growth in venture funds, Q2 2009 saw a $1.4 billion increase in VC investments, a trend that could mean big bucks for startups in the first quarter of 2010.

Don't you hate it when your friends set you up and all they can say about your blind date is that he's / she's "nice". Your mind races. Is he / she a total sea donkey? A buffoon? Should you bring the pepper spray?

Imagine what venture capitalists think when their brother-in-law invites them down to the Starbucks to meet yet another friend / entrepreneur.

Hong Kong-based Grow VC just launched a midnight beta to help triage the dealmaking system. The company is a dating-style site where investors and early-stage companies meet and marry online. Grow aims to be the premier social network for early stage investments" between $10,000 to $1 million dollars USD, and for most investment groups that's a fairly cheap date.

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Wild Apricot is a young technology company out of Toronto, Canada. We provide Software-as-as-Service for associations, clubs, and non-profit organizations. This is our story of an investment round that fell through due to economic conditions.

Jeff Bezos clearly thinks there is a future in casual gaming. Just this May, he invested $3 million in Kongregate. Today, Bezos invested an undisclosed amount in the Social Gaming Network (SGN), which develops games like Jetman and WarBook for social platforms such as Bebo and Facebook.

This investment from Bezos comes just a few months after SGN raised a $15 million Series A round led by Greylock Partners and the Founders Fund.

What sort of funding opportunities exist in the budding Semantic Web space? What are VCs looking for and how much are they will to invest? That was the topic of a panel at the SemTech 2008 Conference that just concluded in San Jose. The panel featured Stephen Hall from Vulcan Capital, Eghosa Omoigui from Intel Capital and Amanda Reed from Palomar Ventures. This post is based on notes from that panel.

Radar Networks, the home of the eagerly awaited semantic web app Twine, will announce on Monday that it's closed another round of funding, including a major investment from the fund lead by Ross Levinsohn, the man who bought MySpace while at Fox.

Super-sleuth Dan Primack over at PE Hub dug up the early news about the investment and Chris Morrison at Venture Beat says Velocity Interactive Group and a number of other investors are putting in money in the $15 to $20 million range.