ReadWriteWeb

Having enough money is crucial for the success of a startup, and insufficient funding is one of the top reasons why new businesses fail. Too often entrepreneurs underestimate the amount of money they'll need - not just to get started but to keep running. And although you want to be able to raise the money you need, it's not always practical or possible or even advisable to seek venture capitalist funding right away.

Real-time local newswire service Fwix has announced that they are opening their API to all interested developers. Although the startup, which launched just over a year ago, has worked on applications with partners in the past, an open API will allow more bloggers and site owners the ability to deliver local news content to users.

The company has also announced a $2.75 million Series A round of funding from BlueRun Ventures.

Today is the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, which triggered the financial meltdown. That was when ReadWriteWeb started tracking Series A deals in Web technology. Thanks to our partner ChubbyBrain, we can now do this reliably and easily. Executive summary for August: down from July, with seed deals very weak. Analysis: decadent Europeans are not the only ones who take holidays in August. Read on for details.

We have been tracking Series A deals in Web technology since the market mayhem in October 2008, and since May we have been working with ChubbyBrain, which tracks this kind of data full-time. Early-stage funding is important for the whole economy, so we decided to report every month, not waiting for quarterly data. The executive summary for July: steady progress and a lot of deals in the Boston area. Read on for details.

In our latest VC interview, we spoke with three of the four partners of XG Ventures: David Lee, Greg Lee, and Andrea Zurek (the other partner, Pietro Dova, could not make the call).

Yes, the G in "XG" stands for Google. The partners were early hires for strategic roles at Google -- or, as one of them put it, they were on the "rocketship." If you are looking for early-stage funding (seed to Series A) for an Internet venture (in video, social media, mobile, real-time, etc.), and you are based in Silicon Valley, you may want to get to know them. This interview is a good start.

We have been tracking Series A deals in Web technology since the market mayhem in October 2008. Last month, we started researching this with our new partner, ChubbyBrain, which tracks this kind of data full-time. Launched in February 2009, ChubbyBrain is a New York City-based information services provider that democratizes startup and investor information. Early-stage investing is so important for the innovation economy, and the data we were seeing was either incomplete, only available quarterly, or presented with a negative slant. That is why we are presenting this data every month.

With this interview, we are again branching out. Naval Ravikant is not a traditional VC. He is an angel investor, a serial entrepreneur, and he writes the very entertaining and informative Venture Hacks blog, a must-read for entrepreneurs. Listen to the MP3 below if you want to learn more about how to get viral growth, how to think about native revenue models for social media, and why hackers are making serious money with virtual currencies.

Do you remember the headlines about VC investment "falling off cliff" after some data was reported by NVCA in early April? We took a contrarian view, saying the trend was down, but challenging the doom and gloom that was jumping from the headlines. This was based on our own online research and some anecdotal data from interviews. Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures also dug a bit deeper. The more we looked into this, the more we saw that the underlying data was not as authoritative as one might imagine. Many people popped up in the comments offering additional data. One was a New York City-based startup research firm (founded as recently as February 2009) called ChubbyBrain (great name!), which tracks this kind of data for a living. So this month, we relied on ChubbyBrain to help us dig deeper and get you the facts.

In the last two months, we have interviewed six VCs. In each case, we asked the same question: "How is early-stage financing doing during this downturn compared to the last one in 2001/2002?"

In this post, we consolidate all the responses, to see if a consensus among VCs emerged. But we also dig a bit deeper. We have been tracking Series A deals since the global financial crisis started. There is some concern that VCs are not walking the walk, that they say all the right things about investing through a downturn, but they may not actually do those things. In this post, we shine a light on that question.

This data comes from the MoneyTree™ Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data provided by Thomson Reuters. Their press release sounds kind of gloomy: