TechCrunch editor and founder Michael Arrington has left the popular tech blog to become a partner in a new venture capital firm called CrunchFund. As the proprietor of TechCrunch, Arrington has long been the blogger-turned-kingmaker in the startup ecosystem. With CrunchFund, he has now proclaimed himself king and is looking to build his kingdom. We will see if that is possible now that the influential blog he founded is no longer under his control.

Arrington's departure is indicative of the crumbling state of AOL, which bought TechCrunch last year. Arrington's departure will have a ripple effect felt throughout both the entrepreneur and media communities.

Silicon Valley's "Pig Pile"

CrunchFund has a lot of investors. Arrington's primary partner will be Patrick Gallagher of VantagePoint Ventures. AOL Ventures is said to be the primary backer, but Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Accel, Benchmark Capital and Andreesen Horowitz, Kevin Rose, Ron Conway and Yuri Milner are also invested.

That is a long list of VC firms and individuals that normally compete against each other. They are coming to pile on with Arrington because no one wants to be left on the outside of a popular venture that is getting a lot of press attention. Arrington as Iconoclast Venture Capitalist is good business.

For now.

Kara Swisher of AllThingsD calls it business as usual in Silicon Valley. With so many investors, no single person or firm has all that much money tied to the CrunchFund. Swisher talked to one unnamed investor who said, "It's not that much money, so who cares?"

Swisher says that CrunchFund is the classic Silicon Valley "pig pile." Everybody is getting in on it, Arrington is the popular and charismatic (erratic?) leader and the barrier to investment is low. Silicon Valley is a place where a company like Color, that offered nothing except a set of talented founders, got a $42 million investment. Giving Arrington $20 million to mine for the next billion-dollar valuation is almost a no-brainer in that environment. Whether he is still running TechCrunch or not.

Tech Blogging and Investing

To a certain extent, Arrington's philandering between investment and writing has given the tech blogging community a bit of a bad name. In the New York Times coverage of Arrington's new venture yesterday, reporter Claire Cain Miller stated:

"The $20 million CrunchFund is the latest example of Mr. Arrington's casting aside one of traditional journalism's cardinal rules - that reporters should avoid conflicts of interest by maintaining distance from the people, organizations and issues they cover - and raises questions about whether industry bloggers are journalists."

[Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is syndicated by the New York Times]

TechCrunch had been silent until earlier today, when writer Paul Carr posted a clarification of TechCrunch's relationship to the CrunchFund. The gist:

"To be absolutely clear about this: the CrunchFund is Mike and Tim's baby. It has nothing to do with anyone else at TechCrunch. The first time most staffers heard about the fund, and AOL's involvement in it, was when it was announced in the Times. Those of us who did have prior knowledge of the fund urged that it be renamed to avoid the appearance of conflict. In fairness to Mike, he took the concerns to heart and - I gather - discussed them at length with other parties in the fund, including Tim Armstrong. Ultimately, though, the name remained unchanged."

Arrington is a different matter because of the amount of power he held as the primary voice of TechCrunch. Edward Wasserman, the Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University told the New York Times; "If it's helping a group of investors make decisions or advancing one's own portfolio, you're not really in the journalism business. You're in the private enrichment business."

The fact that the Arrington has started the CrunchFund shows that he is in the "private enrichment business." Swisher takes umbrage to how Arrington has positioned himself as the editor of a large news operation while also being a backdoor arbiter of startups fortunes through the publication and now his venture fund.

"In fact, the creation of a $20 million investment kitty that Arrington has dubbed CrunchFund is simply the formalization of a long-standing arrangement that has already been going on since he founded his popular tech blog.

That is to say, in which the basic standards of journalism are first warped by calling it newfangled truth-telling and then endlessly corroded by using a wily and unusually aggressive combination of favors and threats to extract, from start-ups and VCs in need of press, both exclusive access and information."

The anonymity that is at the core of BlockChalk's feature set leaves the service open to abuse. As BlockChalk works with its new venture backers, it will be interesting to see if the service will stick to this approach or if BlockChalk will move to a more traditional model.

The service is currently most popular in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but it is not clear how many active users BlockChalk current has.

The New Frontier for Location-Based Networks: Your Neighborhood

As the company's founders note in today's announcement, BlockChalk wants to "help people connect with their neighbors and mobilize their local communities." A number of other ventures, including DeHood, have launched neighborhood-focused LBS apps recently. Most of these have a relatively clear business model (mostly focused on working with local businesses and providing coupons to users). BlockChalk doesn't have a clear business model yet.

Let me explain: Most of the time, when a startup goes after venture capital, they're still in the process of building a product and bringing it to market. They need things like servers, developers, marketing tools and sometimes office space. Do they need money per se? Or is capital an increasingly arbitrary and unnecessary step in building a tech startup?

We are all familiar with the idea of trading equity for funds through angel financing and venture capital; we're also familiar with the TechStars and Y Combinator programs that help to incubate and accelerate startups through minuscule amounts of capital and significant amounts of mentorship.

But most of us are less familiar with models such as Mike Trotzke's SproutBox or Marcus Whitney's Remarkable Wit. These firms provide services (and sometimes keeping-Ramen-on-the-table amounts of cash) to early-stage startups in exchange for equity. They provide development, marketing and other services that most tech startups need without delving into the complicated issues of valuation and funding rounds. These guys are focused on the absolute bottom line of technology, which has nothing to do with money: Making a great product and finding people to use it.

So, we're interested to know from our friends in startups who aren't taking the bootstrapping route, given the choice between pure capital or business-building services, which would you choose? Take the poll, and let us know the reason behind your decision in the comments. We'll be following up soon based on the results.

For the quarter ending this past June, we compared the findings of three research firms that reported on the money invested in Q2:

• July 21, MoneyTree (PricewaterhouseCoopers, with data from the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters): $3.7 billion, with 612 deals,
• July 18, VentureSource (DowJones): $5.27 billion, with 595 deals,
• July 14, ChubbyBrain (a New York City-based startup partnering with ReadWriteWeb): $5.329 billion, with 613 deals.

VentureSource and ChubbyBrain seem to agree on the top line number. But MoneyTree's number is what most people report, and that is about $1.5 billion different.

As the old saying goes, "A billion here, a billion there. Sooner or later it adds up."

Disclosure: Our VC Funding Report

ReadWriteWeb has an interest in this. We sell a report for $299 that has details on the 240 deals done this quarter in the Internet, mobile, and SaaS space (not clean tech or bio tech), and this is powered by data from ChubbyBrain. So we are biased. But it also means that we are engaged and have been looking at this fairly deeply.

Who Cares?

We also think that accuracy matters, and we are trying to figure whom accuracy matters to. We see three main types of participants in the industry:

1. VCs. They need accurate data for their own fund-raising. They have to be able to benchmark their own funds relative to the broader market.
2. Entrepreneurs. Data on what funding deals are being made, and why, helps them figure out how much to raise, when, and from which VC.
3. The startup "community." This is a catch-all for everyone else, who tend to align to either VCs or entrepreneurs. Journalists, the non-aligned fourth estate, want reliable data to key off interesting stories.

Why does this matter? The startup community matters to the health of the overall economy. As the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA, the trade association of VCs) likes to point out:

"Originally, venture-backed companies have created companies that accounted for 10.4 million jobs and over $2.3 trillion in revenue (based on 2006 data)."

So a headline like "VC Investments Falling Off Cliff in the US" really impacts a lot of people. That is the kind of headline that most journalists/bloggers wrote in April 2009, based on data reported by those trusted sources.

We wrote a really boring headline:

"VC Investment in Internet Deals Did Not Fall Off a Cliff."

That's a lousy headline for generating page views. It's a story about "the dog that did not bark."

The point is that headlines drive business behavior to wild excesses on both the down-cycle bust and the up-cycle boom.

Just good reliable data would help.

Innovation Is Global, But It Keys Off US Data

At ReadWriteWeb, we love to track innovation from far-flung corners of the world, and we see the globalization of innovation as a critical trend.

So we want to be able to report on financing trends for early-stage Web technology startups across Europe and Asia, in addition to the US. And we expect any research process to be able to scale to that challenge.

But the reality today is that, globally, entrepreneurs and VCs key off US data. If they were to key off bad data, that would matter to everyone.

Why This Matters

Driving with one's eyes in the rear-view mirror is dangerous. We take action based on what authoritative sources tell us is happening today, and we base our assumptions on what that means will happen next and plan accordingly.

In reality, these sources tell us what has happened in the past, and they may not even tell us that accurately.

When we at ReadWriteWeb look at the macro picture, we favor a contrarian view simply because the reality we see today is often not what the headlines trumpet. When the markets were in the late stage of a boom, we were sounding the warning signals.

When the markets were melting, we began to see surprising signs of life in the early-stage Web technology world we live in.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or an investor, knowing what the crowd is thinking -- and what the headlines are trumpeting -- is valuable. Even more valuable are the underlying facts and trends that may be missing from those headlines. In the disconnect between the two often lies a lot of opportunity.

We hope to ignite a debate that leads to greater accuracy and transparency of these numbers.

Examples of Akibot in Use

To understand how Akibot works, imagine the following scenario: you post a message that reads "There will be a meeting next Wednesday morning at 1 PM regarding the new development project." In other enterprise Twitter clones like Yammer and Present.ly, only those others reading the stream of posts would see the message and would then be able to act on it, if need be. In Akibot, however, the system itself would understand the message and would create an appointment on the team calendar for you. It could even send you and your colleagues a reminder in the form of a text message or email when the meeting time drew near.

Another example goes like this: say a colleague posts a message stating "here is the latest Penske file http://xxxxxxxxx," - pointing to the resource hosted on the company's intranet. A week later, another user could ask "Does anyone know where the latest Penske file is?", and Akibot could then respond with a message pointing to the location previously posted.

Akibot can also function as a time-tracking tool. All you would have to do is post a message letting everyone know when you're beginning to work on a particular project and then post another when you're done.

The microblogging service could even update your CRM system with information about customers and your interactions with them. Again, all you'd have to do is post the information to Akibot.

How Does Akibot Work?

In order for Akibot to do what it does, it seeks out various keywords in a post, but not using simple search or in a "brute force" sort of way. Instead, it looks at the sentence structure as a whole to determine meaning. Akibot's main module is called the "preprocessor" which uses common elements of natural language processing (NLP) combined with two proprietary modules: a "contextual analyzer" and a "context>action" dictionary. The contextual analyzer take the results from the NLP module and finds the context using noun/pronoun/verb structures and then the "context>action" dictionary stores the relevant data and takes action on the item (e.g. it sends a reminder, updates your business software, etc.)

Because Akibot understands natural language - that is, the way people naturally speak - end users posting their messages don't have to use any special syntax in order for Akibot to understand them. However, if you do end up posting something Akibot doesn't understand, it will just ask you to explain and then learns from that explanation so it never has to ask again.

Even Simpler Than Twitter?

There are a few things that Akibot does differently than Twitter. For example, there is no "follow" functionality. By default, everyone follows everyone else, but can "opt-out" from following certain other users if they wish. Since Akibot is meant to be used within a single company, this makes sense. The system is also designed to be uncomplicated so there are no groups, no tabs, no browse functionality, and no search.

Like Twitter, though, Akibot supports private messages, but no special syntax is required here, either. To create one of these types of updates, a user simply clicks on "private" when posting.

Still in Private Beta

The company is still brand-new and there are no exact launch dates yet regarding when it will become publicly available. A lot will depend on the feedback provided by the initial crop of beta testers. Also, if Akibot was to receive funding (they have none now), development could proceed at a faster pace, notes Marcel.

At the moment, the company is considering offering Akibot for free for up to three users and then any additional users would cost $1/per user per month.

If your company wants to join the private beta, you can sign up to be considered on Akibot's homepage under the "Signup" option.

When the Q1 numbers came out, ReadWriteWeb did not share the general doom and gloom in the headlines. We reported the "dog did not bark" story when we said that VC Investment in Internet Deals Did Not Fall Off a Cliff. We did that because the headlines did not match what we heard from entrepreneurs and investors and what we saw from our own limited online research. We had been tracking a small segment of the market -- early-stage Web technology investments -- since the market meltdown in October 2008. In April, we started to work with ChubbyBrain so that we could have more confidence in the quality of the research, and we started to see healthy signs in April and May. It was clear that Q2 was going to look good. But it was critical that we were able to trust the numbers. The startup community makes decisions based on these numbers. The quality of the data matters.

What Is Excluded

The numbers would look a lot bigger if ChubbyBrain had included:

• Global Deals. This is only US deals
• Debt. This is only equity
• Private equity (which usually means leverage buyout). This is only VC deals.
• Angel investment (unless they invested with a VC Fund). This is only VC deals.
• PIPE deals (Private Equity Investment in Public Equity). This is only private companies.

We would have liked to include more angel and global deals. They matter to early-stage innovation, and that is what matters to entrepreneurs. But that would not have dramatically changed the numbers. But if you started adding debt and public companies, the numbers would become meaningless: these deals tend to be way bigger than VC deals. One public or leverage buyout deal would totally change the numbers.

Here are two other things we took care to report on accurately:

• For follow-on investments, we only recorded the portion of the investment made in the quarter, not the total of the announced round.
• The amount that actually closed, not the intended size of the round.

Most importantly, ChubbyBrain only includes deals that were verifiable via either (A) regulatory filings or (B) confirmation from firm or investor or (C) press release.

This process might miss some deals. So the total number maybe bigger than $5.3 billion. But we are confident that what ChubbyBrain has found is accurate.

Trends

Next week, we will be doing a deep dive into the segment that matters to the ReadWriteWeb community: Internet and mobile deals.

The quick takeaway from this early look is that money is available for early-stage startups. Despite conventional wisdom that venture firms would invest only to fortify existing portfolio companies, the quarter saw healthy levels of early-stage investment in seed and Series A rounds, accounting for 35% of the number of deals. This confirms the anecdotal evidence we get from talking to investors and entrepreneurs.

We do not see this as a sign that the general economy is recovering. It is too early to call that. But we do see this is very hopeful news for entrepreneurs. And what is good for entrepreneurs tends to be good for the general economy at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Specific areas of interest for IBM investment include analytics, clean tech, cloud computing, smart grids, electronic health care, and green data centers. The company's expansion into Vietnam is a response to what they see as accelerated IT growth in that area.

"The country's IT sector is growing over 20 percent annually, fueled by massive Internet expansion and a younger population that's driving consumer demand for infrastructure improvements."

The first IBM Innovation Center in Vietnam is the sixth such site to open since 2007 and the forty-third in the past decade. The center will be based in Ho Chi Minh City and will focus on the development and marketing of new tech across banking, telecom, energy, and government industries. Here, local developers and others will find training and access to open standards-based tech.

The company will also be collaborating with local VCs to support the development of emerging technology products. Similar partnerships now account for nearly a third of IBM's revenue and have doubled since 2008, when IBM partnered with around 8,500 companies.

IBM is also turning its attention and earmarking funds to develop relationships with the University of Technology in Ho Chi Minh City and the College of Technology in Hanoi. Their goal is to create a curriculum in cloud computing at the former institution and service sciences at the latter. Computing labs and new departments will be created as a result.

IBM is also debuting the first local-language version of developerWorks, its online resource and social network for developers.

As for IBM's strategy of investment in growth sectors outside the U.S. and Western Europe, Freeman wrote, "The strategy is paying off.

"For example, in Brazil, more than half of the country's estimated 2,000 independent software vendors (ISVs) have become IBM partners. In China, IBM continues to recruit partners at record rates, with more than 11,000 registered so far this year. In India, IBM has over 2,500 business partners across 200 cities, ranging from small resellers to global systems integrators and ISVs - business partners now drive 35 percent of revenue for IBM in India."

Certainly, this smacks of global domination; after all, is not IBM the Starbucks of IT? The company's unrelenting expansion in areas that can least refuse its injections of tech and capital has been making headlines for years. It likely wouldn't hurt IBM to create dependent tech ecosystems in these areas, and we cannot overlook the fact that IT labor is cheaper in many of these parts of the world.

Some have also begun to question IBM's role in South Africa, an area that Freeman specifically mentioned as a growth area ripe for strong investments. The company has a rough history there; a U.S. federal court recently ruled that IBM can be held responsible for enabling apartheid by providing regime leaders with IT infrastructure used to disenfranchise and harm black citizens.

When IBM declared its lack of responsibility for how clients would use its products, the judge countered, "That level of willful blindness in the face of crimes in violation of the law of nations cannot defeat an otherwise clear showing of knowledge that the assistance IBM provided would directly and substantially support apartheid."

IBM is not UNICEF. Historically, like almost any multinational corporation, they have followed profit amorally, whether the revenue streams led to their helping oppress or enlighten the citizens of any geographical area. These partnerships in developing areas are highly profitable for the company. And let us not imagine that their desire to invest in green tech or healthcare-related tech comes from any kind of altruism: These are hot, bankable areas right now.

Still, sometimes capitalism does work for the best for all parties involved. Let's hope that Vietnamese techies benefit as much from IBM's expansion into their country as the company itself doubtless will.

Much like Remarkable Wit, a venture technology firm we recently covered, SproutBox focuses on product development and essential business services, investing talent in startup companies in exchange for equity.

At the BIGOmaha conference this morning, founders Trotzke and Wisler sat down to talk about the SproutBox approach and what they think will make a good startup project.

Starting today and until August 8, SproutBox will accept applications from entrepreneurs. Interested entrepreneurs and start-ups can apply online at SproutBox.com.

As a means of proving the model, SproutBox has already completed work on two projects. The team developed DecideAlready, a web-based decision-making tool, and CheddarGetter, an easy-to-use online subscription management and billing tool which is currently accepting requests to join its private beta.

I've enjoyed using Kwiry to text myself reminders and then subscribe to the RSS feed of items I sent in my Netvibes dashboard. When the service first launched it sent you an email with search results for the text of reminders you sent yourself by SMS. You could add movies to your Netflix queue using Kwiry and SMS. Other people did all kinds of things with it, like use it to turn off their computers remotely. In the end, it looks like only a few thousand people probably used the service regularly at all.

$1 million isn't that much for a software startup, and perhaps working with SMS made the money go even faster, but poof there they go awfully quick!

It's great that the company is offering .csv downloads of customer data but that's only the case for the next 10 days. We hope anyone who needs it will come and get it within that time frame.

The lesson here could be that you could build a full-featured service, get some money from respected investors and still see your whole endeavor go up in smoke one year later. None of the reminder services online are catching on like the huge breakout hit born from SMS, Twitter, is. Twitter serves a universal need that's more fun than remembering obligations (communicating with people) and it's dead simple - all the bells, whistles and do-dahs are built by 3rd parties and are fully opt-in, not at all confusing.

It's too bad about Kwiry, though. We wish the team there well in their next endeavors.

The new Zoho Chat 2.0 is no dumbed-down client. It offers most of the features that you have come to expect from your IM desktop applications. You can send files, record your chat history, customize your theme, and more - just like regular IM apps allow. It does a few cool tricks, too. For example, you can type in a new event in the chat bar at the bottom of Zoho Calendar to create a new appointment on the fly. In Zoho Meeting, you can launch desktop sharing with others from within the IM application. (Windows only for now.)

The chat tool is also able to send you notifications from activities that take place within Zoho itself, including document sharing notifications, unread chat messages and more - definitely a handy feature. Future releases for chat include plans to introduce even more IM networks, most notably Skype.

This release represents a major upgrade of the chat application in Zoho. Current Zoho users can try Chat 2.0 here as of today: chat.zoho.com.

In the announcement, Biz Stone says that Twitter is now in a position to "begin building revenue-generating products." Twitter also expects to grow its team in the next year.

Web vs. API

One interesting (though not unexpected) statistic in the funding announcement is that Twitter now gets almost twice as much traffic from its API than from the web. That number will surely drive how Twitter plans to monetize its service. If only a few people come to Twitter's web site, then just putting advertising on the site will not drive enough income to Twitter to keep the service afloat in the long run.

Twitter also announced that it grew 900% in the last year.

1. The average deal size is increasing. The average went from $2.12 million in November to $4.11 million in December to $6.06 million in January.
2. California still rules, but global investment is happening. In the US, venture capital is still dominated by Silicon Valley, but we are seeing a few more global deals, specifically in the UK, Canada, and English-speaking India.
3. Total diversity was apparent, without any market-segment bias. This is a good sign that ventures are being evaluated on the fundamentals rather than on what's hot.

Which Ventures Received Money?

December:

• NetShelter
• dotblu
• InnerRewards
• KZOInnovations
• smartfundit
• Appcelerator
• Wordstream

January:

• HubDub
• Sittercity
• Appnomic
• CloudSwitch
• GoInternetMedia

Which VCs Wired the Money?

December:

• Rho Canada
• GrowthWorks Canadian Fund
• JLA Ventures.
• DE Shaw, Maple Investments
• Valhalla Partners
• Baytech Venture Capital
• Storm Ventures
• Sigma Partners

January:

• Pentech Ventures
• Apex Venture Partners
• Norwest Venture Partners
• Atlas Ventures
• Matrix Partners
• Kennet Partners

At the same time, however, the total number of video streams per users dropped from 19.4 to 17.4, which is slightly puzzling. QuickPlay attributes this to the growth in adoption of live mobile TV, which generates fewer streams, but longer views.

QuickPlay provides video services to a large number of mobile carriers in the U.S. and Canada, including AT&T, Alltel, Bell Mobility, Aliant, Rogers Wireless, Telus, and Sprint.

News, Music Videos, and Trailers

In terms of content, the most popular genres for live TV streaming were news, music videos, and weather. For regular video streaming, music videos and movie trailers were the most popular genres. The most popular categories for mobile downloading were music, sports, and comedy.

Will this Momentum Continue in 2009?

One of the reasons for this increase might be the rising interest in smartphones, which make accessing video content a lot easier. At the same time, though, it remains to be seen if consumers will continue to be willing to pay for extra mobile video services in the current economic climate.

By the Numbers

Here are the exact numbers from QuickPlay:

Video Streams

• Total live TV and video streams viewed grew 118% from Q3 to Q4 2008, compared with a 27% increase from Q2 to Q3
• Total streams per user dropped slightly to 17.4 in Q4 from 19.3 in Q3
• Average stream duration in Q4 2008 was slightly longer at two minutes and 48 seconds when compared to two minutes and 47 seconds in Q3

Video Downloads

• Average download per user experienced its best quarter of 2008 with an average of 6 per user vs. 4.1 per user in Q3
• Total video downloads showed an increase of 73% from Q3 to Q4 vs. 87% from Q2 to Q3

Image credit: Flickr user Ville.fi

Founders Fund has invested in some of the most high profile startups in the market, including Facebook and Slide.com. We covered the move in depth over on Jobwire, our site reporting on new hires in tech.

However, we've also lowered our cut-off to $0.5 million. Tougher times lead to smaller rounds, which is not necessarily a bad thing because tough times force you to do more with less money. This got our list up to nine deals in total for November.

Below, we have linked each company's name to its entry in the Trade Vibes-powered ReadWriteWeb Company Index (or to the company site if there is no entry). You can use this as a starting point for research and comparison, referring to the venture's own site when needed.

• Machinima
• CarWhale
• Maxplore
• Open Candy
• Zuberance
• Carbon Flow
• Casual Collective

Note: a commenter pointed out that in our original A-Team post we missed Siri, which raised $8.5 million in October, although we have written about them before.

So please tell us who we missed in November. We will correct it in December.

Which VCs Are Wiring The Cash?

We identify only the lead VC in the following list (assuming that the first one listed in the PR material is the lead). We aim to make this more in-depth next month by showing all of the VCs that participated.

• Pond Venture Partners
• MK Capital
• Sierra Ventures
• Emergence Capital Partners
• Bessemer Venture Partners: check out its Anti-Portfolio.
• Clean Pacific Ventures
• Lightspeed Venture Partners: it has one of the best blogs in the venture business.

Emergence Capital Partners did two Series A deals in November (Maxplore and Zuberance). That is pretty cool.

If you want to talk to the firm, here are the basics:

Investment categories:

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
• Consumer services
• Digital and social media
• Information services
• Business services
• Cloud computing

Investment criteria:

• Early and growth stage
• Compelling customer value proposition
• Market leadership potential
• Experienced and passionate management team
• $1 to $10 million initial investment
• US preferred

Emergence is riding the enterprise SaaS wave. Most VCs missed that wave, as we found when we surveyed gritty entrepreneurs. That sector was out of favor at the time, and most ventures simply did not get VC funding then.

Where Are Ventures Getting Funded?

It looks like California is still doing the dreaming, with six out of the eight ventures residing there. The other two are from outside the USA: one from England and the other from India.

Which Sectors Are Getting Funded?

The biggest theme was video, specifically games, but there were also two that had a green focus.

Here's hoping that December will be an even better month.