TiVo on Wednesday introduced a set-top box that the company says makes it easier to access cable, movies, online video, and music through one remote control. While an Internet-enabled digital video recorder is not new, TiVo Premiere is an advancement over other set-top boxes in the way it organizes content, according to the company. The product’s search tool, for example, can find programming and movies on cable TV, as well as video for rent or buy on Netflix, Amazon, or Blockbuster.
Google, PayPal, Equifax, VeriSign, Verizon, CA, and Booz Allen Hamilton on Wednesday at the RSA Conference announced that they have formed a non-profit organization to oversee the exchange of online identity credentials on public and private sector Web sites. The organization, The Open Identity Exchange (OIX), will serve as a trust framework provider. A trust framework is a certification program that allows organizations and individuals to exchange digital credentials and to trust the identity, security, and privacy assertions associated with those credentials.
Much the way Kiva matches investors with entrepreneurs in the developing world, so Grow VC brings a crowdfunding platform to mobile and web startups around the globe. Launched earlier this month, Grow VC aims to bring the first truly transparent, global, community-based approach to early-stage funding. Focusing on startup funding needs up to USD 1 million, Grow VC collects membership fees from its participants and pools 75 percent of them into a community fund. That fund then gets invested into promising member startups. Grow VC manages these investments, but members can control how their portion of the fund should be allocated, allowing them to focus on the startups they feel have the most potential. Grow VC users can follow each other in Twitter-like fashion, while reputation statistics reflect their track records. When a startup fails, the community fund covers its own losses. But when one does well, 75 percent of the returns are paid as commissions to top-ranked members.
(tags: crowdsourcing vc Entrepreneurship)
Bill Gross was famous during the Internet boom as the founder of Idealab, an “incubator” that hatched more than 75 companies. His best-known investment was GoTo.com, which created an online marketplace where advertisers bid for primacy in the results of Web searches–the innovation, now called “keyword advertising,” that made Google wildly rich (with the all-important tweak that sponsored and algorithmically derived results should be clearly separated). GoTo.com (which became Overture Services) was sold to Yahoo for $1.6 billion in 2003.
(tags: vc Entrepreneurship idealab!)
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