Royalty-Based Venture Financing, Born in Boston, Could Shake Up. Gregory T. Huang10/7/09 Every once in a while, an investment model comes along that turns the innovation community on its head. The venture capital industry, still less than 50 years old, is one example. Now an emerging paradigm called royalty-based financing, applied to early-stage startups, may be another. The approach has its roots in the Boston area, and is starting to generate some serious buzz in the Northwest. If you’re a VC, angel investor, or entrepreneur, it definitely needs to be on your radar. The concept of royalty-based financing is simple.
Royalty-based financing is not new, but it’s only been in the past few months that investors around Seattle, including the seed-stage fund Founder’s Co-op, have been openly exploring the model. The idea actually dates back to mining companies getting financed to dig for oil, natural gas, and minerals, and government-funded economic development programs. Fox’s two previous funds have returned good profits. Gregory T. TIME Names Gadget of the Year: Droid. TIME has published its top 10 of everything 2009, and the winner in the gadgets category is a relative newcomer: the Droid. The Motorola phone on the Verizon network is a great device on the best network, TIME argues, making it the obvious choice despite being new to the market. TIME writes: Droid is a hefty beast, a metal behemoth without the gloss and finish of the iPhone, but you don't miss it.
The Droid's touchscreen is phenomenally sharp and vivid, it has an actual physical (not great, but good enough) keyboard, and, best of all, the Droid is on Verizon's best-of-breed 3G network. We tend to agree; the Droid is a fantastic phone and a poster child for Google's Android OS. Disclosure: Motorola and Verizon are Mashable sponsors. Audience. Music: An Instrument Inventor Hears Music Everywhere | Magazine. Photo: Zen Sekizawa When the earth quakes, most people run for the closest doorway. Trimpin heads to the studio. The German-born artist-inventor has been generating sounds inspired by oddball sources since he was a kid. So when a tremblor struck his adopted hometown of Seattle, Trimpin tuned in to the sonic chaos.
“I had tympani hanging on a catwalk that started to move back and forth, got out of control, and smashed to the floor,” he recalls. So Trimpin designed giant marimbas that translate tremors into ever-shifting compositions. A few of his more out-there pieces use technology to extract music from a motley collection of items.
For a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, Trimpin embedded violins with infrared sensors.
Tips for entrepreneurs. 5 reasons why other people will spread your personal brand - Hol. Pearltrees launches Twitter sync and reveals its social system. [France] Paris-based Pearltrees has been catching interest around the web the last few days not least because a gaggle influential Silicon Valley bloggers have descended on Paris for Le Web, but mainly because of its interesting model for visually mapping how people collect and share information on the Web. But today the startup opens the kimono on its full system. They will announce two new things today: Twitter synchronization (enabling a user to create a pearl automatically from Twitter and to tweet automatically from their new Pearltrees), Pearltrees search, Real time discussion and connection.
The other new aspect announced today on stage at Le Web is the Pearltrees Social System. But to explain first, here’s a new video they just released: Pearltrees is effectively visual social bookmarking and therefore has the potential to be more widely used than perhaps the traditional alternatives. You can track what you have looked at and watch what your friends are tracking. Pearltrees > blog. Square Payments System Gets a Free Hardware Boost | Technomix | Square--that plastic gizmo that plugs into your iPhone and reads magnetic stripes--may, or may not, revolutionize the credit-card system.
Inventor Jack Dorsey has, however, removed one big barrier to success: He wants to give it away. Dorsey was speaking to CNBC journalists at the Le Web conference in Paris when he plainly responded "We're going to try to give these away for free" in response to a question about pricing. It'll involve some business model juggling, of course, as Dorsey went on to note: "we're trying to get costs down significantly. " Considering that the hardware must consist at least of the plastic housing, the magnetic reader, and some basic electronics to amplify the reader signal and send it in to the iPhone--bits that are all cheap--it should be possible for Dorsey to achieve his goal. The point of this move is to make the whole thing more attractive to potential users by lowering the barriers to adopting it as their main electronic payments system. [Via Venturebeat]
Copenhagen Update: European Countries Agree to Construct Offshor. Whether a binding climate change agreement will be reached at this week's UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is still up in the air, but at least some progress has been made in the realm of renewable energy. Nine European countries--Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Ireland--signed the "North Seas' Countries Offshore Grid Initiative," a plan to create an offshore wind power supergrid in the North and North West seas. The plan means that offshore wind parks in various countries could all be linked--so wind power from Ireland could be used in Germany, for example. According to a press release from Ireland's Department of Communications, the plan will allow Irish wind farms to "connect directly to Europe, not only securing our energy supply but allowing us to sell the electricity produced on a wider market.
" The same holds for all countries involved in the deal. Plenty of details have yet to be worked out. [Via Green Inc] It’s Privacy Day at Facebook.