This year alone, the Dollar dropped 20% against the Shekel, causing startups to run out of money quicker than what they expected. In the article “Start-ups stuck in winter doldrums“, Globes interviews Erez Shachar, a managing partner at Evergreen Venture Partners, and touches on the influence that the weakening of the dollar (hence the strengthening of the Shekel) has on Israeli startups.

Here’s a recap of the situation:

* Israeli companies raise money in Dollars, but pay operating expenses in Shekels.
* Effectively, their burn rate is higher the weaker the Dollar gets.
* Salaries, estimated at 70% of the startup’s operating expenses, are the biggest cash spender.
* As a result, the quickly disappearing cash reservoirs that startup companies relied upon, force the startups to initiate financing rounds again sooner than expected.
* Venture capitalists and company managers already realize that an exchange rate of NIS 3.70/$ can quickly become NIS 3.40/$, and are preparing accordingly.

In his comments, Erez Shachar says that the problem is acute with Evergreen’s portfolio companies:

“This is why we’re encouraging companies to look at other markets, such as Europe and Asia as a kind of hedge against the exchange rate situation. It’s the right thing to do in any case. The market orientation of Israeli companies has always been the US, and the time has come to look at other markets. There’s no reason not to sell to and hook up with Asians and Europeans.”

It’s common sense to know that if the US falls into a recession, the value of the dollar will fall further. Michael Eisenberg, a partner at Benchmark Capital, gives a few measures to deal with the situation in his post “Open Letter to my CEOs and Israeli Entrepreneurs“. Worth a read.

David Hornik took a nice look at Venture Capital in China earlier this month. I came across it a few days ago and couldn't resist sharing it with my readers.

At 1500 or so words, David's piece is fairly hefty by Internet standards. But I enjoyed reading it. With a broad brush, he paints a picture of VC involvement in China - the attraction, the challenges, some of the major players. The piece came out of a recent trip he took to the People's Republic.




A short excerpt should whet your appetite:

To the mind of the Chinese investing community, the market dynamics described above well outweigh the risks of investing in the current environment. Huge markets with lots of business white space provides for numerous opportunities for economic gain. While American investors are busy debating the degree to which the US startup market is saturated, Chinese investors are having trouble keeping up with the inflow of opportunities. The opportunities in China seem unbounded, making foreign investors starry-eyed.

Give David's piece a look. I think you'll enjoy it... See full article.

Related Entries:

China Venture Capital Forums Influence Policy - 19 January 2006

Red Hot China Venture Capital Forum Strikes Reform Gong - 07 April 2006

China Venture Capital Research Institute Issues New China VC Yearbook - 13 June 2006

In Beijing: China Venture Capital Semi-Annual Forum - 09 July 2007

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you'd like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.

David Hornik took a nice look at Venture Capital in China earlier this month. I came across it a few days ago and couldn't resist sharing it with my readers.

At 1500 or so words, David's piece is fairly hefty by Internet standards. But I enjoyed reading it. With a broad brush, he paints a picture of VC involvement in China - the attraction, the challenges, some of the major players. The piece came out of a recent trip he took to the People's Republic.




A short excerpt should whet your appetite:

To the mind of the Chinese investing community, the market dynamics described above well outweigh the risks of investing in the current environment. Huge markets with lots of business white space provides for numerous opportunities for economic gain. While American investors are busy debating the degree to which the US startup market is saturated, Chinese investors are having trouble keeping up with the inflow of opportunities. The opportunities in China seem unbounded, making foreign investors starry-eyed.

Give David's piece a look. I think you'll enjoy it... See full article.

Related Entries:

China Venture Capital Forums Influence Policy - 19 January 2006

Red Hot China Venture Capital Forum Strikes Reform Gong - 07 April 2006

China Venture Capital Research Institute Issues New China VC Yearbook - 13 June 2006

In Beijing: China Venture Capital Semi-Annual Forum - 09 July 2007

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you'd like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.

• 12 Things I Learned By 42 That I Wish I Knew At 22
  By the time I was 22, I knew who I wanted to marry, was in the process of quitting college, going into debt, and thought that I would be a millionaire by the time I was 30 because I was so smart. If I could go back in time, here are a few items I would tell my 22 year old self.

Check out Lookery’s guaranteed payment program for Facebook and Bebo apps.

Lookery is currently taking submissions for a new publisher program that offers guaranteed payments of US$.125 CPM across 100% of a Facebook or Bebo application’s traffic. We’re seeking a billion pages a month for this new program, at a rate of 33 million a day, and are guaranteeing the rate through the end of April 2008.

[From Lookery » New Guaranteed Payment Program]

I am surprised this didn’t get broader attention, it sounds pretty cool. Basically, as I understand it what this does is enable the creation of semantic data within web pages, blogs posts, or any other kind of content by tagging it as you write it. In much the same way that hyperlinks establish a “relevancy relationship,” this will enable better search relevancy by tagging key words, such as people names.

Something else struck me about this initiative. Reuters has made a significant investment in what we would generally call semantic technologies over the years. Calais is kind of like Amazon Web Services, minus monetization, in that it opens up to external developers the same technologies that Reuters itself is using.

The Calais Web service enables publishers, bloggers and sites of all kinds to automatically metatag the people, places, facts and events in their content to increase its search relevance and accessibility on the Web. It also lets content consumers, such as search engines, news portals, bookmarking services and RSS readers, submit content for automatic semantic metatagging that is performed in well under a second.

[From Reuters Releases Open API for New Calais Web Service: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance]

Less than two months after a national survey of venture capitalists found a bullish outlook amid gathering economic turmoil, a new survey of Silicon Valley VCs released Tuesday has found their “confidence” plummeting sharply to a four-year low.

[From San Jose Mercury News - VCs suddenly worried about valley’s economic health]

I don’t know why anyone would look at venture capitalists and expect them to be leading indicators for a downturn. My surprise here is only eclipsed by a similar sense of disbelief about the notion that a survey of venture capitalists will reflect what they actually believe. This isn’t to suggest that VCs are dishonest, not at all but rather the fact that VC investors typically have a more optimistic view of the future than the broader population.

A potentially interesting legal drama is unfolding at Minerva Biotechnologies, a Waltham, Mass., startup developing biochips and exploring the biology of cancer stem cells. In a terse release, the company said it has terminated CEO Jim Czirr and launched a search for his successor. Minerva also said it has filed suit against Czirr in Massachusetts Superior Court.

Details are still rather sketchy at this point. I spoke briefly with Minerva founder Cynthia Bamdad, who declined to say much about Czirr until she’d consulted her lawyers. Bamdad said Czirr was named CEO in October 2005, but “basically stopped performing any work function back in July” of 2007. “That was the reason for the recent board action.”

So far, I’ve been unable to track down Czirr for comment.

Czirr, described in this Boston Business Journal article as a former center for the University of Michigan football team, is also apparently at odds with his previous company, cancer-drug developer Pro Pharmaceuticals. Czirr stepped down as board member and executive at Pro Pharma in 2003, but still holds roughly 15 percent of the company’s outstanding shares. Czirr has been publicly critical of Pro Pharma’s financial management.

Bamdad is a fascinating personality in her own right. As this 2004 Technology Review piece explains, Bamdad began her biotech career at age 36 as an artist and single mother of five with no higher degrees or scientific background. Newly divorced, she sold her Ferrari, earned an undergraduate physics degree in three years and a Harvard biophysics doctorate in five, produced a marketable biosensor from her academic work, took it to a company that was shortly acquired by Motorola, and went on to found Minerva in 1999.

Her company started life as a developer of nanoparticle-based biochips, but more recently has pushed into stem-cell science. Bamdad said Minerva scientists, in conjunction with academic researchers at UC Santa Barbara, are beginning to develop drug candidates that would attack cancer stem cells, which are primordial cells that may initiate and sustain tumors. The company has also recently taken strides toward understanding how embryonic stem cells grow and “differentiate” into the 200 or so cell types in the body. Minerva has 16 employees and has raised between $12 million and $13 million over its lifetime, all from angel investors, Bamdad told me.

I’ll likely follow up with another post when we know more about what’s actually going on with this controversy.

The very first Linux distribution that I have tried as a full install for a server was Slackware. I still have some preference to Slackware but given the improvements and features from Ubuntu made it difficult for me to tinker with Slackware again. However, this tutorial on how to install Slax on a USB thumbdrive will surely make it easier for me to try it again.



Unfortunately, this only works if you have a machine that allows booting off of your USB port! At least the Asus Eee PC can do that! Hehehe.

Image from Flickr:wfryer. See full article.

Related Entries:



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NewLink Genetics, an Ames, Iowa, biotech working on cancer vaccines and drugs that modulate the immune system, has so far raised about $17 million in a third funding round. The company aims to raise another $8 million in the round for a total of $25 million, according to Nicholas Vahanian, the company’s chief medical and operating officer.

In an unusual approach for a startup, NewLink is pursuing two different, but potentially related, approaches to treating cancer. The first is a therapeutic cancer vaccine designed to stimulate the immune system into attacking tumor cells, which the body’s defenses normally ignore. NewLink has identified a particular protein called a(1, 3)-Galactosyl (alpha-Gal, for short) that normally stimulates an extremely potent immune reaction.

By genetically engineering lines of cancer cells to produce that protein, the company’s scientists intend to make the cells highly “visible” to the immune system. The hope is that the body’s defenders will generate antibodies and other potent molecular weapons that will attack not only the engineered cells, but other cancer cells in the body. NewLink’s cancer vaccine is currently in mid-stage, phase II trials in lung and pancreatic cancer. Vahanian said the early data is “promising,” but declined to go into specifics until the current trials produce interim results, which may happen as soon as early next year.

The company’s second approach involves a small-molecule drug, 1MT, that inhibits an enzyme called indoleamine,-2,3-dioxygenase, or IDO. This enzyme normally down-regulates the immune system — technically, it degrades the amino acid tryptophan in the immune-system’s dendritic cells, setting off a chain of events that disarm certain of the body’s defensive components.

Inhibiting IDO should therefore improve immune response, making 1MT a potentially useful in combination with traditional chemotherapy drugs, which often have immunosuppressive side effects of their own. (Vahanian says the company’s researchers believe that chemo drugs are effective in part because they trigger immune responses.) NewLink is testing the drug as a single agent against a variety of tumors in an early-stage, phase I trial, which could complete enrollment by this fall.

Investors in the round included Iowa Capital Group, Ames Seed Capital, Chicagoland Investors, Midwest Oilseeds and NLG Advisors. NewLink has 150 employees and was founded in 1999. The company has also received a non-equity, forgiveable loan from Iowa’s Department of Economic Development, Vahanian said.