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The first quarter of 2009 wasn’t just a dry one for venture-backed exits, very little money went into the coffers of VC funds as well. According to data released today by the National Venture Capital Association, only 40 funds raised new money during the quarter, down from 71 the year before (1Q08) and 47 the previous quarter (4Q08). Out of the 40 funds, only three were brand new.

In dollar terms, the total raised was $4.3 billion, down 39 percent from the year before (1Q08), but up 23 percent from the fourth quarter when it dipped to a low of $3.5 billion. At least the sequential comparisons are up. The largest capital raising was for August Capital’s $650 million fund. Bain Capital raised a $475 million fund, and Charles River Ventures raised a new $320 million fund.

Here are the stats (Source Thomson Reuters/ NCVA):

Number of U.S. Venture Funds Raising New Capital

1Q09: 40
4Q08: 47
3Q08: 62
2Q08: 78
1Q08: 71
4Q07: 85
3Q07: 77
2Q07: 85
1Q07: 81

Dollar Amount of New Funds Raised By U.S. Venture Capital Firms (in billions)

1Q09: $4.3B
4Q08: $3.5B
3Q08: $8.4B
2Q08: $9.3B
1Q08: $7.2B
1Q09: $4.3B
4Q07: $11.9B
3Q07: $8.6B
2Q07: $8.7B
1Q07: $6.5B

(Photo by MrVJTod)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Big business — the so-called enterprise market — overwhelmingly skipped Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Vista, with 71% of all big corporations still chugging along on the aging but functional Windows XP more than two years after Vista launched. Will they rush to Microsoft’s next OS, Windows 7?

That’s looking unlikely — or at least a slower process than Microsoft may have hoped. Some 83% of big businesses don’t plan on upgrading to Windows 7 in its first year of availability, says a survey of 1,100 IT professionals summarized by InformationWeek:

“Less than half of the IT pros surveyed, 42%, said their organizations planned to deploy Windows 7 within 12 to 24 months of release. 24% said they would wait 24 to 36 months, and 17% said they would wait more than 36 months to migrate to Windows 7.”

That’s not too alarming on its own: Big companies rarely jump onto new Windows versions right away, waiting to see how the new OS plays in the real world — or even for Microsoft to release the first ‘Service Pack’ update. If things go well, or the economy gets better, organizations can always accelerate their plans.

Companies’ biggest gripe: Software compatibility. While the Vista-to-7 upgrade path is fairly painless — as the two versions of Windows share a lot of code — going from XP to 7 is difficult and time-consuming. It could easily be the biggest IT initiative of the year for many companies that make the upgrade. So this is something Microsoft should aim to make less painful.

It’s hard to say what else Microsoft can do to juice corporate interest in 7. (We’d love to hear your ideas.) But the company needs to get cracking: Together with MS Office, Windows is one of the pillars of Microsoft’s business. In Microsoft’s most recent quarter, Windows accounted for more than 40% of the company’s operating income.

So Microsoft will have to make sure these companies upgrade to Windows 7 eventually — preferably as soon as possible. But if they can really convert 83% of companies to upgrade to Windows 7 within three years — as the survey results suggest — that’ll be a much bigger success than Vista.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Microsoft Terrified Companies Won’t Upgrade To Windows 7 (MSFT)
• Microsoft’s Abandoned Ideas For Windows 7
• Windows 7 Coming By The End Of September? (MSFT)

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Former TUAW blogger Erica Sadun has a cautionary post for developers regarding the pending push notifications coming to iPhone OS 3.0: better get yourself some reliable servers. The implication, delivered via headline, is that smaller developers won’t be able to afford push notification. Indeed, as Erica says, coding for an app that can run in the background is one thing — you may need to scale things down a bit for resource management — but deploying a reliable push notification system is a tall order by comparison.

Instead of coding once and deploying, developers will now have to manage servers to handle the load of users who will be receiving push notifications. This ongoing server maintenance issue is the sort of thing we used to laugh about when digg first started, or Twitter, or MySpace, or any number of services that grew a little ahead of server capacity. After speaking to one of the network engineers at Twitter during SxSW this year, I don’t envy the task of staying ahead of these curves. But push, in my opinion, isn’t as onerous as that.

Push notifications aren’t serving entire pages. The difference in data throughput overall is much slimmer than even the light pages Twitter serves. Erica correctly points out that in aggregate, the push server might be hit pretty frequently; however, and there’s more of a concern with reliability for a finance or medical app than something like Twitter or digg. But even when you throw in the added hurdle of security I’m guessing the resources for this are available at a reasonable cost.

I get that this is more work for developers, but Erica makes it sound a little threatening, like developers’ only resolution will be to cobble together a mighty datacenter from spare computer parts. My assertion is that developers who wish to play the push game will simply need to look for outside resources and factor that into their price. Maybe fewer $.99 apps is a good thing? You certainly don’t need 30 apps trying to alert you during the day — how would you get anything done?

In the end, push notifications are welcome, and I’d rather have that than a one-hour battery life for the day. Plus, I would agree that some smaller developers will have to forget push because the potential costs are too high. Guess what? That’s as it should be. If your product requires it, your cost should reflect it. There’s no shortage of service providers out there, and as we’ve seen in the past (look at the podcast services that popped up when that blew up a few years ago) the market will fill the needs of the developers if they aren’t in the business of making their own server farms. It’s certainly a new twist to the iPhone dev game, and it’s an opportunity for someone who can deliver a reliable push framework at a reasonable price — perhaps one running atop Amazon’s EC2, Google’s App Engine or even Microsoft’s Azure cloud service.

iPhone developers will need servers to push originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

iPhone developers will need servers to push originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know when you’re talking about a subject you’re really passionate about and you start to head down a dangerous path? In the back of your mind, you know it’s going to come back and bite you in the ass but you don’t care at that particular moment because you’re so intoxicated with said passion… So you throw caution to the wind and keep going. Ahem. Microsoft COO Kevin Turner had this little gem to say at the MidMarket CIO Summit last week:

Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the safest and most secure OS on the planet today. Everything that we’ve learned in Vista will be leveraged in Windows 7, but certainly when we broke a lot of the compatibility issues to lock down user account controls, to lock down the ability to manipulate states and all the things, that was a very painful process for us to grow through, but we had to do it. And the reason that Windows 7 will be successful is because of the pain we took on Vista. Because from a compatibility standpoint, if it works on Vista, it will work on Windows 7. If it doesn’t work on Vista, it won’t work on Windows 7.

We’re not even going to touch this one, but please, feel free to discuss it amongst yourselves in the comments section.

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced in January that he was taking a medical leave of absence until June of this year. At the time he promised to “remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out,” and the latest information from “people familiar with the matter” indicates Jobs is doing just that.

According to unnamed sources for the Wall Street Journal, Jobs continues to work on the “most important strategies and products from home.” He is said to have been particularly involved in the UI for the iPhone OS 3.0 update set to launch this summer.

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Once again, the gang at Brionvega prove that sometimes sexy is enough. The Italian company’s been doing its thing since the 1940s, and this radio is actually a refresh of a model that first debuted in 1965. The RR227 (as it’s affectionately known) is pretty starightforward — an AM / FM tuner that sports an SD card slot for MP3 or WMA playback. This bad boy also features headphone out, aux in, and a USB connection. It will run off of European mains power (Yanks will need to get an AC adapter) or, if you’re picnicking with a loved one near the Seine, it also runs off batteries. Available in black, white, or red. Retails for €199 (about $260). More pics after the break.

[Via Technabob]

Continue reading Brionvega’s retro-futurist MP3 / radio stolen from the set of Fahrenheit 451

Filed under: Portable Audio

Brionvega’s retro-futurist MP3 / radio stolen from the set of Fahrenheit 451 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So I was in Prague for the weekend together with CrunchGear’s John Biggs, in an effort to learn more about the Czech tech scene first hand. The organizer of the event, dubbed PragueCrunch, was Jack DeNeut from Nelso, an American who has been living there for the past 16 years and is extremely well connected with the local community. When we weren’t enjoying the great weather on the terrace, the awesome local beer or cuisine, we engaged in a lot of conversations with Czech entrepreneurs and learned a lot, so a big thank you to Jack for hosting the event. Also big kudos to all sponsors for making it possible! For pictures, check out the tag PragueCrunch on Flickr.

Hare are some of the most interesting people and companies I met at the event:

Learn10, which is essentially a social platform for learning the basics of foreign languages quickly and smoothly. I liked what the company is doing so much that I’ll share more information about what it is and where it’s going in a separate post later.

I ran into Rich Helsen, Prague-based frontend developer for Silicon Valley startup iWidgets, which recently raised $4.1 million in funding, and recorded a short interview with the man.

Another interesting conversation I had at the event was with Roman and Michal, the two Czechs behind local real estate portal Zeality.cz, a freshly launched web service that basically approaches the real estate listings market with a very map-centric, personalized experience. Video interview:

I was amazed with the growth of and concept behind Geewa, a social multiplayer gaming platform which Leena covered not too long ago. I expect we’ll be hearing more from this company in the future, despite the fact they’re up against a lot of competition in a congested space.

Then there’s meebee, a startup which aims to launch a new web service (currently in private “beeta”) that is supposed to ‘make meetings easier’. From the website: “meebee uses the devices and apps you already use: your email accounts and your calendars, and helps you organize meetings with your friends. Best of all meebee will contact you about meetings, in the way you prefer i.e. vie email, or on your iPhone, or via SMS, even on Facebook.” Check out the video demo on the website for more information.

Some of you may know from my earlier coverage on TechCrunch and some of my own tweets that I’m a big fan of 360 Cities, a global community of panoramic photographers who share the best 360 degrees shots with each other (and you) on the web. Founder and CEO Jeffrey Martin was at the event too, and besides taking this awesome shot he got in front of my Flip camera to answer some of my questions:

Other stuff coming to the web all the way from the Czech Republic and worth checking out:

HashPage, a web-based dynamic mashup builder
Kerio, a company specialized in Internet messaging and firewall products
Wirenode, an easy-to-use mobile website creation application
Mineus, IT services and software development
CIANT (International Centre for Art and New Technologies)

It was also nice chatting with PragueBob, an American expat who’s been living in the city for quite some time. The man amassed over 42,000 followers on Twitter just by being himself, so naturally I asked how that came to be:

Finally, it was good to meet representatives from Ataxo, a 200-employee strong interactive marketing agency that’s quickly expanding in Central and Eastern Europe, and the main sponsor of the event, Dial Telecom, which provides voice, data and Internet services in the entire Czech Republic.

Hope I get invited to the next one!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

We’ve always known mobile barcodes are big in Japan, but on a vacation in Paris, we saw some there, too.

Here’s how they work:  Web-connected phone users take a picture of the barcodes, phone software reads the code and does something like send that user a coupon or directs them to a Web site.

They haven’t quite caught on in the US yet. Before its failed print advertising business failed, Google spent a couple years trying, though.

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See Also:

• Are Mobile Barcodes Toast As Google Kills Print Ads? (GOOG)
• Google-Backed Mobile Barcodes Get A Boost: Readers Coming Pre-Installed On Samsung Phones
• 2-D Mobile Barcodes Coming To Apple iPhone Next Month

Every so often an interesting story surfaces that has regrettably been passed over. One such story is the case of the Palm Touchstone, the wireless charging dock for the upcoming Palm Pre. During CTIA, tnkgrl was getting briefed on the Pre by a Palm marketing manager when he let it slip that the Touchstone is not just a wireless charger but is also the name of a whole series of products and accessories for the Pre. What makes this interesting is that the name Touchstone alone implies that the rest of the series in the Touchstone line-up will feature inductive technology. So what can we expect to see — a USB dock, TV-out dock, stereo speakers, car kits? Who knows, but for now we’re pretty satisfied with reverting to a childlike state of imagination.

[Via PreThinking]

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This week’s hoopla over at the Federal Communications Commission focused on the launching of a Notice of Inquiry that is seeking comment on a National Broadband Plan, which the agency must produce for Congress by February of 2010. “If we do our job well,” interim FCC Chair Michael Copps told an Open Commission meeting audience on Wednesday, “this will be the most formative—indeed transformative—proceeding ever in the Commission’s history.”

If that wasn’t hyperbole enough, SavetheInternet.net has got Senator John Kerry (D-MA), hailing the NOI as “a new paradigm in media policy.” “The FCC is looking for ideas and goals from just about everyone—but especially from people like you,” Kerry says in a blog post.

The NOI is, in fact, quite a document, but several weeks earlier the agency launched a related proceeding that was less publicized but deserves some attention. It asked for comment on the FCC’s “consultative role,” through which it advises several other government agencies on how to distribute the 7.2 billion in broadband stimulus money contained in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

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