Feed: Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing - AggScore: 60.7

At Union Square Ventures, we seldom invest in a company before it launches publicly. The exception is when we have the opportunity to back an experienced entrepreneur with a strong team and a strong product vision. That is exactly what happened with Tracked.com. So we now find ourselves in the unusual position of announcing the public launch of an investment we made some time ago. A year ago, Mike Yavonditte, a web veteran based in New York who had worked at Ziff-Davis, Juno, Alta Vista and Interactive Corporation, and who had most recently gone wire to wire as the CEO of Quigo, began assembling a team to build a new kind of financial information service.

We recently wrote about our search for native mobile applications, which we defined as applications that simply were not possible previously (as opposed to making something that already exists online accessible via mobile). We have also long been interested in gameplay (Zynga and Heyzap) and in local information (outside.in). We were therefore thrilled to find an opportunity that combines all three and are pleased to announce our investment in Foursquare. Foursquare allows you to "check in" at a venue (via the iphone app, the mobile site, or SMS). Your check in is broadcast to your friends, which is a great way to let them know where you are. For most people, a conscious act of sharing is a lot less worrisome than an ongoing broadcast of location.

Many of you are familiar with dust up between Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell that was touched off by Malcolm's review of Chris's new book, Free: The Future of Radical Price. [UPDATE: Free is no longer free. The link to Chris's book has been retired. You can find Chris's book on Amazon.] Anderson's book points out that the cost of providing web services is declining as a result of open source software, commodity hardware, and cheap bandwidth. Gladwell agrees with the trend but notes that it is very expensive for YouTube to host video.

Union Square Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund located in New York City. We focus on web services. We look to back passionate, experienced entrepreneurs who are focused on creating highly scalable services and significant value propositions for...

We are fascinated by the disruption underway in mobile applications. Carriers seem to have lost their role as gatekeepers for applications as smartphone sales are rapidly ramping and "app stores" or direct downloads are the new distribution models. This is exciting as it opens up a whole new arena for startups to compete in. Here is some of our early thinking about this with the goal of getting a discussion going. The challenge for startups (and investors!) has been identifying opportunities that are "native" to the new platforms. By "native" we mean opportunities that simply did not exist previously and cannot exist without the phone. For instance, we would not consider delivering breaking news to a mobile a native opportunity, as a startup rarely has a better chance of being "CNN for mobile" than CNN does.

Union Square Ventures hosted an event called Hacking Education that sparked conversations far beyond the day of the event, and did so in a way where we gave up control of the conversation and allowed it to spread. Steven Johnson recently wrote his thoughts about how Twitter will change the way we live, and within that article explained the process by which we shared our small event with anyone who was interested, and explained its impact: Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web.

Online casual games are a large and rapidly growing form of entertainment. According to Comscore over 85 million people play casual games every month in the US alone and minutes spent playing grew a staggering 42% from 2008 to 2009....

It has been two months since we hosted a great group of academics, entrepreneurs, educators, and administrators at our Union Square Sessions Event, Hacking Education. Fred posted his initial thoughts immediately after the event and in a great example of...

Fred wrote a post earlier this week advocating for more "open spectrum". Fred argues in his post that freeing up more open spectrum will have a much larger impact than spending $7.2B in stimulus money to run wires to rural...

Today we put on an event called Hacking Education which is about the intersection of education and technology. Thanks to all those who came out to the event today and to those who participated on the web. If you are...

There is an old and perhaps slightly shopworn saying in the venture business that you back the jockey and not the horse. But in markets undergoing dramatic transformation, where there is a real advantage to being quick on your feet,...

There is a great post up on the Pinch Media blog that links to a presentation they did for an IPhone user's group here in New York. Pinch Media provides analytics for several hundred applications in the iPhone app store....

This is hardly news since it leaked almost a month ago. Today our portfolio company Twitter announced that it has raised $35mm from two west coast venture capital firms, Benchmark and IVP. Union Square Ventures will also invest to maintain...

David Swensen, the guy who manages Yale University's $19 billion endowment was asked the other night by Charlie Rose if there was anything he learned in school that informed his investment strategy today. David replied that he learned to argue...

As anybody who has looked into dieting or just improving their nutrition knows, there is a lot of conflicting advice on the impact of fats and carbohydrates on your body. But no matter what you ultimately conclude, you are now...