GigaOM

Lately we’ve been discussing the many reasons why taking smaller, angel-sized investments instead of larger venture capital stakes often makes more sense for startups in a wobbly, exit-bereft market like the current one.

Today, Ron Conway, the well-known founder of the Silicon Valley-based Angel Investors LP fund, now associated with Baseline Ventures, weighs in with his own assessment of the benefits of the “all angel” investment path.

A former semiconductor executive who went on to co-found Altos Computer Systems, Anchor Intelligence and, most recently, SNOCAP, Conway took up angel investing in 1998. He’s seen his share of both hits and duds, but among the investments that earned Conway his “super angel” status are Google(s GOOG), Digg, PayPal(s EBAY), and Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com(s IACI)). He is also an advisor to Facebook. In other words, Conway knows what he’s talking about. So, if you’re seeking funding, you’d do well to consider his advice, dished out below the fold. Continue »

With the tech conference season upon us, Found|READ thought some tips for how to master conference marketing on the cheap would be useful. Today’s tips are courtesy of serial entrepreneur Pete Grillo, currently founder of iterasi, a one-and a-half-year-old startup in Portland, Ore., that has built a hosted storage service to capture and archive web pages. It’s a seemingly simple tool, but it allows you to save web pages in perpetuity — personal archives for individuals and businesses!

Iterasi had been living off angel funds since 2006, so even though Grillo’s investors might have been fine with a marketing blitz, Grillo didn’t feel like he could spend the $10,000 needed to get an iterasi booth at TechCrunch50 or sponsor a $5,000 dinner at last month’s Gnomedex. But iterasi was about to launch a new release, and Grillo recognized that an impactful marketing play would be necessary if it was to get noticed in a very noisy market.

So Grillo and his team came up with a non-traditional marketing tactic. They found an old yellow school bus with a dubious battery and an owner/driver who wanted to get to Gnomedex, too. Then they invited several bloggers, a dozen programmers and tech folks from the Portland area to ride along with them to Seattle.

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Last week, Dell’s PR team was busy emailing us about a joint announcement they were going to make in tandem with Facebook. They were going to announce a partnership, they said,

…around the next generation of Cloud Computing. In addition to the joint announcement, the companies will also be discussing their perspectives, insights and future plans surrounding the Cloud Computing space.

Since it conflicted with some of my other commitments, I couldn’t go. I am actually glad I didn’t go, for it turned to be much ado about nothing. According to a post on the WSJ’s blog, the only piece of news that came out of the event held at the top of a posh office tower in San Francisco was that Facebook has 10,000 servers — and not all are made by Dell. Dan Farber has a more elaborate report but essentially it says the same, except it also has Dell re-hashing the news that Dell is now working with Salesforce.com, replacing Sun. Facebook’s Jonathan Heiliger, according to the WSJ, said the company was:

… tired of all the high-cost features companies pack into servers – on a slide, he pointed to extra USB ports and unnecessary graphics capabilities as examples. Most server makers are selling what, in automobile terms, would be the equivalent of a Lexus “at a Toyota price,” he said. What Facebook wants “is the Scion product at the Scion price.” He said Dell seems to be ahead of other server makers in selling inexpensive servers that reduce power and cooling requirement.

So essentially Dell is offering stripped-down, cheaper computers that may be consuming less power! Dan Apparently the company has been doing that for a long time, as per their founder. So how this redefines cloud computing, I don’t understand. What it seems like is an attempt by Dell to add some Facebook pixie dust and finish it all up with the latest, hottest lipstick shade, called “cloud computing.” I gotta be honest, a certain impromptu toga party definetely had more news value.

Well I guess it’s finally time to check out Wordscraper. Caving Responding to a formal complaint from Scrabble copyright holder Mattel, Facebook has blocked access to Scrabulous for pretty much everyone.

I was hoping to at least play Scrabulous when I travel outside the States, but no longer, because Facebook has preemptively blocked it across the globe. (Except in India, where creators Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla hail from and where a court case is still pending.) Worse still, I’m not particularly enthused by my alternatives.

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