Source: MHT

It wasn’t that long ago that C-level executives would snicker at the IT guys experimenting with a silly thing called “e-mail.” Why, they would ask, would you send someone an electronic message when you could pick up the phone, or simply have your secretary write and hand deliver an office-wide memo?

Source: Popsci

Following up on a 2007 world record for the fastest transistor speed, Northrop Grumman announced today that it has shattered the world record for integrated circuit performance. The new circuit layout operates at 0.67 terahertz, or 0.67 trillion cycles per second, more than doubling the frequency of the fastest known IC in the world. Read more here

Source: TechCrunch

We’ve been digging deeper on the Elevation Partners investment in Facebook Common Stock. In our original post we had heard that Elevation Partners paid “around $30/share” for the stock in a late 2009 transaction. A new source with direct knowledge of the deal (a limited partner in the fund) now says the price was more like $20/share. That valued Facebook at just under $9 billion, and Elevation Partners took around 1% of the company in the transaction.

Private sales occurring on SecondMarket at about the same time were closing at higher prices, in the $25/share range.

As we wrote in the first post, Elevation Partners is clearly counting on this investment to offset losses on investments in Palm and Forbes, and save the fund:

The fund secretly bought up some $90 million of Facebook shares on the secondary market late last year. One person with knowledge of the transaction told us: This deal – which anyone with $90 million could have struck – could be the only thing that tips the fund in the black, a crucial bragging point as Elevation gets ready to think about raising its second fund in a brutal fundraising environment.

Read more here.

 

Source: Appscout

Move over Google, Walmart, Amazon, MySpace, Craigslist, and Netflix -- according to new numbers from traffic analytics company Hitwise, Facebook is now the most searched brand in the U.S., across all search engines. Read more here.

Source: Techdirt.com

When the startup visa was first put forth by Paul Graham, I was a big supporter. When Brad Feld took the idea and got political support for it, I was still a big supporter. But when the bill was actually introduced, I expressed some serious worries about it -- specifically over the fact that it was entirely focused on enterpreneurs who could raise a certain amount of money. As I noted, there were some potentially serious unintended consequences of requiring enterpreneurs to raise a specific amount of money just to stay in the country.  Read more here.  

Source: InformationWeek

If customer-centric innovation can be measured by sheer volume of acquisitions, then Oracle, Cisco, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard are the top innovators in the IT industry.

If. But is the level of an IT vendor's acquisition activity necessarily a direct indicator of its ability to deliver customer-centered innovation? No, it's certainly not. Read more here.

Source: The New York Times

Maples Investments, whose founder Mike Maples, Jr. has backed high-profile web startups like Twitter and Digg, announced today that it’s renaming itself Floodgate and transforming itself from an angel investment firm into a “Super Angel.”  Read more here. 

Source: Tonic.com

Better known for information technology, IBM teams up with Stanford University researchers to make huge strides in the development of better, greener plastics.  Read more here.

Source; MHT

Bill Aulet has been named managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. The MIT Sloan School of Management senior :ecturer previously was serving as acting managing director following the departure of Ken Morse from the position last August.

A serial entrepreneur, according to his biography posted on MIT's website, Aulet previously headed MIT spinouts Cambridge Decision Dynamics and SensAble Technologies Inc. Before being named acting managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, he held a four-year entrepreneur-in-residence position at the center.
To read more, click here.

Source: Venturebeat.com

Performance monitoring service Gomez has released its annual list of major websites with the best overall responsiveness as measured by Gomez over the entire year 2009. Surprise winner: IRS.gov, a site that uses images sparingly and pushes off large documents to PDF format for downloading, rather than trying to serve them as Web pages. Read more here.