What does an economic downturn do to VCs? Apparently, they focus on business services and products. Biz360's round is the latest in a slew of business IT fundings.

From the press release:

Biz360 Secures $10 Million in Funding to Expand Product Line  and Boost Marketing and Sales Personnel

Strategic investment led by Foundation Capital, with full participation of Granite Ventures and Scale Venture Partners

SAN MATEO, Calif. — May 8, 2008— Biz360® Inc., the leading provider of media and market intelligence solutions, announced the closing of a $10 million round of financing. The round was led by Foundation Capital, with full participation of other current investors, Granite Ventures and Scale Venture Partners.

With an opportunity to extend its market-proven suite of business intelligence products, Biz360

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Yeah - that was one of my favorite movies of my youth - I've always loved Mork.  I guess that's part of the reason I moved to Boulder.  The title of this post is nonsensical - I just wrote what came to mind because this is going to be another of my "here's what I found interesting on the web this morning" posts.  I've got six for you today instead of five.  Going forward, these will be categorized as "Daily Reading" although of course you can search for magic words that you remember via my Lijit Search Wijit on the sidebar.

- Starting a High-Technology Startup: While it's not a terribly exciting title, it's a great article by Ben Casnocha for eJournal USA about starting a company.  I adore Ben and think he's an extraordinary young man.  It's an article.

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I just read Fred Wilson's blog post about the need to ask for the order.  I completely agree -- if you don't ask, you don't get. 

However, I believe that there are different ways to ask for the same order.  And the way that you ask can either increase or decrease the odds of a successful outcome.  Some examples:

Before we launched Half.com, we knew that we needed to have a lot of  inventory on the site -- so we reached out to dozens of used bookstores, CD stores and video shops.  We had a team of three business development people working full-time to get these sellers to agree to list on our site.  Initially, we would call a prospective seller, explain our site/model, and if they were interested, we'd "ask for the order" and send them our standard three-page seller agreement.  Despite...

After the crash at the end of the last decade, web startups clamped down to focus on their core value proposition and were forced out of necessity for survival to hone their revenue models. However, for the past couple years, the metrics of “success” with early-stage digital media startups (especially consumer-facing ones) have clearly focused on distribution, as opposed to monetization. The stories of tremendous growth in adoption with the promise of revenue later on has been enough to excite both entrepreneurs alike. Yet, with the current economic climate driven by the looming recession, it’s been interesting to see the pendulum swing the other way in the past couple months.

If the notion has reached the popular business press, then it’s indeed a pervasive story.

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Mary Meeker's overview of the internet economy from the Web 2.0 summit is up. The big coming trends were online advertising growth (of course), local momentum and video monetization.


From the transcription on Oreilly:

If we look at the five most highly capitalized Internet companies of the world; Google, Yahoo, eBay, Yahoo Japan and Amazon.com, their market value today is 46 percent higher than it was at the march 2000 NASDAQ peak. That is largely due to the massive appreciation in Google.

[...]

If we look at advertising revenue per user for some of the top sites on the Internet, Google gets about $13; YouTube gets less than $1.

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It was just a month ago that Adify CEO Russ Fraidin told me that he thought his company would be worth more than $300 million "sooner rather than later."

Turns out he was right.

Both Silicon Alley Insider and paidContent are reporting that Cox Communications has agreed to acquire the company for $300 million, plus possible earnouts, less than two years after it formally launched.

That's in the same ballpark as the $300 million Yahoo paid for Blue Lithium and the $275 million AOL bought Tacoda for.  

Adify, which provides a technology platform and back-office systems to about 100 online publishers, had raised $8 million in funding and was out raising more when someone from Cox yelled "we want it all!"

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Maybe last week's outage and subsequent revolt made it look important. Maybe it was the departure of two chiefs. Whatever the reason, a few more investors have sunk up to $20M more into Twitter.

From CNET:

Twitter gets another round of funding

Posted by Charles Cooper
Tweet and ye shall have.

A source familiar with the negotiations tells me that Twitter signed a term sheet for "either $15 million or $20 million" last week. We're still trying to find out who is in, but the word is that it's largely an inside round of funding with one outsider setting the price.


 
Read More.

Arthur C. Clarke was considered one of the most visionary authors of the
20th century.  His images of the future shaped the imaginations of a
generation of geeks and nerds like me.  The movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey,”
promised a future that would unfold in my lifetime, unlike the distant
futures described in most science fiction.  Indeed the future seemed to be
unfolding as we watched.  Only a year after my eighth grade buddy and I took
the train to downtown Chicago to see “2001,” Neil Armstrong set foot on the
moon.  Clearly we had been born at the most exciting time in the history of
the world!

Now, forty years later, Arthur C. Clarke has passed away, and the vision of
technology’s progress that he helped us imagine is but a quaint fantasy — a
...