The offices, set up in a variety of ways but emphasizing open space and the ability to rent a single desk, are also known as co-working spaces. Such offices have long been popular with technology start-ups in the San Francisco Bay Area looking for cheap space, but as the latest tech wave rises, shared workspaces are popping up in cities around the country.

Besides the cost advantages, entrepreneurs in technology and other fields say they like co-working spaces because their open floor plans boost collaboration, offer more flexibility on leases and can even help land investors.

“Nowadays with the shared workspaces you don’t need to buy furniture, you don’t need to set up Internet, you don’t need to sign a long-term lease,” said Saeed Amidi, founder and chief executive of Plug and Play Tech Center, a co-working space in Sunnyvale, Calif., with about 1,000 workers. “You can just get started … within two hours of walking in.”

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But after spreading its bets to clean technology — and missing out on early-stage investments in some of the hottest new Internet companies — the firm is scrambling to grab a leadership role in the latest Web boom.

That was evident at a June event in San Francisco, where the firm hosted a packed room of entrepreneurs. At the front of the room, Kleiner venture capitalist Bing Gordon spent an hour onstage espousing his theory of “gamification” — that is, how start-ups can benefit from using online gaming techniques — to the gathering.

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Several start-ups are betting on the latter. The latest to enter the space is Pure Storage Inc., which announced that it raised $30 million in new capital to build a storage system that uses only flash memory.

It enters a market that includes several other start-ups building all-flash appliances, well-established storage companies that have embraced the change, and a variety of competing visions among investors and entrepreneurs for the best way to play the transition.

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Alejandro Mayorkas, chief of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday will unveil several initiatives designed to attract and retain foreign entrepreneurs, particularly in the high-tech sector, who wish to launch start-up companies in the U.S.

Among the initiatives is a plan to make it easier for some foreigners to qualify for legal permanent residence, or green cards, if they can demonstrate their work will be in the U.S. national interest. The changes will also include a way for entrepreneurs to obtain work visas without a job offer from an established company.

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The four-year-old mini venture firm said its strategy runs counter to the Y Combinator-led trend of maximum number of companies and minimum investment dollars.

Tandem plans to select eight start-up eggs — in this case from the mobile arena — put them in one basket, and watch them carefully.

Tandem co-founder Doug Renert said he hears from start-up founders who complain that they don’t get enough hands-on time with the network of advisers at other incubators.

Calling out the elephant in the room, Renert said, “At [Y Combinator], those companies get three months in [the incubator], and get shot out, to figure it all out.”

Tandem may take issue with the big orange incubator’s tactics, but there aren’t too many people saying the model is badly flawed. Y Combinator did, after all, just spread to larger digs and is currently hosting its largest class ever.

So what is Tandem’s better deal?

Renert explained that in exchange for the standard convertible note and 10 percent of the common stock, companies in Tandem’s next class would receive “$200K, to start, and six months in our new incubator space.” Which, he added with zeal, is a snazzy little Victorian home in the Peninsula.

Tandem calls its model “muscle capital,” which seems to mean its advisers will be far more active and participatory than just offering the occasional coffee date. Renert gave an example from a previous class, in which Tandem’s staff acted as the business end of a mobile gaming start-up so the founders could focus on software development.

At the very least, Tandem’s founders should be able to provide a voice of experience for navigating the recently bubble-icious tech scene; two of Tandem’s partners co-founded Webvan, which vies with Pets.com for first place in the category of “most iconic collapse of tech bubble 1.0.”

Tandem’s test, bubble not withstanding, will be to see if it can leverage the extra “muscle” and capital to make “smaller” more profitable.

After all, the only difference between “small” and “exclusive” is smashing success.

Today, many entrepreneurs can quickly raise small amounts of money–several hundred thousand dollars or less–to get their ventures going, with plenty of individual “angel” investors and others willing to plunk down the cash.

But entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who were around more than a decade ago during the dot-com mania say fund-raising today requires meeting a higher bar–namely, a working product and some marketplace traction–than it did in the late 1990s. Then, a clever idea often was enough to attract investors.

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The new offices–still void of any computers, desks or chairs–were decked out with red ambient lighting, a DJ was spinning records and guests snacked on a mix of Seattle and San Francisco food. Sourdough and shrimp!

Pincus addressed the 200 or so attendees in front of an exposed brick wall typical of buildings found in the Pioneer Square neighborhood, and he did his best to woo potential engineers with the offer of a great company culture. He also took the liberty of comparing Zynga to one of Seattle’s biggest success stories: Amazon.com.

First was the employee pitch. Like Zynga’s other 1,500 employees in more than 13 offices worldwide, Seattle engineers and product managers will have a lot of autonomy in a corporate culture Pincus likened to a confederation of entrepreneurs who get to act as their own CEO.

Additionally, he compared the company’s ambitions to Amazon’s.

The analogy was easy to make given his proximity to the retail giant, but also because one of Amazon’s first VPs of engineering, Neil Roseman, will be the Zynga VP in charge of building the Seattle office.

However, it was mostly Zynga’s bigger goal that he was referring to.

“Amazon built shop….We want to build play. If we do our jobs right, playing games with your friends will be simple,” he said.

With popular Facebook titles such as FarmVille, CityVille, Zynga Poker and Mafia Wars, Pincus said, roughly 250 million people play Zynga games on a monthly basis. In all, they generate five terabytes of information a day, up from one terabyte a day five months ago. The number of social connections the players have made has soared to eight million from three million in the same time period.

In an interview after his general remarks, Pincus contended that talking about play instead of games changes the social stigma. “If you spent part of your day playing games, people might think you’ve wasted your time. But if you said you spent your day playing, people are envious,” he said, noting of the old saying, “It’s all work and no play. Not, all work and no games.”

The idea goes beyond Amazon’s association with shopping. Google has an association with search, Facebook with share, and YouTube with watch. “[Play is] one of the verbs I’d bet on,” he said.

So, how big is playing?

Pincus estimates that it’s massive.

There will be four billion devices that will be connected to each other through social networks, and half of them will engage in play. “We are very optimistic with where play will go in the future.”

However, as the industry matures, there’s a natural contradiction taking place. The simplicity of Zynga’s games made it easy for a wide audience to play (not just core gamers). But as those players develop and sharpen their gaming skills, Zynga and other social-game makers will be challenged to create more complex quests to keep them entertained. By introducing more difficulty, it will inherently narrow the company’s audience.

“Yes, that’s a challenge,” Pincus said. “But great games are Shakespearean. They should be all things, to all people.”

He argues that one game should be enjoyable for his niece, nephew and himself simultaneously. But that has been the challenge for the game industry. Companies end up catering to the audience that is the most vocal and spends the most money. That’s why the console game business trends toward hardcore gamers.

“It becomes harder and harder,” he said.

However, there are exceptions. Nintendo developed something that no one knew they needed or wanted, and, he said, Apple’s Steve Jobs constantly comes up with products people want, as opposed to giving them what they asked for.

“No one was screaming for the Wii,” he said, but now you see grandmothers Wii bowling with their granddaughters.

Yesterday, in a major policy speech in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton jumped on the Internet bandwagon again, unveiling a $25 million government investment for entrepreneurs to allow dissidents to thwart “thugs, hackers and censors.”

Since that’s about the amount a third-string social photo-sharing site gets while walking down University Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif., from venture capitalists with bags of money to spend, let me just say the money is, well, underwhelming.

Luckily, Clinton’s speech–the latest chapter of the Obama administration’s “Internet Freedom Agenda”–was much better.

In fact, it was a sobering look at the situation, replete with all its conflicts and compromises, including some related to the State Department of late (hello, WikiLeaks!).

While more of a gimmick, Clinton outlined what she called a “venture capital-style approach” to stopping governments from closing down digital communications platforms.

In Egypt, that has included the whole dang Internet after times got tough and protesters tweeted too much.

Even still, said Clinton, such efforts–however effective now–were ultimately useless.

“Those who clamp down on Internet freedom may be able to hold back the full expression of their people’s yearnings for a while, but not forever,” she said.

Still, even though Facebook and Twitter have been lauded as critical tools in the reform protests in the Mideast, those Luddite strongmen did manage to put up a very good fight in shutting them down.

But Clinton advocated pressing on. Along with the seed funding for firewall-piercing and evading technologies, she also announced the creation of a new coordinator for cyber issues and the fact that the State Department had just begun to tweet in Arabic and Farsi and would soon be doing so in Chinese, Hindi and Russian.

All very nice steps, but the overall arrival of the long-promised global “strategy for cyberspace,” which has gotten bogged down in politics, is still to come.

In fact, a GOP-fueled criticism of the State Department was also released yesterday, designed to muck up Clinton’s speech, about how another $30 million in digital investments was being spent or, more precisely, being spent badly.

Clinton answered critics:

“Some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology–but there is no silver bullet in the struggle against Internet repression. There’s no ‘app’ for that.”

Well, actually, since there is an app that turns your Apple iPhone into a hand massager, there certainly should be.

Speaking of that, Clinton was deft at dealing with the obvious delta between pressing for Internet freedom, even as U.S. government lawyers were whacking away at WikiLeaks–and, by association, Twitter itself.

Clinton noted the release of a mass of classified State Department documents “began with an act of theft,” arguing that this was the real issue.

She went on to further argue:

“I said that the WikiLeaks incident began with a theft, just as if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase. The fact that WikiLeaks used the Internet is not the reason we criticized its actions. WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom.”

Actually, the issue is that the Internet, once it really gets going, doesn’t really want to be controlled by anyone.

Kind of like humanity.

Or as Clinton so correctly noted about the various protests taking place abroad:

“In each case, people protested because of deep frustrations with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The Internet did not do any of those things; people did.”

In any case, judge for yourself: Here’s the video of the speech at George Washington University from the State Department’s Web site, as well as the full text below:

Thank you all very much and good afternoon. It is a pleasure, once again, to be back on the campus of the George Washington University, a place that I have spent quite a bit of time in all different settings over the last now nearly 20 years. I’d like especially to thank President Knapp and Provost Lerman, because this is a great opportunity for me to address such a significant issue, and one which deserves the attention of citizens, governments, and I know is drawing that attention. And perhaps today in my remarks, we can begin a much more vigorous debate that will respond to the needs that we have been watching in real time on our television sets.

A few minutes after midnight on January 28th, the Internet went dark across Egypt. During the previous four days, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians had marched to demand a new government. And the world, on TVs, laptops, cell phones, and smart phones, had followed every single step. Pictures and videos from Egypt flooded the web. On Facebook and Twitter, journalists posted on-the-spot reports. Protestors coordinated their next moves. And citizens of all stripes shared their hopes and fears about this pivotal moment in the history of their country.

Millions worldwide answered in real time, “You are not alone and we are with you.” Then the government pulled the plug. Cell phone service was cut off, TV satellite signals were jammed, and Internet access was blocked for nearly the entire population. The government did not want the people to communicate with each other and it did not want the press to communicate with the public. It certainly did not want the world to watch.

The events in Egypt recalled another protest movement 18 months earlier in Iran, when thousands marched after disputed elections. Their protestors also used websites to organize. A video taken by cell phone showed a young woman named Neda killed by a member of the paramilitary forces, and within hours, that video was being watched by people everywhere.

The Iranian authorities used technology as well. The Revolutionary Guard stalked members of the Green Movement by tracking their online profiles. And like Egypt, for a time, the government shut down the internet and mobile networks altogether. After the authorities raided homes, attacked university dorms, made mass arrests, tortured and fired shots into crowds, the protests ended.

In Egypt, however, the story ended differently. The protests continued despite the internet shutdown. People organized marches through flyers and word of mouth and used dial-up modems and fax machines to communicate with the world. After five days, the government relented and Egypt came back online. The authorities then sought to use the Internet to control the protests by ordering mobile companies to send out pro-government text messages, and by arresting bloggers and those who organized the protests online. But 18 days after the protests began, the government failed and the president resigned.

What happened in Egypt and what happened in Iran, which this week is once again using violence against protestors seeking basic freedoms, was about a great deal more than the internet. In each case, people protested because of deep frustrations with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The Internet did not do any of those things; people did. In both of these countries, the ways that citizens and the authorities used the Internet reflected the power of connection technologies on the one hand as an accelerant of political, social, and economic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extinguish that change.

There is a debate currently underway in some circles about whether the Internet is a force for liberation or repression. But I think that debate is largely beside the point. Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition. Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.

So it is our values that cause these actions to inspire or outrage us, our sense of human dignity, the rights that flow from it, and the principles that ground it. And it is these values that ought to drive us to think about the road ahead. Two billion people are now online, nearly a third of humankind. We hail from every corner of the world, live under every form of government, and subscribe to every system of beliefs. And increasingly, we are turning to the Internet to conduct important aspects of our lives.

The Internet has become the public space of the 21st century–the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. We all shape and are shaped by what happens there, all 2 billion of us and counting. And that presents a challenge. To maintain an Internet that delivers the greatest possible benefits to the world, we need to have a serious conversation about the principles that will guide us, what rules exist and should not exist and why, what behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged and how.

The goal is not to tell people how to use the Internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square. The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the Internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should. But if people around the world are going come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us.

One year ago, I offered a starting point for that vision by calling for a global commitment to Internet freedom, to protect human rights online as we do offline. The rights of individuals to express their views freely, petition their leaders, worship according to their beliefs–these rights are universal, whether they are exercised in a public square or on an individual blog. The freedoms to assemble and associate also apply in cyberspace. In our time, people are as likely to come together to pursue common interests online as in a church or a labor hall.

Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online comprise what I’ve called the freedom to connect. The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same. Because we want people to have the chance to exercise this freedom. We also support expanding the number of people who have access to the Internet. And because the Internet must work evenly and reliably for it to have value, we support the multi-stakeholder system that governs the internet today, which has consistently kept it up and running through all manner of interruptions across networks, borders, and regions.

In the year since my speech, people worldwide have continued to use the Internet to solve shared problems and expose public corruption, from the people in Russia who tracked wildfires online and organized a volunteer firefighting squad, to the children in Syria who used Facebook to reveal abuse by their teachers, to the Internet campaign in China that helps parents find their missing children.

At the same time, the Internet continues to be restrained in a myriad of ways. In China, the government censors content and redirects search requests to error pages. In Burma, independent news sites have been taken down with distributed denial of service attacks. In Cuba, the government is trying to create a national intranet, while not allowing their citizens to access the global internet. In Vietnam, bloggers who criticize the government are arrested and abused. In Iran, the authorities block opposition and media websites, target social media, and steal identifying information about their own people in order to hunt them down.

These actions reflect a landscape that is complex and combustible, and sure to become more so in the coming years as billions of more people connect to the Internet. The choices we make today will determine what the Internet looks like in the future. Businesses have to choose whether and how to enter markets where internet freedom is limited. People have to choose how to act online, what information to share and with whom, which ideas to voice and how to voice them. Governments have to choose to live up to their commitments to protect free expression, assembly, and association.

For the United States, the choice is clear. On the spectrum of Internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness. Now, we recognize that an open Internet comes with challenges. It calls for ground rules to protect against wrongdoing and harm. And Internet freedom raises tensions, like all freedoms do. But we believe the benefits far exceed the costs.

And today, I’d like to discuss several of the challenges we must confront as we seek to protect and defend a free and open Internet. Now, I’m the first to say that neither I nor the United States Government has all the answers. We’re not sure we have all the questions. But we are committed to asking the questions, to helping lead a conversation, and to defending not just universal principles but the interests of our people and our partners.

The first challenge is achieving both liberty and security. Liberty and security are often presented as equal and opposite; the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. In fact, I believe they make it each other possible. Without security, liberty is fragile. Without liberty, security is oppressive. The challenge is finding the proper measure: enough security to enable our freedoms, but not so much or so little as to endanger them.

Finding this proper measure for the Internet is critical because the qualities that make the internet a force for unprecedented progress–its openness, its leveling effect, its reach and speed–also enable wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. Terrorists and extremist groups use the Internet to recruit members, and plot and carry out attacks. Human traffickers use the Internet to find and lure new victims into modern-day slavery. Child pornographers use the Internet to exploit children. Hackers break into financial institutions, cell phone networks, and personal email accounts.

So we need successful strategies for combating these threats and more without constricting the openness that is the Internet’s greatest attribute. The United States is aggressively tracking and deterring criminals and terrorists online. We are investing in our nation’s cyber-security, both to prevent cyber-incidents and to lessen their impact. We are cooperating with other countries to fight transnational crime in cyberspace. The United States Government invests in helping other nations build their own law enforcement capacity. We have also ratified the Budapest Cybercrime Convention, which sets out the steps countries must take to ensure that the internet is not misused by criminals and terrorists while still protecting the liberties of our own citizens.

In our vigorous effort to prevent attacks or apprehend criminals, we retain a commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms. The United States is determined to stop terrorism and criminal activity online and offline, and in both spheres we are committed to pursuing these goals in accordance with our laws and values.

Now, others have taken a different approach. Security is often invoked as a justification for harsh crackdowns on freedom. Now, this tactic is not new to the digital age, but it has new resonance as the internet has given governments new capacities for tracking and punishing human rights advocates and political dissidents. Governments that arrest bloggers, pry into the peaceful activities of their citizens, and limit their access to the Internet may claim to be seeking security. In fact, they may even mean it as they define it. But they are taking the wrong path. Those who clamp down on Internet freedom may be able to hold back the full expression of their people’s yearnings for a while, but not forever.

The second challenge is protecting both transparency and confidentiality. The Internet’s strong culture of transparency derives from its power to make information of all kinds available instantly. But in addition to being a public space, the Internet is also a channel for private communications. And for that to continue, there must be protection for confidential communication online. Think of all the ways in which people and organizations rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. Businesses hold confidential conversations when they’re developing new products to stay ahead of their competitors. Journalists keep the details of some sources confidential to protect them from exposure or retribution. And governments also rely on confidential communication online as well as offline. The existence of connection technologies may make it harder to maintain confidentiality, but it does not alter the need for it.

Now, I know that government confidentiality has been a topic of debate during the past few months because of WikiLeaks, but it’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree. The United States could neither provide for our citizens’ security nor promote the cause of human rights and democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our efforts. Confidential communication gives our government the opportunity to do work that could not be done otherwise.

Consider our work with former Soviet states to secure loose nuclear material. By keeping the details confidential, we make it less likely that terrorists or criminals will find the nuclear material and steal it for their own purposes. Or consider the content of the documents that WikiLeaks made public. Without commenting on the authenticity of any particular documents, we can observe that many of the cables released by WikiLeaks relate to human rights work carried on around the world. Our diplomats closely collaborate with activists, journalists, and citizens to challenge the misdeeds of oppressive governments. It is dangerous work. By publishing diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks exposed people to even greater risk.

For operations like these, confidentiality is essential, especially in the Internet age when dangerous information can be sent around the world with the click of a keystroke. But of course, governments also have a duty to be transparent. We govern with the consent of the people, and that consent must be informed to be meaningful. So we must be judicious about when we close off our work to the public, and we must review our standards frequently to make sure they are rigorous. In the United States, we have laws designed to ensure that the government makes its work open to the people, and the Obama Administration has also launched an unprecedented initiative to put government data online, to encourage citizen participation, and to generally increase the openness of government.

The U.S. Government’s ability to protect America, to secure the liberties of our people, and to support the rights and freedoms of others around the world depends on maintaining a balance between what’s public and what should and must remain out of the public domain. The scale should and will always be tipped in favor of openness, but tipping the scale over completely serves no one’s interests. Let me be clear. I said that the WikiLeaks incident began with a theft, just as if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase. The fact that WikiLeaks used the Internet is not the reason we criticized its actions. WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom.

And one final word on this matter: There were reports in the days following these leaks that the United States Government intervened to coerce private companies to deny service to WikiLeaks. That is not the case. Now, some politicians and pundits publicly called for companies to disassociate from WikiLeaks, while others criticized them for doing so. Public officials are part of our country’s public debates, but there is a line between expressing views and coercing conduct. Business decisions that private companies may have taken to enforce their own values or policies regarding WikiLeaks were not at the direction of the Obama Administration.

A third challenge is protecting free expression while fostering tolerance and civility. I don’t need to tell this audience that the Internet is home to every kind of speech–false, offensive, incendiary, innovative, truthful, and beautiful.

The multitude of opinions and ideas that crowd the Internet is both a result of its openness and a reflection of our human diversity. Online, everyone has a voice. And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the freedom of expression for all. But what we say has consequences. Hateful or defamatory words can inflame hostilities, deepen divisions, and provoke violence. On the Internet, this power is heightened. Intolerant speech is often amplified and impossible to retract. Of course, the Internet also provides a unique space for people to bridge their differences and build trust and understanding.

Some take the view that, to encourage tolerance, some hateful ideas must be silenced by governments. We believe that efforts to curb the content of speech rarely succeed and often become an excuse to violate freedom of expression. Instead, as it has historically been proven time and time again, the better answer to offensive speech is more speech. People can and should speak out against intolerance and hatred. By exposing ideas to debate, those with merit tend to be strengthened, while weak and false ideas tend to fade away; perhaps not instantly, but eventually.

Now, this approach does not immediately discredit every hateful idea or convince every bigot to reverse his thinking. But we have determined as a society that it is far more effective than any other alternative approach. Deleting writing, blocking content, arresting speakers–these actions suppress words, but they do not touch the underlying ideas. They simply drive people with those ideas to the fringes, where their convictions can deepen, unchallenged.

Last summer, Hannah Rosenthal, the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, made a trip to Dachau and Auschwitz with a delegation of American imams and Muslim leaders. Many of them had previously denied the Holocaust, and none of them had ever denounced Holocaust denial. But by visiting the concentration camps, they displayed a willingness to consider a different view. And the trip had a real impact. They prayed together, and they signed messages of peace, and many of those messages in the visitors books were written in Arabic. At the end of the trip, they read a statement that they wrote and signed together condemning without reservation Holocaust denial and all other forms of anti-Semitism.

The marketplace of ideas worked. Now, these leaders had not been arrested for their previous stance or ordered to remain silent. Their mosques were not shut down. The state did not compel them with force. Others appealed to them with facts. And their speech was dealt with through the speech of others.

The United States does restrict certain kinds of speech in accordance with the rule of law and our international obligations. We have rules about libel and slander, defamation, and speech that incites imminent violence. But we enforce these rules transparently, and citizens have the right to appeal how they are applied. And we don’t restrict speech even if the majority of people find it offensive. History, after all, is full of examples of ideas that were banned for reasons that we now see as wrong. People were punished for denying the divine right of kings, or suggesting that people should be treated equally regardless of race, gender, or religion. These restrictions might have reflected the dominant view at the time, and variations on these restrictions are still in force in places around the world.

But when it comes to online speech, the United States has chosen not to depart from our time-tested principles. We urge our people to speak with civility, to recognize the power and reach that their words can have online. We’ve seen in our own country tragic examples of how online bullying can have terrible consequences. Those of us in government should lead by example, in the tone we set and the ideas we champion. But leadership also means empowering people to make their own choices, rather than intervening and taking those choices away. We protect free speech with the force of law, and we appeal to the force of reason to win out over hate.

Now, these three large principles are not always easy to advance at once. They raise tensions, and they pose challenges. But we do not have to choose among them. Liberty and security, transparency and confidentiality, freedom of expression and tolerance–these all make up the foundation of a free, open, and secure society as well as a free, open, and secure internet where universal human rights are respected, and which provides a space for greater progress and prosperity over the long run.

Now, some countries are trying a different approach, abridging rights online and working to erect permanent walls between different activities–economic exchanges, political discussions, religious expressions, and social interactions. They want to keep what they like and suppress what they don’t. But this is no easy task. Search engines connect businesses to new customers, and they also attract users because they deliver and organize news and information. Social networking sites aren’t only places where friends share photos; they also share political views and build support for social causes or reach out to professional contacts to collaborate on new business opportunities.

Walls that divide the Internet, that block political content, or ban broad categories of expression, or allow certain forms of peaceful assembly but prohibit others, or intimidate people from expressing their ideas are far easier to erect than to maintain. Not just because people using human ingenuity find ways around them and through them but because there isn’t an economic Internet and a social Internet and a political Internet; there’s just the Internet. And maintaining barriers that attempt to change this reality entails a variety of costs–moral, political, and economic. Countries may be able to absorb these costs for a time, but we believe they are unsustainable in the long run. There are opportunity costs for trying to be open for business but closed for free expression–costs to a nation’s education system, its political stability, its social mobility, and its economic potential.

When countries curtail Internet freedom, they place limits on their economic future. Their young people don’t have full access to the conversations and debates happening in the world or exposure to the kind of free inquiry that spurs people to question old ways of doing and invent new ones. And barring criticism of officials makes governments more susceptible to corruption, which create economic distortions with long-term effects. Freedom of thought and the level playing field made possible by the rule of law are part of what fuels innovation economies.

So it;s not surprising that the European-American Business Council, a group of more than 70 companies, made a strong public support statement last week for Internet freedom. If you invest in countries with aggressive censorship and surveillance policies, your website could be shut down without warning, your servers hacked by the government, your designs stolen, or your staff threatened with arrest or expulsion for failing to comply with a politically motivated order. The risks to your bottom line and to your integrity will at some point outweigh the potential rewards, especially if there are market opportunities elsewhere.

Now, some have pointed to a few countries, particularly China, that appears to stand out as an exception, a place where Internet censorship is high and economic growth is strong. Clearly, many businesses are willing to endure restrictive internet policies to gain access to those markets, and in the short term, even perhaps in the medium term, those governments may succeed in maintaining a segmented internet. But those restrictions will have long-term costs that threaten one day to become a noose that restrains growth and development.

There are political costs as well. Consider Tunisia, where online economic activity was an important part of the country’s ties with Europe while online censorship was on par with China and Iran, the effort to divide the economic internet from the “everything else” Internet in Tunisia could not be sustained. People, especially young people, found ways to use connection technologies to organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change. In Syria, too, the government is trying to negotiate a non-negotiable contradiction. Just last week, it lifted a ban on Facebook and YouTube for the first time in three years, and yesterday they convicted a teenage girl of espionage and sentenced her to five years in prison for the political opinions she expressed on her blog.

This, too, is unsustainable. The demand for access to platforms of expression cannot be satisfied when using them lands you in prison. We believe that governments who have erected barriers to Internet freedom, whether they’re technical filters or censorship regimes or attacks on those who exercise their rights to expression and assembly online, will eventually find themselves boxed in. They will face a dictator’s dilemma and will have to choose between letting the walls fall or paying the price to keep them standing, which means both doubling down on a losing hand by resorting to greater oppression and enduring the escalating opportunity cost of missing out on the ideas that have been blocked and people who have been disappeared.

I urge countries everywhere instead to join us in the bet we have made, a bet that an open internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries. At its core, it’s an extension of the bet that the United States has been making for more than 200 years, that open societies give rise to the most lasting progress, that the rule of law is the firmest foundation for justice and peace, and that innovation thrives where ideas of all kinds are aired and explored. This is not a bet on computers or mobile phones. It’s a bet on people. We’re confident that together with those partners in government and people around the world who are making the same bet by hewing to universal rights that underpin open societies, we’ll preserve the internet as an open space for all. And that will pay long-term gains for our shared progress and prosperity. The United States will continue to promote an Internet where people’s rights are protected and that it is open to innovation, interoperable all over the world, secure enough to hold people’s trust, and reliable enough to support their work.

In the past year, we have welcomed the emergence of a global coalition of countries, businesses, civil society groups, and digital activists seeking to advance these goals. We have found strong partners in several governments worldwide, and we’ve been encouraged by the work of the Global Network Initiative, which brings together companies, academics, and NGOs to work together to solve the challenges we are facing, like how to handle government requests for censorship or how to decide whether to sell technologies that could be used to violate rights or how to handle privacy issues in the context of cloud computing. We need strong corporate partners that have made principled, meaningful commitments to internet freedom as we work together to advance this common cause.

We realize that in order to be meaningful, online freedoms must carry over into real-world activism. That’s why we are working through our Civil Society 2.0 initiative to connect NGOs and advocates with technology and training that will magnify their impact. We are also committed to continuing our conversation with people everywhere around the world. Last week, you may have heard, we launched Twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi, adding to the ones we already have in French and Spanish. We’ll start similar ones in Chinese, Russian, and Hindi. This is enabling us to have real-time, two-way conversations with people wherever there is a connection that governments do not block.

Our commitment to internet freedom is a commitment to the rights of people, and we are matching that with our actions. Monitoring and responding to threats to internet freedom has become part of the daily work of our diplomats and development experts. They are working to advance internet freedom on the ground at our embassies and missions around the world. The United States continues to help people in oppressive internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers, and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online.

While the rights we seek to protect and support are clear, the various ways that these rights are violated are increasingly complex. I know some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology, but we believe there is no silver bullet in the struggle against internet repression. There’s no app for that. Start working, those of you out there. And accordingly, we are taking a comprehensive and innovative approach, one that matches our diplomacy with technology, secure distribution networks for tools, and direct support for those on the front lines.

In the last three years, we have awarded more than $20 million in competitive grants through an open process, including interagency evaluation by technical and policy experts to support a burgeoning group of technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against internet repression. This year, we will award more than $25 million in additional funding. We are taking a venture capital-style approach, supporting a portfolio of technologies, tools, and training, and adapting as more users shift to mobile devices. We have our ear to the ground, talking to digital activists about where they need help, and our diversified approach means we’re able to adapt the range of threats that they face. We support multiple tools, so if repressive governments figure out how to target one, others are available. And we invest in the cutting edge because we know that repressive governments are constantly innovating their methods of oppression and we intend to stay ahead of them.

Likewise, we are leading the push to strengthen cyber security and online innovation, building capacity in developing countries, championing open and interoperable standards and enhancing international cooperation to respond to cyber threats. Deputy Secretary of Defense Lynn gave a speech on this issue just yesterday. All these efforts build on a decade of work to sustain an Internet that is open, secure, and reliable. And in the coming year, the Administration will complete an international strategy for cyberspace, charting the course to continue this work into the future.

This is a foreign policy priority for us, one that will only increase in importance in the coming years. That’s why I’ve created the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, to enhance our work on cyber security and other issues and facilitate cooperation across the State Department and with other government agencies. I’ve named Christopher Painter, formerly senior director for cyber security at the National Security Council and a leader in the field for 20 years, to head this new office.

The dramatic increase in internet users during the past 10 years has been remarkable to witness. But that was just the opening act. In the next 20 years, nearly 5 billion people will join the network. It is those users who will decide the future.

So we are playing for the long game. Unlike much of what happens online, progress on this front will be measured in years, not seconds. The course we chart today will determine whether those who follow us will get the chance to experience the freedom, security, and prosperity of an open Internet.

As we look ahead, let us remember that Internet freedom isn’t about any one particular activity online. It’s about ensuring that the Internet remains a space where activities of all kinds can take place, from grand, ground-breaking, historic campaigns to the small, ordinary acts that people engage in every day.

We want to keep the Iternet open for the protestor using social media to organize a march in Egypt; the college student emailing her family photos of her semester abroad; the lawyer in Vietnam blogging to expose corruption; the teenager in the United States who is bullied and finds words of support online; for the small business owner in Kenya using mobile banking to manage her profits; the philosopher in China reading academic journals for her dissertation; the scientist in Brazil sharing data in real time with colleagues overseas; and the billions and billions of interactions with the Internet every single day as people communicate with loved ones, follow the news, do their jobs, and participate in the debates shaping their world.

Internet freedom is about defending the space in which all these things occur so that it remains not just for the students here today, but your successors and all who come after you. This is one of the grand challenges of our time. We are engaged in a vigorous effort against those who we have always stood against, who wish to stifle and repress, to come forward with their version of reality and to accept none other. We enlist your help on behalf of this struggle. It’s a struggle for human rights, it’s a struggle for human freedom, and it’s a struggle for human dignity.

Thank you all very much.

In contrast to a decade ago, when many such deals went through with little trouble, today’s venture-backed acquisitions are fraught with landmines that can result in delayed payments and reduced purchase prices long after the deal has been struck, say venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and deal attorneys.

Such complications were evident in the $125.2 million acquisition of privately held surveillance-technology firm Era Systems Corp. by SRA International Inc., a tech supplier to the federal government.

While the deal was struck in mid-2008, Era’s shareholders took a haircut on their purchase price and didn’t collect their reduced amount until last year, partly because of a disagreement during the escrow period.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The VC arm, which gets $100 million from Google each year to invest as it sees fit, wants to give more early-stage companies seed funding, and to that end has taken over an enormous Google-owned building in Mountain View, Calif., and started filling it with companies. The space is mostly empty; there are just about 20 people working there now.

Google Ventures Partner David Krane took us on a tour of the Startup Lab, which opened in October and is currently occupied by start-ups like LawPivot (legal Q&A) and OpenCandy (software discovery), a product group from the vacation rental roll-up company HomeAway, and the yet-to-be-launched company of GrandCentral (now Google Voice) founder Craig Walker (which Google Ventures hasn’t invested in yet, though it’s made Walker an entrepreneur in residence).

The companies each pay $5 per month for as much space as they need, filled with recycled furniture from AdMob. They get a ping-pong table, free bikes and a microkitchen filled with snacks, courtesy of Google. They also added their own barbecue for the universal getting-to-know-you activity of grilling meat.

“This is not to be thought of as any sort of curated environment,” Krane said, anticipating the are-you-copying-Y-Combinator question. “This is merely work space.”

Krane said he mostly leaves the companies at the Startup Lab alone, stopping by about once a week. Google Ventures occupies its own floor of a building over on the other side of campus, right below Google’s autonomous car team, and also has offices in New York City, Cambridge, Mass., and Seattle.

Google Ventures has made about 30 total investments to date, with one exit: Ngmoco to DeNA. Just last week, it closed its first deal with a company led by former Google employees, the Web security provider Dasient.

It’s kind of crazy that a two-year-old venture firm with a staff of about 20 former Google employees wouldn’t have stumbled into investing in a former Googler’s company before now. And this is at a time when Google is fighting a talent war against its own employees’ entrepreneurial urges, which often lead them to join younger companies or start their own.

Krane said to expect more deals with former Googlers as Google Ventures “will do substantially more than 30 deals” this year.

“We don’t advocate or want people to leave Google,” Google Ventures Partner Bill Maris said, “but if someone has the entrepreneurial bug at that exit interview…”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110212/google-ventures-sows-seed-funding-with-new-startup-lab-video-tour/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20110122/why-andreessen-horowitz-models-itself-after-a-hollywood-talent-agency/ http://allthingsd.com/20110122/why-andreessen-horowitz-models-itself-after-a-hollywood-talent-agency/#comments Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:02:31 +0000 Deborah Gage http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35451 Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have raised nearly a billion dollars in the 18 months since they founded their Silicon Valley venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, even though they’ve never been venture capitalists before.

How’d they do it? The obvious reason is that the two partners are incredibly successful entrepreneurs – Andreessen co-founded web-browser pioneer Netscape Communications Corp., hiring Horowitz as one of the company’s first product managers, and the pair founded software company Opsware Inc., selling it to Hewlett-Packard Co. for $1.6 billion. As a result, entrepreneurs trust their expertise, so they get access to the best deals.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110122/why-andreessen-horowitz-models-itself-after-a-hollywood-talent-agency/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110119/collecta-another-real-time-search-engine-bites-the-dust/ http://allthingsd.com/20110119/collecta-another-real-time-search-engine-bites-the-dust/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 02:09:05 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2506 Los Angeles-based start-up Collecta has shuttered its real-time search business, including a destination site, API and publisher widgets. The two-year-old company isn’t closing down, but will pivot to unannounced and related projects, said CEO Gerry Campbell in a phone conversation today.

Asked whether creating a real-time search engine is a viable start-up business, Campbell answered quickly: “No.” His company’s pivot is the latest of multiple efforts in the space; last year, OneRiot gave up its search business to pursue real-time advertising, and Ellerdale sold to Flipboard to help add relevance analysis to its social magazine app.

The exit of Collecta and its competitors from real-time search is remarkable given they had swarmed to the space only a couple of years ago.

In 2009, many entrepreneurs and their investors bet that real-time search was the next frontier, recognizing that search engines were having trouble handling the onslaught of status updates and fresh information streaming onto the Web from Twitter and elsewhere.

Given the companies’ emphasis on speed, perhaps it’s not surprising that they failed and moved on so quickly.

Campbell would not say how many employees Collecta had laid off as part of the change, but he maintained the company has plenty of money in the bank from the $4.7 million it raised last spring from Dace Ventures and True Ventures. Mashable reported earlier today in its story about the Collecta changes that co-founder Jack Moffitt is no longer with the company.

Campbell said Collecta will apply its “very serious technology” to other real-time projects, but it will not become a real-time ad engine like OneRiot.

Who’s left in real-time search? There are still a few, including Wowd and Topsy.

Topsy’s tweet search is much more comprehensive than Twitter’s own, and it serves half a billion queries per month, mostly through its API, Topsy co-founder Rishab Aiyer Ghosh told NetworkEffect via email today. And while Google and Bing also index tweets (and Bing has an extensive relationship with Facebook), they have not fully incorporated social updates into their core search engines.

“With TweetMeme, CrowdEye and Collecta all pivoting out of it, Topsy may be the only real-time/social search engine left,” Ghosh said. He maintained that there’s still an opportunity to build an independent real-time search engine “done right,” despite the competition dropping like flies. Topsy has raised $15 million in funding from investors including BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners and the Founders Fund.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110119/collecta-another-real-time-search-engine-bites-the-dust/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110114/index-ventures-danny-rimer-and-mike-volpi-to-open-silicon-valley-office/ http://allthingsd.com/20110114/index-ventures-danny-rimer-and-mike-volpi-to-open-silicon-valley-office/#comments Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:13:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39499

Two of Index Ventures’ high-profile partners–Danny Rimer and Mike Volpi–are opening a new Silicon Valley office for the Europe-based venture firm in September.

The move is actually more of a return home for both men, now located in London, who had lived and worked at tech epicenter for much of their careers.

Among other things, before their stints at Index, Rimer was an Internet analyst at Hambrecht & Quist and also at the now-defunct Barksdale Group, while Volpi was an exec at Cisco.

BoomTown had been hearing about the possibility of the move for months, but Rimer and Volpi finally confirmed it in an interview yesterday.

“We thought we would be better positioned to support our entrepreneurs by being in Silicon Valley,” said Volpi (pictured here), who left the area when he became CEO of the then-hyped Joost premium online video service. “Having two solid investors from Index on the West Coast was important, as opposed to a chipshot.”

Volpi noted that of Index’s $1.3 billion in investments in 173 companies, $400 million was in 58 U.S.-based start-ups. In addition, the firm had helped another 35 move here.

There are currently nine investing partners at Index, which is actually headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Rimer noted that initially it will just be him and Volpi here, as well as some support staff. But it was likely they would expand their office, which will be located in either San Francisco or around Palo Alto, Calif.

“It has been a challenge to be a European firm and also be present in the Valley and be considered an insider here,” said Rimer (pictured here), who often traveled to California. “There is a lot to have an immediate ability to be face-to-face with our companies.”

Recent investments by Index in California include Flipboard, Swipely, Boku and Factual.

Rimer and Volpi said the move did not mean deals were only to be found in Silicon Valley, as Index is not focused on geographical investing.

In addition, the pair will continue their focus on cloud computing, infrastructure and social, wherever the investments were to be found.

“We’re not coming to the U.S. to do only U.S. deals,” said Volpi. “But there is a lot to be said for being part of the daily mix in Silicon Valley.”

In other words: Party at Mary Meeker’s house!

(The well-known Morgan Stanley analyst has also recently moved to the West Coast from New York to join Kleiner Perkins.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/index-ventures-danny-rimer-and-mike-volpi-to-open-silicon-valley-office/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110112/andrew-masons-goat-rodeo-of-groupon-investors-will-be-fun-to-watch/ http://allthingsd.com/20110112/andrew-masons-goat-rodeo-of-groupon-investors-will-be-fun-to-watch/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:01:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39446

Next week, at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, BoomTown will be interviewing one of my favorite start-up CEOs: Andrew Mason of Groupon.

And what’s my very first question for the adorkable toast of the digital town, who has just collected a billion dollars in funding, giving his hot social buying site a $4.75 billion valuation?

No, it’s not about what Mason is going to do with all that moolah.

Not, it’s not about why Groupon spurned the $6 billion acquisition offer from Google (and the Yahoo one before that).

No, it’s not about what hair care products Mason uses to get his hair looking so much like Justin Bieber’s coif.

Most of all, what I want to know is how he’s going to manage his ridiculously large–and, let’s be honest, very opinionated–investor group, which is made up of a big chunk of the digital arena’s most prominent VC firms, institutional investors and angels.

Consider the list, which is much more diverse than Facebook’s at a similar time in its gestation (and, in fact, it feels a lot like the social networking site’s current investor stampede):

Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mail.ru Group (formerly DST Global), Maverick Capital, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Accel Partners, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis and others.

(How in the world is the ubiquitous Ron Conway not shoved in this pig pile? Or is he?)

And, of course, the inevitable Allen & Company acted as financial advisor for this massive funding, which also feels like a bit of a private pre-IPO.

It will be interesting to see exactly whom among this shareholder group that Mason and the other top Groupon execs will listen to and who will have the most influence over the next year.

None of the new moneybags got a board seat, which is probably a good thing. As most entrepreneurs know all too well, investors can be a tricky thing–at once helpful and then not so much.

Mason, a clearly gifted exec, certainly has his hands full now, managing expectations for the fast-growing company, as well as the business itself.

Let’s hope that now that this surreal investor sideshow circus is over, that Groupon’s precious time can be focused on just that.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110112/andrew-masons-goat-rodeo-of-groupon-investors-will-be-fun-to-watch/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110104/holy-start-up-pileup-social-networking-gets-professional/ http://allthingsd.com/20110104/holy-start-up-pileup-social-networking-gets-professional/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:30:09 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1931 The same variety of apple has apparently been falling from trees all over Silicon Valley, hitting Web entrepreneurs on the head and inspiring them to create better ways to connect personal and professional social networks.

Beyond the directory-style LinkedIn, that could mean facilitating professional profiles on social sites, pushing job postings through networks, introducing contacts, soliciting referrals and sharing resources.

Part of the reason this idea has been so resonant with Web entrepreneurs–and investors too–is the trouble they’re having with hiring qualified people to work at their own companies.

(Unlike in other parts of the world right now, unemployment rates are not as much of a problem among techies.)

Assetmap, a pre-launch San Francisco-based start-up, for example, wants to help companies and nonprofits understand what assets they may have at their disposal through their networks.

These connections already exist, but they’re often unexploited, according to Assetmap co-founder Nathaniel Whittemore, who let me in on a bit of what he’s doing.

Whittemore told NetworkEffect the failings of sites like LinkedIn include “forcing a distinction between personal and professional that is becoming less and less obvious and failing to recognize that the one-to-one friend-based social graph isn’t the only graph that has value for business.”

Whittemore and co-founder Danny Moldovan hail from the world of social entrepreneurship. Former Northwestern classmates, they had both been at the fast-growing activism platform Change.org.

They have teamed with Jayson Vantuyl, co-founder of Engine Yard, the Ruby on Rails hosting service. At the moment, they are funded by friends and family while looking for outside capital, and plan to launch this spring.

There are many early companies in this space with fancier pedigrees.

Top Prospect, a social recruiting site that rewards users with $10,000 or more for helping friends find jobs, was funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Ron Conway, David Goldberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Rick Thompson, Chamath Palihapitiya and other angels.

Also based in San Francisco, Top Prospect was founded by Rotem Perelmuter, who formerly sold an online radio service to MTV Networks during the dot-com boom (and more recently ran a hedge fund). The site is currently in open beta.

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter’s Tasty Labs, which has gotten money from Union Square Ventures, hasn’t said much about what it is doing, but is also working on something similar to the idea of an asset map.

Elsewhere, BranchOut, which bills itself as offering “your professional profile on Facebook,” raised $6 million from Accel Partners, Floodgate, Norwest Venture Partners and many angels.

And Hashable, a network for introductions, raised $4 million, also from Union Square Ventures.

And Namesake, from Ad.ly and Newroo co-founders Brian Norgard and Daniel Gould, offers a pretty site for “opportunity routing,” with features such as a real-time stream and chat.

It goes on–other young start-ups in the space include Sumazi, Pursuit, Identified and Gild. (You knew this would happen: Gild turns the social recruiting concept into an online game.)

It wouldn’t really make sense to combine social and professional networks by starting from scratch, so these sites are built on top of existing networks like LinkedIn and particularly Facebook. If you want to try them out, be prepared to cough up those Facebook Connect credentials a whole bunch of times.

(Cute explainer graphics above from Assetmap, Top Prospect and Identified, respectively.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110104/holy-start-up-pileup-social-networking-gets-professional/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:44:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38810

In one memorable episode of the famous old short films “The Little Rascals,” after not getting invited to a party, the Our Gang little dudes decided to form their own group, comically called “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.”

In other words: No girls allowed!

While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could do–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days.

That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors.

As in zero.

What’s most remarkable is that most of these start-ups are run by what I consider enlightened and open-minded entrepreneurs, mostly young enough to be part of a generation more inclined to value equality and diversity in the workplace.

In addition, each of these companies has a massive base of women consumers, in some cases well over 50 percent of its audience.

Thus, it would seem logical that in casting about for those to help guide these companies, one or two women leaders might slip in.

To be fair, it’s not for lack of trying, but of completion, as was the case with Twitter’s recent addition of three new board members.

They were longtime Silicon Valley exec Peter Currie, Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue and former DoubleClick leader David Rosenblatt.

All are deeply qualified for the Twitter board, which is obviously prepping for its next stage of growth and maturity.

But in its search, the San Francisco microblogging site did not manage to cast the net quite wide enough.

While sources said at least one prominent online woman exec was considered, there were some legitimate issues with her appointment, and it was not completed.

Still, one might imagine Twitter could have tried harder to find other workable choices.

Currently, the Twitter board is made up of the new trio, as well as Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey.

Things are not any better over at Facebook, which has several prominent women execs running the show, most especially its high-profile COO Sheryl Sandberg.

But, inexplicably, though she does attend board meetings, she is not yet a director of Facebook, nor is any other woman.

In fact, here is Sandberg on topic at a recent TED event for women, in an eloquent speech titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders”:

Instead, the Facebook board is all men, all the time, composed of CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, prominent techie and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, investor Peter Thiel, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Washington Post head Don Graham.

It is no better at three of the most prominent recent Web 2.0 start-ups, which one source attributes to the lack of woman VCs, who are often the first board members after major investment rounds.

At Zynga, the hot social gaming company in San Francisco, it continues, with an all-male board, despite a very heavily female audience for its casual social games.

That would be co-founder and CEO Mark Pincus, COO Owen Van Natta, investor Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, investor Reid Hoffman and Brad Feld of the Foundry Group.

The same is true at woman-targeted–spas, spas and more spas–social buying site Groupon, which has an unusually large board for a start-up and made up of–as per usual–all men.

The list: Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy, former AT&T President and COO John Walter, New Enterprise Associates’ Harry Weller and Peter Barris, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried and early investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

And, much smaller, is Foursquare’s board, which is the trio of co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger.

New investors–Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts–have observer status and both are, needless to say, dudes.

There is no question it is tough to make sure there is a good balance of qualified women leaders to men in tech–it is an issue we wrestle with every single year for the program of speakers at our own All Things Digital conference, although we are most excellent on this issue on our Web site and conference staff.

But it can be done, especially at public tech companies. Google has two women on its board of nine directors; Yahoo has three of 10; even Oracle has two of a dozen.

But a grand total of zero at the leading companies of Web 2.0 is not just a coincidence.

It’s a shame.

Tomorrow, BoomTown will post a list of great women who would be superb directors for any of these companies, but until then, let’s not follow in Spanky’s steps:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/feed/ 60 http://allthingsd.com/20101213/video-picplzs-dalton-caldwell-says-its-all-about-the-money/ http://allthingsd.com/20101213/video-picplzs-dalton-caldwell-says-its-all-about-the-money/#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 04:48:03 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1195 When you talk to early-stage Web entrepreneurs, they often want to talk about their latest feature, their undying dedication to delighting users, how they’re growing like crazy and all the vast unmet needs their company is finally addressing. Believe me, I have nothing against changing the world, but often it all sounds the same.

However, when you talk to Dalton Caldwell about his start-up Mixed Media Labs, he pulls the conversation to the topic of making money. Priority No. 1 for Caldwell is building a sustainable business. That drive arises out of his last start-up experience, with the music site Imeem, which failed in dramatic fashion (something about which he’s spoken publicly).

Mixed Media Labs, said Caldwell in a recent interview, is setting out to build a series of apps intended to prove that monetization of a mobile social community is possible. The company’s first app is Picplz, which has logically been lumped in with other very similar recent mobile photo-sharing apps like Instagram and Path. Instagram has seen tremendous growth and is beloved by early adopters. Path is trying an audacious approach to controlled, personal sharing.

The strengths of Picplz appear to be a bit harder to describe, but they include being built primarily in HTML5 so that the company can launch and iterate quickly on multiple platforms rather than just on the iPhone. Picplz is available on Android, iPhone and through a fully featured Web app. It recently added support for posting photos to Flickr, Tumblr and Posterous.

Picplz is also the one competitor to have its Series A funding provided by and a board seat occupied by Marc Andreessen, whose firm Andreessen Horowitz put $5 million into Mixed Media Labs despite having also provided early funding for Instagram.

So what’s the big idea? Caldwell said “there was no secret PowerPoint” he was withholding from me about his company’s larger plans. Rather, he wants to test a lot of things and see what works. He sees Mixed Media Labs as an application studio like Ngmoco and Zynga, he said, where the goal is to find apps that monetize by empowering small teams to execute big ideas.

And speaking of monetization, what will this magical business model be? Caldwell said it’s likely to be performance ads. At this point, of course, Mixed Media Labs is really not much different from other early-stage start-ups; it has seven employees, none of whom are sales people (and yes, it’s trying to make some apps that delight users).

Here’s a short video of Caldwell in his new, virtually unadorned San Francisco office, elaborating on some of these topics.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101213/video-picplzs-dalton-caldwell-says-its-all-about-the-money/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101130/everything-will-be-social-and-that-includes-sweating/ http://allthingsd.com/20101130/everything-will-be-social-and-that-includes-sweating/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 22:44:20 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=871 The prevailing opinion among tech entrepreneurs seems to be that everything, online and off, would be improved by a social component. For some sectors, what it means to “get social” is quite obvious: Yelp is made more interesting by learning what restaurants your friends recommend; millions of people love the shared experience of social games like FarmVille; Quora’s encyclopedia of knowledge is more valuable because it’s backed up by the social reputation of users’ real names.

But motivating people to be healthy and athletic is one of the most interesting and novel extensions of the digital social identity I’ve seen. Specifically, new features offered by the mobile GPS-tracking app RunKeeper, as well as its competitor Nike+, allow users to tell their Facebook friends when they are starting a run. If users comment on that status post, the encouragement is automatically sent from Facebook to the app and spoken out over the headphones of the runner.

RunKeeper, which makes both iPhone and Android apps, even allows users to automatically transmit their location to a live online map they can share with friends. (You’re right, that’s exactly like inviting people to stalk you.)

On a related note, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher recently wrote about how Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley set up his phone to automatically do a check-in at every mile marker as he ran the New York Marathon.

Since I think this idea of monitoring oneself and sharing personal data with the larger community is particularly interesting, I wanted to note that RunKeeper (actually its parent company, FitnessKeeper) announced today it had raised $1.11 million in funding led by new investor O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and including LaunchCapital and the company’s existing angel investors. Boston-based FitnessKeeper is still quite small, with nine people and $1.51 million total raised.

Nike+ screenshot via AppJudgment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/everything-will-be-social-and-that-includes-sweating/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101021/kleiner-perkins-announces-250-million-sfund-for-social-start-ups/ http://allthingsd.com/20101021/kleiner-perkins-announces-250-million-sfund-for-social-start-ups/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:38:54 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=51090 During a press event at Facebook headquarters this morning, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced a new $250 million fund for start-ups playing in the social space. The venture capital firm’s partners in the effort: Amazon.com, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Company LLC.

The release below; Kara Swisher is covering the event live.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Launches $250 Million sFund Initiative for Social Web Entrepreneurs

Amazon.com, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast and Liberty Media to Invest and Help Accelerate a New Wave of Social Web Innovations

October 21, 2010 – Palo Alto, Calif. – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced the sFund, a new $250 million initiative to invest in entrepreneurs inventing social applications and services. Amazon.com, Facebook, and Zynga, the leading companies defining today’s social and online environment; entertainment and media leaders Comcast and Liberty Media and Allen & Company, LLC, have committed to invest in the sFund and serve as strategic partners. The sFund will provide financing, counsel, and relationship capital for a new generation of entrepreneurs to deliver on the promise of the social web.

“We’re at the beginning of a new era for social Internet innovators who are re-imagining and re-inventing a Web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites,” said KPCB partner John Doerr. “There’s never been a better time than now to start a new social venture.”

The sFund will be led by KPCB partner Bing Gordon, former chief creative officer and longtime executive at Electronic Arts and board director of Amazon.com and Zynga. Gordon said, “Social is just getting started and the opportunities are vast. As in the early days of the Internet, the race is on. Today every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy.”

“Social apps are viral, and when they hit, it often happens suddenly, and then they grow explosively. That’s one of the reasons the scalable, elastic, no capex, variable cost nature of Amazon Web Services is ideal for social apps,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “The top three companies that develop for Facebook all use AWS.”

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said, “The Web is being rebuilt around people, and we’re at a point where any app, website, or device can be designed to be social from the ground up. We’re focused on enabling entrepreneurs to build companies that can disrupt their industries.”

Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga, noted, “Zynga’s successes – such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars – show the speed with which entrepreneurs can transform existing industries and invent entirely new ones through social platforms. Our model demonstrates consumers’ desires to connect with others in new and valuable ways.”

Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation, said, “Social businesses play an increasingly important role in our entertainment and communications products. We’re very pleased to be a part of the sFund and look forward to seeing the great innovations that are generated from its investments.”

All anchor investors in the sFund initiative are prioritizing developer services for entrepreneurs, who will be part of an active ecosystem. The strategic partners launching the sFund each bring unique contributions. Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide AWS Getting-Started Support for one year, priority access to worldwide Startup Events, and dedicated business and technical support. Facebook will contribute access to its platform teams, beta APIs, and new programs, like Facebook Credits. Zynga will host periodic sessions with sFund companies to focus on management and technical development, including open source collaboration. Comcast Interactive Capital, Comcast’s venture fund, will provide access to Comcast’s resources, teams, and relationships.

Over the past year, there has been unprecedented innovation in social applications. KPCB’s latest social ventures show the breadth of the social opportunity, from seed stage to scale-up, and enterprise to entertainment, including:

Cafébots — The first company dedicated to Friend Relationship Management. By building applications that are useful, fun, and scalable, consumers will be able to extract more information from and make better use of their social graphs. KPCB led a Series A funding for the company founded by a team of Stanford PhDs.

Flipboard — The world’s first social magazine, delivering a beautiful, personalized experience of the news, images, and information being shared by your friends across social network feeds on your iPad.

Jive — Jive’s social software leverages innovations in social to radically change the way work gets done in the enterprise. Jive has over 3,000 customers serving 15 million users. KPCB led a growth stage funding round in July.

Lockerz — A new social commerce company aimed at ages 13-30 creates a revolutionary new way to shop, play content, and connect. In less than a year, Lockerz has grown to more than 17 million members, offering major discounts on the best fashions, electronics, music, and more.

KPCB will have 10 U.S. partners working on the fund, including Chi-Hua Chien, John Doerr, Eric Feng, Bing Gordon, Lila Ibrahim, Randy Komisar, Aileen Lee, Matt Murphy, Ellen Pao, and Ted Schlein. Another four KPCB partners in Shanghai will extend the sFund’s reach in China.

Go to www.kpcb.com/sfund and www.facebook.com/kpcbprofile, or follow us at twitter.com/kpcb to learn more about the sFund.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101021/kleiner-perkins-announces-250-million-sfund-for-social-start-ups/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100929/seven-places-to-start-a-tech-company-in-new-york-city/ http://allthingsd.com/20100929/seven-places-to-start-a-tech-company-in-new-york-city/#comments Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:40:09 +0000 Alexander Hotz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30436 Like many entrepreneurs, Andres Blank, the COO and co-founder of Pixable, a business that lets Facebook users print photo books of their Facebook pictures, started running his company out of his apartment. During the day the space was adequate, but the workday came to an awkward halt when his girlfriend came home from work.

“When she wasn’t there it was an office,” Blank said. “But when she was there it was more like a home, which made it harder for us to have all-nighters.”

Startups often begin in a bedroom, basement or garage, but those lucky enough to expand often need office space to accommodate that growth. Fortunately for Blank and his co-founders, Pixable managed to secure a spot at NYU Poly Varick Street, a city-funded incubator for tech startups. Along with affordable rent, the Varick Street incubator gave Pixable a rich environment in which to develop ideas.

As New York City’s tech scene continues to blossom, a host of locations like Varick Street have sprung up to support fledgling companies. Typically these spaces are open to any entrepreneur willing to pay, but some are more selective.

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