The short business week last week after the Martin Luther King holiday left us with 20 percent less news than usual. Here’s what was left:
—In a rare press interview, Marvell Technology Group CEO and co-founder Sehat Sutardja talked about his hands-on management style at Marvell and the founding of the company as one of the first fabless chip designers back in the 1990s.
—Tilera is one of the last survivors from a crop of multicore chip design companies founded in 2003-2004. We profiled the San Jose, CA-based company, which just collected $45 million in new financing to expand into cloud computing.
—VChatter, a Facebook-based video chat service that markets itself as a “safe” alternative to ChatRoulette, added $350,000 to its seed funding. I interviewed founder and CEO Will Bunker, who’s known for founding OneandOnly.com, the dot-com-era dating site that became match.com.
—We surveyed the blogosphere’s reaction to the news last week that Google’s original CEO, co-founder Larry Page, will take back the reins from current leader Eric Schmidt.
—In a column, I took a close look at two e-book apps for the iPad recently heralded by the New York Times as “superbooks”—Alice for the iPad and Why the Net Matters—and found them wanting.
—Reading device developer Plastic Logic, based in Mountain View, CA, raised $300 million in equity-based financing and debt guarantees from Oak Investment Partners and Russia’s state-owned nanotechnology firm, RusNano.
—In other deals news, Vook raised $5.25 million, Scribd raised $13 million, Scientific Conservation Inc. raised $16 million, Bloom Energy raised $100 million, Kabam raised $30 million, CloudTalk raised $3.8 million, and Sungevity secured a $2 million line of credit.
