Diane Greene’s Advice to Female Entrepreneurs: You Too Could Start a VMware

[Corrected, see below] Female technologists and CEOs are still rare in Silicon Valley, but Diane Greene has been both—and she’s been far more successful at it than most males. Trained at MIT and UC Berkeley, Greene was the co-founder and founding CEO of Palo Alto, CA-based VMware, which introduced a layer of virtualization between hardware … Continue reading “Diane Greene’s Advice to Female Entrepreneurs: You Too Could Start a VMware”

Nexant Raises $50M

Nexant in San Francisco, CA, says it has raised $50 million in a round led by Dr. Romesh Wadhwani of Symphony Technology Group. Previous investors TeleSoft, Oak Investment Partners, Intel Capital, and Beacon participated. Nexant makes software that manages the power grid, handling energy efficiency, demand response and distributed generation. It also sells consulting services … Continue reading “Nexant Raises $50M”

Is Cloudera the Next Oracle? CEO Mike Olson Hopes So

Cloud computing is expected to commoditize entire sectors of the IT industry over the next few years, and to create entirely new classes of big companies as well. One of those big companies will be Cloudera, says Mike Olson, the firm’s CEO. Or at least he hopes it will be Cloudera, a Palo Alto, CA-based … Continue reading “Is Cloudera the Next Oracle? CEO Mike Olson Hopes So”

Facebook Pushes Further Into Mobile

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this morning announced plans to extend Facebook’s influence in the mobile world, making it the center of a social ecosystem in which users would use their Facebook credentials to sign on to various services, reveal their locations, see where their friends are located, and find and claim deals from nearby businesses … Continue reading “Facebook Pushes Further Into Mobile”

Craig Venter to NASA: Think About Engineering Your Astronauts

What is the right genetic profile for an astronaut—someone who’s going to spend months living on the moon, or years traveling to an asteroid or Mars? Craig Venter has an answer. The biologist told a group of scientists at NASA Ames on Saturday that NASA already does genetic selection when it picks astronauts. He just … Continue reading “Craig Venter to NASA: Think About Engineering Your Astronauts”

A Bumper Crop of Financings For Bay Area Startups

It has been a busy day for Bay Area fundraising news. IT companies are dominating, with an online payments company, a data integration company, two wireless services companies, and a massively multiplayer online game company raising over $66 million in funding combined. Two medical device companies raised money too, though. Here are the IT companies… … Continue reading “A Bumper Crop of Financings For Bay Area Startups”

NextSpace Shows a New Way to Work

In 2009, in the depth of the recession, Rebecca Brian and Jamie Capozzi both found themselves working at home, trying to keep their marketing and branding agencies afloat. They felt isolated and distracted, and as they looked around, they saw that they weren’t the only ones. “It was the year of the contractor,” says Capozzi, … Continue reading “NextSpace Shows a New Way to Work”

Pelican Snaps Up $10M

Pelican Imaging in Mountain View announced a $10 million Series B round led by Globespan Capital Partners, with participation from previous investors Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and In-Q-Tel. Pelican makes optics, sensors and software algorithms for smart phone cameras, enabling a thinner camera with higher quality images, and will use the new money to commercialize … Continue reading “Pelican Snaps Up $10M”

Cloudera Collects $25M

Cloudera in Palo Alto, CA, announced a $25 million Series C round today led by Meritech Capital Partners, with participation from current investors Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. Cloudera is commercializing the open source platform Hadoop, which supports very large file systems like Amazon S3 and allows applications to work with and analyze petabytes of … Continue reading “Cloudera Collects $25M”