Why This VC Firm Designed Its New Office To Look Like A Living Room

Image Aydin Senkut's early stage investment firm, Felicis Ventures, just moved into a bigger office last week, for more room to bring in founders of his portfolio companies. Senkut's firm was an early investor in Rovio, and it's clear the firm is proud of its investment from the number of fluffy Angry Birds scattered throughout. "Everybody says that they are different. It's like when you walk to an Apple store versus when you walk into any other retail store. The first thing we want people to see is that this is not set up like a typical venture fund, it looks like a living room," Senkut said.

ZipCar Leads $13.7M round in P2P Car Service Wheelz

Image There's a race going on to be the best peer-to-peer car sharing service, with almost half a dozen getting fueled up with financing over the last six months. On Wednesday, yet another one got some fuel in the tank to take off, this time across college universities. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Wheelz, a relatively new peer-to-peer car-sharing service dedicated to college campuses, announced Wednesday that it's received $13.7 million in a Series A round of funding, led by ZipCar, and participation from Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology strategic investment firm based in Detroit. The new amount brings Wheelz total amount of funding to $15 million, including a $2 million seed round from angel investors, including Chamath Palihapitiya, who recently started his own fund called The Social+Capital Partnership, as well as Aydin Senkut (of Felicis Ventures) and Red Swan Ventures, run by Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos.

Apple Acquires Aussie Start-up Chomp for $US50 Million

Image By Michelle Hammond - Apple has acquired Australian start-up Chomp for around $US50 million but is remaining tight-lipped over what it plans to do with the Chomp app, which is used to search the App Store. Chomp’s software allows people to search through downloadable applications available for Apple’s iPad and iPhone, as well as gadgets running Google’s Android operating system. Users can enter queries such as “tip calculator” or “kids’ games” to get different options of apps that fit those descriptions. Founded by Ben Keighran and Cathy Edwards, Chomp’s investors include BlueRun Ventures, SV Angel founder Ron Conway, Aydin Senkut, David Lee and Brian Pokorny.

Sierra Nevada Corporation Awarded Contract for U.S. Army Mobile Tower System

Image SPARKS, Nev., March 15, 2012 / PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has been awarded a $56 million contract by the United States Army to manufacture SNC's Mobile Tower System (MOTS). The contract will include the production of ten Mobile Tower Systems (MOTS), as well as engineering and logistics services.

Comodo Launches Consumer Advocacy Campaign

Image With more than 50,000 new malware samples attacking the Internet daily and hackers becoming more and more sophisticated – tracking online behavior, monitoring social networks and developing new forms of cyber criminality every year – computer users must take measures to protect themselves online. And Comodo, a leading Internet security provider, wants to help them do just that. Now, Comodo Security Solutions is embarking on a campaign to give both consumers and businesses educational information in the form of informative blogs at Blogs.comodo.com and via tips on Facebook and Twitter as well as through educational videos. For example, Comodo's educational campaign will explore many Internet-related problems facing both businesses and individuals, ranging from solutions that increase web site traffic to ways Android users can defeat malware attacks.

TurkTechNet Announces All-Expenses Paid New York Bootcamp and Demo Day For Promising Turkish Technol

Image New York, NY - TurkTechNet (TTN), a New York based non-profit organization dedicated to elevate Turkish entrepreneurs, technology startups and investors to the level of global competition, announced their inaugural all-expenses paid New York roadtrip for promising Turkish technology startups. The New York roadtrip includes flights and accommodations in New York for one week, 4 days of bootcamp fundraising training and a demo day with US investors. In response to the pressing needs of Turkish startups to gain access to global capital resources and know-how, TTN was launched by leading Turkish government officials, businesses, entrepreneurs, academicians and investors based in New York.

American-Turkish Company to Invest in Power Stations in Yemen

A delegation from the American-Turkish PEG company arrived in the Yemeni capital of Sana'a Monday to hold talks with competent government bodies regarding establishing more power generation projects in the country. The visit is a response to an invitation extended by the Ministry of Electricity, which plans to sign agreements with the PEG company on building more power projects, especially in the capital, Sana'a, which was badly affected by repeated attacks on its supply lines, leaving thousands of its household deprived of such vital and basic service.

Comodo Antispam- Advanced Spam Email Filter Solution for Business

Image Comodo (comodo.com), a leading certificate authority and Internet security solutions provider, announced the release of Comodo Antispam Gateway (CASG) 1.2, an advanced email filtering solution that frees employee inboxes of junk mail glut. Ideally suited for small to mid-size businesses that host their own email servers, CASG is a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) that can be configured and managed from any Internet-connected web browser. CASG quarantines messages that were determined to be spam or scanned positive for virus attachments, stopping annoying and malicious threats from reaching a user's email.

Turkey's Internet Tiger Shows Signs of Stirring

Image By Ben Rooney - (WSJ) -  Turkey has that most scarce, yet highly sought-after, attribute among European economies: growth. With this rising tide, is now the time for investors to be contemplating Turkey’s growing Internet economy? Certainly the statistics look good. According to the European Union, Turkey’s real gross-domestic-product growth for 2010 was 9%, compared to just 2% for the 27 EU members. It is forecasting that growth for 2011 will be 7.5% against 1.9% for the EU.
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