Airbnb, a service that pairs travelers seeking a unique experience with locals willing to rent out their spaces for a fee, is the latest startup to grab the attention of Ashton Kutcher.

The actor has invested a significant amount of money into the San Francisco based startup and will join its team as a strategic advisor, according to the company’s official blog. Kutcher’s role will involve enhancing Airbnb’s community engagement and expanding the service internationally.

Airbnb users have booked over a million reservations from the more than 60,000 listings available across the US and Europe, reports the New York Times.

Airbnb is hardly the only startup Kutcher has invested in, however it is reported to be the largest investment he’s made to date.

Such a financial commitment on Kutcher’s behalf, while likely to pale in comparison to Airbnb’s total funding of $7.82 million, could spark new interest in the company and propel it to success.

In the last few years, Kutcher has been gaining attention as an intelligent investor in the tech startup world. He’s put money into many hot new startups such as ticket event service SeatGeek; proximity-based, buyer-powered market Zaarly; airfare pricing site Hipmunk; mobile development lap Milk; and many more.

Tags: travel

Companies: Airbnb

People: Ashton Kutcher

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

GigaOm already stands out as one of the most heavily-funded sites in the tech news world — and today it nearly doubled that funding, announcing that it has raised another $6 million.

Back when the San Francisco-based company had “only” raised around $8 million, I already found the funding “kind of remarkable”. The new total, $14 million, isn’t a huge amount for a tech startup, but it certainly dwarfs the amount raised by most competing sites. (VentureBeat, for example, has raised less than $1 million, while Business Insider has raised more than $6 million.)

When I asked GigaOm chief executive Paul Walborsky about the decision to raise more money, he responded, “We are big believers in building out a big company.”

GigaOm is certainly one of the most-respected names in the field, but thus far, tech blogs haven’t been acquired for enough money to justify a higher level of funding — the biggest deal has probably been AOL buying TechCrunch for $40 million. Walborsky said that he and founder Om Malik (pictured above) are confident that they’ve figured out a model that works and can continue grow. Rather than limiting its monetization efforts on GigaOm sites (which include GigaOm itself, as well as sites like video-focused NewTeeVee and cleantech-focused Earth2Tech), it sounds like the company sees the blogs as a way to build its brand. The sites also draw in potential new customers for its conferences and the research and reports sold through GigaOm Pro. The new money will mostly go towards building out the technology infrastructure behind Pro, Walborsky added.

“We believe that the growth of GigaOm is going to be driven by our research platform and GigaOm Pro,” he said. “That does not minimize the importance of our online audience. What we write about on the blog is what brings people to read GigaOm on a daily basis.”

GigaOm now claims more than 4 million unique monthly visitors across its sites, a number that’s growing 30 percent annually. According to Walborsky, the company doubled its revenue in 2010, thanks largely to GigaOm Pro. It’s on-track to double that revenue yet again this year, and to become cash-flow positive by the end of 2011.

Tags: tech blogs

Companies: Alloy Partners, Gigaom, Reed Elsevier Ventures, True Ventures

People: Om Malik, Paul Walborsky

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Business social networking site LinkedIn has priced its initial public offering between $32 and $35 per share, meaning the company seeks to raise up to $175 million and would be valued at $3 billion, according to an updated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

LinkedIn’s valuation is the first official record of the hyper-valuations many Web 2.0 companies like Twitter and Facebook have seen in recent years. The company plans to offer up to 4.83 million new shares of common stock, which would raise up to $175 million if they sell at the top end of the expected pricing. Current shareholders also plan on selling around 3 million shares of the business social networking company.

LinkedIn, founded by Reid Hoffman (pictured above), is a business network that’s designed to help professionals connect with other potential business contacts and get a “warm introduction” through people in their network.

The company has warned that a majority of its revenue comes from a small number of members who generate a majority of the page views for the site. Its major investors — Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Ventures and Greylock Partners — will not participate in the initial public offering, according to Reuters. Those investors own around 40 percent of the company, according to the company’s S-1 filing with the SEC.

LinkedIn will list its shares under the ticker “LNKD” on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after spurning the tech-heavy NASDAQ stock market. It’s one of several high-profile tech initial public offerings that landed on the NYSE over the NASDAQ, ending the exchange’s decade-long dominance over the tech IPO market. The NYSE has dueled with the NASDAQ stock market to attract high-profile tech IPOs, but it’s traditionally been a losing battle as the NASDAQ stock market regularly plays host to the largest tech companies in the world like Google and Apple.

LinkedIn filed to go public in January this year to raise up to $175 million. The latest filing with the SEC also indicates that LinkedIn now has 100 million members, up from the 90 million it indicated in its last S-1 filing. It had 990 employees at the end of 2010, the last time it reported how many employees it had.

Tags: initial public offering, IPO, social networking, valuation

Companies: Bessemer Ventures, Facebook, Greylock Partners, linkedin, Sequoia Capital, Twitter

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Kayweb Angels, a new fund for early-stage companies has launched in New York. The fund, started by CEO Haig Kayserian is part of Australia-based web services firm Kayweb.

The firm hopes to provide a step between simple VC investing and major angel infusions, Kayserian told VentureBeat today. The focus on this specific phase of a startup’s life cycle would consist of infusions of money, expert advice from VCs familiar with similar projects, and a major dose of input from developers who have faced the same obstacles and have an “insider’s view.”

“New York is crying out for tech talent, with many, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, promoting the city as the hub for the best startup ideas, without the tech talent to match,” said Kayserian. “Our experience living and dealing in New York as web developers has made us believers in this notion, and who can argue when you look at the success of New York startups like Foursquare?”

Kayserian argues that the slippage of tech talent to the West Coast, and Silicon Valley specifically, could be slowed or even halted if the angel community spent more time nurturing talent at the developer level.

“Traditional angel investors provide seed capital, which is usually spent by web and mobile startups on building their product. As no product exists, the equity they demand can be as high as a controlling share of the company,” said Kayserian.

“VCs similarly provide the capital at seed stage, and almost always ensure you lose decisions [over controlling] your startup. They can do this as [the startups] are very fresh and have no product to show,” he said.

In that type of climate, Kayserian said there is a real need for a new class of investors who help startups build a product for a more modest level of equity, where the developers maintain a controlling share of the business.

That would mean that when the time comes for a startup to approach a traditional angel investor or VC, they would already have a version of their product built. Startups would then theoretically be in a stronger negotiating position when it comes to control and other general management issues.

Kayserian said that Kayweb Angels expects to hold a portfolio of five investment projects by the end of summer and add a further five between then and the following summer.

The company’s usual development commitment is valued at between $150,000 to $300,000 at the seed stage. With 10 investments planned over the coming year, it aims to have a fund size of around $2 million.

Tags: angel developers, angels, VCs, Venture Capital

Companies: Foursquare, kayweb, kayweb angels

People: haig kayserian

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Legal document website LegalZoom has attracted the attention of two big venture firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners.

The Glendale, Calif. company recently announced that it has added Kleiner Perkins and IVP as “new shareholders” — I confirmed with a spokesman that both firms bought stock from existing shareholders. (The news actually went out last week, but doesn’t seem to have gotten much coverage from the tech press.) Interest in secondary markets has been growing (from investors and others), but for the most part hot social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter have hogged the spotlight, so the interest in LegalZoom comes as a bit of a surprise.

The company says it has more than 500 employees and has served more than 1 million customers. In fact, a source told us in February that LegalZoom is in the early stages of preparing for an initial public offering. The company tries to simplify the legal process, not by providing advice per se, but by offering an easy way to create legal documents like wills, business incorporation papers, and so on.

Meanwhile, after a period where it was largely quiet outside of cleantech, Kleiner has been trying to reestablish itself, both by launching early-stage initiatives like its sFund for social networking startups and by going after more mature big names — it led Twitter’s most recent round and also bought Facebook shares on the secondary market.

LegalZoom’s existing investors include Polaris Venture Partners.

Companies: Institutional Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, LegalZoom

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

A new report issued today by venture capital company Clearstone Venture Partners on how well the venture capital community is doing says that VCs who put their money into technology startups now will get the best return on their money since the boomtimes of the dotcom era last decade.

Titled “The State of Venture Capital in America,” the report says that because conditions have improved considerably due to a shakeout in the number of VC players involved in the tech sector, there’s been a reduction in capital allocated, making the money VCs do invest count even more.

It concluded that the top three reasons for superior performance returning to the venture capital asset class are: a scarcity of capital leading to better returns to those who are investing; far higher valuations being awarded to successful companies at their IPOs; and the rising importance of businesses going global sooner in their life cycle.

The significant decline in VC funding raised since the dot-com bubble burst — only $12 billion in 2010, versus more than $80 billion in 2000, and $37 billion in 2007 — has combined with a high uptick in money pouring into clean technology deals, which made up 17 percent of venture investments in 2010, to create ideal conditions for investing.

These factors and a sluggish IPO market could lead to a second “Golden Age” of tech investing on the part of venture capitalists, said the report.

“While the asset class has been largely abandoned by institutional investors, this disinterest will paradoxically lead to superior returns in the future,” William Quigley, managing partner at the Menlo Park, Calif.-based outfit and author of the report told VentureBeat.

That makes it a prime environment for investors looking to find bargains at the seed stage level and large payouts when popular companies such as Zynga, Facebook and Twitter do go public.

“Investors in the hot start-up companies of today, Facebook, Groupon, Zynga [etc.] will do fantastically well,” said Quigley who has seen a number of his early-stage investments go public, including MP3.com, Tickets.com, Emusic and PeopleSupport.

However, he warned that because most of the new Silicon Valley companies already have an existing product and gone global, public shareholders in these company will be taking on substantially more risk this time than they did versus their investments in the leaders from the last tech cycle.

“The iconic companies of the dot com and telecom bubble, such as Amazon.com, eBay and Juniper Networks were priced at very attractive valuations when they were offered to public shareholders  Amazon went public at less than 1 times forward 12 month revenues,” he said.  “I don’t see the same fantastic opportunity for IPO investors this time around.”

“The newest crop of high-profile IPOs will be fully priced, with all of the risk that implies for public investors,” he added.

The report also said that taking a data-driven prospective, conditions today in the private and public capital markets bode well for superior performance and a to return to the venture capital asset class this decade.

“Specifically, the rewards accruing to private investors in the leading tech companies of today far exceed what private investors used to earn from their investment in the best companies of previous tech cycles,” it said.

Companies: Amazon.com, Clearstone Venture Partners, eBay, Emusic, Facebook, Groupon, Juniper Networks, MP3.com, PeopleSupport, Tickets.com, Twitter, Zynga

People: William Quigley

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Shares of Avnet (AVT) were off 0.4% to a recent $36.08 despite the firm’s beat and raise quarter.

For the third quarter, Avnet said it earned $1.10 a share, compared to 76 cents a share in the year-ago period. Revenue grew to $6.71 billion.

Analysts were expecting the company to earn 99 cents a share on revenue of $6.31 billion.

For the fourth quarter, Avnet guided for $1.10-$1.22 a share, on revenue of $6.6 billion to $7.3 billion. Both beat consensus of $1.04 EPS and revenue of $6.5 billion.

Barrons.com spoke with CEO Roy Vallee who says it was a good quarter that “hit on nearly all cylinders” and that he sees the stock’s weakness today as a result of general softness in the semiconductors (as about half of Avnet’s overall revenue comes from the industry).

Vallee says that the impact of the Japanese earthquake is at this point too difficult to quantify. “Japan has a big impact on the technology supply chain as a consumer, a producer of goods, and a producer of raw materials that they sell to other producers all over the world. We’re working closely with all our suppliers to understand what the impact will be down to the part level, but we don’t have a good view yet. However, at this point we don’t think there is going to be a significant impact on the June quarter.”

Going forward, he thinks the company’s free cash flow will be a driver for the stock: “We just put up our fourth quarter in a row of roughly 40% year-over-year growth, and when we grow that rapidly, we can find ourselves with negative cash flow, and that was true for the quarters prior to this last quarter. We’ve turned the corner now, where the earnings growth overtook the revenue growth, and we were able to generate $188 million in cash flow from operations; as wel look forward, we expect that cash flow to stay nicely positive.

“The key [takeaway from the quarter] for us is that we have very strong revenue in both of our businesses [electronics marketing and technology solutions], in all regions of the world, and technology really seems to be leading the global economic recovery. Within that, Avnet is growing faster than the tech industry, including investments we’ve made in high growth markets like Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia; so we’ve created an exciting growth profile. We’re putting up record EPS [results] while making these investments to increase our exposure to high growth markets, so there are parts of the portfolio that aren’t even contributing to margins, returns and profits in the way they will as we scale up.”

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Intel said that its net income for the first quarter was $3.3 billion, up 34 percent from $2.4 billion a year ago. Revenue was $12.9 billion, up 25 percent.

The record results show that a full-blown tech recovery is in high gear despite worries about the state of various regional economies. And it also shows that smartphones and tablets — two markets where Intel doesn’t have huge business — aren’t taking away sales in the core PC market.

Intel is the world’s biggest chip maker and its results are a bellwether for the PC market and the tech economy as a whole.

Earnings per share were 59 cents, compared with 43 cents a share a year earlier. Analysts had expected 46 cents a share on revenue of $11.6 billion.

“The first-quarter revenue was an all-time record for Intel fueled by double digit annual revenue growth in every major product segment and across all geographies,” Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said in a statement. “These outstanding results, combined with our guidance for the second quarter, position us to achieve greater than 20 percent annual revenue growth.”

Intel credited the strength of enterprise server and PC sales for the big improvement. Data center chip revenue was up 32 percent compared to a year ago, while PC client division revenue was up 17 percent. Intel Atom revenue was up 4 percent. Average prices for microprocessors, which are the brains of personal computers, were up compared to the previous quarter.

For the second quarter, Intel projects revenue to be flat at $12.8 billion, plus or minus $500 million. It is also targeting a gross profit margin of 61 percent. For the full year, Intel expects to spend $10.2 billion on capital spending, such as new chip factories. Uncertainties include the situation in post-quake Japan, where a market slowdown could have an effect on Intel’s business.

Intel got a boost of $496 million in revenue during the quarter from its acquisitions of Infineon Wireless and McAfee. Both deals closed during the quarter. Interestingly, even though Intel spent more than $7.6 billion in cash on McAfee, the company still has $11.5 billion in cash after today’s report. That’s what you call a cash-generation machine. Intel also benefited from an extra week in the first quarter, compared to the usual 13 weeks. Intel’s goal is to grow earnings by double digit percentages this year.

Intel’s stock price rose 5 percent in after-hours trading. Intel now has 93,500 employees, compared with 79,900 a year ago.

While the consumer markets were slow in Europe and the U.S. in the first quarter, the enterprise strength and the growth of consumer markets in emerging regions made up for that. Emering markets such as China and Brazil now have more than 2 billion consumers who could buy a PC at a cost of one or two months of income.

Intel also had its best launch ever with the debut of its Sandy Bridge chip, which combined a microprocessor and graphics in the same chip. There was a flaw in the Cougar Point chip set that accompanied Sandy Bridge, but Intel said it recovered from that flaw more quickly than it anticipated.

[picture credit: world2do]

Tags: chips, microprocessors

Companies: Intel

People: Paul Otellini

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Intel said its net income for the first quarter was $3.3 billion, up 34 percent from $2.4 billion a year ago. Revenue was $12.9 billion, up 25 percent.

The record results show that a full-blown tech recovery is in high gear despite worries about the state of various regional economies. They also show that smartphones and tablets — two markets in which Intel doesn’t have huge business — aren’t taking away sales from the core PC market.

Intel is the world’s biggest chip maker and its results are a bellwether for the PC market and the tech economy as a whole.

Earnings per share were 59 cents, compared with 43 cents a share a year earlier. Analysts had expected 46 cents a share on revenue of $11.6 billion.

“The first-quarter revenue was an all-time record for Intel fueled by double digit annual revenue growth in every major product segment and across all geographies,” Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said in a statement. “These outstanding results, combined with our guidance for the second quarter, position us to achieve greater than 20 percent annual revenue growth.”

Intel credited the strength of enterprise server and PC sales for the big improvement. Data center chip revenue was up 32 percent compared to a year ago, while PC client division revenue was up 17 percent. Intel Atom revenue was up 4 percent. Average prices for microprocessors, which are the brains of personal computers, were up compared to the previous quarter.

For the second quarter, Intel projects revenue to be flat at $12.8 billion, plus or minus $500 million. It is also targeting a gross profit margin of 61 percent. For the full year, Intel expects to spend $10.2 billion on capital spending, such as new chip factories. Uncertainties include the situation in post-quake Japan, where a market slowdown could have an effect on Intel’s business.

Intel got a boost of $496 million in revenue during the quarter from its acquisitions of Infineon Wireless and McAfee. Both deals closed during the quarter. Interestingly, even though Intel spent more than $7.6 billion in cash on McAfee, the company still has $11.5 billion in cash after today’s report. That’s what you call a cash-generation machine. Intel also benefited from an extra week in the first quarter, compared to the usual 13 weeks. Intel’s goal is to grow earnings by double digit percentages this year.

Intel’s stock price rose 5 percent in after-hours trading. Intel now has 93,500 employees, compared with 79,900 a year ago.

While the consumer markets were slow in Europe and the U.S. in the first quarter, the enterprise strength and the growth of consumer markets in emerging regions made up for that. Emerging markets such as China and Brazil now have more than 2 billion consumers who could buy a PC at a cost of one or two months of income.

Intel also had its best launch ever with the debut of its Sandy Bridge chip, which combined a microprocessor and graphics in the same chip. There was a flaw in the Cougar Point chip set that accompanied Sandy Bridge, but Intel said it recovered from that flaw more quickly than it anticipated.

[picture credit: world2do]

Tags: chips, microprocessors

Companies: Intel

People: Paul Otellini

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

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