FISAM Capital is no longer.

Reuters’ Matthew Goldstein reports that the tech-focused fund has been forced to close up shop after a single large investor redeemed its money.

Stefan Frank, a former portfolio manager with Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors, founded FISAM in November 2009. The fund managed a little under $100 million, and after Frank received the redemption request he found it difficult to keep trading, these sources said.

Apparently the firm saw a 6 percent gain since inception, meaning the SEC, which yesterday announced plans to cavity search anyone beating the market by 3 percent, will be giving them a pass.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

via guestofaguest.com: Lady Gaga contributes to Japan relief via Zynga, Apple  teases us with the iPhone 5 release date, MTV probes the tech world and Facebook in the upcoming episode of “Diary” and more, all in today’s Monday Tech Files! MORE>>

Article courtesy of %source%

Cisco Systems (CSCO) shares are up 45 cents, or 2.7%, at $17.45 after the company a short while ago announced its board of directors has approved the company’s first-ever dividend of 6 cents per share per quarter.

At about 1.4%, the yield is in keeping with remarks by CEO John Chambers as recently as the company’s February earnings call that Cisco would pay a 1% to 2% dividend. Obviously, they erred on the side of the lower rate.

It seems to please this morning, and it’s in keeping with some other tech giants, such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), which raised its dividend earlier this week but still gets about a 1% yield. But will it be enough longer term?

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

The Foundry makes digital visual effects software which has been used in motion pictures like Tron legacy 3D, Avatar, Harry Potter and many others. Private equity firm The Carlyle Group just acquired a majority stake in the Foundry from Advent Venture Partners and other stakeholders. The details of the transaction have not been made public.

Making a movie involving digital visual effects is a complicated and technically sophisticated business.  In fact, the visual rendering farms used for movies like Happy Feet or Lord of the Rings rank among the top 500 supercomputing centers in the world. Each film sequence combining live action and visual effects involves a huge number of visual elements which must be integrated into a final, polished product. The Foundry’s software creates rough combinations of these elements (a process called compositing) in a visual representation which can then be refined by dozens of artists. The video below shows some work created using Nuke, the Foundry’s core compositing product.

I talked to Mike Chalfen, a partner at Advent Venture Partners, the Foundry’s main investors about the deal. He contends that this deal is a validation of the firm’s growth investment strategy. Growth investment means investing is a business which has a proven business model and technology and is usually already profitable but wants to expand. Venture capital tends to invest in newer products and markets.

Advent only invested in the Foundry 2 years ago. Chalfen told me that the Foundry is a typical growth investment deal. The company makes a complex product which is hard to replicate and there was a pent-up sales demand which was not being satisfied. The company expanded 100 percent in 2009.

I asked Chalfen about the growth investment climate in Europe. He told me that he is feeling bullish about the tech market in Europe. It has become less important where a company is based. According to Chalfen, in the US massive companies created very rapidly but it is often easier to find truly differentiated companies in Europe. However, he is of the opinion that too many European founders here fall in love with their technology at the expense of the business aspect. European technology and American business savvy could be a match waiting to happen.

.

Tags: digital, movies, special effects

Companies: The Foundry

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Bubble or no bubble, the conditions brewing in Silicon Valley around hot new startups differs greatly from the tech collapse from 1999 to 20001 because most of these new companies are actually making money this time around, Paul Santinelli, partner at early-stage venture capital fund North Bridge Venture Partners, told me today.

“There is a bubble mentality in venture financings, absolutely. But there are significant differences with this bubble compared to the one that existed in 1999-2001,” said Santinelli.

“Today, most companies are actually generating revenue and the cost to build and scale those companies is exponentially less expensive,” he said. “So, the capital required is less, which creates an interesting dynamic of a feeding frenzy.”

San Mateo, Calif.-based North Bridge was founded in 1994 and has over $3.2 billion in capital under management. The VC outfit is an early stage investor that focuses on seed and first round investments, ranging in size from $100,000 at the seed level to $10 million.

Companies: BASF, Facebook, north bridge venture partners, Twitter, Zynga

People: paul santinelli

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs promised that the iPad 2’s processor is twice as fast as the original iPad’s and that its graphics performance is nine times better.

Now that the results are coming in, it’s clear that the performance is good but varies widely by application. One of the most demanding apps on the original iPad is Epic Games’ Infinity Blade sword-fighting game (pictured above). Tests show that the revised version of Infinity Blade for the iPad 2 has far more graphics detail than the earlier version, according to AnandTech, a tech gadget site run by uber geek Anand Lal Shimpi.

In any given scene, there is far more graphical detail, lighting, and shadows on the iPad 2 version. Jagged lines that appeared in the earlier version no longer appear in the iPad 2 version. That could be enough to make graphics aficionados fall in love with the iPad 2, but it might be a subtle difference for less picky users. AnandTech’s older and newer images are shown at the bottom of this story, so you can see the subtle improvements for yourself.

Other benchmark tests also show that the iPad 2 pretty much blows away the Motorola Xoom. That’s important to people who want to be able to buy a tablet computer that lasts for a while and can run demanding apps.

AnandTech said that the A5 processor in the iPad 2 is 50 percent faster than the original iPad’s A4 processor in browsing the web. In other synthetic tests (meaning theoretical benchmarks as opposed to real application benchmarks), AnandTech was able to surpass Apple’s claim of 2x faster CPU (central processing unit) performance.

The A5 includes a PowerVR SGX 543MP2 graphics core from Imagination Technologies. Based on a review of the architecture, the graphics core has more than twice the compute horsepower of the PowerVR SGX 535 used in Apple’s A4 chip. On top of that, there are four times as many pipelines, or processing paths. And as the chart on the right shows, the A5’s texture filtering performance is better as well, about three times better than the original iPad and significantly faster than the Motorola Xoom.

Based on the GLBenchmark 2.0 test, AnandTech found five to seven times faster performance on the iPad 2 compared to the iPad on a number of other graphics tests. On one test dubbed Egypt, the Apple chip in the iPad 2 is 3.7 times faster than the Nvidia Tegra 2 in the Xoom.

Another tech site, Iosnoops, says the actual clock speed of the A5 isn’t 1 gigahertz as with the A4. Rather, both cores run at about 890 megahertz, although the speed varies based on the app running.

Check out the graphics in the original iPad version of Infinity Blade below, and in the iPad 2 version below that. You’ll notice, for instance, there are better lighting effects on the warrior’s shield in the foreground.

Tags: iPad 2

Companies: AnandTech, Apple

People: Anand Lal Shimpi

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

The past years haven’t necessarily been kind to former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman. But has a chance to turn things around after joining the board of directors for car-sharing company Zipcar today.

Whitman was able to generate billions of dollars in value for eBay when she became the company’s chief executive in 1998, taking the company from $4.6 million to nearly $8 billion in revenue. But she started to lose her touch as the company began to lose to the likes of online retailer Amazon.com.

Whitman left eBay in 2008 and was replaced by current chief executive John Donahoe. eBay has since shifted its focus from online auctions and sales to its transaction service PayPal. Since then, eBay has had an about face, with revenue growing 5 percent in the fourth quarter last year after revenue from PayPal rose about 22 percent when compared to the same quarter a year earlier.

Whitman also tried running for governor of California, spending more than $100 million of her own money on campaigns. That money and the tech pedigree didn’t pay off, and she went down in flames, losing to Democrat candidate Jerry Brown. Whitman seemed to have lost her touch and couldn’t get a win.

She’ll get a second (or third) chance now after joining Zipcar’s board just before it goes public. Zipcar filed to go public in June last year to raise $75 million. That funding will be used to pay off its debt and spin up its operations in other cities. The company also raised $21 million from Meritech capital, which should help clean up its balance sheet and make the stock more appealing to public investors.

The service is available in most cities, where cars are strewn across the city in special parking spots. Users sign up for a subscription, and then schedule a time and a car to pick up. They receive a card that activates the car and are free to drive it during their scheduled time.

The whole Zipcar team seems pretty excited about the move — despite some of the extra baggage Whitman is carrying around. Whitman likened Zipcar to eBay, saying that eBay “transformed how people think about retail by allowing consumers to buy and sell goods through online auctions.” That was a good ride — but only for a while.

[Photo: tracie7779]

Tags: car-sharing

Companies: Zipcar

People: Meg Whitman

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

The past years haven’t necessarily been kind to former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman. But has a chance to turn things around after joining the board of directors for car-sharing company Zipcar today.

Whitman was able to generate billions of dollars in value for eBay when she became the company’s chief executive in 1998, taking the company from $4.6 million to nearly $8 billion in revenue. But she started to lose her touch as the company began to lose to the likes of online retailer Amazon.com.

Whitman left eBay in 2008 and was replaced by current chief executive John Donahoe. eBay has since shifted its focus from online auctions and sales to its transaction service PayPal. Since then, eBay has had an about face, with revenue growing 5 percent in the fourth quarter last year after revenue from PayPal rose about 22 percent when compared to the same quarter a year earlier.

Whitman also tried running for governor of California, spending more than $100 million of her own money on campaigns. That money and the tech pedigree didn’t pay off, and she went down in flames, losing to Democrat candidate Jerry Brown. Whitman seemed to have lost her touch and couldn’t get a win.

She’ll get a second (or third) chance now after joining Zipcar’s board just before it goes public. Zipcar filed to go public in June last year to raise $75 million. That funding will be used to pay off its debt and spin up its operations in other cities. The company also raised $21 million from Meritech capital, which should help clean up its balance sheet and make the stock more appealing to public investors.

The service is available in most cities, where cars are strewn across the city in special parking spots. Users sign up for a subscription, and then schedule a time and a car to pick up. They receive a card that activates the car and are free to drive it during their scheduled time.

The whole Zipcar team seems pretty excited about the move — despite some of the extra baggage Whitman is carrying around. Whitman likened Zipcar to eBay, saying that eBay “transformed how people think about retail by allowing consumers to buy and sell goods through online auctions.” That was a good ride — but only for a while.

[Photo: tracie7779]

Tags: car-sharing

Companies: Zipcar

People: Meg Whitman

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

It looks like several key players from the early days of Facebook have taken an interest in an artificial intelligence startup called Vicarious Systems.

The company, which is based in Union City, Calif., just announced that it has raised its first institutional venture round. It isn’t saying how much money was involved, but the round was led by Founders Fund, the firm whose partners include Peter Thiel (former chief executive of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook) and Sean Parker (Facebook’s founding president). Also investing were the social networking giant’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (who since co-founded Asana, and who is pictured above) and its former chief technology officer Adam D’Angelo (who co-founded Quora).

Vicarious Systems hasn’t launched yet, but the company said it will be “developing algorithms that mimic the function of the human brain,” and that its first product will be “a vision system that understands the contents of images and videos the way humans do.”

That sounds pretty ambitious. The Vicarious team has some experience in this field, since co-founder Dileep George was previously chief technology officer at Numenta, another company looking at smarter ways to understand video content.

“There have been a lot of broken promises in this field, but we can’t succeed without having courage to take risks,” Moskovitz said in the press release.

The funding was first reported last week on an AI-focused news Singularity Hub, but doesn’t seem to have gotten any attention from the tech business press until now. Felicis Ventures (the firm from “super angel” investor Aydin Senkut, who also invested in VentureBeat) and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale participated in the round as well.

Tags: artificial intelligence

Companies: Founders Fund, Vicarious Systems

People: adam dangelo, Dileep George, Dustin Moskovitz

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

It looks like several key players from the early days of Facebook have taken an interest in an artificial intelligence startup called Vicarious Systems.

The company, which is based in Union City, Calif., just announced that it has raised its first institutional venture round let by Founders Fund, although it isn’t saying how much money was involved.

Vicarious Systems hasn’t launched yet, but the company said it will be “developing algorithms that mimic the function of the human brain,” and that its first product will be “a vision system that understands the contents of images and videos the way humans do.”

That sounds pretty ambitious. The Vicarious team has some experience in this field, since co-founder Dileep George was previously chief technology officer at Numenta, another company looking at smarter ways to understand video content.

In addition to Founders Fund, the firm whose partners include Peter Thiel (former chief executive of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook) and Sean Parker (Facebook’s founding president), investors include the social networking giant’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (who since co-founded Asana, and who is pictured above) and its former chief technology officer Adam D’Angelo (who co-founded Quora).

“There have been a lot of broken promises in this field, but we can’t succeed without having courage to take risks,” Moskovitz said in the press release.

The funding was first reported last week on an AI-focused news site called Singularity Hub, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten any attention from the tech business press until now. Felicis Ventures (the firm from “super angel” investor Aydin Senkut, who also invested in VentureBeat) and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale participated in the round as well.

Tags: artificial intelligence

Companies: Founders Fund, Vicarious Systems

People: adam dangelo, Dileep George, Dustin Moskovitz

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals