Fun in VC land

Two of InfoWorld's Top 10 iPhone apps are from Sigma portfolio companies: Vlingo and Sharpcast.

I bet Viximo's TrueFlirt iPhone app would probably have made the cut if it had been announced earlier ... instead it was launched at MacWorld just this week, to great acclaim.

Finally, here are a couple of videos to enjoy. The first is about that all-important first meeting with a VC, and the second about the importance of finding good legal advice.

Hazon hits the headlines

Right now the front page of the JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency - a news service for the Jewish world), has two top-of-page stories from Hazon's 2008 Food Conference which was held on the last weekend of 2008 in Northern California. The two stories (for when more pressing news pushes onto the front page) are The Jewish Food Movement Comes of Age, and What Kind of Meat do Jewish Activists Eat?

I am very proud of my association with Hazon, as regular readers know, and see from the press and the twitterverse, that Hazon continues to bring light and energy to important issues. As one of our previous board members said, Hazon puts the Jewish community on the right side of a big issue. What a great way to end 2008, despite the many other awful news stories in the Jewish world right now. And what better way to think about what we can do in 2009. Let's try to be on the right side of other big issues, too.

VC:VC Immense Egos

This is the first panel of a 1999 Dilbert cartoon about doctors. Written a year later it might have targeted Venture Capitalists, endowment managers or philanthropists, all of whose egos were inflated by the tech bubble of that time. How the mighty have all fallen.


Of course, now, it would have to be about bloggers :)

A tangentially related recent article in the Economist (Ivory-Towering Infernos) looks into the latest questions being raised about the symbiotic relationships of large university endowments and the private equity (including VC) funds in which they invest.

Energy Flow

Thanks to a recent pitch by an entrepreneur, I saw this amazing chart from the US Government Energy Information Administration. The diagram shows sources and uses of energy in the USA in 2007.

In these times of nationalizing everything, finding out we have such a soviet-sounding bureaucracy is little comfort. However, this may be worthy of Tufte (or at least, in the right direction), so enjoy. Click on the picture to see the full size.

The units are quadrillion BTUs. Those Brits are everywhere (BTU = British Thermal Units).