Tag Archives: VentureBeat

Intel Capital continues to search for opportunities despite downturn

Image representing Intel as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Sodhani’s multi-billion dollar investments include major positions in Clearwire (recently announced) and over 400 other early stage startups.  Below is a brief excerpt from the interview:

Interview with Arvind Sodhani: Intel Capital isn’t backing off on venture » VentureBeat

VB: How is the downturn changing what Intel Capital does?

AS: Not much has changed on our side. We will continue to invest. My belief, shared by the CEO of Intel, is that you continue to innovate in a downturn, and innovation doesn’t stop because of slowdowns. We’ll continue to invest in technology innovation. The good news is valuations will be more attractive. I think other investors will pull back. We have heard a lot of stories about the venture capital community pulling back. Depending on the life-stage of the fund, VCs are not funding existing companies or new companies.

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The real potential of micro-blogging is in developing countries

Given a slow morning, I was just reading through some older Google Reader feeds, and came upon this excellent post over at VentureBeat. Anand Rajaraman is an investor in an Indian service called SMS GupShup, which serves as a Twitter-like micro-blogging service for the Indian mobile market. Why would micro-blogging matter in places like India? Here’s a short example that Rajaraman mentions:

One day the GupShup spam control team noticed several messages that looked like gobbledygook to them. So they sent these suspected spammers account termination notices. They didn’t expect the response: messages not just from those senders but from many others, pleading with them not to terminate the accounts. It turns out the messages were in a language called Hmar, only spoken by some 65,000 tribal people living in the hilly regions of India’s northeast. There are now several Hmar groups on SMS GupShup; the tribal group sees this as a major communication channel. Being too small to attract mainstream media, the group also sees SMS GupShup as their main form of media and a way to save their language and culture from extinction as they assimilate into the Indian mainstream.

Amazing.