Jeetu's shared memory

Now that Congress has failed to bail out Wall Street, the country (and world, to a lesser extent) has begun bracing itself for nuclear winter. The technology sector is no exception, even if the Silicon Valley tends to fancy itself as immune to broader economic turmoil.

As Fred Wilson points out, startups fortunate enough to enjoy venture capital will fare the best during these hard times. So we compiled a list of all the technology startups that have raised at least $25 million over the past two years, according to CrunchBase. The ~160 startups to stockpile that much capital recently are listed below.

Facebook tops the list with $455 million raised over the last two years (the bulk of its total $496M). Clean tech comes in highly as well with Nanosolar having raised $300 million, eSolar $140 million, and SulfurCell $134 million.

Of course, to know truly how well-prepared these startups are for the next few years, we’d have to see other figures like burn rates, revenue and head counts, not all of which are publicly known. Nevertheless, their recent funding rounds provide a good guideline.

Have we missed any relevant companies or funding rounds? Submit them to CrunchBase and we’ll update this list.

1. Facebook – $455M
2. ZeniMax – $310M
3. Nanosolar – $300M
4. OverSee – $210M
5. OANDA – $200M
6. Kayak – $196M
7. GridPoint – $167M
8. Plastic Logic – $150M
9. eSolar – $140M
10. Demand Media – $135M
11. SulfurCell – $134M
12. Modu – $120M
13. United Mobile – $115M
14. Zhaopin – $110M
15. Ning – $104M
16. Glam Media – $104M
17. hulu – $100M
18. 9You – $100M
19. Specificmedia – $100M
20. SpinVox – $100M
21. Rearden Commerce – $100M
22. Ausra – $97.8M
23. CDNetworks – $96.5M
24. Move Networks – $91.3M
25. Spot Runner – $91M
26. Tesla Motors – $85M
27. Big Fish Games – $83.3M
28. Realtime Worlds – $81M
29. Adconion Media Group – $80M
30. The Active Network – $80M
31. HelioVolt – $77M
32. Youku – $77M
33. Datapipe – $75M
34. Trion World Network – $70M
35. Arcadian Networks – $70M
36. Vantage Media – $70M
37. A123Systems – $70M
38. Boston Power – $68.6M
39. Infinia – $66.5M
40. LinkedIn – $65.8M
41. Fisker – $65M
42. Brightcove – $64.4M
43. SilkRoad technology – $64M
44. Coremetrics – $60M
45. ReachLocal – $55.2M
46. Veoh – $55M
47. Federated Media – $54.5M
48. Slacker – $53.5M
49. RockYou – $52.5M
50. 51.com – $51M
51. HealthCentral – $50M
52. ChannelAdvisor – $50M
53. Blowtorch – $50M
54. Dayjet – $50M
55. GarageGames – $50M
56. Revolution Money – $50M
57. Slide – $50M
58. Strands – $49M
59. obopay – $49M
60. JumpTap – $48M
61. ice – $47M
62. Greenplum – $46M
63. Internet Mall – $45M
64. Clear – $44.4M
65. Jingle Networks – $43M
66. Avail Media – $42M
67. Metaweb Technologies – $42M
68. BitTorrent – $42M
69. Amobee – $42M
70. Enforta – $40M
71. Undertone Networks – $40M
72. Turbine – $40M
73. Pure Digital Technologies – $40M
74. Trilliant – $40M
75. SiBEAM – $40M
76. Teneros – $40M
77. SearchMe – $39.6M
78. fabrik – $39.2M
79. Zynga – $39M
80. Turn – $38.5M
81. LifeLock – $37.9M
82. Digg – $37.2M
83. GreatCall – $36.6M
84. Segway – $35M
85. hi5 – $35M
86. Bestofmedia Group – $35M
87. Yodlee – $35M
88. Angie’s List – $35M
89. Lehigh Technologies – $34.5M
90. Sermo – $34.5M
91. ooma – $34M
92. meebo – $34M
93. Dailymotion – $34M
94. Clearspring – $33.5M
95. XunLight – $33M
96. Cuil – $33M
97. Seatwave – $33M
98. Dilithium Networks – $33M
99. Waterfront Media – $33M
100. Mzinga – $32.5M
101. Vanu – $32M
102. Vuze – $32M
103. PicScout – $32M
104. Pando – $31.9M
105. Etsy – $31.3M
106. BuzzNet – $31M
107. Global Roaming – $30.5M
108. NebuAd – $30.2M
109. MFG – $30M
110. Zillow – $30M
111. GodTube – $30M
112. 56.com – $30M
113. Zazzle – $30M
114. Metacafe – $30M
115. Batanga – $30M
116. VideoJug – $30M
117. Eyeblaster – $30M
118. badoo – $30M
119. Viagogo – $30M
120. IGA Worldwide – $30M
121. Leapfrog on-line – $30M
122. MobiTV – $30M
123. MOLI – $29.6M
124. Automattic – $29.5M
125. Intacct – $29M
126. Genius – $29M
127. Kosmix – $28M
128. LiveOps – $28M
129. RadioFrame – $28M
130. PGP Corporation – $27.3M
131. Milestone Systems – $27M
132. Palo Alto Networks – $27M
133. Tideway – $27M
134. BlackArrow – $26.8M
135. ChoiceStream – $26.5M
136. Ruckus – $26M
137. ContextWeb – $26M
138. Solarflare – $26M
139. Quantcast – $25.7M
140. Become – $25.5M
141. Mimeo – $25M
142. Reunion – $25M
143. Gemini – $25M
144. PharmaNation – $25M
145. InMage Systems – $25M
146. Aurora Biofuels – $25M
147. Nimbuzz – $25M
148. Firefly Energy – $25M
149. Yelp – $25M
150. Meraki – $25M
151. Dash – $25M
152. Retail Convergence – $25M
153. Trulia – $25M
154. SpringSource – $25M
155. Zecco – $25M
156. Koolanoo Group – $25M
157. Verimatrix – $25M
158. Optaros – $25M
159. Visible World – $25M
160. Splunk – $25M
161. DeviceVM – $25M

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Two crude bombs hit Malegaon in Maharashtra, killing two and injuring 30, and Modasa in Sabarkantha district of Gujarat killing one and injuring six.

The House of Representatives defeated a $700bn emergency rescue for the US financial system, triggering a massive sell off in stocks.

A new service popped up today called IconDial. It’s about as simple and straightforward as possible. Go to the site, which has a phone-style dial pad, and dial any phone number in the world. After a 3-5 second advertisement, your call will be put through. There is no restriction on who you can call – all countries are supported, and you can call both land lines and mobile phones.

For now the service is limited to calls of a “couple of minutes” but the company says they are looking to allow calls of up to 20 minutes soon.

The business model is similar to Free 411, which allows free directory assistance calls with an advertisement based business model. But Free 411 tries to reduce costs with an automated system and smart use of data. It’s not clear that IconDial can lower its costs to any reasonable level, particularly when it allows calls to mobile phones (which have built in costs to the caller in most countries). There’s just no way the company can recover those costs with a short audio ad.

So I guess what I’m saying is, try it now while it’s still around.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

In the past, we have written extensively about the potential of BOSS, Yahoo’s open search web services platform. BOSS is an open API that lets developers access and manipulate Yahoo’s search results. A wide range of companies, including Hakia and Me.dium, are currently using it to power their own search engines. One of the more interesting applications of BOSS we have come across lately is PopGist. PopGist blends search results with Techmeme-like discussion sections that list related stories from other sites.

Sponsor

PopGist’s developer, Matthew Chen, is also the co-founder of Megite, a once popular memetracker that surely gave Matthew the inspiration for this project.

Not Pretty – But it Works

PopGist is not much to look at. Neither its Google inspired logo nor the bland presentation of its search results immediately instilled a feeling of confidence in us. If you can look past that, however, the search results themselves are very useful.

If you search for Google Chrome, for example, PopGist will return reviews from most major blogs as well. If you look for a company, PopGist will also include links to profiles on services like TradeVibes in the results. At its best, PopGist can become a one-stop search engine for researching a company or a product and safe you a lot of time and energy, as you won’t have to try multiple search queries to get relevant results.

Services like PopGist tend to be prone to being overrun by spam, but surprisingly, PopGist’s results always came back very clean. In our tests, PopGist usually returned the best results when entering relatively simple queries and the most useful discussion sections were always clustered around the top three results.

Overall, we were impressed with PopGist’s results. While it surely won’t replace Google for us, its search results allow us to get a quick glance at a product in its context without having to use various services.

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(I received a tip-off about this unique initiative and so thought of sharing it on this blog. )

Open Video Player is a community site dedicated to sharing best practices around video player development. Promoted by Akamai, the global leader in online content delivery networks, Open Video Player is a resource for developers wanting to build online video players using Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. Resources on the site include source code to build video players using ActionScipt 3 for Adobe Flash / Flex and .Net for Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Other resources include – expert video tutorials on how to utilize Internet standards to build professional-grade players, code & documentation to connect Open Video Player based projects to leading advertising technologies.

Participating in the project are leading advertising technology companies, ad servers, video solution providers and platform companies : 24/7 Real Media, Adobe Corporation, BlackArrow, Clickability, EyeWonder, KickApps, Microsoft Corporation, OpenX, Panache etc.

So why is Akamai doing this? Well, video is a phenomenon on the web and CDNs have been deeply instrumental in getting videos to spread around on the internet. In the process they have had the opportunity to work with top video websites, ad networks etc and collate a knowledge base of delivering high quality consumer video experiences. By utilizing an open source licensing model, branded players can be incorporated into commercial applications without any lockin requirements. And if video spreads, the growth of CDN networks would happen in parallel. In that sense, this initiative can be seen as an attempt by Akamai at promoting PRIMARY demand in video content/delivery- in the hope that its trickle down affect will mean business gains for them in the long term. Not a bad strategy at all. A little removed from the usual quick gain marketing/branding activities that one can think off…

Go here if you want to check out examples of video player applications developed with the Open Video Player project files.

Key Site Components include

Media Framework : This is a resource for the rapid development of video player applications using either Adobe Flash Player or Microsoft Silverlight. The framework is a developer toolkit with player source code, which leverages best practices and open technologies to enable the creation of video player applications for both streaming and progressive download content. Akamai is contributing the Media Framework under an Open Source license to be extended and improved upon by the community.

Media Framework Connectors : Openvideoplayer.com offers sample code-based reference implementations from leading advertising technology companies for easy integration and support of ad formats, ad servers and ad networks.

Developer Forum : A forum staffed by interactive designers and developers within the Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight developer community for an open exchange of ideas and expert advice on player development.

Developer Resources : A library of documentation and video tutorials on how to utilize Internet standards to build professional grade online video players.

Quick thoughts: Why is Adobe Flash participating in this? Because they are the overriding choice for online video delivery and would like to be omnipresent. But why is Microsoft SilverLight in this? Probably because they have no other choice. With the kind of head start that Flash has, SilverLight has to latch on to any opportunity that comes their way. Makes sense for both actually.

A security flaw in Adobe Systems software has left Amazon’s video streaming service wide open to freeloaders. The hole allows users to record and copy direct from Amazon’s video feed.

Studios have always been skittish about having their films distributed electronically, and this new hole might give them another excuse to support the RIAA’s heavy-handed copyright measures.

The best quote of the day goes to Bruce Schneier, a security expert who obviously doesn’t believe in mincing words, who told Reuters: “It’s a fundamental flaw in the Adobe design. This was designed stupidly.”

The ‘stupid’ flaw is located perilously on the Flash video servers connected to the Flash players installed on most PCs.

Adobe has not placed stringent enough security measures on the connection between the players and the servers. Supposedly a security feature designed to do so was dropped – to boost download speeds.

Latest word from Adobe? The software company issued a statement, saying: “Adobe is committed to the security of all of our products, from our players to our server software. Adobe invests a considerable amount of ongoing effort to help protect users from potential vulnerabilities.”

An Amazon spokesman insisted the company’s Video On Demand service, could not be pirated. Reuters’s tests showed that isn’t true.

The Replay Media Catcher from Applian Technologies proved fully capable of downloading movies from Amazon and other sites that also use Adobe’s encryption technology and video player verification.

In truth, video capture from streams has been around for quite some time and it’s a little late for Adobe to notice. The challenge will be to find a way that protects Adobe-streamed content without affecting download times or viewing experience, while at the same time providing security.

WordPress may be one of the best blogging platforms around today, but that hasn’t stopped a worldwide community of developers from thinking they can do better. Desiring a more open environment where individuals can contribute and extend the project with their own work, they designed a platform called Habari to utilize a unique community participation model. Within this model, users whose contributions are consistently of a high quality are granted more privileges within the project. What has resulted from their efforts so far is a next-gen blogging platform that may eventually give WordPress a run for its money.

Some of the active developers of Habari include Michael Heilemann, Owen Winkler, Khaled Abou Alfa, Chris J. Davis, Scott Merrill, and Rich Bowen, to name a few. If you’ve been heavily involved in the WordPress community, then you may recognize some of these names already. What they, and a hundred or so other developers worldwide, are working on is a new blogging platform with a fresh design and backed up by clean code. As one developer says, “Habari is just as much a way of coding as it is a blogging platform.”

Habari Integrates With Flickr, Viddler

What’s most interesting about Habari is the way it integrates with third-party services. Instead of having to download a plugin for things like Flickr integration, for example, in Habari you can browse Flickr for a photo to add to your post just as some other blogging platforms allow you to browse your computer’s hard drive. As you search for a photo, you have the option to enter in a tag to better locate the picture you need. In this way, Habari the platform performs very much like Zemanta the plugin, an add-in which allows for a similar type of interaction.

Searching Flickr in Habari:

Another example of this platform-to-cloud integration is how Habari lets you record video blogs. From within Habari itself, you can click a record button to record a video. When finished, the video can be posted directly to Viddler’s video-sharing web site as well as to your blog itself.

Although Flickr and Viddler are the only two sites configured at the moment, they are only the beginning. Just as how a service like FriendFeed can pull in data streams from sites all over the social web, Habari will be able to access other media silos as well. And for anything that’s not supported by the platform itself, there are still plugins available just as there are in WordPress. Currently, some of the more popular plugins include Disqus comments, Feedburner integration, Twitter posting, and a lifestreaming plugin (example).

Habari Features

Also like WordPress, Habari supports static pages, Atom publishing, tagging, multiple authors, and multiple sites under one install. There are even importers for Serendipty and WordPress available to help make the transition easier.

Because Habari is still a work-in-progress to some extent, it may not be ready for the newest of bloggers just yet. One day though, the developers hope to appeal to both them and blogging experts both. They want to address the pain points that make blogging difficult for new users, but they also want to bring the focus of blogging back to content creation. That’s why the compose page is clean and simple by default (see below). They also want to focus on ways to make your blog the place where you actually blog, not the place where you have store videos and photos.

Habari wants you to just write:

It’s Not New, They Just Need Better Marketing!

The Habari Project has been around for a couple of years now, so you may have heard of it before. If not, don’t worry – you’re not alone. When one of the developers gave it a shoutout at this weekend’s Blogorlando conference, neither the speaker nor many of the audience members had ever heard of it. “Come again?”, and “How do you spell that?”, people asked. And this was a blogging conference, mind you.

If you’re looking to try a new blogging platform, Habari is ready for install today. You can learn more about the Habari Project on their homepage here: http://habariproject.org. If you’re interested in getting involved, visit the community page here: http://wiki.habariproject.org/en/Getting_Involved.

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