Venture Capital funds nowadays are moving on to technology, now eying apps and softwares for Google Glass – a new product of google that enables people to have internet in their glasses.
Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz ventured into a partnership that focused on Glass.
“It is an efficient way for software and hardware developers to get their ideas in front of three prominent venture capital firms and to jump-start developers’ creativity in thinking about ways to use the new hardware,” said Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures. The fund, which operates separately from Google, invests up to $250,000 in this type of early-stage start-up.
The firms are also allowing themselves to be on top of things, capturing the best ideas first and ensuring that they may get the biggest tech investments which is wearable computing.
In 2008, Kleiner Perkin’s iFund amounted to $100 million that was all about iPhone app developers and now the firms from the google venture is trying to do the same.

Google glasses are indeed the next big thing for apps and according to General partner at Kleiner Perkins, John Doerr, “Though it’s early days, there’s the potential here to build a platform,” said Mr. Doerr, who is also on Google’s board. “I think it’s exactly the right time to kick-start an effort to support entrepreneurs.”

Of course, competition is expected and it may all seem indirect, like the internet connected watches and bracelets, the firm is still focused on glasses.

“This is about Glass, this is not about wrist or foot or ring,” Mr. Doerr said.
Online fitness trainers are one of his target and hands-free internet access is the game he will play in the new technology market. Envisioning multi-tasking and allowing disabled people do what normal people can, Mr. Maris says he could imagine it happening.
Meanwhile, Mr. Doerr has been usin the glasses for in his life, taking photos and searching for words in a game of Scattergories. Is that allowed in the rules Mr. Doerr? Nonetheless, people now have questioned the new abilities that these glasses can allow a person to do.

“Using the device, if someone is reading e-mail or taking a picture, you know it, and you can be more present in a conversation because you haven’t put a phone in your face,” Mr. Doerr said. “And if you want to be focused on the person across the table, focus on them. Ignore those droids.”

Wanderful Media is a startup backed by of a bunch of major news publishers. The company’s vision is to create the online version of the deal- and coupon-filled circulars that are delivered with newspapers and in the mail. Find&Save’s first version wasn’t much of a success since it literally converted print circulars to digital and posted them online. However, CEO Ben T. Smith IV admitted, “It got interesting content out there, but it wasn’t interesting.”

Before Find&Save was acquired, it was part of Travidia, a print-to-digital conversion company. This new version, Smith said, is Wanderful’s chance to put its own spin on the service.

The revamp basically makes the whole experience more personal and social. Aside from browsing details and products, users can now save them in lists and set up alerts for expiring sales while also sharing products and lists on different social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and email. They can also visit and follow other users, retailers, and product categories.

This summer, Find&Save will be planning to launch native mobile apps, and is also working on mobile browsers which will be useful for checking in the store.

Smith said, moving forward, Wanderful will be even more personal and helpful to people since it now has lots of data to use and provide. (That data still comes from physical circulars, as well as retailers and other digital sources.) It can also tell a local level when and where there is a very good deal.

“We know the price of a two-liter Pepsi in Los Gatos for the past two years,” Smith said. “We can make it easier and much more personal so that everybody’s getting their own experience over time. It will continue to evolve with more data.”

A number of newspaper sites use the previous version of Find&Save as well as the new version since it is integrated as the main local commerce experience. You can check it out yourself, you can visit the Find&Save pages for the Dallas Morning News, the San Jose Mercury News, or the San Francisco Chronicle.

Anand Sanwal is CEO of CB Insights, a New York-based company that gathered the data. He says Silicon Valley VCs have been opening offices elsewhere in the country and not as much here. “Look at places like Los Angeles or New York, I’d say sentiment for their tech scene is very strong right now,” Sanwal said. “Washington doesn’t have that same level of enthusiasm.”

Greg Gottesman with Madrona Venture Group here in Seattle disagrees and says that startups in Washington are provided with big deals from Silicon Valley, and has a strong network of local investors. “My sense is that good deals with great entrepreneurs and good technology – they’re getting funded here,” Gottesman said. In Washington, companies have raised $100 million in the first quarter – down almost two-thirds from the end of last year.

In the first quarter, venture capital activity edged up to $6.9 billion, nationally.

No. 5: Castlight Health Inc.

Disclosed round total: $100,000,000

Number of funds invested: 14

Top Bay Area executive: Giovanni Colella, co-founder and CEO

No. 4: Box Inc.

Disclosed round total: $125,000,000

Number of funds invested: 17

Top Bay Area executive: Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO

No. 3: Intarcia Therapeutics Inc.

Disclosed round total: $155,898,000

Number of funds invested: 44

Top Bay Area executive: Kurt Graves, president and CEO

No. 2: Square Inc.

Disclosed round total: $200,000,000

Number of funds invested: 10

Top Bay Area executive: Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO

No. 1: SquareTrade Inc.

Disclosed round total: $238,000,000

Number of funds invested: 11

Top Bay Area executive: Steve Abernethy, co-founder, president and CEO

Public investors and hedge funds have targeted these venture capitalists when these things happen and they have been doing it whenever these venture capitalists take the start-up companies to the public.

As early as now, the public investors are already hitting on early this year such as those investors of SurveyMonkey and Twitter.

Though investments are good, the Venture capitalists may find his a sensitive time and may have doubts in these investments with only 39% of those see the IPO activity while 60% foresee a longer time frame for exits, according to Rothstein Kass.

A half of those polled (54%) sees new funds to be launched.

“This is such a nexus of energy and smart people and cool stuff,” said� Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon, “Anytime technology can hang out with entertainment it’s always worth showing up. This is like the Coachella of tech.” Gordon also co-founded� Electronic Arts .

Gordon’s thrilled about the promise of “the maker movement”. These are new products from 3-D printers like Makerbot, which are now becoming increasingly available. Some of which are Ouya, a new video game console that gained traction on Kickstarter, Leap Motion and Memoto’s life-blogging camera.

“Atoms are a good way to go,” Gordon said about the emergence of gadgets as compared to the inclination to apps in the previous years.

The big trend to watch is “the rise of the local web” according to Chi-hua Chien, another general partner at KPCB.

He said, “All these companies are building for the local web, which didn’t exist in the overall natural web because of the rise of mobile devices”, pointing to� AirBnB,� Uber,� Zaarly, Lyft, and Cheery. He mentioned that these tools are very helpful for those with small businesses and can greatly contribute to the economy’s progress. These handy gadgets are “enabling a great way for people to make a living now,” Chien mentioned.

Andreessen Horowitz’s partner, Scott Weiss declared that this is the year of the gadget at SXSW.

“I’m looking for ideas that transcend this petri dish here,” Weiss said. He was referring to the fact that one of the hottest companies at the festival last year, Highlight never took off in the mainstream.

“The spaces we are looking at [are] all types of global mobile commerce and I think that one of our companies,� Shoptiques kind of embodies what I would call, ‘the OpenTable of blah.’ You know every business that you walk into today, whether it be a boutique or car repair shop … All those ’90s blue screen TVs [in those businesses] will be replaced by a mobile device and a cloud service, and they’re just happening vertical by vertical.”

Steve Case, an investor in companies ranging from� LivingSocial toZipCar mentioned that another big trend is that Internet-based companies are thinking beyond the Internet.

He said, “Companies are focusing on how the Internet can transform other parts of the economy, like health care of education … Half the economy hasn’t been disrupted by the Internet.”

Case is certain about the potential in daily deals business despite the challenges faced by LivingSocial: “it’s rarely a straight line, there are some bumps in the road.”

Moving forward, he will take more time in considering which businesses to invest in. Case’s firm Revolution LCC headed a $3.5 million financing round in Homesnap last year. Let’s see which will be able to grab his attention this year.

A cyber security solutions provider in Herndon, Va., Endgame Inc. generated $23 million in Series B funding. Return backers Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and TechOperators joined the round that was led by Paladin Capital Group. www.endgame.com.

A developer of a hybrid electric powertrain for Class 1-3 commercial fleet vehicles in Boston named XL Hybrids Inc. has raised $4million in Series B funding from anonymous investors. www.xlhybrids.com

A Seattle-based big data bioinformatics startup, Spiral Genetics, was able to yield $3 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Spiral Genetics declared its partnership with Omicia, a genetic profiling services company in Oakland. www.spiralgenetics.com

HG Data Co. is located in Santa Barbara, Calif. They provide business intelligence services to technology companies and has raised $2 million in Epic Ventures-led  VC funding. www.hgdata.com

Review, analysis, and indexing solutions provider for surveillance videos BriefCam has generated an unidentified amount of a strategic funding from Motorola Solutions Venture. BriefCam is found in Tel Aviv. www.motorolasolutions.com

“This seed investment is meant to help these promising companies keep going while they work towards a more substantial second round of financing,” explains Senia Rapisarda, BDC Venture Capital’s VP of Strategic Investments and Initiatives. It was Dominique Belanger, who told the good news to the graduates of GrowLab. Belanger is the director in Ms. Rapisarda’s team who is in-charge of the BDC Venture Capital and GrowLab partnership. The companies “are now well equipped to further refine their product and grow their number of customers,” said Ms. Rapisarda after the three intensive months of the program received by the four companies.

BDC Venture Capital’s current investments are in the form of convertible notes. These are short term loans that are normally converted into shares later on in the company’s existence. Aside from the Vancouver’s GrowLab, BDC Venture Capital is also offering the same type of financing to Montreal’s FounderFuel who have “venture-ready” graduates and to Toronto’s Extreme Startups. Included also are selected top-performing startups from Waterloo’s Hyperdrive.

“BDC Venture Capital has played a real leadership role in advancing accelerators in Canada,” noted by GrowLab’s Executive Director, Mike Edwards. “Its convertible notes program certainly increases our flow of high potential applicant, motivates those who make it in, and leverages all the work done during the program by improving the startups’ chances of success,” he added. “Ultimately, this is all great news for the entire startup ecosystem.”

Currently, BDC Venture Capital has already provided $5.7 million in convertible notes to 38 Canadian startups, while $1.95 million has already reached 13 GrowLab graduates since the first one in 2011.

One of these ventures is Bain Capital. Unfortunately for them, their rank seems to be going down but with a good strategy, they continued to be on top.

So what was the strategy? – Taking advantage of any changes or forces in the market and an aggressive expansion through additional partnerships.

“Less money being raised in the venture industry, we’ve tried to take advantage of some of those market dynamics and build our business as some venture firms have struggled.” Said co-managing partner Mike Krupka.

Five new partners of which 4 of them have been considered as part of the company already for quite some time now, namely Salil Deshpande, Todd MacLean, Matt Harris, and Jack Sweeny.

Deshpande used to be with Bay Partners, MacLean meanwhile is the co-head at Accel Partners, Harris is one of the founders of Village Ventures, and Sweeny is the CEO of 5 companies and the chief executive of Axeda.

All are connected to the firm.

Ben Holzman and Ben Nye were also promoted as managing partners, being in the lead of the firm together with Krupka. But with great opportunities come along goodbyes as Jeff Schwartz, the managing director for so long of Bain Capital, will be retiring this year.