Santa Monica-based Clearstone Venture Partners is the lead investor in a Northern California firm focused on the blogging and publishing industry, Apture . Apture said this morning that Clearstone was the lead investor in a $4.1M, Series A investment in the firm, which develops tools which allows publishers to add multimedia to their articles and web pages. David Stern and Sumant Mandal of Clearstone have joined Apture's Apture develops tools which allow publishers to highlight and link terms in articles to multimedia popups, showing additional information, videos, photos, and other content. ...Tags:

If the limited partners who fund venture firms either a) change the percent of funds they allocate to VCs or b) don’t come through on their capital calls, we’ll all quickly find the venture community becoming drastically constrained. Erick Schonfeld writes about the current state of affairs in his TechCrunch post: “ The End of Venture Capital as We Know It ” There has been a lot of conjecture about how the Venture community will respond to the economic downturn. My personal opinion is that its going to be bad, really bad.

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Trouble in Venture Capital? "Keep Clearstone's Jim Armstrong shares some sobering year-end perspectives. "Things Keep the faith!" Things get good as fast as they went bad," Jim encourages. Is it the beginning of another great buying opportunity?

in funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures. The company was incubated by Clearstone Ventures, which has been actively pulling together management teams and funding new startups in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Tags: clearstone capital venture tmobile application mobile geodeli Santa Monica-based Geodelic announced today that the firm is shipping a new application for local discovery, along with T-Mobile USA. According to the venture backed firm, the new software for T-Mobile's myTouch 3G, learns a user's favorite locations and helps them find local

This morning's Insights & Opinions piece comes from Jim Armstrong , Managing Director at Clearstone Venture Partners . Tags: insights opinions armstrong clearstone venture capita Jim is very active helping Southern California's aspiring entrepreneurs, and has been instrumental in helping to promote the technology industry here. Jim has been giving helpful advice to CEOs recently on his blog , and we're sharing his recent top ten list of board meetings do's and don'ts for CEO. Here

Seeing last week’s Venture Capital Dispatch in the online Wall Street Journal, When Venture Capitalists Let One Slip Away , reminded me of Jim Armstrong’s (Clearstone Venture Partners) comment last year about false negatives. “You Tags: General Anti-Portfolio Bessemer Venture Partners Clearstone Venture Partners Joe Platnick Pasadena Angel 8220;You can afford to have a false positive; you can afford to invest in things and fail, but because the big ones are so rare, you cannot afford a false negative. You cannot afford to be looking the wrong way.”

2.    Do they actually have capital and a track record of investing their own personal funds 3.    couple of years ago, William Quigley of Clearstone Venture Partners wrote an appropriate blog post, Value of Certain Angel Investors : As it happens, angel investors in this category usually know the VCs who invest in their space and can be a great help in introducing a start up to smart venture capital investors. Part IV of a Continuing Series on How to Select an Angel Group Several months before Jason Calcanis’ crusade (or jihad—depending on your political affiliation)

Frank recently talked with Clearstone’s Jim Armstrong about Jim’s views on how the economy is affecting both startups and the venture capital business, and it’s well worth a listen to get an idea of the issues facing both startups and venture capitalists in the new year.  (btw, Tags: Venture Capital Economy Entrepreneurshi Frank Peters, podcaster at the Frank Peters Show and chairman of the Tech Coast Angels, always has informative and in-depth interviews. btw, we’re now cross-posting relevant interviews from Frank’s podcast on socalTECH).

The firm, which has previously raised funding from Clearstone Ventures and the Acartha Group, continues to have Clearstone's Jim Armstrong and Acartha's Ameet Patel listed as board members. ...Tags: Tags: integrien venture capital softwar Irvine-based Integrien , a developer of enterprise, IT monitoring software, has raised $6.5M in a funding round, part of an ongoing $7.475M fundraising effort, according to a recent regulatory filing by the company.