A portfolio firm of Santa Monica-based Clearstone Ventures , Meru Networks , filed for an IPO late Friday night, saying it is looking to go public on the NYSE. owned by Clearstone Ventures, said it would look to raise up to $86.25M in an IPO underwritten by BofA Merrill Lynch, Baird, Cowen and Company, JMP Securities LLC, and ThinkEquity LLC. Clearstone's William Quigley sits on Meru's board of directors. The Silicon Valley firm, which is 21.0% Meru develops enterprise wireless LAN networking products. ...Tags:

When I drill down on that term, you can see why with posts like: Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals Lops A Third Of Company THQ Lays Off 100 Employees, Closes San Diego Office Citrix Cuts 10 Percent; Santa Barbara Hit And it's also interesting to see what geographies are being associated with "Layoffs" more often than others: Layoffs Woodland Hills Layoffs San Diego Layoffs Santa Monica Layoffs Los Angeles I guess this is a sign of the times. The Scott Sanfilippo Interview Media Optimization Firms Are Red Hot In Southern California in 2009 Proliferate

Clearstone's Jim Armstrong shares some sobering year-end perspectives. "Things It's never been harder to create a billion dollar company. Trouble in Venture Capital? "Keep Keep the faith!" Things get good as fast as they went bad," Jim encourages.

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. Aside from Sonnad, who was at thePlatform, the company includes executives from Shopzilla, Yahoo!, 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

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 As Bessemer puts it, “Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies, whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. 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

High-caliber Angels with a lot of experience at both large and small companies, tend to have strong Rolodexes and skills that can be applied to helping portfolio companies. When reviewing their experience, consider both their work history and the companies they’ve backed as investors. If you’re further along with an angel group, consider doing more diligence on the group and its members by contacting 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) against for-profit

Instead of making as many new investments, VCs will use their cash for inside rounds to fund their top preforming portfolio companies that have the greatest likelihood of success. Last week I hosted a panel of Los Angeles Venture Capitalists with Jim Armstrong (Clearstone Ventures), Mark Suster (GRP), David Travers (Rustic Canyon), and Brian Garrett (Crosscut Ventures). For existing internet 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.

in a funding round, part of an ongoing $7.475M fundraising effort, according to a recent regulatory filing by the company. Details on the funding have not been announced by the company. 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: Irvine-based Integrien , a developer of enterprise, IT monitoring software, has raised $6.5M Tags: integrien venture capital softwar

No details on the funding have been announced by the firm, however, the filing indicates that Clearstone Ventures Suman Mandal and Anthem Ventures' Bill Woodward remain on the company's board. The funding brings the company's total raised to around $9.7M Santa Monica-based ThisNext , which operates an online social shopping site and community, has raised another $1.2M in venture funding, according to a regulatory filing from the firm Thursday.

The round was led by Time Warner, and also included prior investors Clearstone Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks. The new round brings the company's total raised to $14M. Marina Del Ray-based Six Degrees Games , which runs the ActionAllStars.com virtual world focused on six to 14 year olds, has raised $7M in an additional funding round. Six Degree Games is headed by Minard Hamilton.