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 develops tools which allow publishers to highlight and link terms in articles to multimedia popups, showing additional information, videos, photos, and other content. ...Tags:

Clearstone's Jim Armstrong shares some sobering year-end perspectives. "Things Jim shares some great insights,"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. Trouble in Venture Capital? "Keep Keep the faith!"

Los Angeles-based Rubicon Project , the online ad optimization firm headed by Frank Addante , announced this morning that it has hired investment banker Allen & Company . Rubicon has raised over $42M in funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, IDG Ventures and GE/NBC Universal's Peacock Equity Fund. Tags: rubicon project merger acquisition investment banker advertising According to Rubicon, Allen & Company will work with the company to "exploring options for ongoing business growth initiatives" including strategic acquisitions, platform expanson, and continued international growth.

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 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.” 8221;

was invested in 65 Southern California deals in Q3, compared to $773.3M billion invested in 637 deals in Q3, up 17 percent quarter-to-quarter, but down three percent in deals. In PwC/NVCA said that Mission Ventures and Enterprise Partners were the most active local VCs for the quarter, with five deals each; Clearstone Ventures had four, and DFJ Frontier and Palomar Ventures reported three deals each. Dow PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association have weighed in on Q3 venture capital totals, saying that $475.5M and 87 deals in

Several months before Jason Calcanis’ crusade (or jihad—depending on your political affiliation) against for-profit angel groups, I wrote a post about evaluating angel groups and the criteria to use when seeking investment. 2.    Do they actually have capital and a track record of investing their own personal funds 3.    3.    How transparent is their organization and Part IV of a Continuing Series on How to Select an Angel Group For those that didn’t see the earlier post, the list included:

m were the source of the investment information. Total Funding: $355.00M Investors: 3i Ventures Generation Partners Goldman Sachs Lance Armstrong Foundation Oak Investment Partners Spectrum Equity Investors Oversee.net - 515 South Flower Street, Suite 4400 Los Angeles CA 90017 - Operates an advertising network, services for parked domain name holders, and a series of consumer focused web sites. Total Funding: $42M I nvestors: Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, IDG Ventures and GE/NBC Universal's Peacock Equity A stealth internet advertising / publishing renaissance is quietly happening in Southern California 10 years after the dot com bubble burst.

What’s out, and what’s in as a theme for venture investments? An article posted on the WSJ site talking about an increase in VC interest in travel quotes local venture capitalist Jim Armstrong , of Clearstone Ventures , who says:  “We’re excited about categories with a lot of money around them and there’s a lot of money in travel.” There’s Pasadena-based LeisureLink (funded by Clearstone), Pasadena-based AdventureLink (funded by Mail Room Fund, Anthem, and Allegis Capital), Redondo From the sounds of things, social networking is out, and travel might be up.

billion was invested in 3,808 deals in the fourth quarter of 2008. The report, based on data from Thomson Reuters, found that 2008 investments declined by 8 percent in terms of dollars, and 4 percent in terms of deal volume, with fourth quarter results seeing a 26 percent drop to $5.4 Most sectors saw drops in investment during the year, with the exception of few--including a couple of sectors where Southern California has a significant presence, in Clean Technology and Media & Entertainment. PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) released their 2008 Q4 MoneyTree Report this evening, reporting that $28.3

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). 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.