Internet portal Yahoo is quietly shutting Geocities , the Internet home page portal it acquired in 1999. Yahoo said it is no longer accepting new customers, and will discontinue the service later this year. billion stock-and-option acquisition by Yahoo in 1999. Geocities was one of Southern California's original, dot com successes, having both a successful IPO in August of 1998, and a $4.5 The firm was later moved to the Bay Area by Yahoo.

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 locations

So here's the Hot List for 1/1/2009 - 1/15/2009 Top 5 Posts The 7 Ways to Get Traffic on the Web Why You Need To Lead A Tribe - Seth Godin LA Gets Dugg, Hammered, Screwed How To Get The World Excited About Your Business –The James Siminoff Interview Viral analytics and metrics - go viral young startup Top 20 Keywords SEO Metrics Marketing Social Media Alelo Google Yahoo Mahalo MySpace Tech Coast Angels Idealab Mission Ventures Clearstone Hollywood Santa Barbara Venice San Diego Santa Monica Twiistup

A few months ago, Peter Lee --a venture local capitalist who has served at firms such as Prism Ventures and Clearstone Ventures Partners--joined a relatively unknown venture firm here in Southern California, Baroda Ventures (www.barodaventures.com). David founded Geocities back in 1994, took it public in 1998, and in 1999 Yahoo bought the firm as a public company. We caught up with Peter earlier this week to get the background on Baroda, and to talk a little about the firm's investment goals. We're We're familiar with Baroda, but for our readers who haven't heard of Baroda

became an angel investor after Overture was acquired by Yahoo. The board asked me to jump in, and I did, working with Ted Alexander and Jim Armstrong, of Mission Ventures and Clearstone Ventures, respectively. Yesterday, Pasadena-based LeisureLink (www.leisurelink.com) announced a $6.2M funding round for the firm's travel booking service.

billion to Yahoo, we did CitySearch, we invested in the largest travel site in Europe, called LastMinute.com, and also CyberSource--a number of very early stage, Internet companies. My competition is not Rustic Canyon, it's not Clearstone, or the other venture firms in town. This morning's interview is with Mark Suster , a venture capitalist at GRP Partners (www.grpvc.com). GRP has just recently closed on a new $200M fund, and Mark has been one of the more active venture capitalists in the Los Angeles area in recent months.