Francisco Dao came up with the idea of letting 10 companies that weren’t selected for Twiistup to do a presentation the night before to a group of people and let the audience pick one company to win the final slot at Twiistup.  I I’ll put up the video when they post it on their website. Many of them have their iPhones and laptops Most people suck at presenting to big groups.  It’s It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to influence journalists, business partners, potential

The Scott Sanfilippo Interview Media Optimization Firms Are Red Hot In Southern California in 2009 Proliferate - Aggregate - Integrate Startups Uncensored #4 - “Finding and Working with Partners” SoCal VC’s absent from Forbes Midas List Top Five Best Uses of an Entrepreneur's Legal Dollars What Data Crunchers Did for Obama An Evaluation of Web Strategy in the Musical Instrument Business Keywords Layoffs Fund Venture Capital Events Technology Angel Mahalo Zag MySpace Geni

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

La Jolla-based ProQuo , a venture-backed startup helping consumers manage and reduce junk mail, has quietly shut down, according to reports. ProQuo was venture backed by Mission Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and had raised around $15M in funding. Tags: proquo startup shutdown failure jobs employmen The shutdown was first noted by Xconomy . READ MORE>> ...Tags:

Southern California's top startups showed up in force Friday at the Westin South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, for the Technology Council of Southern California's annual VentureNet conference. (socalTECH The conference, held at the Westin South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, featured pitches by eight different companies vying for the attention--and pocketbooks--of venture capitalists. socalTECH was a media sponsor of the conference). The day started with a keynote by John Suh of Legalzoom.com, and topped off with a pitch from David Sacks -- CEO of Geni.com, and also CEO of Geni spinoff

San Diego-based cloud storage provider Nirvanix has added a new customer of the firm's storage service, Nasuni , a Massachusetts startup providing virtual file server software. Nirvanix is backed by Intel Capital, Valhalla Partners, Mission Ventures, Windward Ventures, and the European Founders Fund. Nasuni said it is using Nirvanix to provide its customers with unlimited cloud capacity. Nirvanix is a provider of a cloud storage service targeted at enterprises and web application developers; Nasuni develops a virtual network attached storage (NAS) file server that

San Diego-based music startup Slacker has apparently lost its CEO, according to a report from VentureWire . Slacker is venture backed by Austin Ventures, Centennial Ventures, Mission Ventures, Rho Ventures, and Sevin Rosen Funds. VentureWire said it confirmed the departure of Dennis Mudd with an investor in the company. The firm has raised around $70M in funding.

While having a thorough understanding of their breakthroughs in technology or science it is the routine acts of fund raising, hiring resources and managing for results rather than publications that make taking research out of the lab and into a start-up a special case. This panel provides real-life insights to both university insiders and outsiders on how to move university research successfully into commercial ventures .The Tuesday, December 8, 2009 -- Out of the Lab and into a Business. LAVA Breakfast Meeting.

Adam also had a stint at Mission Ventures, and ran worldwide sales for open source middleware at IBM. We caught up with Webtide to learn more about the firm's open source web server software, Jetty. Where It's just sign up here, so we can get them into the system. One of the big, open source successes in both Southern California and the software world was Gluecode Software , which was based in Los Angeles and acquired by IBM in 2005. One of the firm's co-founders, Adam Lieber , is now the founder and CEO of Webtide (www.webtide.com), which is also based here.

Los Angeles-based Big Stage Entertainment , a venture-backed startup developing 3D animation technology used to create avatars, said this morning that the firm has created a new application which works on the Apple iPhone. Big Stage is venture backed by Mission Ventures, Selby Ventures and the Tech Coast Angels. According to Big Stage, its iStage software, which allows users to create photo-realistic avatars, allows users of the iPhone to create a realistic, animated 3-D model of their face in minutes, and insert that into branded content. The firm