Victoria's Blog

In Silicon Valley, venture firms with a track record of success find themselves awash in money thanks to the growing number of institutions that want to invest more of their capital in tech. In March, an SEC filing showed that General Catalyst had closed a $1.375 billion fund , the biggest vehicle in its 18-year history. Battery Ventures also closed on two funds earlier this year that are the 35-year-old firm’s biggest to date. Sequoia Capital, meanwhile, is reportedly out raising $12 billion across a series of funds, a move that’s unprecedented for the firm — or any U.S.-based venture firm, for that matter. Fifteen-year-old Emergence Capital could easily follow the same path. Emergence funds early stage ventures that are focused on enterprise and SaaS applications, and it does this very well. Its bets include the storage company Box (now public), the social networking company Yammer (sold for $1.2 billion to Microsoft in 2012), and Veeva Systems, the company that’s generally k...

While the cryptocurrency world continues to swirl around in a daze of troughs and highs, startups are continuing to make use of the fundamental underlying strengths of blockchain technology. A new entrant in this race is Tradeshift, a leading players in supply-chain payments and marketplaces, which is today launching its new service which enables supports blockchain-based finance, or writing all transactions to a public ledger in order to create transparency and securing a record. While this doesn’t involve the use of currencies like actual Bitcoin or Ethereum, “having the transactions on a public ledger ensures full transparency and the ability for companies to prove that they have legit transactions,” says CEO and cofounder Christian Lanng. SO what this all means is that Tradeshift’s cloud platform will bring supply chain payments, supply chain finance, and blockchain-based early payments together into one unified end-to-end solution, called “Tradeshift Pay”. They are aiming at ...

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News . More posts by this contributor In Canada’s cloud services market, venture investment opportunities abound What did VCs study in college? Although bitcoin and blockchain technology may not take up quite as much mental bandwidth for the general public as it did just a few months ago, companies in the space continue to rake in capital from investors. One of the latest to do so is  Circle , which recently announced  a $110 million Series E round  led by bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer  Bitmain . Other participating investors include  Tusk Ventures ,  Pantera Capital ,  IDG Capital Partners ,  General Catalyst ,  Accel Partners ,  Digital Currency Group ,  Blockchain Capital and  Breyer Capital . This round vaults Circle into an exclusive club of crypto companies that are valued, in U.S. dollars, at $1 billi...

GDPR is right around the corner, so it’s time to prepare your personal data requests. If you live in the European Union, tech companies have to comply with personal data requests after May 25th. And there’s a handy website that helps you do just that. My Data Request lists dozens of tech companies and tells you how you can contact them. The website also links to the privacy policy of each service and tells you what to do even if you don’t live in the EU. Some companies, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Tinder and Snapchat have made that easy as they have created a page on their website to download a zip archive with all your personal data. But it’s worth nothing that your archive doesn’t necessarily include all data about you. For instance, Facebook tracks your web and location history as much as possible. But you won’t find any of that in the archive. The download tool is mostly about getting a copy of your posts, Messenger conversations, photos and more. For most c...

TODAY: In 1897, Oscar WIlde is released from Reading Gaol after two years of hard labor, an experience which will inform his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). “We know there are going to be a lot more disasters in the future, so how do we protect our collections in light of that knowledge?” How to protect rare books and manuscripts from climate change. | Pacific Standard Ever the fools, scientists have released a study alleging that using two spaces after a period is better than using one . | The Atlantic What’s more important, the auto or the fiction ? Christian Lorentzen on new books by Sheila Heti, Helen DeWitt, and Tao Lin. | Vulture “Today’s imperial censorship is usually masked as the publisher’s bottom line . ‘This won’t sell’ is the widest moat in the castle’s defenses.” Rabih Alameddine on who gets to tell stories. | Harper’s You do me, I’ll do you, and we’ll both benefit : On Gertrude Stein’s “mutual portraiture society.” | The Paris Re...

Facebook’s next money-maker could be this tool for connecting marketers to social media creators so they can team up on sponsored content Facebook ad campaigns. The Branded Content Matching search engine lets advertisers select the biographical characteristics of creators’ fans they want to reach, see stats about these audiences, and contact them to hammer out deals. Leaked screenshots of Facebook’s promotional materials for the tool were first attained and published in german by AllFacebook.de . TechCrunch has now confirmed with Facebook the existence of the test of the search engine. Facebook first vaguely noted it would build a creator-brand tool in March, but now we know what it looks like and exactly how it works. Even though Facebook will not actually broker or initially take a cut of the deals, the tool could equip brands with much more compelling and original marketing content. That could in turn encourage them to spend more on Facebook ads to spread that content, while a...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Michael Moorcock on the eerie prophecyof his friend, Ray Bradbury. | Lit Hub Is the opening paragraph of True Grit… perfect? Emily Temple does a close reading of Charles Portis’s classic. | Lit Hub Louise Penny: How I survived a fearful childhoodin the pages of Charlotte’s Web. | Lit Hub How getting out of your genre comfort zonemakes you a […] Good read found on the Lithub