For more on Patrick and DOTGO, please see the Press Release below.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/patrick-mcquown-joins-dotgo-as-ceo-97597804.html

U.S. Department of State
April 27, 2010

Fact Sheet

Silicon Valley Partnership: The Innovators Fund

The Department of State has entered in a non-exclusive partnership with The Innovators Fund (IF), a new Silicon-Valley based venture capital fund that will launch in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and Malaysia.

The Innovators Fund is being launched in part as a result of President Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech and its call to action, and in part as a result of a discussion that Secretary Clinton had with leading U.S. technology entrepreneurs and innovators at the Department of State in January 2010, in which the IF’s Founder participated.

IF will collaborate with a number of existing funds and raise a series of country-focused seed Funds that will provide angel and seed financing and mentorship to promising young entrepreneurs.  It will have a strong emphasis on mentorship and will send leading Silicon Valley executives to the countries in which it will operate to provide intensive mentoring as well as continued online mentoring and collaboration.

The Department of State will work with IF on an ongoing basis to help facilitate partnerships with local institutions — business schools, companies, NGOs and others — who can work together with IF and its’ partners to support entrepreneurship and economic opportunity.

IF will actively collaborate with other angel investors, funds, entrepreneurs and other partners.  IF has already established collaboration partnerships with Polaris Venture Partners and Dogpatch Labs (a leading U.S. venture capital fund and its affiliated incubation and mentoring initiative), TomorrowVentures (a leading seed-stage and venture capital effort), Craig Newmark (of craigslist.org), Oasis 500 (a leading Jordan-based venture capital effort) and TechStars (a leading mentor-based start-up accelerator program) and will be reaching out to others.

The Innovator Fund’s mission is to further entrepreneurship and innovation — and to generate opportunity for people — in the countries and regions in which it will operate.

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)

OAF Silicon Valley Recap

TomorrowVentures attends the inaugural OAF Silicon Valley.  As usual, six hand selected startups presented to a room full of angels.  Rather than give a detailed description of the evening, here are some blog posts and tweets from the a some of the startups and angels themselves.

Rapportive

AppWhirl

TekTrak

MightyMeeting

Don Dodge

Fund raise includes new investors TomorrowVentures and CompuCredit along with all existing Prosper investors

Prosper.com, the world’s largest peer-to-peer lending marketplace with nearly one million members and over 32,000 funded loans totaling over $194 million, today announced that it has raised $14.7 million in a Series D round from new investors TomorrowVentures, LLC and CompuCredit Holdings Corporation and all of Prosper’s existing investors: Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, Omidyar Network, QED Investors, and Volition Capital (formerly Fidelity Ventures). Including this latest round of financing, Prosper has raised a total of $57.7 million to date.

Prosper also announced that Court Coursey, Managing Partner at TomorrowVentures, will join the company’s Board of Directors. Prosper’s other Board members include, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners; Larry Cheng of Volition Capital; Bob Kagle of Benchmark Capital; and Capital One Co-founder Nigel Morris of QED Investors.

“We were attracted to Prosper because it offers a game-changing solution and is poised to capitalize on the consumer lending market in a substantial manner,” said Court Coursey, Managing Partner at TomorrowVentures. “Prosper is the leader in the space and positioned to be at the forefront of revolutionizing fundamental aspects of the financial services industry for many years to come.”

Prosper, America’s first peer-to-peer lending marketplace, maintains approximately two-thirds of the U.S. peer-to-peer lending market and, according to Deutsche Bank Research, Prosper is the largest peer-to-peer lending marketplace worldwide. Gartner Research has forecasted that the peer-to-peer lending industry will “soar at least 66 percent to $5 billion of outstanding loans by 2013.” Prosper crossed the $1 billion milestone in consumer loan demand in March 2008 and has now surpassed $1.8 billion in demand.

“We are greatly appreciative of the tremendous support and commitment shown by our early backers, and honored by the caliber and strategic depth of our new investors,” said Chris Larsen, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Prosper. “This latest round of financing strengthens our leadership position and our charge toward continuing to pave the way for bringing the benefits of a third way of banking – peer-to-peer lending – into the mainstream.”

Larsen continued, “The reset button has been hit for consumers who are frustrated with credit companies and a dearth of financing options, and for investors who want to play an active role in reshaping the financial services industry as we’ve known it. Prosper is committed to giving people more power and freedom over the status quo and we’re motivated by what this change-up means for the future of financial services in America and around the globe.”http://blog.prosper.com/2010/04/16/prosper-marketplace-closes-147-million-series-d-round/

New York, February 2, 2010 – Reuters and News Distribution Network (NDN) today announced a video solution for newspaper, magazine, and radio outlets, which is built around an advertising-based revenue share model. The product delivers licensed, professional video across top-level categories including news, business, sports, entertainment and lifestyle.

NDN’s cutting-edge platform leverages Reuters editorial strength and other major news and entertainment sources to create a comprehensive video suite. Once aggregated in NDN’s control room, the video is indexed for efficient search capabilities and coded for client’s publishing purposes.

“This collaboration allows us to be at the center of a content distribution play, alongside other premium content owners and adds value to the US media market by providing a competitive alternative with a commercial benefit,” said Christoph Pleitgen, managing director of Reuters news agency for Thomson Reuters.

NDN’s state-of-the-art content distribution platform goes beyond the traditional licensing agreement to offer flexible advertising capabilities, which enable participants to share in and contribute to network revenues. The network also provides sophisticated video metric capabilities to support audience and advertising performance analytics.

“We believe this strategic relationship is a critical step toward bringing online publishers, the content and services needed to revolutionize their product offering,” said Greg Peters, chief executive officer of NDN.

About Reuters
Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world’s largest international multimedia news provider touching more than 1 billion people a day. Reuters provides unbiased business, financial, national and international news to professionals via Thomson Reuters desktops, the world’s media organizations, as well as directly to affluent business professionals through Reuters.com and other digital platforms.

About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals.  We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, healthcare and science and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization.  With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs more than 50,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. Thomson Reuters shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: TRI) and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: TRI). For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.

About News Distribution Network
News Distribution Network, Inc. offers a unique video content syndication and advertising solution for the online media market with a centralized platform featuring a full array of premium news, finance, travel, entertainment and sports content.  NDN’s state-of-the-art player suite and content management tools eliminate significant infrastructure and operating costs while creating monetization opportunities for publishers.  NDN gives content providers increased brand presence and revenue streams by accessing a broader audience on trusted, established news destinations, and provides marketers with scale efficiency as well as rich targeting options for reaching premium online audiences. For more information, please visit www.newsinc.com.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Erin Kurtz
Head of PR – Media
+1 646 223 8149
erin.kurtz@thomsonreuters.com

Kate Solley
Marketing Manager
404-962-7416
ksolley@newsinc.com

To learn more about the conference, please click here.

To read the full article on Reuters, click here.