Southeast VC

North Carolina Venture Capital 2007 Highlights

CED did a nice job putting together a 4 page North Carolina Venture Report on 2007. I'll just point to it here, but I will point out some interesting facts:

• NC-based companies raised $909m in 2007. This positions NC as #7 when stacked up against other states and this is NC's highest ranking ever. It represents a 72% increase over 2006.
• Triangle-based companies raised 87.5% of the venture capital in NC.
• Our firm is part of 3 of the top 6 companies that secured VC in 2007 - Motricity, ChannelAdvisor and Batanga.

Also, this report contains a list of all the VCs that have invested in NC-based companies. This is a good "prospect list" for NC-based entrepreneurs that may want to raise money this year.

Facebook Keynote Includes Key Stats and E-Commerce Plans

I attended ChannelAdvisor Catalyst over the last few days in Pinehurst, NC. 500 people attended and listened to executives from eBay, Google, Amazon.com, Facebook, Nike and Paypal. It also included a lot of valuable networking and a panel from leading stock analysts.

I always enjoy re-connecting with some of ChannelAdvisor's customers as well as meeting new ones. It was hard to believe the slowdown in e-commerce given the strong growth in attendance over 2007 and the bullish comments made by so many internet retailers.

A keynote I particularly enjoyed was the one yesterday by Ben Ling, Director of Platform Product Marketing at Facebook. As most of you may know, I am a pretty avid Facebook user with 3 of our companies having apps on FB and some of them have multiple apps.

Anyway, here are some notes I took from Ben's talk and I thought I'd share them here:

- Facebook views shopping as a social experience and they think more and more experiences online will be social.

- Facebook's goal is to create the ability to share information more effectively.

- Some general stats I noted during his talk:

• Facebook now has 71 million users with 200k new users a day;
• 50% of these users return daily
• geographic breakdown 1/3 of their users are in the US, 1/3 in Europe and 12% in Canada.
• 1/2 of their users are not college students
• they expect a trillion page views in 2008
• They have over 300k applications and they have the #1 photo application on the web and the #1 event application on the web as well
• Facebook has 500 employees including 100 engineers

Facebook will be releasing general e-commerce capabilities towards the end of 2008. They will allow acceptance of credit card payments and passwords will be stored for other purchases on FB. Ben mentioned they will be partnering to make all of this happen. It will be interesting to track this and watch as Facebook finds ways to monetize the success of the strong and rapidly growing user base.

UPDATE: Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor posted a good summary of Catalyst here.