IA Venture Partners

http://www.iaventurepartners.com/

VC focused on "big data"

Afghanistan's Lithium Eureka

http://green.venturebeat.com/2010/06/14/afghanistans-lithium-eureka-a-big-win-for-china-or-another-bolivia/

Startup Reading List

Web 1.0:

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Ap)

The Oracle of Oracle: The Story of Volatile CEO Larry Ellison and the Strategies Behind His Company's Phenomenal Success

Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft

Web 2.0

The PayPal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, And the Rest of Planet Earth

The Google Story: For Google's 10th Birthday

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

GnuBio and David Weitz

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=25481&channel=biomedicine§ion=

"At a time when the longtime goal of a $1,000 genome is still just out of reach, a Harvard University physicist is promising an even cheaper price--the ability to sequence a human genome for just $30. David Weitz and his team are adapting microfluidics technology that uses tiny droplets, a strategy developed in his lab, to DNA sequencing. While the researchers have not yet sequenced DNA, they have successfully demonstrated parts of the process and formed a startup, GnuBio, to commercialize the technology. Weitz presented the findings at the Consumer Genomics Conference in Boston last week."

RainDance Technology
http://www.raindancetechnologies.com/

GnuBio
http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2010/05/31/daily32-GnuBio-launches-as-open-source-genome-sequencing-startup.html

David Weitz
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/weitzlab/

Siguler Guff & Co. investing in Russian Silicon Valley

http://deals.venturebeat.com/2010/05/31/u-s-private-equity-fund-to-invest-250m-in-russian-tech-center/

Siguler Guff & Co. is expressing a huge amount of confidence in Russia’s plan to modernize the economy.

Could Humans Be Infected by 'Computer Viruses?'

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100526095830.htm

Inference Algorithm and Probabilistic Programming at MIT

Historically, building a machine-learning system capable of learning a new task would take a graduate student somewhere between a few weeks and several months, says Daniel Roy, a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science who along with Cameron Freer, an instructor in pure mathematics, led the new research. A handful of new, experimental, probabilistic programming languages — one of which, Church, was developed at MIT — promise to cut that time down to a matter of hours.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/machine-learning-0518.html