Sunlight is working with you to build a national campaign that makes government more open and transparent at every level.

You can see where we are so far by visiting this page. Be sure to check out the wiki.

http://sunlightfoundation.com/campaign

We believe that a disaffected, disengaged, cynical public threatens democracy in the United States as few other things can. At its heart, our campaign is about building the political and community clout necessary to combat this problem.

We think we can invigorate democracy by coming together, demanding transparency with serious political muscle, using the very latest in technology to make government information more meaningfully accessible to us, and holding government accountable with it.

As we embark on this campaign, it’s important we’re on the same page about a lot of things, but there’s probably nothing more important to be clear about than our values and beliefs.

So here are five principles we will hold to in all our work.

1) Think and Act Like a Movement
2) Listen and Be Authentic
3) Create Beautiful, Compelling Content
4) Fail Harder…
5) Laugh As Often As Possible

Here’s what we mean.

1) Think and act like a movement.

At its heart, this “campaign” is facilitating the growth of a movement. This is not a command and control type thing we are building. To that end, we will share everything and build leaders.

Anything that is created or has success with this campaign – from logos and style guides to resources and training materials to tactics and lessons learned – will be open and shared across the network. With this approach we want to empower any person who is willing to take up the call of making government transparent with the tools s/he would need to be successful.

One of the best examples of this ethos is, oddly enough, embodied by the U.S. Marine Corps as they make “every man a rifle man” – or “every person a rifle person” as it’s been reworked in recent decades. In other words, if you’re a Marine, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the infantry, an officer or a cook; in all cases, you receive some of the best rifle training in the world and could take up arms on the front lines if required.

While we certainly aren’t militaristic, we can’t stress it enough:

In the open government movement, we want every single citizen to have easy access to all the tools and resources they would need to communicate the need for transparency at the local, state and federal levels, and be able to take actions that help bring it about.

2) Listen and be authentic

From our failures to our concerns to our needs and questions (big and small), we want to listen first and make statements second. We’ll be upfront and honest with each other, acknowledge what’s working and what’s not, and remember that we’re all on the same team trying to accomplish a very large mission.

3) Create beautiful, compelling content.

Making the case for anything in a way that gets hundreds of thousands of people to buy in and actively support takes a lot of convincing and influence. When it comes to transparency, we are trying to build public support and influence government with a relatively new, still relatively amorphous concept. To that end, image and message matter in a big way. We commit to making sure we deliver compelling messages in simple to understand, beautiful packages – from email to video to data visualizations to Web sites to text messages to …whatever we come up with.

4) Fail Harder.

Or: Fail “quickly and cheaply.” We are taking on a very challenging mission in making local, state and federal government transparent. If it was easy, it would have been done already. That means in order to succeed, we’re going to have to try some big things that have never been done before – and that means sometimes we’re going to fall on our face. The internet makes it possible to “fail” quickly and cheaply, and when that happens, that’s a good thing – as long as we learn and grow from it. If we’re not failing sometimes, we’re not pushing hard enough.

5) Laugh as often as possible.

Whether we are building a network of leaders, being open with each other, creating content, failing harder or dealing with jerks, laughter helps a lot. Just about always. Just because our mission is challenging doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be having fun along the way.

And to that end, a somewhat related principle to number 5 that is worth noting and will make all our lives easier:

6) Have no tolerance for jerks.

We adhere strongly to this rule. Please don’t be one. If it needs explaining to you, it’s possible you’re a jerk :)

With these values in place, there are a couple of assumptions we will have in the approach to our work, that we also want to be very clear about. I’ll discuss those in the post right after this one.

Perhaps yesterday’s tweet by Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it best. Hell has indeed frozen over. Google has run its first major television ad, during the Super Bowl, no less. The rumor that Google would run a commercial during today’s Super Bowl 2010 proved true. Google aired a spot from its online video Search Stories series, [...]

....

The US government filed its Statement of Interest regarding the revised Google settlement yesterday with the District Court in New York. While the statement was signed by an attorney from the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, several agencies including the Copyright Office reportedly contributed to it.

As you may recall, the judge has only 2 choices: he can approve the settlement, or send it back to the parties for revision. He cannot modify it himself.

The US government statement advises the judge that the public interest would be best served by sending the settlement back, and points out that the revised version still suffers from the "same core problem" that afflicted the first version: "an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court in this litigation."

The press reports that I've seen take the government's statement as an emphatic thumbs down.

The judge has scheduled a hearing for February 18 in his Manhattan courtroom.

It is very unlikely that the judge will approve this version of the settlement. Also, he may once again decide postpone a full-fledged fairness hearing-although the many objectors, large and small, are eager to have their day in court. Because the parties withdrew the proposed settlement before the originally scheduled fairness hearing occurred in October 2009, the judge has not yet formally considered the many objections filed to date on the revised settlement and filed in anticipation of the fairness hearing cancelled last October.

Bottom line for the long term: even if the judge sends the settlement back, and even if the parties agree to deadlines as short as the deadlines for this presumably ill-fated revision, there is no resolution in sight for the litigation.

Whether the case is tried or the settlement discussions continue, the legal end point will not be the trial judgment or settlement approval issued by the district court judge. The end point will be the disposition of the final appeal from that district court judgment or approved settlement, and that disposition is years away.

It's hard to imagine what relevance the final legal disposition would have then, as public and private innovators are not sitting on their hands, waiting for the judge to sort this out.

Since my attempts at capturing web developers’ hearts and minds by publishing fundamental research have failed miserably but my thirst for attention continues unabated, today I will once more shout at iPhone developers. That’s proven to work.

More specifically, today I will shout at web developers who think that delicately inserting an iPhone up their ass is the same as mobile web development.

Before we start, a little thought experiment. Suppose I proposed the following:

1. IE6 is today’s most advanced browser. (Note: this was actually true back in 2000. Please bear with me.)
2. IE6’s market share is about 80%.
3. The other browsers are way worse than IE6, and developing for them is a pain; something we’re not interested in and are a bit afraid of.
4. Therefore we will develop websites exclusively for IE6.

Would you agree with those sentiments, even if we’re back in 2000 and IE6 is really the best browser we have?

Or would you reply that our sites should work as well as they can in all browsers through the use of web standards, progressive enhancement, and all the rest of the best practices we’ve been preaching for the past ten years?

I distinctly remember a time when we web developers cared about such concepts. But those times are long gone.

Get the big picture with the Column Navigator

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I love my iPhone and I love Apple (cue images of flag pins and “I love muh countray!”), but I believe they’re blowing it with the App Store gate keeping. That’s of course not a new opinion. Developers left and right have been decrying the broken process. But there’s nothing like feeling it on your own bones to make the point.

We have a couple of new features in the wing for Campfire. They’ve been done for more than 10 days now. Why haven’t we released them yet? Because the iPhone app Ember needed to have a simple regular expression updated to support the features. We really like Ember, so we decided that holding back the features until this pro forma update went through was prudent. We’re still waiting.

This has made me think about all the ways the app store process sucks and how little we get back in return. The argument I keep hearing for why this terrible process is worth it is quality control. Here’s a breakdown of each argument:

• Applications will be more stable: No they won’t. Echophone still crashes on me all the time. It’s not like the iPhone is immune to crash bugs. And why would it be? You’re writing native Objective-C here. Shit is going to crash every now and then. No 10 minute look-over by a App Store clerk is going to help that.
• The App Store will be free of malware: That’s certainly no given. If you really wanted to be evil, you could very well hide your malice underneath a cute game and have a time bomb or a remote trigger installed. Do you think the App Store clerks are combing through source code to look for security issues? Ha!
• Only good stuff in the App Store: Ha! The App Store has some 140K+ applications. I can guarantee you that the bulk of that is less than average. There are some 100 fart apps for christ sake!

We’re paying for the inconvenience of quality control without the quality part. In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.

Contrast this with OS X and the web. Both platforms are much more open and on a mac you have very little trouble with stability or malware or even quality. In general, the market is pretty good at sorting this stuff out. If you make a crappy application, people don’t buy or recommend it. And OS X seems to be holding up well as a secure platform compared to, say, Windows, so malware isn’t much of a concern either.

What I think Apple should do instead is to reserve the power to nuke apps that prove troublesome. Have a “if you fuck it up, we’ll yank it” policy rather than a “we’ll review everything poorly and slowly and still not catch it all” policy. They’d be able to get by with a much smaller App Store clerk staff, developers would be thrilled to escape the needless gate keeping, and consumers would enjoy more applications updated more frequently.

What’s there to loose except for the feeling of powah?

According to 4chan's Twitter account and status update blog, they have been "explicitly blocked" by the Verizon wireless network.

If you're unfamiliar with 4chan and why an ISP/wireless company would block it, read more about it on Wikipedia. The high-traffic image board of mostly anonymous users was created by Christopher Poole in 2003 and has been the subject of a fair amount of negative media and legal attention over the past six years. But why would Verizon choose to block the site now? Does this put Verizon on par with foreign ISPs that block torrent sites and social networks? Or is there more to the story?

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Poole wrote this afternoon, "Over the past 72 hours, we've been receiving reports from Verizon Wireless customers having difficulty accessing the image boards. After investigating, we found that Verizon is dropping traffic... only on port 80 (HTTP). No other subdomain/IP/port is affected, which leads us to believe this block is intentional."

However, a couple hours ago, Poole posted, "After an hour and a half on the phone, we've received confirmation from Verizon's Network Repair Bureau (NRB) that we are 'explicitly blocked.'"

In the past, we've held a generally negative view of ISP censorship and traffic-shaping, regardless of site content. It'll be interesting to see how this battle shapes up, as Poole is calling for 4chan users to file complaints with Verizon's Network Repair Bureau.

We are contacting Poole and Verizon to figure out specifically why the site is being blocked and will update this post as more information becomes available.

While we've personally confirmed that the image boards are not accessible from the Verizon wireless network, we're not certain that Verizon as an ISP is blocking the site or whether they plan to in the near future. Again, a move of this magnitude would have to have some pretty compelling justifications, and we can't wait to find out Verizon's reasons.

This incident calls to mind AT&T's temporary blocking of the site in July 2009. Eventually, AT&T said the block was due to a DDoS originating from 4chan IP addresses, to which Poole responded, "We're glad to see this short-lived debacle has prompted renewed interest and debate over net neutrality and Internet censorship - two very important issues that don't get nearly enough attention - so perhaps this was all just a blessing in disguise."

UPDATE: A Verizon NRB rep said their center has been deluged with phone calls but was unable to relate the specific reason the site has been blocked. We are continuing to call other Verizon numbers at this time, but we've been alerted that Verizon has not yet set up any process for dealing with media calls on this issue as no other media outlets have yet contacted them.

UPDATE: Multiple Verizon FIOS/DSL customers have let us know that the boards are still accessible from other devices not on the Verizon wireless network. However, we're confused as to why Verizon wireless would block a website and still allow access on other parts of its network.

Discuss

How the Super Bowl ad featuring David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno came together.

The meeting would mark the first time in the long health care debate that leaders from both sides would be allowed to air their ideas publicly.

In Douglas Adams’s humorous sci-fi novel series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a special kind of fish is mentioned — the Babel Fish. When inserted into the ear, it translates any spoken language into whichever language the listener understands. It is a very nifty device, and now Google seeks to create something similar.

According to Times Online, Google is developing a speech-to-speech automated translator for Android phones. It’s essentially a combination of two of Google’s existing technologies; its online universal translator service, Google Translate, and its voice recognition system.

Google plans to make its Babel Fish a lot like a human translator; the software would analyze chunks of speech, and translate them in their entirety rather than translating word for word. Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, claims the technology could go live in a couple of years. “Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently,” he says.

Anyone who’s used Google Translate knows that translations aren’t (and probably never will be) perfect, but they’re very helpful when you can’t understand a word of some foreign language. However, Google’s voice recognition also has issues of its own, and I fear that these two combined would produce a very high amount of errors. The Times also mentions the issue of different accents, a problem that Google plans to solve by making the software gradually learn the speaking habits of the phone’s owner.

Despite the big issues Google has to overcome to make this technology useful, if anyone can pull it off, Google can. The idea of being able to call someone who doesn’t speak your language, and have the conversation translated almost instantly, well, that’s one of those inventions that made Google the company it is today.

Tags: Google, machine translation, translation

Earlier this weekend, someone used the Alexa web stats service and compared the daily reach of GigaOM with that of my friends at Techcrunch and that on Mashable, and wondered if I was sad.

Now I could have easily answered this question over on GigaOM, but instead I am leaving that for what it is for — news, analysis and the unfolding story about business of technology. For everything else, I have this blog and that includes questions about my perceived sadness.

For now I wouldn’t bother to point out that we are actually a network of seven blogs and are syndicated to mainstream publications such as The New York Times, BusinessWeek, CNN Money and Salon. Instead, I will just focus on our philosophy and business strategy which doesn’t revolve around mere page views.

When we relaunched the brand new GigaOM design in November 2009, I wrote that “we’ve tried to do is strike a fine balance between what is a blog and what would be an online magazine.” It was so because we wanted to focus on more analysis and in-depth posts. It was not to just compete with other technology publications, but was also standout amongst what has become a very crowded market.

That is why I have admiration for Michael Arrington and his team at Techcrunch and what they have been able to do to dominate the technology news market. Everyone from Techcrunch to Business Insider to Venturebeat to Readwriteweb and not to mention technology blogs from mainstream publications such as AllThingsD and Bits have their own unique playbook to covering technology industry. We have our playbook. What we do is focus on what we do best: take years of experience, a professional approach and use our sources to present the best news analysis and informed opinions in near realtime. In a post last year, I wrote:

As Twitter has become increasingly ingrained in our everyday lives, its value as as source of information tidbits has become clear. Think of it like that plate of chips and salsa you get before the entree arrives: tasty — spicy, even — but not entirely satisfying. Meanwhile, blogging has become the main course — the source of context. And the evolution into that role has injected new life into the blogosphere.

In this age of instant information, thanks to the rise of Twitter and Facebook, the demand is for tools of context, and that is why I think we are on the right path. Jeff Jarvis, a noted media critic and veteran of the publishing business writes:

If you are selling a scarcity — an inventory — of any nonphysical goods today, stop, turn around, and start selling value — outcomes — instead. Or you’re screwed. Apply this rule to many enterprises: advertising, media, content, information, education, consultation, and to some extent, performance.

That is what we are offering to our readers: value.

You know the biggest reason why there is no reason for me to be sad: our community of readers know exactly what we stand for and what they get when they come to GigaOM.com. In response of the said post , several commenters on the Hacker News reflected how we think of our publication. To them I say thank you for making it all worthwhile by noticing our efforts. That is precisely the encouragement we need to keep doing better for you.

To me their comments are a reason to be elated: we are in sync with the needs of those who we serve.

Demand Media pays $15 to $20 on average for an article — videos are about $30 — but the company has no trouble finding steady contributors.

By Josef Adalian

Sunday's Dave-Jay-Oprah Super Bowl ad might have been a foursome -- but an early notion to include Conan O'Brien in the spot didn't work out.

Rob Burnett, executive producer of David Letterman's "Late Show," said he approached Team Coco about O'Brien appearing in the promo.

"There was an initial thought of having Dave, Jay and Conan together in the spot," Burnett told TheWrap. "I did call Jeff Ross ...

Here's the view out of my hotel this morning. TED2010 is held in a beautiful theater inside the Long Beach Performing Arts Center. In front we're building spaces for people to gather during breaks. The tent right in front of it is an eco-village, to the right the domes will house high-tech exhibits, the big tent front left is a "global village" and the registration area is right at the front.  Much more inside...!

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As more and more of our friends and favorite organizations start publishing updates online, being able to organize them well is becoming even more important. Niche-popular desktop social media stream-reader Tweetdeck issued a software update this morning and the most striking change is in its handling of user groups. It's beautiful. The new Tweetdeck is faster, more flexible and easier to navigate.

Groups, we have argued, are the secret weapon of the social web. Here are five ways that the new Tweetdeck gets groups right and that Facebook, the world's dominant social media stream reader by a long-shot, could learn from what Tweetdeck is doing. That would drastically improve Facebook's own user experience.

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Internet startup investor John Borthwick of Betaworks has told us that he invested in Tweetdeck specifically because its column metaphor represented a drastic break from the page-based metaphor of the rest of the web and the Instant Messaging metaphor of most other Twitter clients. That's how Tweetdeck works: it lets you put your friends and contacts on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn into grouped columns across your screen. It's a powerful system and the clear leader in the ecosystem of interfaces built around Twitter. Competitor Seesmic has a similar offering and is also based on columns for groups.

These applications may be more overwhelming than many mainstream users are looking for, but the principles could be adapted to Facebook's own interface in some very interesting ways.

The Problem With Facebook's Group Support

Groups of users, which Facebook calls Lists, are extremely helpful in prioritizing messages by their source. They enable users to subscribe to more sources of information in total without fear they will miss high-priority content. Groups help contextualize messages in a stream and with good search support they can help you target queries and unearth the information you're looking for within a limited space of trusted, topical sources of information. Last month, Facebook suggested its users subscribe to news organizations on the social network and put those updates in a special list called News, for example.

Unfortunately, Facebook has never treated Groups with the respect that they deserve. The newest redesign pushes friends Lists a click removed from the front page of the site, even. (It took me three clicks from the home page to see the view pictured on the right, for example.) The company is instead focused on serving up content from favored sources using the new News Feed (vs Live Feed) algorithm. This algorithm says that the more you've interacted with a source of information in the past, the more likely you are to want to read that person's updates in the future. News Feed is a self-reenforcing paradigm that simplifies and narrows a user's universe by taking editorial control out of their hands and putting it in the hands of a black-box formula.

How could Facebook better handle groups? Let's take a look at how Tweetdeck does it.

Tweetdeck's Superior Handling of Groups

• Buttons to navigate directly

  The new Tweetdeck update today added a series of buttons at the bottom of the application for your group columns. Hover over them and you'll see the column name. Click on that button and you'll be brought immediately to that column, a much nicer experience than the awkward old scrolling. The hover display does show some information that's probably not useful to anyone (API calls remaining) but putting rapid group navigation in a good place in the app makes a big difference. It would also be nice if those buttons were configurable in some way - like the red one or #3 is for my @ replies column. But Tweetdeck now makes it much, much easier to navigate between groups than Facebook does. Facebook almost seems to be discouraging use of groups by burying them several clicks below top level options.

  
  
  
• Different Notification Priorities

  Tweetdeck makes it easy to set up different levels of notification for different groups. For example, my "high-priority" Twitter group sends full messages as a pop-up in the corner of my screen when it updates, but my column for people I actually know in real life on Facebook (like my family members) throws a pop-up and an audio notification in Tweetdeck when there's something new. That's awesome.

  Facebook is all about the notifications, why not let me get a special notification when someone in a particular group has posted an update?

  
  

• Shareable Groups, Suggestions etc.

  For years Twitter has been fundamentally public and Facebook private, but for better or for worse that's changing on Facebook. Isn't it time for Facebook to offer bundles of pages or people that you can follow all at once? Twitter and Tweetdeck make this easy with lists, sharable lists and the Tweetdeck directory of recommended lists to follow. Facebook users would love something like that! My college newspaper staff as one big list of Facebook users to follow? My football team? Suzy Bright's curated list of top sex writers to follow on Facebook? People would eat that kind of stuff up.
  

• Keyword Filters

  Last week I was working when the season premier of Lost came on TV. I'm likely to watch it later on DVD. Tweetdeck let me add a filter to all of my groups to hide any posts that included the word Lost! Sick of hearing about the iPad? No problem! Tweetdeck does a great job of building value on top of these groups of contacts: filter for, filter out keywords, analyze a group for its most-used words. There are lots of possibilities. Facebook users would probably like these same options.
  

• A Group for New Friends

  Tweetdeck has a great feature that lets you create a column to display the bios of people who have just started following you. From there you can click once to follow them back. Facebook could easily do something like that, bring new friends and/or recommended friends up higher into a very visible place in the interface. Facebook wants users to go beyond connecting with people they already know in real life (sorry, users, that's what Facebook has decided) so why not create a "group" that's made up of people who are fans of the same pages you are or are otherwise recommended for connecting with?

There are all kinds of ways that Facebook could offer meaningful support for user groups and turn the News Feed into a more powerful tool, with more control for users and more value in the long run. Tweetdeck is doing a pretty darned good job of exactly that.

Discuss

As the market improves, my guess is that many of you will likely be thinking about raising funding for your company.  With my latest startup, I’m now a venture-backed startup founder (I’ve raised $33 million in three rounds of capital for my marketing software company).  So, I’ve got some direct experience with the process.  Several of the companies I’m an angel investor in or otherwise involved with have also been in the fund-raising process.  So, along the way, I’ve learned a few things, and I’d like to share them with you.

 

There’s already lots of great content on the web about raising capital and understanding deal terms.  My favorite is the content on Venture Hacks (a must read, if you’re raising capital).  But, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to share some of the “lessons learned” from my own experiences.  Some of these you’ve probably heard before, but one or two will likely be new to you. 

And, a quick note before we jump in:  I’m doing a FREE live webinar with my co-founder at HubSpot, Brian Halligan this Wednesday, February 10th at 1 p.m. ET.  The title is “Money, Marketing and Management with HubSpot’s Founders”.  The idea is to share a bunch of practical tips we’ve learned while building HubSpot (including some insider stuff gleaned from raising $33 million in VC).  If you’re intereted in this article, you’ll probably like the webinar.  If you can’t make this specific time, you can still register and we’ll send you an email with a link to the recorded version. Oh, and did I mention, it’s free? 

Sign-up for: Money, Marketing and Management (aka “Stuff we learned about startups that you’ll probably find useful”)

Ok, back to our article.

Insights From Raising $33 Million In Venture Capital

1.  Get the first round right:  The terms of your Series A deal are very important. Not just because of the impact on that first round, but because many of those same terms are likely to carry through to future rounds.  It’s tempting to concede on some important terms because you’re thinking “well, that’s just life…and it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.”  Try to resist that temptation.  One of the things I’ve learned is that when negotiating the term-sheet for your Series B or Series C round, the “base” terms (the starting point of negotiations) is whatever terms were in your Series A.  So, if you agree to some non-favorable terms on the “A” round, you’re not just paying the price for that concession in this round, you’re likely going to continue to pay in future rounds as well.  Factor that in. 

2.  Avoid valuation infatuation:  Entrepreneurs often become obsessed with the pre-money valuation on the deal.  Though this is certainly an important element of the transaction there are other factors at play that have significant impact on the raw direct economics of the transaction including the employee stock option pool (and who pays for it). If you get close to finalizing a deal, it is imperative that you have a spreadsheet that helps you understand the economics of the deal.  You should read Jeff Bussgang’s article on the topic.  It is worth your time.

3.  Raise more than you need:  Regardless of how much capital you raise, chances are, you’re going to have wished you raised a little bit more (or perhaps even a lot more).  Within reason, if you have access to capital and the terms are decent, raise more than you think you need.  Don’t get hung up on dilution.  To help you overcome this fear of too much dilution, build yourself a simple spreadsheet that models the actual financial impact to your person bottom-line based on various outcome scenarios.  What you will likely find is that if things go really well and your startup is the spectacular success it deserves to be, the extra dilution is not going to change things all that much.  And, if things go really poorly, it won’t matter either (because those extra common shares aren’t going to make you money).  You might be thinking “I’ll just raise the additional capital in a future round, at a much higher valuation” — which is somewhat right.  But, what you should keep in mind is the transactional cost of the additional round.  Raising a venture-round is a very time consuming process and when your bank balance is getting low, you’re going to really want to just keep working on the business instead of shifting focus back to the funding game.  In short:  If you have the ability to raise a slightly larger round, and the terms are reasoanble, you should probably go ahead and take the extra money.

4.  Know what “market” is:  It’s possible that you’ll encounter some not so favorable terms during your VC negotiation — terms that are not that common.  It’s also possible that your potential investor is just pushing on the edges a little bit to see what they can get away with.  You need to know which terms are actually rare/uncommon.  Your strongest line of defense against weird, non-favorable terms is a line that goes something like “that’s not market”.  This is sophisticated VC-speak for “what you’re asking for isn’t very common in VC deals right now.”  This line of defense has two advantages:  1) it works  2) it demonstrates your savviness. To figure out what the common deal terms are now, track down the report that one of the larger law firms that does a lot of startup transactions publishes periodically.  The report usually includes (among other things), what percentage of transactions have specific deal terms (like participating preferred).

5.  Orchestration is important:  Try to keep the interested parties moving along at as close to the same pace as possible.  You don’t want to get a term-sheet from one VC and have had the first meeting with others.  Orchestration is not easy, but it’s important.  The reason is that to really get great VC terms in a round, the single largest contributing factor is competition.  If you can get two or more VCs competing to invest in your company, you’ll get much better terms.  As it turns out, this is not easy to do because to really get credible competition going, you’re going to need to have several VCs at the “termsheet” stage of the conversations.  If one VC delivers a termsheet to you, but you still haven’t had the second (or third or fourth) meeting with some of the others, it’s going to be tough to get that competing termsheet.  Meanwhile, the VC that gave you the first termsheet is going to be “anxious” for you to accept.  This anxiousness could manifest as simple “prodding” or as an out-right “exploding termsheet” (i.e. a termsheet with a deadline).  So, try to keep your conversations moving forward with several VCs are a similar pace.  The good news is that nothing accelerates the process of other VCs more than knowing that you’ve already gotten a termsheet.  Once you get that first termsheet, you’re likely to get more as the VCs try to jostle for position. 

6.  Beware deal fatigue:  Even in good times, fund-raising is an arduous process.  Be prepared for yet another round of meetings, yet another level of due diligence and yet another round of negotiations.  Don’t try to sprint to the finish line and be exhausted when you get there — you may have another lap to go.  And, it might be the most important lap.  Much like any large negotiation, there are often relatively important deal terms that get finalized in the final stages of the deal.  You need to maintain your energy so that you don’t just give-in on some of these seemingly unimportant “details”.

7.  Don’t Use Your Uncle Larry As Your Lawyer:  As entrepreneurs, it’s not often that we need to engage legal counsel.  In fact, if this is your first startup, it’s possible you’ve never actually hired a lawyer before.  If you’re raising venture capital — you need a lawyer.  And, your uncle Larry who helped you out with that lease agreement last year is not good enough.  You need a lawyer that has done many venture financing deals before.  This is a high stakes game.  VCs are super-smart and they negotiate financing deals all the time.  They do this for a living, you don’t.  You need someone that has competency in this area.  A great lawyer understands the nuances of this game both from the perspective of which deal terms are important, what “market” is (#4 above) and when to stay firm and when to concede.  I’ll say this one more time for effect:  You need great counsel that has tons of startup financing experience.  Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish on this.  Oh, and by the way, you might want to know that you’re likely going to pay for the legal fees of the VC as well (it comes out of the funding round).  I’m not sure why this is, and I don’t like it one bit, but it’s common practice. 

8.  Partner personalities matter:  Yes, ideally you’ll be raise funding from a top-tier fund that’s a great brand.  But, what’s more important is that you fundamentally like the VC partner that is investing in you.  This is a long-term relationship and life is short.  You might part ways with one or key team members along the way (which is never fun), but your venture investor will almost certainly be with you until the very, very end.  If you have the luxury of choice, you should put strong weight on the person you take money from, not just the firm and not just the deal-terms.  I followed my own advice on this in our funding rounds.  We had higher offers than the deal(s) we took, but we solved for the best overall deal and the best partner. 

9.  Switching Partners Is Hard, Do Your Homework:  It’s likely that in the early stages of your VC process, you’ll get introduced to a particular partner at a firm.  Usually, this is based on what area that partner invests in (i.e. which one you “fit” with).  But, in many larger firms, there might be more than one partner that could conceivably do your deal.  Or, you might get bucketed wrong (because your startup straddles a couple of areas of intest for the firm).  If that’s the case, you need to work hard to figure out who the best partner would be (from your perspective) and try to connect with that partner as early in the process as possible.  Once conversations begin in earnest, it’s very, very hard to switch to a different partner within the firm. 

So, what do you think?  Are you going through the arduous process of raising venture capital now?  Or, have you been through the pain before?  Any of this stuff ring true?  Would love to read your thoughts and experiences in the comment.  Oh, and if you have questions you’d like me to address my upcoming webinar (which will spend a fair amount of time on funding), leave them as a comment.  I’ll pick a few and address them.  Thanks.

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AMEE, the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE will use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform.

The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as “enterprise carbon management”, is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and consumer pressure to address climate change. AMEE’s engine is now being used by companies offering carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs.

The problem AMEE is addressing is that there are currently, multiple standards and hundreds of thousands of individual emission factors used to determine something’s carbon footprint.

So AMEE has codified the major greenhouse gas standards, their computation models, and emission factors into an engine that is available to clients its API. This is exposed as a RESTful HTTP-based web service with XML, JSON and Atom interfaces. Customers so far include SAS and the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). AMEE’s search engine also enables discovery of greenhouse gas standards and emission factors.

In July last year it boosted its board with Toby Coppel, former chief strategy officer of Yahoo!

It has also created RealTimecCarbon, a joint project by Dynamic Demand, AMEE and Demand Logic, which lets you see the real-time carbon intensity of electricity so consumers can avoid consuming at times of high emissions. This could eventualy be linked to appliances, buildings and factories so they could automatically manage demand according to the carbon being released.

Pat Burtis, Investment Manager at Amadeus Capital Partners, joins the AMEE Board of Directors.

Newsstand sales decline for magazines in the second half of 2009, and overall circulation drops as well.