Grig.com & HBCUEntrepreneurs.com FAMU Alumni based investment groups reaches HBCU students via W Released by: HBCUEntrepreneurs.com Web Site: http://www.hbcuentrepreneurs.com Investment groups reaches HBCU students via Web 2.0 for entrepreneurship & venture capital system! Email: info@hbcuentrepreneurs.com Keywords: entrepreneurship, venture capital, HBCU, FAMU Alumni Update Date: 4/19/2007 7:11:17 AM Hits: 162 Descrption:  http://www.vpfund.com/archives/2005/07/the_democratiza.html Web 2.0: It's a great time to be an investor The Web is clearly changing before us. Most folks don’t have a complete picture of what’s happening, but the media’s attention to blogging is a clear sign to many that things are different. Indeed they are! Blogging or weblogs have been around for many years; Fred Wilson gives a few good examples in his post, Blogging 1.0. What’s different about today’s Web is that new technologies and behaviors that have popularized the blogging phenomenon, are also transforming the Web from a medium where information is simply published and remains static, into a platform where applications reside and services are distributed. This transformation is being referred to as Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a collection of small pieces of loosely joined technologies coupled with a movement towards collaboration and interoperability. This has enabled control of information to shift to individuals and has given us a voice like never before. We are now able to easily locate and connect with like-minded circles and form social networks that drive mass-collaboration — wikis, open-source and tag-based folksonomies are all examples of this. Implications of Web 2.0 will be far reaching. It has already significantly affected how I use the Web. I now find information not through Google or Yahoo but through services like del.icio.us, Technorati, and Gataga. I use these services to create RSS feeds from tags so that new postings are delivered daily to my news aggregator. I now categorize the most relevant information into new RSS feeds of blogs that I then subscribe to. In some cases, I use a collection of these feeds to create TagClouds that generate automatic folksonomies that allow me to analyze the popularity of related information (tags) over time. Does this make me a geek? Probably so, but it also makes me an early adopter of things to come that will have implications on every major Web property — from Ebay to Amazon. An arms race is clearly already happening between Yahoo and Google as evidenced by a spate of recent micro-acquisitions of promising Web 2.0 startups Flickr, Dodgeball, Blo.gs etc. These strategic acquisitions are a clear attempt by each to acquire knowledge, technology and data to position them to capture mindshare and advertising dollars from the changing Web. http://www.americanventuremagazine.com/news.php?newsid=2638 Global Venture Capital Investment in Web 2.0 Companies on the Rise. Nearly US$850 Million Deployed to Web 2.0 Deals in 2006. San Francisco, 21 March 2007—Venture capitalists continued to favor the innovative activity of Web 2.0* companies, deploying substantial sums in the segment throughout 2006, according to the latest data released by Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureOne at the Web Ventures Conference in California. The global research showed that US$844.4 million was directed into 167 deals last year, more than twice as much money and nearly twice as many deals as occurred in 2005. The research demonstrated a continuing trend that has seen the amount of worldwide venture capital invested into Web 2.0 practically doubling in size every year since 2002.