For some reason, I think it is pretty cool that Spark Capital has invested in Twitter. Twitter’s new funding round

On one hand it is a bummer that a local VC has to go to San Francisco for yet another Web investment, but somehow this one feels good. And yes, Spark has only invested in two Boston based companies out of a portfolio of twenty. Or maybe only one, as it looks like Buzzwire is now mostly based in the Denver Co. area.

On the other hand it is good that a Boston firm is supporting a high risk darling of the web set with growing traction, scaling problems and no defined business model. I like that Spark is countering the perception of the stodgy and conservative modus operandi of the traditional Boston area VCs. They have demonstrated this via the Twitter investment as well as their initiative to curtail the use of non-compete agreements by Massachusetts companies.

I had mentioned before that Boston has another loose association with Twitter in a past post. Certainly we have some very active Twitterati such as @pistachio and @chrisbrogan to name only the tip of the iceberg.

So Kudos to Spark Capital. We can only hope that they find a Boston/Cambridge startup worthy of their attention. Who knows, they might be the first VC to snag a Y Combinator summer session company and keep it here rather than forcing a move to San Francisco or SV.

Check out Scott Kirshners post for more detailed analysis.

The local business paper, Mass High Tech* published a list of the Largest Venture Capital & private equity firms ranked by the amount invested in 2007. I found a few data points pretty interesting.

1. the top two firms with $23 Billion under management, had a total of 1 investment in NE for 2007. Granted, these firms are later stage investors and not what we may typically think of as Venture Firms.

2. The VC that invested the most in the Boston area, half again as much as their closest rival, was North Bridge Venture Partners, with 41 deals for $142,000,000.

It should also be noted that NBVP is leading the way for the “old school” Boston VC firms by expanding into more consumer oriented investments in both mobile applications and web properties.

3. Next was Polaris Venture Partners with 30 deals for $91,300,000.

Some top firms were missing from the list, Charles River Ventures, General Catalyst, Matrix Partners, Sigma Partners, I assume due to not responding to the survey.

thanks to MHT for the work to compile this list.

* I could not find this List in the online Mass High Tech. If anyone comes across the link, please send me and I will update the post.

1. PR Companies are good to have at Tech networking events. Otherwise there would be few females and all the conversations would go something like this ” and then I ran a benchmark series using the sysbench fileio option to further benchmarkall three types of EC2 instances. it looks like / mounted filesystem (/dev/sda) has much better raw io performance than the larger /mnt (/dev/sdb) filesystem.”

2. There is rumor of an upcoming falafel-off Tech Meetup to be held at MIT in the near future.

3. There needs to be a more macho name for a white wine spritzer.

4. There are a lot of interesting small web companies out there built and run by a single hacker/founder. www.jobvent.com is one example, along with a few stealth ones I look forward to profiling in the future.

5. Don’t let your drunken engineers hang around until the end, as they are libel to spill the dirt on the inner-workings of your organization. (Don’t worry, your secrets are safe with me).

6. Brian and Jay know how to put together a networking event.

If it is anything like their last gathering, Brian and Jay will have another mega networking event to their credit. http://www.popsignal.com/

We are pleased to announce that the old java applet is gone and in it’s place is a beautiful flash graph. The graph contains more information, when you mouseover a company node, you now see the Status, Industry and Comments fields. The companies are arranged in groups according to what stage they are in. Series A, Acquired etc…. SelectClick a node and it will be come the focus Company and display the relevant record. Clicking in the white space allows one to pan the groups which uncover any company previously hidden.

A great place to check it out is from the VC Directory.

Best of all, the graph loads much faster now. You might have to reload or refresh your browser window. Enjoy.

Congratulations to Ganesh, you made John very happy.

Dan Bricklin asked us to remind people of the upcoming event Tech Tuesday at The Skellig Irish Pub in Walltham. This regular event has been drawing good crowds for a long time. I will see you there as I have my sights on the XBox 360 the sponsor Microsoft is giving away.

Scott Kirsner the well respected chronicler of all that is Tech in Boston, recently published his “Cool Half-Hundred” Companies list. In the same spirit, we are putting together our own purely subjective, no logical reason or diligent analysis list of companies that we think are worthy of the “Even Cooler” tag.

Web Fun:

Doink.com - Online art and animation with a social component.

Viximo - Virtual Goods Market

Swaptree - Online trading of CDs, Games and Books, with 3-way trading algorithm.

Web Services:

Kayak - Huge and successful online comparison shopping for airline tickets.

SecondRotation - sell and recycle electronics at an agreed upon price.

Good2Gether - Online distributor of Non-Profit information and donation mechanism.

Web Media/Advertising:

Affine Systems - technology that analyzes the visual content of videos and images ,” not just the metadata “

Lookery (sorta Boston) - demographic advertising for Social Networks

Product Design / Web Design / Marketing

Bokardo.com - Social Web Design

Hunt & Gather - Interactive Media Agency

SimpleBits - world recognized expert in the field of standards-based web design

Research & Development

Arts Alliance Labs - build highly scalable, advanced technology products

Virosity (BetaHouse) - ruby on rails development for early stage startups

Hacker Homes (where senior hackers go to play)

Abinitio - massively paralell financial analysis applications

ITA Software - advanced algorithms and distributed computing techniques for airline industry

Software:

Acquia - value-added software products and services for the Drupal platform

Autovirt - state of the art solutions to the problems of Data Migration and File Server Consolidation

ClickArts - products that allow rapid development of reliable, high peformance applications for chip multiprocessors

Tokutek - accelerate key database operations by orders of magnitude

Vertica Systems - column-oriented relational database management system (RDBMS)

Mobile:

Aylus Networks - MediaShare family of products and applications to enable a new class of real-time multimedia sharing solutions.

Envio Networks - mobile social networking?

Geezeo - Social on-line finance

Mobicious - best place to find anything for your phone

Communications:

Auraria Networks - products that are at the leading edge of content management and information identification and analysis

Recently there was an invitation only workshop at Boston University addressing the question, “Is Boston’s Venture Ecosystem Losing More Ground to Silicon Valley?“

At some point we might be privy to some of the discussions and conclusions reached during that confab, but for now, I would like to add an issue to the discussion.

Where are the active angel investors like Master of 500 Hats in the HUB? Silicon Valley is rife with successful entrepreneurs that have now turned to investing and advising the next generation of startups. Individuals such as Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman and the PayPal mafia, Paul Bucheit and several other xGooglers and the list goes on.

Maybe it is just a perception and there is a lot of activity in this area, just not publicly acknowledged. It might be attributed to adherence to that old Yankee adage that “your name should appear in the paper only three times: when you are born, when you marry, and when you die.” as mentioned on the eCoastAngels web site. Or, the reason may be the dearth of successful Web and SaaS companies in the area. But it seems that even in relative terms, the Boston area lacks this kind of angel/advisor/entrepreneur. Is our attitude here to keep our success to ourselves rather than pollinate our neighbors? Lets see if there are more of these individuals than we know about.

So, I am hoping to bring visibility to the angel/advisory activity here in theHub. Following are a few examples of the individuals we need more of. The list is only a start and not exhaustive, please send me your examples of these individual and I will add them to this post.

Who do we have here in Boston filling this much needed space in the investment ecosystem? Well, certainly the premier contributor would have to be Paul Graham of YCombinator. They have the seminal investor/advisor model, which is proving successful. Too bad most of their companies have to move to SV to find investors. A case could be made that based on YC’s track record, if someone started an angel fund, say Dart Angels, by throwing 5 darts into a Demo Day dartboard, and investing in those five companies, they could be successful. That is a shame that the YC companies can find no traction here in Boston.

One example of local individual angel/advisor here in Boston is Andrew Payne After successful stints founding Open Market and Revinio, he is actively investing in and creating new consumer Internet projects.

Dharmesh Shah is a driving force on the local startup scene, both as a founder and angel investor.

Now the call is out. Hey there VistaPrint, Bladelogic, Tripadvisor, Akamai, Upromise, Lycos, Open Market, Storage Networks, EMC, MQube …..etc. whats up?

Readers have nominated the following individuals for the list of Advisor/Angels

Don Dodge local Microsoft Exec and Angel/Advisor of local startups

A lot of bits have been generated regarding the recent swipe TechCrunch took at the departing Chief Architect of Twitter. The personal taunting and Tabloid aspect have ticked off a few people. Of course the article had the desired effect from the TechCrunch perspective and the page views and comments are flying.

The point I want to bring up is that this method of personal “dissing” seems to be directly influenced by the recent visit of Loren Feldman to the TechCrunch “compound”. Feldman has recently caused a bit of controversy on his own by singling out Shel Israel to personally ridicule and generally try to make his life miserable. He has gone to the lengths of registering the shelisrael domain where he hosts puppet show parodies of Shels FastCompanyTv show interviewing Web personalities. While I have to admit that some of the bits made me laugh, the unrelenting and apparent meaness can get old quickly. If you look in the background of some of the interviews which were shot at the Arrington enclave, you can see Mike Arrington in the background assuming the role of grip as the puppet works his magic. At that point I had an ah ha moment but didn’t know why. Now the latest controversy makes it obvious. Has TechCrunch taken a step closer to the ValleyWag approach. You be the judge. Next up a scathing animated feature starring Zuckerboig and a parody of the recent Facebook chat app.

So what is next? Loren is obviously taking a page out of the Howard Stern, start a beef, playbook. Even on this relatively tiny scale, it bumps up traffic. So how about an East Coast vs. West Coast beef or “Social Media is for Wussies” campaign led by Amanda Chapel.

Bottom line, there is not really a major point to this post, but I was hoping do my little part by fanning the flames to jack up the pageviews with a manufactured controversy and link bait headline.

For those of you that attended Techcocktail last September, you will remember the great event put on by Brian Balfour and Jay Meattle and Geezeo. Well they are at it again with POPSignal. http://popsignal.eventbrite.com/

If you missed it last year be sure to try to attend. Don’t wait to sign up. See you there.