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Seattle based Redfin, an online real estate startup, has raised another $10 million in a venture capital round led by Greylock Partners. Existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Vulcan Capital and The HIllman Company all participated in the round, and Greylock's James Slavet joins the Redfin board of directors. This was a safety round, as Redfin announced profitability over the summer and have now exceeded a $20 million in revenue run rate (it was just $15 million last summer). They've roughly quadrupled in size since 2008, even in a down real estate market. - Steve Woda

Analytics, whatever that means, has emerged as the hot topic all over our industry. Gartner seems to have bolted from Business Intelligence and placed "Advanced Analytics" in the firmament of must-have technologies for 2010 (I guess everyone followed their lead and implemented BI last year so there is nothing else to talk about). The problem with analytics is, who can do it? Numerate people in organizations are as scarce as hen's teeth. According to the conventional wisdom, very special experts, quants we'll call them, are needed because mere mortals can't handle this stuff. But you can't buy quants like muskmelons on the road to Bettendorf in July, and even if you could, a muskmelon would be less troublesome. One of the often-cited problems with quants is that they tend to be condescending towards those who lack quantitative skills. This is the reason Tom Davenport often uses the term "PhDs with personalities," a phrase I find quite distasteful. - Steve Woda

Back in March, as the first draft of the Obama administration’s massive green energy investment program began to emerge, we asked if the Department of the Treasury was poised to become cleantech’s new venture capital fund (The Treasury: clean energy’s new VC). It turns out that we were wrong. Treasury only administers the Obama administration’s green energy funds. The Department of Energy is where the power is, since it actually decides who gets the money. For confirmation of DOE’s growing power, look no further than this press release announcing the appointment of Jonathan Silver, a Washington-based venture capitalist, as the executive director of the DOE’s loan program office. DOE (not Treasury) is clean energy’s new VC. The appointment is yet another indication of the agency’s transformation as one of Washington’s leading funding sources. - Steve Woda

The Department of Energy has billions in loan guarantees to hand out to alternative energy firms and automakers. But the highly competitive process has been criticized as slow, unmoving even. What is a government agency to do? Hire a venture capitalist, of course. The DOE announced Wednesday the appointment of Jonathan Silver, a former managing general partner at Washington D.C.-based venture capitalist firm Core Capital Partners, to head its loan guarantee and green auto programs. Core Capital invests in alternative energy, software, telecommunications and advanced manufacturing technology. Silver will report directly to DOE Secretary Steven Chu and has been hired to accelerate the application review process for both programs, according to the agency. - Steve Woda

This week we met Motorola's Droid, the first handset with Android 2.0. To an outsider, it just looks like another Google smartphone, but 2.0 is more than that: it's proof that Android is finally going to take over the world. So Wait, What Is Android, Exactly? In Google's words, it's "the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices." That doesn't mean much, so here's a breakdown: It's a Linux-based, open-source mobile OS, complete with a custom window manager, modified Linux 2.6 kernel, WebKit-based browser and built-in camera, calendar, messaging, dialer, calculator, media player and album apps. If that sounds a little sparse, that's because it is: Android on its own doesn't amount to a whole lot; in fact, a phone with plain vanilla Android wouldn't feel like a smartphone at all. Thankfully, these phones don't exist. - Steve Woda

Jonathan Silver has been named executive director of the Department of Energy’s loan program. He had been a co-founding managing director of Core Capital Partners, before leaving in 2008. Underscoring his commitment to strengthen and streamline the Department of Energy’s operations, Secretary Steven Chu today named Jonathan Silver Executive Director of the Department’s loan program office. In this role, Silver will oversee the Department’s Loan Guarantee Program as well as the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program. Silver will report directly to Secretary Chu, helping accelerate the application review process for both programs. As Executive Director, Silver will be responsible for staffing the programs and leading origination, analysis, and negotiation, as well as managing the full range of the Department’s alternative energy investments. - Steve Woda

The Obama administration has hired a Washington-based venture capitalist to speed its efforts to choose alternative-energy companies and car makers that will win loan money and loan guarantees from the federal government. The appointment of Jonathan Silver -- managing general partner of Core Capital Partners, an investor in alternative energy, advanced manufacturing, telecommunications and software companies -- makes him the latest in a growing roster of venture capitalists in positions of influence at the Department of Energy. The agency has become a potentially huge source of capital for companies in the renewable-energy industry, many of them relatively small companies that have been battered by the recent turmoil in the credit and private-equity markets. Some renewable-energy trade groups have complained the Energy Department isn't moving fast enough to fund projects. - Steve Woda

Nowadays, it's easy for developers to build fully fledged applications that run inside the browser. Keeping these applications safe from hackers is another matter. With this in mind, scientists at Microsoft research have unveiled a new way to secure complex Web applications by effectively cloning the user's browser and running it remotely. Many of the latest Web applications split their executable code between the server and the client. The problem is detecting whether the code running on the user's home PC has been compromised in some way. The new Microsoft solution, known as Ripley, was announced today at the Association for Computing Machinery's Computer and Communications Security Conference in Chicago. - Steve Woda

Venture capital (VC) funds like to invest in disruptive change, but what they really love is the stable, change-resistant nature of their own business. That is about to change. "Bits of destruction" spare no one. (The term bits of destruction was coined by Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, a top-tier venture capitalist who has not been afraid to criticize his own industry and who always innovates.) Risk capital, of which VC is sometimes a part, is critical to innovation, which is critical to healthy economies. Therefore, this does matter to all of us. In this part 1 of a series, we will look at the four big secular waves of change hitting the VC business. - Steve Woda

Venture capitalists and chief executives of venture-backed companies don’t exactly see eye-to-eye when it comes to their respective roles as board members. But they do generally agree on the strategic objectives for the companies they’re building, according to a new study due out today that offers a revealing look inside the boardroom. The “A Seat at the Table Study,” a follow-up to the 2006 survey conducted by the National Venture Capital Association and venture-capital research firm Dow Jones VentureSource, also shows that VCs and CEOs are spending more time these days in the boardroom as they weigh heavy issues in the face of a punishing economy. The survey (see charts below) was sent out in October and the results are based on 317 replies from venture capitalists and 211 responses from CEOs of venture-backed companies. - Steve Woda

Software-as-a-service pioneer and salesforce.com (CRM) co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff credits storytelling as one of the primary reasons for his company's rapid success. "Communication is probably the most essential part of my job," Benioff told me in an recent interview about his new book, Behind the Cloud. The book describes how salesforce went from idea to $1 billion company in less than a decade. Whether you own a small business, run a large company, or have a great idea for The Next Big Thing, consider these seven tips from Benioff about how to shape and articulate your vision. - Steve Woda

We continue to work our way through wind downs in the third part of the series from Roger Glovsky. Roger, you have the floor… The primary responsibility for shutting down operations and liquidating assets falls on the managers and/or owners of the business, at least until or unless the creditors or court system takes over. This could come as a nasty shock to some investors. Many angel investors or even venture capitalists enter a transaction with the intent of just contributing money. They may be surprised to learn some day that the management team for the company they invested in have all resigned and that no one is remaining to wind down the business, sell off the assets, or pay down the liabilities. Suddenly, one day the investor or owner receives a call (most likely from a creditor) asking what they plan to do with their company and how they plan to address the outstanding liabilities. Not a happy call for the investor or owner. - Steve Woda

We all forget too easily: the best startup funding is sales. Sure, angel investment, friends and family, SBA loans, all of those options are necessary for most startups. But sales is better. If you can, find the early customers. Give them a deal, make them important, work with them to optimize their needs; but make a sale. Even if you need to go out and find investment — and I speak now as an actual angel investor — there’s almost nothing as convincing as actual sales. People are spending money. It makes a new business proposal far more credible. - Steve Woda

Pitney Bowes Inc. is a 90-year-old legacy company that has grown tremendously in the last decade, both organically and through more than 80 acquisitions, with the goal of building out all aspects of its mail and document management business on a global basis. It has six divisions, including the core mail and postage meter business, document management software products, and outsourced mail services. I joined the company with the express goal of helping solve a critical problem: how to innovate across the broad portfolio of Pitney Bowes’s businesses and assets by generating ideas that combine the best from every business. The primary role of my team is to create processes to formalize innovation, so that we don’t let our research labs and development shops operate in isolation. Innovation is broader for us than “product innovation” or “services in­novation.” It’s really as broad as our business model. - Steve Woda

Last week Twitter debuted a new feature that lets you group your followers, Twitter calls it Lists. To learn Twitter List basics, Josh Catone’s Mashable post HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists is a good place to start. Why do lists of Twitter accounts matter? Twitter Lists are an efficient way to find Twitter-people that you don’t know, but should. Consider this list of 500 entrepreneurs, founders, startups, CEOs, and influential business people put together by Peter Urbanski. When you subscribe to a list like this, the updates of everyone in the list appear in your Twitter feed—You don’t have to subscribe to each individual account. You may not want to subscribe to a list with 500 active Twitterers, but take a quick look and you may turn up a handful of interesting, thoughtful people you do think are worth following. - Steve Woda

When it comes time for hiring managers, managers within your company, or business partners to find out about you and your work, social media is the first place people go. Famously, we Google the name and the fun begins. Much has been made of the boss firing the employee after the employee disses the boss on Facebook along with many other examples. That won’t be repeated here; Cubicle Warriors don’t do dumb things like that. But what if you wanted to represent yourself as the star employee you are right now? How would you do that through social media? Here are five suggestions. - Steve Woda

In keeping with its efforts to promote the Web as as a development platform, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) on Thursday plans to release a set of internal JavaScript programming tools as open source software. Google's Closure Tools were used to create Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps, among other applications. The Closure apps include Closure Compiler, a JavaScript optimizer designed to produce tight, efficient JavaScript, code that, Google claims, has fewer bugs and is easier to maintain. It removes unnecessary code and compacts the rest to maximize speed. There's also a Firefox extension that works with Firebug called Closure Inspector. It aims to simplify debugging by making optimized code more readable. Firebug is a Firefox extension that facilitates HTML, CSS, and JavaScript debugging in the browser. - Steve Woda

There's a security problem on the horizon, which could derail the progress of social networking has made in breaking down the barriers between business and personal Internet usage. (Whether that's a good thing or not is a separate argument.) I'm speaking of the rising tide of fake Facebook messages, phishing threats, and malware. And I didn't even mention the constant "friend-request" harassment from people you've never met. (Ba Dum Bum!) Seriously, though, it's no wonder that many businesses are reluctant to allow employees to surf Facebook and LinkedIn at work. Probably these sites were blocked initially because of their time-wasting potential (and, in the case of YouTube, the unnecessary bandwidth usage). However, the security issues now running rampant on Facebook give enterprises a legitimate reason to demur. - Steve Woda

Perhaps one of the most important parts of any brand is their logo. Getting the right logo however - one that is reflective of the company's mission and culture, and which conveys trust and authority - is not an easy task. If you've ever hired a professional graphic designer you know how cumbersome the entire process can be. Fortunately, there are services available which ease the burden and pretty much ensure you get precisely what you want out of your logo. Logomyway is a company that I first came across at Ad-Tech Chicago this past summer. The service enables businesses to start a logo contest and receive concepts from thousands of designers all over the world. Create a contest brief and within a few hours designers can start submitting their designs. The beauty of this is how quickly and affordable it is. - Steve Woda

As the World Wide Web has exploded into millions of sites and billions of documents, the search engines that purport to know about everything on the Web have faced a gargantuan task. Sure, more spiders can be activated to crawl the Web and collect information. But what system can analyze all the data before the information is out of date? The answer is a cluster-based analysis system, sometimes referred to loosely as a cloud database system. At the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo Nov. 3 in Santa Clara, Calif., representatives ofYahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) explained how they use Hadoop open source software, from the Apache Software Foundation, to analyze the Web. Hadoop is a system that can be applied to "big data," or masses of data collected from the Web, such as the crawls that lead to the search indexes. Eric Baldeschwieler, VP of Hadoop software development, leads the largest known active Hadoop development team and said Yahoo is the world's largest Hadoop user. - Steve Woda

In order to make its BlackBerry platform more attractive to developers, Research In Motion (NSDQ: RIMM) said Monday it is enhancing the platform with new application programming interfaces that will potentially enable richer applications. During its second-annual BlackBerry Developer Conference, the company looked to address some of the perceived weaknesses in its platform for developers. Mobile applications are becoming increasingly important in the smartphone space, primarily due to the success Apple has had with its App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Apple owners have already downloaded more than two billion apps in about a year and a half, and the iPhone is gathering a lot of mindshare and attention within the developer community. - Steve Woda

News breaks faster on Twitter than just about anywhere else, and Google wants in on that speed. The search giant's recent deal to include Twitter updates in its search results is a key part of the company's strategy for improving its core product. In a visit to Cambridge, MA, last week, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said that the biggest changes coming to its algorithms have to do with efforts, like the Twitter deal, to integrate real-time search. Basic search has improved drastically in recent years, and this has intensified the competition to find key information as close as possible to the moment it appears on the Internet. For example, Microsoft's search engine, Bing, announced it was integrating Twitter on the same day as the Google announcement. - Steve Woda

Have you ever noticed that many of the leadership clichés we live by are not living up to their reputation? Leaders flippantly throw around sound bites of so-called “wisdom,” picked up at conferences or from leadership books and use them without truly questioning whether or not they are true or even useful. Bit by bit, these clichés have reached the status of “conventional wisdom” – widespread beliefs that are not only untested but untrue – also causing havoc in the workplace. So as a lover of what’s true, I begin the campaign to eradicate the old clichés and update these concepts to be useful in our new realities: - Steve Woda

Last week, more evidence emerged in the Securities and Exchange Commission's debacle over the mishandling of the Bernie Madoff über-fraud. While the SEC failed repeatedly to uncover the greatest Ponzi scheme in our country's history ($50 billion and counting), the New York Times revealed a tale of "unseasoned people uncertain about what to do and unwilling to ask for help." But learning how to ask for help — and how to do it right — is critical to doing your job well and setting yourself up for success. - Steve Woda

Last week, more evidence emerged in the Securities and Exchange Commission's debacle over the mishandling of the Bernie Madoff über-fraud. While the SEC failed repeatedly to uncover the greatest Ponzi scheme in our country's history ($50 billion and counting), the New York Times revealed a tale of "unseasoned people uncertain about what to do and unwilling to ask for help." But learning how to ask for help — and how to do it right — is critical to doing your job well and setting yourself up for success. - Steve Woda

Determined to retain your most talented executives? Well, here's some counterintuitive advice: The best way to keep them from leaving is to prepare them to do just that. In tough economic times like these, retention becomes less of a priority for many companies as they focus on more-immediate business concerns. But companies that neglect this issue during a downturn may be in for a nasty surprise just as things start looking up: Historically, there is a significant increase in the number of executives leaving their companies as market conditions improve and more job opportunities open up. - Steve Woda

One of the biggest advantages of social media is the ability to get your brand Web-wide recognition among very active consumers across any number of niches, large and small. One of the biggest disadvantages is the massive amount of time it takes to get these profiles set up and keep them maintained. You can also run into problems when someone else has squatted on your brand name within these networks. KnowEm has a solution. Begin by simply entering your name in the search box. What you'll get in return is a list of hundreds of social media sites - and the availability (or lack thereof) of your business name on those sites. It's broken down into social categories; blogging, bookmarking, business, community, design, entertainment, health, information, microblogging, music, news, photo, tech, travel and video. At the very least, this is a good place to start to see the networks that apply to your business, and whether or not your desired user ID is available. But there's more. - Steve Woda

I’m sure I’ll spark the ire of some VC’s for saying so, but there is certainly such a thing as black-out days in venture capital. It’s worth you knowing this so you don’t waste your time. It’s also very important to understand so that you can properly plan when you raise money. Let me first tell you the black-out periods and then I’ll explain why. It is very difficult to raising venture capital between November 15 – January 7th. It is also very hard to raise VC from July 15 – September 7th. (you need to have had your first meeting even earlier.) If you’re thinking about raising VC and have not yet started the process, you’ve probably already missed the boat for 2009. - Steve Woda

Summary: Angels make more introductions than VCs because angels need co-investors. You can’t clear the market in series–you can only clear it in parallel. Tranches are dumb–they have zero upside and catastrophic downside. Two investors aren’t always better than one. Finally, a ‘very special’ message to graduating Y Combinator founders: don’t do deals on D-Day and feel free ping us if you want additional help. - Steve Woda

I can’t play poker, but I do enjoy watching it on TV. We’re in the middle of the 2009 World Series of Poker, an event that draws thousands of professional and amateur players to Las Vegas every year. The grand finale is the Main Event, a massive Texas Hold ’Em tournament with thousands of players and millions of dollars for the winner. Tournament poker used to be the province of professionals. But starting a few years ago, a huge wave of amateurs has invaded the game. As a result, of the thousands of entrants into the Main Event, only a few hundred are real pros. - Steve Woda

I can’t play poker, but I do enjoy watching it on TV. We’re in the middle of the 2009 World Series of Poker, an event that draws thousands of professional and amateur players to Las Vegas every year. The grand finale is the Main Event, a massive Texas Hold ’Em tournament with thousands of players and millions of dollars for the winner. Tournament poker used to be the province of... more... - Steve Woda

Let’s face it: as an entrepreneur, the odds are stacked against you. Most businesses fail after the first few years, and even if you do manage to survive, that doesn’t mean your business will redefine an industry, become profitable, or change the world. Getting off on the right foot is essential to navigating a startup from its infancy to profitability. Luckily, there have been countless entrepreneurs that have gone through the same toils building their own businesses, and most of them are happy to share their experiences to better prepare you for the journey ahead. In addition, there is now an array of social media and web apps that no entrepreneur has ever had access to before. Together, these resources can give you the edge in a fast-changing business worl - Steve Woda