The ISPs have agreed to send warning letters to thousands of their customers who are the most active downloaders of music and films. The UK government will do their part by discussing legislating regulations on the ISPs if the warning letters don't work.

The most commonly discussed legislation would be a "download fee" applied to every ISP bill which would be paid to the music and film companies.

All of that is well and good, but I read nothing in the FT piece and heard nothing in the BBC interview about regulating the music and film industries to force them to make their content easily and readily available over the Internet.

Of course there are people who don't want to pay for their music and films, but I believe that vast majority of downloaders are people like me who would gladly pay if the content was available to purchase when I wanted it in the format I want it.

Let's take The Dark Night. Let's say that I'd really rather watch it at home on my big screen. I know I can get it on bit torrent so I do that. If it was available to be purchased the same day it went live in the theaters, I'd be happy to pay $20 for the right to watch it at home. But the film companies want to maintain their release windows so it's not available. So its to bit torrent that I and thousands of others go.

Last month I wanted to purchase a new music album from a band I like. I went to emusic and amazon mp3. It wasn't available. It was available exclusively on iTunes in DRM format. Screw that. I can't play DRM'd music on my Sonos or Request systems. It's of little to no use to me in DRM format. So I bought the CD on Amazon but also downloaded it on limewire so I could listen while I waited for the CD to show up.

The solution to the downloading promblem is not simply to plug the hole at the ISP level. First, its not fair to impose a fee on every ISP customer when not everyone downloads. It would be fair to impose a downloading fee for those who want to download, and maybe it will come to that. But we all know that it will be very easy to hack around that technology.

The real solution is to give the customers what they want which is simple, easy, affordable, instant access to the content they want at a reasonable price. When and if the content owners do that, they will be on their way to solving the download problem. If they don't do it themselves, we should regulate them and force them to do it.

For example, in the misdirection trick, a researcher dropped a lighter and cigarette while misdirecting the subjects to the opposite hand. Most of the observers did not notice the researcher dropping the two objects even though it happened in plain sight.

In the illusion trick, a researcher tossed a ball into the air. In one case, his gaze followed the ball's upward flight. In the other, his gaze remained on his hand. 68 percent of the observers claim to have seen the researcher toss the ball into the air when his gaze followed the ball--that is, social cues created this expectation. Only 32 percent of the observers claimed to have seen it fly upward when his gaze didn't because there were no social cues.

You can see photographs and videos of these experiements here. For good or for bad, misdirection and illusion are probably principles of marketing too. Sometimes you can't even see the gorilla market in your midst because of how your mind works.

I, for one, am terrified of what Congress is doing and what they aren’t doing. You won’t hear this story told in the mainstream press because, as my good friend Harriet points out, it’s complicated and doesn’t explain itself graphically. Furthermore, it’s not partisan so there is no natural protagonist/antagonist to root for.

The GSEs got into an enormous mess because their special status allowed them to take an unsafe chunk of the market, its executives were rewarded for risk-taking, and its management was excessively entangled with the government, which made it hard for them to say no when the regulators asked them to take on even more loans. Congress’s plan is . . . more of the same.

[From Megan McArdle (July 23, 2008) - Neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring]

Llew Keltner flies about 600,000 miles a year. The CEO of Light Sciences Oncology insists he can’t imagine doing his job any other way. There are doctors in about 30 countries testing his company’s experimental drug/device combo treatment in clinical trials of cancer patients. He meets the physicians in person, twice a year, to talk about the product and learn how it’s being used. Then there are always meetings to talk about it with investors and potential partners. He visits the company office only once or twice a quarter, he says.

“How could I go into those meetings with investors if I didn’t do that?” Keltner says. “It’s invaluable experience.”

Still, I was able to book an hour this week to meet the highly-mobile Keltner at his company’s Bellevue, WA headquarters, a week after he raised $40.1 million in venture capital. Most of what’s been written about the company has focused on the “it-failed-to-go-public” angle, yet it turns out Light Sciences Oncology has a much more important news event coming up. After 13 years in business, it will find out in a few months whether the company’s light-infusion technique can actually help cancer patients live longer.

It’s been a long time coming for a company supported for years by Craig Watjen, the treasurer from the early days of Microsoft, and more recently, an array of venture capital firms that includes Essex Woodlands Health Ventures, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation and Novo A/S. The market they are pursuing initially, liver cancer, affects an estimated 19,000 people in the U.S. each year, although the technology could be able to be applied to many more tumor types than that, Keltner says.

To understand why, some background is required. The company’s product, called LitX, is attempting to become the first treatment of its kind. The system works by using a light-emitting diode, guided by a biopsy needle, which doctors can thread inside a solid tumor with the help of an ultrasound or CT imaging machine. The patient is then injected with an inactive chemical drug called talporfin sodium. Once the light is turned on, powered by cheap AAA batteries, it activates the drug to kill tumors within a limited wavelength, sparing nearby healthy tissue. The light stays on for almost three hours while the patient can watches TV or reads a magazine, and then goes home.

The company has passed some early clinical trials that show tumor shrinkage, yet has said little about it, Keltner says, because he doesn’t want to raise false hope among patients about a treatment that’s not yet available. Now, he feels he can “loosen up a bit,” because LitX has advanced to the final proving ground, a Phase III trial of liver cancer, which could provide evidence needed to bring the product to market.

The company began recruiting 200 patients for the test of LitX against liver cancer in November 2006. It chose that disease because …Next Page »

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So how does Sciona work its magic? Genetic testing, of course. For $300 dollars, it sends you a swab kit and asks you to complete a detailed fitness and lifestyle questionnaire, after which it provides a personalized “DNA Fitness Action Plan” that ostensibly makes recommendations based on how well your body builds muscles, uses nutrients, and recovers from exercise, among other things. Sciona also has a nutrition program, if that’s of greater interest to you. (The cost of figuring out how you can optimize your nutritional intake is also $300.)

The company’s site looks like it was modeled on a 1980s Bally Total Fitness ad. (If I were one of its investors, I’d insist on a redesign pronto.) But I think the growing field of “neutrogenics,” as some, including Sciona, call it, makes sense. While most educated people today have a good understanding of what’s required to stay healthy — lay off the tequila shots, don’t smoke, exercise — tests like what Sciona’s propose can help concentrate them on those things that are most important to tackle, like the need, say, to cut back on corn oils.

Sciona’s investors, by the way, include Burrill & Co., BioVentures Investors, DSM Ventures, and BASF Venture Capital.

***More on the Cubs auction.

***PE pros looking to go hostile, take note of the compare/contrast offered by Dealbook. There should be a personality quiz to go along with it: Are you a Microsoft or an Inbev?

***This goes out to you, MBA Students. In fact, the entire Mergers & Inquisitions blog does, but its especially useful to you now.

***And Don’t Click On This Link. So Bush dumbly blamed the failing financial sector on its own drinklust? Puh-lease. This non-story is boring and the over-coverage of it lame.

***Instead read about the financial sector from a more quotable (anonymous) person, who said Wall Street is “redefining bad.”

***Lastly, the Mars/Wrigley debt launched today. Go Go Gadget mega-deal!

That profit was more than likely made when the firm began selling its interest in the operating company to Sun some time last year. Its unclear if that interest has been fully completed to date. According to a source, all Cerberus now owns of the company is 15% of the real estate business. Remember, the 2004 LBO of Mervyns split the business into real estate and operating companies. (This isn’t unusual for buyout firms to do, often because buyout firms aren’t real estate experts and vice versa. Look to Toys ’R’ Us for another example.) What’s unique about this deal is that Cerberus and Sun didn’t own equal parts of the operating company. The breakdown remains unclear. They each own a small part of the real estate company; Lubert-Adler and Klaff Partners LP own part of that, too.

The key here is that Sun Capital has been buying back Cerberus’s stake in the operating company and may be left holding the bag.

And since Dan’s argument unleashed a mildly heated debate, here’s further proof that Cerberus and Sun had a “heads we lose, tails we lose” situation. In 2004, the president hired by Sun and Cerberus was quoted in Women’s Wear Daily as saying, basically, that this deal didn’t depend on the company’s success or failure:

“Everybody said it was a real estate play,” Leto recalled. “The operating company was not valued and the three owners knew they’d get their money back from the real estate. But they asked me to come out here and see what I could do.” Later in the article he says, “Everyone thought this was a straight liquidation play.”

***I’m waiting to hear back from Sun and Cerberus to see if they’ll disclose the size and breakdown of their investments in the company—will update tomorrow morning when I do.

***Rick Leto, by the way, left his post at Mervyn’s in 2007.

Consider if Obama had penned his first editorial on the Huffington Post rather than the Times. There is no doubt that, even with the HuffPost's political leanings, McCain's response would have run, and probably unedited. If the blogging community has realized one thing, it's that people want to be their own filters, and they don't need an established media company to do it for them. Yes, people want a place where things are aggregated (Huffington, Memeorandum, etc.), even when that aggregation is accompanied by commentary. But the commentary must be one voice among others, it must be identified as coming from a particular point of view, and it must be open to commentary to have any currrency (intellectual and financial) in today's marketplace.

Contrast this view with the NYT's descision on the McCain response. For some reason, the NYT's editorial staff still thinks they're relevant to the conversation, that their "voice" should be heard, if only indirectly by influencing the timing and content of McCain's response. News consumers neither need nor want that type of involvement any longer becuse the "transfer costs" are too high, both in terms of delay and distortion of the original message. Instead, the NYT's job is make the news accessible, organized, and unfiltered, they run a market bazaar, not a department store now. The sooner they realize it, the sooner headlines like the latter one above will change.

Canning is chairman and co-founder of Madison Dearborn Capital Partners, and is known to have a close relationship to MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. That friendship, however, apparently wasn’t enough to overcome a bid that reportedly did not approach the $1 billion floor established by other bidders. Such bids would set a record for sports franchises, although they also include Wrigley Field and a local sports cable channel.

As peHUB reported earlier this week, the Canning group included:

• Bruce Rauner, principal and chairman of buyout firm GTCR
• Dave Donnini, principal with GTCR
• Byron Trott, banker with Goldman Sachs known for his relationship with Warren Buffett.
• Michael Krasny, former CEO of current Madison Dearborn portfolio company CDW.
• Patrick Ryan, CEO of Aon Corp.
• Andy McKenna, who once served as Cubs chairman early in its ownership by Tribune Corp.
• Larry Levy, a Chicago-based restaurateur who supplies concessions to sporting facilities like Wrigley Field
• Michael Sacks, CEO of Grosvenor Capital Management
• Michael Ferro, founder of Click Commerce (sold to Illinois Tool Works).

The Arizona Senator raised $50,000 in the second quarter, according to a peHUB analysis of Federal Election Commission records. That trounces the $15,800 raised by Obama, who had bested McCain in all prior quarters. Moreover, a number of private equity pros helped raise Q2 money for McCain – with those figured not included in our calculations. One example of that was Steve Klinsky of New Mountain Capital, who helped raise an additional $28,500.

Overall it was the slowest quarter for private equity giving since the primary season began last year. Part of the problem may be that donors have already maxed out, while others might have been waiting until the Democratic race was over (which didn’t happen until late Q2). Expect another surge of contributions, particularly if McCain picks PE darling Mitt Romney as his running mate.

To date, Obama has raised $376,515 from private equity pros, while McCain has raised 231,071.

The peHUB analysis only included contributions from professionals at U.S.-based buyout firms with at least $500 million under management.

You can view the total fundraising to date here:  PresTotals.xls
You can view all of the individual Q2 donations here: Q2pres.xls

I just bought one of these on eBay, and whenever someone asks me about it I’m going to say “100 billion dollars” in a Dr. Evil voice.

Nobody’s going public these days, but the acquisitions market is certainly heating up. A day after Boeing announced its purchase of Bingen, WA-based Insitu, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is getting into the act. The San Jose, CA-based networking giant announced it is buying Pure Networks, a privately held company based in Seattle. The deal is worth some $120 million (for all shares of Pure Networks) and is expected to be completed in the first quarter of fiscal year 2009.

Pure Networks makes software and tools for managing home networks, such as diagnostics for why your wireless Internet connection is running slow. It currently partners with Linksys, which was bought in 2003 by Cisco for $500 million, to help consumers set up and secure their home Internet and various networked devices more easily. The company’s “innovations will provide Cisco and Linksys with a key underpinning to take home networking to the next level of ease of use,” said Ned Hooper, senior vice president for Cisco’s corporate development and consumer group, in a statement.

The employees of Pure Networks will stay in Seattle and be integrated into the Linksys team, according to the statement. As Xconomist and Clarion Group partner Eddie Pasatiempo pointed out last week, that stage—deal integration—is the real test of any acquisition’s success.

And speaking of home networks, the cable to my building has been down all morning. Heard that, Comcast?

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I have a few CFLs in the Nolan household but I simply don’t like them. They have to warm up to before outputting full power and the color of the light is hit or miss depending on the brand of bulb you are buying. Then there is that pesky mercury problem that proponents who claim to also be environmentalists selectively overlook… given the choice of mercury contamination or excessive electricity use, I’ll take the latter because mercury is serious stuff. Remember that fluorescent lighting is also a hundred year old technology.

The typical CFL has 4-6mg of mercury but the thing that should be concerning is that CFLs use elemental mercury which readily vaporizes when exposed to air, meaning a broken CFL in your home should be dealt with not simply by sweeping up and throwing away the broken glass, as you would an incandescent, but also by opening windows and allowing the air to change to decrease the mercury levels. BTW, the broken glass should not be vacuumed up, but rather collected and placed in a sealed bag to be disposed of in a certified Household Hazardous Waste facility, according to the EPA. Right…

I am a big fan of LED lighting but even here I find the solution to be a glass half empty. LEDs have a funky cold blue light, something that will no doubt be corrected over time, but the bigger problem is that LED light has to be concentrated which means it doesn’t disperse well so for area lighting it is not an option. On the plus side, LED lighting generates a lot less heat than other options and of course lasts pretty much forever.

For over one hundred years, traditional incandescent light bulbs have dominated the lighting industry. While the past belongs to these incandescent bulbs, the future belongs to light emitting diodes (LEDs), a new and efficient technology that is revolutionizing the lighting industry and ensuring it will have a smaller impact on the planet.

[From Amazon Green Scene’s Blog: Light Emitting Diodes: The New “Green Light” Permalink]

While I would call LED lighting very efficient, it’s certainly not new… the first calculators that appeared in the early 1970’s depended on two innovations, the microprocessor and LED lights.

There is a controversy brewing in the world of government grant money to start-ups that is trickling into the VC community.  The Small Business Association (SBA) of the US government administers Small Business Innovation  Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) provides grants to small businesses (defined as fewer than 500 employees) to the tune of $2 billion per year.  This compares to $20-30 billion per year in VC money that flows to start-ups, so a meaningful figure in the entrepreneurial economy.

But the two worlds of VC-backed start-ups and SBIR grants have mixed like oil and water historically due to a key restriction in grant eligibility:  start-ups that are 51% or more owned by VCs do not qualify for SBIR or SBTR grants.  Thus, a young start-up in a field relevant to the government grant world has a conundrum when it considers taking VC money - it no longer will be eligible to receive non-dilutive government grants.

Many VCs argue this is a ridiculous exclusion that is fostering an adverse selection problem.  The economy is awash in VC money and so only the less promising start-ups aren't getting it.  Instead, they get taxpayer-funded government money.  The most promising start-ups who can get VC money are not eligible for government money.  Hence, the government is serving as a funder of last resort to companies who the invisible hand of the market has rejected.
 
That may sound like an overly harsh view, but it is one that the NVCA (National Venture Capital Association) is arguing as they try to get the Senate and House to agree to loosen the restriction. Mark Hessen of the NVCA points out that "Venture capitalists have funded well over 90% of all the biotech firms in the United States".  It is an interesting debate and the House and Senate are in the midst of it. 

I confess to being sympathetic to both views.  My father was an entrepreneur in the 1960s and 1970s who received government grant money to foster his innovations in the defense electronics community.  At the time, though, the VC community was miniscule compared to today.  In 1980, the VC industry comprised of under 100 firms with a mere $4 billion under management.  Today, there are 700 firms with over $250 billion under management.  It's hard to argue that just because a firm is successful in attracting VC money, it is unworthy of government support.  The fact that SBIR applications have been dropping sharply in recent years (down 12%, 15% and 21% in FY'05, FY'06, FY'07) is a clear signal that something in the system needs to change.

In light of SemGroup’s filing and the rumors surrounding Sun Capital’s Mervyns, I thought we ought to revisit the LBO Bankruptcy Class of 2008. I started this chart a few months back in Buyouts, but it turns out the chart isn’t available online, and anyways I’m sure you’re all hungry to see an updated one.

But before we look at the already-dead fish, a list of some of the ones still gasping for air. The most at-risk companies, as compiled from Buyouts’s analysis of the Standard & Poor’s “Weakest Links” list, include 16 companies with CCC+ or lower ratings.

At a glance, it looks like Eurofresh, owned by Bruchmann Rosser Sherrill & Co, and two Cerberus companies, Residential Capital and IAP Worldwide Services, are in the most danger of default. The three companies have been assigned a “CC” credit rating with CreditWatch Negative. They ratings affect, respectively, $234 million, $535 million, and $234 million in debt. Eurofresh recently got upgraded (from a “D”!) thanks to an amendment with its senior secured lenders, but IAP got downgraded thanks to covenant violation and a high likelihood of Chapter 11.

Anyways, on to the body count. I think it really supports the idea that if you play too close to the fire, you’re going to get burnt. Just look at Cerberus and Sun Capital, two turnaround artists that make the most repeat appearances. Not to speak for them, but I’m guessing their response would go something like this: Since they’re in the business of buying broken companies, they don’t ever pay much to start with. That explains how Sun Capital scored a 25X-plus return on a company like Mattress Firm last year.

Email me if you’d like an excel file. View a larger version of this image if you can’t see it here.

JimmyJane, a startup looking to become the Montblanc of vibrating sex toys, raised $6.3 million in a Series D round from a group of investors that includes technology hedge fund Palo Alto Investors and a limited liability company controlled by venture capitalist Tim Draper, according to a regulatory filing.

Palo Alto Investors declined to comment on the financing. Little information is available on the firm, other than that it manages a $1.5 billion technology-focused hedge fund. In an unrelated press release, Palo Alto Investors recently described its investment strategy as “Focused exclusively on overlooked, misunderstood and undervalued segments of the equity market that have significant potential for positive returns.” It invested in JimmyJane out of its Micro Cap fund.

Draper—managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson—is the kingpin of investing in young companies that become viral successes, such as Hotmail and Skype Technologies. A source familiar with the firm said the limited liability company controlled by Draper does not involve any DFJ money. Draper could not be immediately reached for comment.

But he isn’t the only VC involved with San Francisco-based JimmyJane. Phil Schlein, a venture partner at U.S. Venture Partners, is listed as one of the company’s directors. Schlein was president and CEO of Macy’s California for more than a decade and has focused on the retail sector while at USVP. Schlein invested his personal money in JimmyJane’s Series C, and did not commit USVP’s money. He also could not be reached for comment about whether he participated in the company’s Series D.

JimmyJane has expanded its product line since raising its last round of financing, a $1.1. million Series C round, at the end of 2006. Its original line of high-end vibrating sex toys were pricey, starting at $175 and ranging up to $3,250 for its diamond-studded platinum vibrator. It has since added several down-market offerings, such as a the $90 “Iconic Rabbit” and a $36 vibrating ring.

Another addition to its line, pictured above, is a vibrator engraved with artwork by noted pop-artist Jamie Hewlett [image from JimmyJane.com]

In the past week, it added sensual massage stones for $25 each. Company executives did not return a call for comment.

The executive team has put together an impressive board of directors. Since its last financing, it added Jean-Michel Valette, who has served on the boards of several consumer-oriented products, including Samuel Adams brewer The Boston Beer Co.; Peet’s Coffee & Tea; and mattress maker Select Comfort.

Another director is Amy Schoening, who was the chief marketing officer of clothing store Gap Inc., where she helped redirect the Banana Republic brand. She now runs a brand consulting company called True Story in San Francisco and has been working with companies such as the Levi Strauss & Co. to help sell more of its Dockers brand.

BFD. Can something be scandalous if everyone already accepts it as a given? Sure it’s a bit more candid than presidents normally are, but it’s not like he called out anyone in particular. I was waiting for a follow-up about how Wall Street’s bender was enabled by Washington’s decision to turn a blind eye in the name of an ownership economy. You know, something that would have noted how Bush improperly absolved his administration and appointees of any blame. But no, just the comments. Maybe the irony also was supposed to be a given…

To be clear, this is not the valuation of the top 10 newspaper companies because Hearst, Tribune, Cox are private and Dow Jones is part of behemoth News Corp, but it does make a stark statement about the wisdom of being public ownership of media stocks. There are calls for private equity to jump in and pick up cheap newspaper stocks but I don’t see that happening because 1) The Sam Zell Experience, 2) organized labor is a hazard on the print side of newspaper operations and threatens the online side as well, and 3) we’re dealing with some fundamentally broken businesses who’s salvation is not going to be found in cost cutting and reorganizations.

BONUS: Here’s a really cool family tree chart that details who owns what in the media business.

Many of you argued strong counterpoints, but I was puzzled by the most prevalent comment. It went something like this: Had the Mervyn’s buyout not happened, the company simply would have failed earlier. Therefore, the buyout was still good for Mervyn’s.

Pardon me while I pull you out of your buyout bubble and slap you silly.

Yes, it is possible that Mervyn’s would have failed sans buyout. But it’s also possible that former owner Target would have turned things around on its own, or that different buyers would have been successful where Sun and Cerberus failed. It’s also possible that the buyout was actually a negative event for Mervyn’s, due either to operational mismanagement by the buyout firms (yes, that has been known to happen) or due to the split structure.

We just don’t know, and my argument doesn’t pretend to.

Though it is not often stated, I think insiders feel the web is coming of age, and they are wondering what’s next. It is not that they expect something new on the scale of the web, but they are worried that the insight that Tim defined – the leverage behind services like Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, and Twitter – is now broadly understood. They are not surprised there has been a flood of new services trying to mine this vein. The problem is the technically savvy core community of users whose early embrace fueled the growth of these services is running up an attention deficit. Any new service that expects this group to invest time and energy will need to displace the attention those users invest in existing services that have already achieved substantial network effects. That is not going to be easy.

Two things will need to happen if the recent pace of innovation on the web is going to be sustained over the next few years. The next generation of services will need to have an impact on the real world and the real economy, not just an attention economy driven by self expression and discovery online. These new services will also need to reach real people, many of who use few if any web services today.

Tim makes the argument for using the web to attack real world problems in this post: What good is collective intelligence if it doesn’t make us smarter. Tim’s point is that the hive mind of the blogosphere is useless if the rubber never hits the road. We can post and comment and tweet and tag and follow all we want in cyberspace; but if it ultimately doesn’t change anything in real space, we haven’t really accomplished anything.

"I've argued all along that the real heart of Web 2.0 is the ability of networked applications to harness collective intelligence. Yes, you can harness collective intelligence to build amazing internet businesses, as the past five years have shown us.

But what good is collective intelligence if it doesn't make us smarter?

In an era of looming scarcities, economic disruption, and the possibility of catastrophic ecological change, it's time for us all to wake up, to take our new ‘superpowers’ seriously, and to use them to solve problems that really matter."

So in Tim’s view, what’s next is the intersection of cyberspace and real space. John Battelle calls it Web Meets World. We agree with Tim, John, Umair, and everyone else who argues that the real impact of the web will ultimately be in its ability to organize people online to make a difference offline.

But none of these folks make the related point that for the web to have a greater impact going forward it will not only have to touch the real world, it will have to reach real people.

At USV we have been thinking about this challenge for the past several months. Our most recent portfolio company, Meetup, has been thinking about this challenge since it was founded in 2002. Organizing people online to make a difference offline has been the central mission of Meetup since the beginning. The team there has always understood that there was a difference between collective intelligence and collective action.

But the folks at Meetup were prescient in another way as well. They knew all along that the web would only reach its potential if it reached real people. Many readers of this blog will have been to tech Meetups. Most know of the political Meetups that powered Howard Deans 2004 campaign, and have informed every politician’s 2008 campaign. What may come as a surprise is that only 1% of Meetups are tech related, and only 5% are politically related. Most address the everyday needs of real people. Meetup, for example, organizes over 2300 moms Meetup groups in 1100 cities in 11 countries.

So we are thrilled to be an investor in a company that has been organized since its inception around the key insight that we believe will drive the next several years of innovation on the web – the need to solve real problems in the real world for real people. But we are pleased to be an investor for many other reasons as well. We have known the founder, Scott Heiferman since 1995. At the ripe old age of 36, he is a veteran of the New York start up scene, with four notches on his belt that I can count. The company he leads today so perfectly embodies our investment thesis that we have often used it as an example. It feels, in a way, like Meetup was always meant to be a Union Square Ventures portfolio company. Many of our other portfolio companies are aligned in spirit if not in practice. Check out these Etsy Meetups.

Obviously we think Meetup is perfectly positioned to lead the web to the world. It is, in many ways, the original Web Meets World company. It is also a great place to work and is, at the moment, looking for great people to work there.

Lots of news from the bigger players (think Genzyme and Biogen Idec) in the Boston-area life sciences arena last week, plus a peep here and there from the startups.

—Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY), a developer of RNAi-based drugs in Cambridge, MA, extended its collaboration with pharma giant Novartis (NYSE: NVS) through October 2009; the deal is worth up to $700 million for Alnylam.

—Allied Minds, a Boston-based investment firm that backs very young companies spun out of academic institutions, helped found a University of Colorado spinoff called Precision Biopsy; the startup is developing “optical” biopsy needles for prostate cancer diagnosis.

—Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) inked a deal worth up to $437 million in upfront and milestone payments to co-develop and co-market a drug from South Plainfield, NJ-based PTC Therapeutics. The drug is already being tested as a treatment for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, and could theoretically be useful against a host of other genetic diseases.

—And speaking of Genzyme, Luke profiled the company’s efforts to capture a big piece of the market for multiple sclerosis drugs—a market that fellow Cambridge firm Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) currently leads.

—Speaking of Biogen’s multiple sclerosis drugs, the company and its partner, Ireland’s Elan, reported that their MS drug Tysabri is being taken by more than 31,800 patients worldwide—and and that they haven’t detected any new cases of PML among the drug’s users. Tysabri was temporarily pulled from the U.S. market several years ago after a few patients on the drug came down with the rare brain infection.

—Speaking of Biogen one more time, a company spokesperson reassured us that if Swiss pharma giant Roche succeeds in its unsolicited bid to acquire South San Francisco-based Genentech (NYSE: DNA) it will not rock the boat for Rituxan, a lymphoma drugs that Biogen currently co-markets in the U.S. with Genentech; Roche, which already markets the drug overseas, will simply become Biogen’s new partner.

—Having abandoned plans to go public back in January, Waltham, MA-based molecular diagnostics firm BG Medicine raised $40 million in a Series D financing. New investors Legg Mason Capital Management, GE Asset Management, and SMALLCAP World Fund joined existing investors Flagship Ventures, Gilde Healthcare Partners, Humana, and Stelios Papadopoulos in the deal.

—Luke had an interesting talk with Tod Woolf, the CEO of Worcester, MA-based RXi Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: RXII), which is seeking to turn RNAi science from the likes of Nobel Prize winner Craig Mello and others into treatments for a host of diseases. Luke looked at the unusual path RXi took to the NASDAQ exchange and the firm’s plans for funding its research while the market is down.

—Luke also had an interesting talk with the CEO of Lexington, MA-based Epix Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: EPIX). Michael Kauffman gave a preview of data that Epix plans to present at a big Alzheimer’s disease conference in a few days showing that its experimental treatment for the ailment is promising—though not quite as promising as a number-crunching error last year originally led observers to believe.

—Medical needle maker Needletech Products of Attleboro, MA, said it will be acquired for $47.8 million by Buford, GA-based medical device maker Theragenics (NYSE: TGX).

—Cambridge, MA-based Peptimmune completed a second close of its Series D financing worth $8.9 million and plans to use the money to further development of its treatment for multiple sclerosis. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates, MPM Capital, Hunt Ventures, Boston Medical Investors, and Silicon Valley Bank Capital.

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Zynga’s existing investors, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures also participated in the round, which brings Zynga’s total funding to $39 million. “With this new investment, we are doubling down on social gaming,” said Pincus in a release that just went out. (Zynga, an 80-person company, is best-known for games applications like Texas Hold Em’ Poker, BlackJack, and Scrabble that appear at Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and various other social networks.)

KPCB partner Bing Gordon, who founded the games giant Electronic Arts, has joined Zynga’s board, which also includes LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman, Foundry Group’s Brad Feld, and Pincus.

TechCrunch had the news late last night, and spoke with Pincus, who claims the company is cash flow positive and hasn’t touched the first round of $10 million that Zynga raised last January.

What I’m wondering: why then raise nearly $30 million more? Pincus says he’ll need to start spending more on production values and marketing. No doubt the company — which just acquired YoVille, a virtual world application for Facebook — will also look to acquire more competitors. But it still seems like an exorbitant amount to do that. Readers, what do you think?