D FORMA. General Assembly-based mobile chat facilitator Opinionaided, which raised a $1.2 million round announced in March from General Catalyst, DFJ and SoftBank, among others, is about to announce some fresh capital. On Thursday, the company plans to announce another round of funding from “a veritable who’s who of VCs and super angel investors,” which it will use to scale the service. Can Opinionaided succeed where so many variations on spontaneous social connections have failed?
HOSTILE TAKEOVERS. Members of the New York Tech Meetup were surprised to see that organizer Nate Westheimer had stepped down along with managing director Jessica Lawrence and other long-time officials. “We’re not sure why this happened, but we wanted to assure you that a leadership change is NOT taking place,” Ms. Lawrence told members, eventually explaining that the change had been due to “a glitch in how we were managing our Meetup.com account.” The tech group seems to be experiencing difficulties, as the promised redesign of nytm.org is behind schedule and probably won’t be out for at least a month or two, although the WordPress site has been reskinned. Who’s redoing the site? Betabeat asked. Maybe it’s Mr. Westheimer’s stealthy next project! “Can’t announce that yet,” Ms. Lawrence said. “Because it isn’t 100 percent confirmed.”
REMEMBER THE CR-48? Google has a Mountain View-based Chrome OS tech support team of just eight “ninjas”–surprisingly small, but also surprisingly huge given the company’s vast majority of users will never speak to a human there.
DOIN’ IT. STILL DOIN’ IT. STILL DOIN’ IT. Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures raises a glass to Steve Jobs with a diss to reporters. “Here’s to the doers of words, not just the writers of them,” the VC blogged. Cult of Jobs plus cult of start-up exceptionalism? It’s a hit–99 notes and counting! You doer-ed the shit out of that blog post, dude.
