Soro Says Sell [Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]

Don't miss the fireworks today as hedge fund manager George Soros testifies before the Senate Commerce Committee. He apparently will say that oil is a bubble, and that commodities are not a legitimate institutional asset class.

Right, but are commodities an attractive nuisance, like venture capital? That's what we really want to know.

Catastrophe Risk and Hidden Correlations [Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]

Spending a lot of timely lately mulling some issues related to catastrophe finance and spurious correlations. Anyone find interesting patterns in these two photos of burned homes from last October's wildfires in San Diego County? How would you apply risk models in these two cases to capture salient differences? Could you?

[via RMS]

Why Time Warner Cable's Pay-Per-Use Internet Experiment Will Fail [Silicon Alley Insider]

Time Warner Cable's (TWC) long-rumored Beaumont, Texas experiment -- giving new cable modem subscribers a bandwidth allowance and charging for overages -- begins this week, the AP reports.

Time Warner's tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap.

Uploads and downloads will count toward their quotas, and subscribers will have a two-month grace period to figure out how much bandwidth they're using before getting charged extra. Overages will cost $1 per gigabyte.

Our first reaction: Are these typos? Those caps are tiny, and this is not going to work.

For instance, downloading just five movies a month from Apple's (AAPL) iTunes store would go over the 5-gig cap on the "cheap" subscription. Want to rent another movie? That'll be another $1 on top of what you're paying Apple. Even 40 gigs a month for the "fast" service isn't that much bandwidth in the era of all-you-can-eat Netflix streaming and four-computer households.

These caps will look even sillier once hi-def Web video, which eats up even more bandwidth, becomes more commonplace. And if you're using a legitimate peer-to-peer service like Joost, you could easily increase your consumption by uploading while you're downloading. (For more examples, see this post.)

Also confusing: Time Warner Cable is the lone major U.S. Internet provider to support Fon, a Google-backed (GOOG) startup that encourages you to share your Internet connection with strangers. Does TWC expect you to pay for what other people are downloading on your shared connection? Or if your neighbor (or someone less familiar) hops onto your wireless connection without your permission, can you request a refund?

As growth slows in the cable industry, and competition from phone companies heats up, we expect cable carriers to look for new pricing models, including pay-per-use Internet service. But we don't think Time Warner Cable has thought this one through. These caps are impractical, and any serious Internet user -- or someone who might be become one, someday -- should run away screaming to the nearest competitor. (Meanwhile, Comcast's proposed 250-gig limit makes much more sense.)

$400M Contract for Foster-Miller, 65K Order for OLPC, $1B In, $5M Out for Alnylam, & More Deals News [Xconomy Venture Capital Feed]

Roundup, deals, VC

Rebecca Zacks wrote:

Sheesh, maybe it was the sheer volume of the last week’s deals that made the equipment at our Web hosting company explode. Check it out:

—The U.S. military awarded Foster-Miller its biggest robot contract yet, for $400 million worth of the Waltham, MA-based firm’s TALON robots and spare parts. The robots will be used to counter roadside bombs.

—The One Laptop Per Child Foundation inked a deal to provide the small state of Caldas in central Colombia with 65,000 XO laptops for public-school children.

—Japanese drug giant Takeda Pharmaceutical Company forged a strategic partnership with Cambridge, MA-based RNAi leader Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY). The 5-year deal is potentially worth more than $1 billion.

—Alnylam invested $5 million in Vancouver-based Tekmira Pharmaceuticals in order to gain access to the Canadian firm’s RNAi-delivery technologies.

—The assets and operations of Meriden, CT-based flu vaccine maker Protein Sciences were bought by Emergent BioSolutions, of Rockville, MD, for up to $28 million in cash, $20 million in stock, and up to $30 million in milestone payments.

—Billerica, MA-based American Science and Engineering won a $6.2 million contract from the NATO C3 Agency for its X-ray-based cargo and vehicle screening systems.

—Two stealthy Boston-area mobile-software startups announced venture financings in the same week. Azuki Systems, of Acton, MA, (formerly Peermeta) raised $6.1 million in Series A funding from Kepha Partners and Sigma Partners, among others. And Waltham, MA-based EnvIO Networks raised $10 million in a Series B funding round led by Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

—Advanced Technology Ventures of Waltham, MA, led a $16 million round of investment in New York-based Web marketing firm [x+1].

—Harvard School of Public Health spinoff Syndexa Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, MA, raised $15 million in a Series B financing. The funds will help support the company’s efforts to develop drugs for obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

—Amherst, NH’s AeroSat, which has developed a broadband antenna system for passenger planes, raised $14 million in new funding from Boston-based PAR Capital and existing investors CAI Managers and AeroEquity.

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Sheesh, maybe it was the sheer volume of the last week’s deals that made the equipment at our Web hosting company explode. Check it out: —The U.S. military awarded Foster-Miller its biggest robot contract yet, for $400 million worth of the Waltham, MA-based firm’s TALON robots and spare parts. The robots will be used to counter [...]

India [PE HUB]

UTI Ventures, an eight-year-old Bangalore-based firm, is in the process of trying to raise its third venture fund, according to the Business Standard, which says UTI’s target is between $400 million and $450 million, roughly four times its last fund, which closed in 2005. UTI’s investments are all over the place, from Vallabhdas Kanji, which sells [...]

TechStars Google Day [Feld Thoughts]

TechStars 2008 is in full swing as it heads into week two.  Today was Google day.  During the day Kevin Marks and Dion Almaer were in The Bunker talking about Google AppEngine and OpenSocial.  In the evening Dick Costolo, Rick Klau, and I talked about the FeedBurner story from inception through the acquisition of FeedBurner by Google.  I forgot to make my crack about ClosedPrivate, but we got plenty of other good stuff out there.  Thanks to Kevin, Dion, Dick, and Rick for coming out to Boulder!

Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft are also in town this week.  I expect videos from the evening events will be up on the recently launched TechStars Community site.  Andrew Hyde is responsible for the videos and he's putting them up pretty quickly after they happen - like the Starting Your Startup session - with me, Todd Vernon (Lijit CEO), and David Cohen.

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