Sherpa Ventures Starts $150M Fundraising With $15M Infusion From TPG

Sherpa Ventures - a new early-stage venture firm recently founded by well-known Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar, formerly of Menlo Ventures, and former Goldman Sachs tech banker Scott Stanford - has started off its efforts to raise $150 million for its initial fund with a $15 million commitment from private equity giant TPG Capital, according to sources close to the situation.

The pair declined to comment on the new funding anchor for Sherpa, which has apparently already made more than two dozen investments in startups since its creation earlier this year. They include BackOps, a cloud-based company that offers back-office services like accounting, human resources and financial reporting; and Munchery, a gourmet-meal delivery service.

Along with Sherpa, Pishevar and Stanford also are working on a second part of their new business, called Sherpa Foundry, a business aimed at helping major strategic corporations gain a digital edge with their existing assets.

Interestingly, TPG recently made a big investment in Uber, the red-hot travel-logistics company. Pishevar has been a close adviser to co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick.

As I noted in a February post about their new endeavors, the pair's efforts will certainly be interesting to watch:

Indeed more than many in the tech scene, the incessantly networking Pishevar is perhaps well suited to such an ambitious effort like Sherpa. He's has worked closely with a lot of Web 2.0 s hottest startups, such as Uber, Fab and Warby Parker, while also leading Menlo's investment in Tumblr.

An active angel investor, he has also started a number of companies, such as the Social Gaming Network, which was merged with MindJolt.

And Stanford is equally well known in Silicon Valley, having shepherded a wide variety of high-profile deals for the banking giant, while heading its global Internet investment banking business from San Francisco as a managing director. He's been at Goldman for a dozen years and has been involved in investments in Facebook, Zappos and LinkedIn. Before banking, he worked at pioneering search company, LookSmart.

EMC Cloudscaling Purchase Is One More Attempt To Stay Relevant

Amazon Cloud Drive Photos App Expands To Support Video Upload & Playback On Android

Amazon Cloud Drive Photos, the photo-uploading utility that helps move photos from a mobile device into Amazon's online storage, may have to change its name. Now, the tool doesn't just support photo uploads, it supports videos, as well. Videos can be manually uploaded one by one, or users can opt to have videos auto-save from their devices directly into Amazon's cloud.

This automatic upload option was already available for photos through an update out at the beginning of the year, but videos within Cloud Drive Photos had not yet been supported, whether manually or through the auto-upload feature within the application.

Amazon says that videos are restricted to 2 GB in size or 20 minutes in length, whether they're being uploaded or downloaded from the Cloud Drive service - that's slightly longer than YouTube's default setting ahead of account verification. This is fine for the majority of users' personal videos, of activities, pets, kids or events, for example, recorded on their mobile devices.

After the files are in Amazon's cloud, the video can be played back to any device, including, of course, the Kindle Fire and other Android tablets. According to a post on Amazon's Web Services blog about the technical underpinnings to the new feature, Amazon's Elastic Transcoder service was used, which supports over 20 file formats and 40 video codecs. The team says its goal was to have videos transcoded within 15 minutes after uploading, but ended up achieving videos that are often ready within a minute or two. They also went ahead and processed all the videos stored in Amazon users' Cloud Drive libraries ahead of launch.

Though the company offers a version of its Amazon Cloud Drive Photos app on iOS devices, too, only the Android version has received the video support at this time. That makes sense because not only is the Kindle and Android-based tablet, and therefore Amazon's priority, the Android app was also the first to launch, back in November 2012.

The iOS version didn't arrive until this May, and it serves as a viable alternative to Apple's own iCloud sync and storage service, with reasonable pricing of 5 GB for free, then $10/year for 20 GB, $25/year for 50 GB and so on, all the way up to 1,000 GB for $500/year. Keep in mind that the storage goes up so high not because users need so much space for photos (and now videos, too), but because Amazon Cloud Drive is meant to serve as a competitor to Google Drive or Dropbox, with support for a variety of file types, including office documents and music, which can also be streamed back through Amazon Cloud Player.

In other words, this isn't the first time users could upload videos to Amazon's cloud. This is just making it possible to do so within the Cloud Drive Photos application.

The updated Cloud Drive app is available now on Google Play and Amazon's Appstore.

Microsoft SkyDrive’s ‘Secret Sauce’ Makes it Storage-Friendly

SkyDrive in Windows 8.1 has a secret weapon no one's talked very much about. It's actually pretty amazing, in that small sort of way that doesn't change much, but still manages to completely alter how you use something. In fact, it might just make SkyDrive the best cloud service around. If you install Dropbox, SkyDrive, or even Google Drive on your desktop today, you're going to sync the whole of your folder to your drive, at once, and keep all the files there whenever they're synced. If you don't have enough space, tough. Delete something you don't have synced to the cloud, or just stop syncing. SkyDrive has a different solution. Microsoft calls this its "secret sauce". Basically, SkyDrive makes files and folders you store in the cloud behave as though they're stored there anyway, without taking up space on your computer. You can browse, inspect, and even preview them, even though the whole file isn't taking up space on your drive.

Read the full story at Gizmodo.