Filed under: Deals, Raising money, Warburg Pincus, Engagements, Venture capital industry, Private equity industry, Investments, Public or private?

Most private equity firms hunt for stable companies with stable cash flows that are either cheap or inefficiently operated. These companies can then be resold for more money or taken public, or the strategy can fit into the Warren Buffett time frame of “forever.” Biotechnology has long been the realm for only public companies, but that’s changing.

Private equity firm Warburg Pincus has already made some biotech plays that seemed to be a harbinger of the trends here, and even more so when you consider foreign drug companies buying US-based biotechs on the cheap with that US Peso of a currency we have.

A new fund called GANIC Pharmaceuticals has been launched this week, with Warburg Pincus as the main backer. the private equity firm made an initial investment in GANIC from the Warburg Pincus Private Equity X, L.P., a $15 billion fund which shut in April. As of now, we don’t have any exact launch figures for the size of the investment that was given to GANIC.

GANIC’s management is all former senior executives of MedPointe Pharmaceuticals and the company will will focus on building a substantial enterprise by acquiring revenue generating companies, portfolios, and/or products and by investing in innovation and acquiring pipeline development assets.
Continue reading at BioHealthInvestor.com to hear estimates of the size and strategies that the fund might employ.

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Filed under: World wide web, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Mozilla, Freeware, Social Software, web 2.0, Browsers

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a compelling new browser start page. There was a real flurry of start pages a year or two ago when the likes of Google Personalized Begin Page (now iGoogle), NetVibes, Pageflakes, and a myriad of other copycat sites launched. Strangely, even with such an astounding variety of begin pages to select from, we’ve never found any of them to be particularly compelling.

Then we were introduced to Feedly. Feedly is a begin page that only works in Firefox, because it requires a Firefox browser extension to run. It’s actually a locally hosted page that goes out and grabs information feed reader sites and social networks that you use, and presents it to you in a friendly magazine style layout.

Feedly can go through your Firefox bookmarks, as well as your My Yahoo! page, NetVibes, Bloglines, Twitter, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail accounts to find relevant information to present to you. If we have the ability to offer one tip, it would be to choose carefully. When setting up our page, we checked every possible option, and ended up with far too many feeds, and too many feeds that we had lost interest in that were still in some account somewhere that Feedly found.

Feedly also has a very tight integration with Google Reader, and anything that you read in Feedly will be marked as read in Google Reader, and vice versa. This is cool, but it’s also perilous, since and feeds that you add to Feedly (or that it finds) are automatically added to your Google Reader account. So again, choose carefully what feeds you want to be seeing in Feedly, as they will affect your Google Reader account.

But once it’s all set up, Feedly is a very useful and elegantly done start page - so much so, that we haven’t been compelled to remove it. And since no other start page has captured our interest, that’s certainly something.

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Filed under: Fun, World wide web, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Freeware, Social Software, web 2.0

Pidgin doesn’t officially support Facebook Chat (yet?), but it can be customized with useful add-ons like the new Facebook Chat plug-in. Once installed, the plug-in allows Pidgin to log-in to a Facebook account, pull the buddy-list, and send/receive messages.

Adium, arguably Pidgin’s counterpart on Mac, also received support for Facebook Chat in the current 1.3 beta release, though, the feature is absent from the most current official update. If you’re a risk-taker who enjoys putting his/her computer in jeopardy for the sake of testing new software, give it a shot.

We’ve also covered a couple of other methods of taking Facebook Chat outside the site:

1. There’s a Firefox plug-in that adds the social-network’s IM service to a sidebar.
2. The social software/service one-stop-shop known as Digsby also added support for Facebook Chat earlier this year.

[via Lifehacker]

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Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

HelloTxt is a web service that lets you send out status updates to your contacts on a wide array of social networking and micro-blogging services. The site makes it simple to send identical updates to Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Plurk, Tumblr, and other popular and not so popular services. But up until recently there was one major problem with HelloTxt: The communication was one way. You could send, but not receive status updates.

Now HelloTxt has added a new feature called Status Snap which lets you read updates from your contacts on supported networks. Right now, only Twitter and Facebook are supported, but HelloTxt plans to add more networks to Status Snap over time.

In order to enable Status Snap you need to login to your HelloTxt account and click the Status Snap boxes next to each network you want to enable the service for. HelloTxt has also added a lifestreaming feature that shows all of your current activity on your main page.

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Filed under: Cards, Debt

Fair Isaac didn’t start working on the idea of a quantitative credit scoring system until 1958, and didn’t introduce its credit agency scores until 1981.

That’s right: banks used to lend people money without FICO scores. Instead they relied on stuff like employment history and, gasp, character. To get a loan, you used to have to meet with an officer or even a committee face to face, and they’d assess your reliability

As the foreclosure crisis has shown, relying solely on the quantitative can lead to disaster. The old-fashioned bankers might have been on to something. The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) that credit card issuers are now expanding their underwriting standards to include a focus on the applicant’s line of work and where they live. If you work in construction in Nevada right now, you might have a tough time getting a loan.

This newfound prudence can be tough for some business owners who are seeing their lines of credit slashed for no reason other than that they’re in a certain industry — even if they happen to be faring quite well. But for most individual borrowers, I would say that a slash in your credit availability should be a warning sign that you’re skating too close to the financial edge. The bank’s metrics that tag you ask risky may be dead on, whether you realize it or not.

More about credit scoring:

Credit scoring myths

Help your credit score by adding your statement

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