As we wrote yesterday, it appeared that Chris Sacca’s newly launched fund, Lowercase Capital, has raised over $20 million in funding over the course of the summer. But today, it looks like Sacca has filed another Form D under the name Lowercase RT, LP for another $20 million. Similar to the filings from yesterday, it’s unclear who the investors are from the SEC filing.

This brings the total amount raised over the past 6 months to nearly $50 million. It’s important to note that Sacca operates a number of other funds, so this recent $20 million and the previous raises could be used in his other investment vehicles. As Lowercase’s account cryptically Tweeted yesterday, #4: closed.

As GigaOm’s Liz Gannes wrote earlier this summer, Sacca operates a fund that makes investments in early-stage startups, and one that buys secondary market shares of companies such as Twitter and Facebook. Another two funds are jointly run with New York-based investors, and are focused on taking large public companies private in Hollywood, transportation and wireless. A fifth fund buys founder shares of early stage companies under the Lowercase brand.

Lowercase’s previous investments include SimpleGeo, Fanbridge, DailyBooth, Posterous and Stickybits. And Lowercase has been on an funding tear, participating in a number of recent rounds in hot startups, including Embed.ly, Chartbeat, and Backupify.

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Sacca’s On A Roll; Raises Another $20 Million For Lowercase Capital

Sacca’s On A Roll; Raises Another $20 Million For Lowercase Capital

Sirius XM appears to be at a bit of a crossroads. Howard Stern, arguably the company’s most recognizable on-air talent, has all but decided to negotiate his new contract in public, recently stating that “I do get a little charge out of thinking that in December we might be done. I get a little turned on by that.” Mere negotiating tactics, or a genuine feeling of wanting out? Who’s to say? I’m certainly no mind reader. Stern’s current contract has him making around $100m per year, and that’s something Sirius XM would like to change.

Howard Stern isn’t the only high-profile employee to run into Sirius XM’s belt-tightening.

Longtime Opie & Anthony producer Steve Carlisi, known to fans as Steve C., was let go earlier this week. The key is, he was let go and not replaced. Sound familiar?

Dave McDonald, who left Sirius XM’s Ron & Fez show earlier this year despite the best efforts of the Save Dave campaign, still hasn’t been replaced. That makes two producers (the other being “Hurricane” Earl Douglas, who’s since become a published author) the Ron & Fez show has lost in as many years who haven’t been replaced. (Dave McDonald has since moved onto WPJB public radio in New Jersey.)

At this rate the show will be little more than Ron, Fez, and Pepper Hicks all talking into a single iMic.

Big corporations—if you permit me to stretch the truth a bit and consider Sirius XM a “big corporation”—fire people all the time, but to fire so many producers without replacing them? It smacks of financial desperation, as if Sirius XM has convinced itself that you can have a successful radio show without a full team supporting the on-air talent. It doesn’t work that way.

Then again, I’ve never been in charge of a big, successful company like Sirius XM…

And not to think too much into this, but Opie, of the Opie & Anthony show, which has been on satellite radio since October, 2004, just tweeted that his latest contract offer (his current contract expires in October) from Sirius XM is a “joke and insult.”

Way to treat your talent, Sirius XM.

The boys are on vacation this week, and I fully recognize that my idle speculation will no doubt have annoyed them, but these are the types of moves that don’t exactly fill the average Sirius XM listener with any sort of optimism.

And let’s not kid ourselves: outside of certain live events, talk radio is the only reason to subscribe to Sirius XM. We all have music-filled phones, we can all easily subscribe to Rdio or Pandora or take-your-pick. (When not listening to XM channel 202 during the day, I’m listening to Spotify and not COOL HITS RADIO STATION on Sirius XM.) The idea of paying for a one-to-many, top-down radio service in 2010 isn’t quite as appealing when you’re connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, and can hold decades’ worth of music in your pockets at all times.

Not to say that radio is dead, of course, but the idea of paying for radio seems a little out of place these days, particularly when the service is content with firing (and not replacing!) the talent that attracted us to it in the first place.

Of course, our comments are broken here a CrunchGear, so there’s no opportunity to either agree with me or call me a giant idiot.

/me kicks the tires

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Amidst Howard Stern Negotiations & Numerous Talent Firings, The Question Becomes: Where Are You Going, Sirius XM?

Google really did just change the game in search today with the introduction of Google Instant. While Google execs at today’s event emphasized how much faster it makes search, Google Instant is really about showing you more search results. And this will have very interesting implications for consumers expectations of what they want from search, search market share, and how sites try to game search through SEO tactics.

Google Instant turns search into a realtime stream of results which flow onto your screen as you type your query. With each letter you type, a whole new set of results flash by. This is important for several reasons. First and foremost, you will now see many more search results than you would have otherwise. Most people never click through to the second page of search results. If it is not in the first ten blue links (or really the first five or six), it might as well not exist for most people. With Google Instant search, instead of people seeing only ten results, they may now see 50 or 100 (depending on how many letters they type and how far they get through each search query).

Google just found a way to jack up the number of search results you see by doing nothing more than type in a word or two like you always do. Most people can scan results visually and can absorb a lot more information if it is streamed to them in this fashion rather than having to manually click through to see more results. If people get used to this, it will put pressure on Bing and other search engines to quickly follow suit. People go to the search engines whether they can find things more quickly. (Google Instant is already turned on for some people and will roll out throughout the day. If you go to Google’s main search page you can see how it works.)

Which brings us to the whole issue of search market share. Currently, market research firms such as comScore count search market share by the number of queries and search results each engine delivers. Search engines like Yahoo and Bing have been juicing these numbers recently by adding search results to other parts of their sites such as slideshows and news. But now how do you count a query when each letter brings up different results. Google dominates search market share as it is currently measured, and now it just changed the game. Counting queries is now completely outdated.

SEO (Search engine optimization) will change as well. Sites will need to optimize for particular letter combinations, not just entire keywords. It will be interesting to see whether results get spammed or if Google will gain the upperhand in this constant cat and mouse game.

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Google Instant Is Less About Speed Than It Is About Volume

Google Instant Is Less About Speed Than It Is About Volume

When the World Economic Forum reaches out to the world and asks people to talk about resource sustainability, energy efficiency and carbon emissions, they expect serious, thoughtful answer. And for the most part they get them.

Americans, of course, have to add a little flair. And so I’m not surprised to see a whole series of super hero interviews where they talk about these important issues, filmed in Venice Beach. The funny thing is that the answers are pretty good if you don’t watch the actual video and just listen to the audio. Boba Fett and Iron Man really nailed it with thoughtful answers in my opinion.

And it’s nice to see the very conservative WEF take a lighthearted approach to this. They even featured the video on their blog and will show it at next week’s summit in China. Our own Sarah Lacy will be there covering the event.

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Proud Americans, Solvin’ The Worlds Problems

Proud Americans, Solvin’ The Worlds Problems

In part three of our Super Angel v. VC SMACKDOWN Dave McClure says “I am all about the flip. GREED IS GOOD. I am Gordon Gekko in Silicon Valley.” But is he? Wouldn’t greed be going after the big win not the tiny flip?

In this clip we come to one of the core distinctions between Super Angels and VCs: Are sub-$50 million exits the desired goal in Silicon Valley or are small acquisitions what you settle for when your company doesn’t hit it big?

McClure argues that small flips are more sustainable for the Valley, despite the fact that small flips don’t create the next Googles and Facebooks to acquire future generations of Super Angels’ companies. McClure says he’s counting on non-technology companies to start buying hundreds of technology companies, but do entrepreneurs want to sell to someone even stodgier than a Microsoft or a Yahoo?

David Hornik counters that Sand Hill Road is about changing the world and that’s the business he wants to be in. (For the record, that’s the business I moved to Silicon Valley ten years ago to cover.)

For part one of our series, “Why the Hate?” go here; for part two “Are Super Angels Just a Phase?” go here. And to catch the live debate at Orrick’s offices this Friday go here.

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Super Angel v. VC SMACKDOWN Part 3: Are Angels Just about the Flip? (TCTV)

Super Angel v. VC SMACKDOWN Part 3: Are Angels Just about the Flip? (TCTV)

Today at the Google Search event in San Francisco, the search giant unveiled Instant, a huge new feature that allows users to search in real time (without hitting the search button). It looks to be an awesome product that will save users a lot of aggregate time. But that’s on Google.com. I rarely use Google.com anymore. I want it in the Chrome Omnibox.

That’s coming soon, Google’s Marissa Mayer promised. “Sometime in the next few months this is something that will be activated in the browsers,” she said. She didn’t elaborate, but obviously, you can imagine this coming to builds of Chrome (which Google makes) first. And it wouldn’t be surprising to see this in Chromium (the open source version of Chrome) pretty soon.

That said, it’s not yet clear how Google will implement this in Chrome. Currently, when you search in the Omnibox, you still have to hit enter to do a query. That’s important because the Omnibox is also the address bar, so people are typing in URLs here a lot. This should be an interesting problem for Google to solve.

And how Google will implement this in other browsers remains to be seen. You can probably imagine this will be a plug-in for browsers that Google doesn’t make — such as Firefox and Safari. And it will be interesting to see what Microsoft thinks of this seeing as they make both their own browser (IE) and search engine (Bing).

Earlier in the event, Google also noted that Instant would be coming to the mobile experience later this Fall.

Continued here:
Google Instant Coming Natively To Browsers “In The Next Few Months”

Google Instant Coming Natively To Browsers “In The Next Few Months”