Garage Technology Ventures is kicking off a cleantech investment initiative with a corporate partner that it hopes will blossom into a broader program and reach well beyond the energy industry.

Early-stage investing is chugging along at a nice pace. But Silicon Valley venture capitalists are less confident about the months ahead than they were during the financial tumult of the fall. This is according to the Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Confidence Index prepared each quarter by Mark Cannice, a professor at the University of San [...]

Rimage Corp., a publicly traded provider of on-demand DVD and Blu-ray publishing systems, will acquire Qumu Inc., an enterprise video communications company. Rimage will pay $52 million, which includes a $39 million cash component and 1 million shares of Rimage commons stock. Qumu was reportedly backed by investors including Advanced Technology Ventures, SAP Ventures, Storm Ventures, Garage Technology Ventures, Halo Opportunities Fund and the Angels Forum.

Craig Winfield Johnson, a man who played a big role in the formation of Silicon Valley as we know it, died unexpectedly from a stroke suffered last Tuesday, according to his firm, Virtual Law Partners. He was 62 years old.

Johnson was a graduate of Yale and a former Peace Corps volunteer who served in Ethiopia. After he graduated from Stanford law school, he went to work at Wilson Sonsini advising startups until he was bitten by the startup bug himself.

In the course of his career he founded two law firms: Venture Law Group, which represented Yahoo!, Hotmail, WebTV and other notable startups before it merged with Heller Ehrman in the wake of the dotcom bust, and Virtual Law Partners, a Web-based law firm that cuts down on overhead by letting attorneys share documents and back-office processes and keep 85% of what they bill (compared to the 33% kept by associates at conventional law firms).

Mohanjit Jolly — who started his career as an aerospace engineer and ended up working at Garage.com — moved his family to Bangalore two years ago to oversee DFJ’s investments in India. He inherited around ten portfolio companies and has since added eight more. He’s also hired three people.

“It’s very difficult to manage a growing portfolio halfway around the world remotely,” he says. “DFJ [which had been investing in India since late 2005] realized that.”

U.S. investors have underestimated the cost of investing in India by about a factor of three, he explains, because they don’t realize the challenges that Indian companies have.

I’ve been really annoyed lately at how many hackers are on Twitter lately. Every day, as new followers hop on board my account, I think, “Great! Here are more people who want to strike up conversations with me and make an effort to get along in this social media playground.”

Nah. It seems like one out of 10 or so are what I call “Porn Tweets,” hackers who just want to lure me to their illicit websites so they can into hack into my computer. The POTUS became a victim. So did Britney Spears.

Apparently, we’re not the only ones targeted. Former Apple Macintosh evangelist Guy Kawasaki was hit Tuesday. The managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, whose followers on Twitter are approaching 150,000 in number, is considered one of the more high-profile users of the micro-blogging site to get hit with the Trojan Horse on Tuesday.