I had the chance to speak with Baris Aksoy, head of Intel Capital in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa and the lone investor in the Turkish office. He says the combination of a growing entrepreneurial community and a strong economy makes the country attractive.

Just six Brazilian tech startups landed venture capital investments in 2009, but that number grew to 17 in 2010 and to 45 last year, according to Diogo Gomes, an online entrepreneur and blogger based in Brazil.

Trendyol.com, a fashion e-commerce company based in Turkey, has raised $26 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing investor, Tiger Global, the company announced Wednesday. The deal is Kleiner Perkins’ first in Turkey. Trendyol.com has sealed more than $50 million in total financing since the site launched in March 2010.

Game developers should thank Facebook for only taking 30% of their revenue when the social network’s credits system of paying for virtual goods becomes its sole currency this July. Facebook commands an iron fist over its itsy-bitsy “partners” the way the mob used to muscle corner store merchants a century ago. Game developers are still [...]

This week, the CEO of SecondMarket, the secondary market for illiquid assets, traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where SecondMarket was given a “technology pioneer” award. The distinction didn’t come as a surprise to anyone in Silicon Valley. In the process of fueling the celebrity of companies like Facebook and Zynga, whose secondary [...]

Zynga’s new investors are building an online keiretsu on a global scale that the social gaming company may be well poised to exploit, records show. The firms, Moscow-based Digital Sky Technologies (DST), New York-based Tiger Global Management and Palo Alto, Calif.-based Andreessen Horowitz, recently led a $180 million investment round for an undisclosed stake in [...]

Tiger Global has offered to cut the size of its fifth private equity fund by up to 25%, according to one of the firm’s limited partners. Figures that a PE fund with hedge roots is more prone to doing the right thing than are most PE funds with PE roots…

For those unfamiliar with Tiger Global, it’s one of the cubs spawned by Julien Robertson’s Tiger Management hedge funds. It mostly seems to make direct investments in emerging markets, with a focus on the technology sector. There’s no website, so additional background is a bit tough to come by.

The fund in question is Tiger Global Private Investment Partners V, which closed on approximately $1.24 billion in early 2008 (according to a regulatory filing). According to our source, the firm is offering to cut LP commitments back by up to 25%, in 5% increments. Chances are that not all LPs will take full advantage of the offer but, if they did, that would reduce the fund size down to around $930 million.