ThinkNear founder Eli Portnoy. (Photo: LinkedIn)

Cha-ching! GigaOm reports that TechStars New York just got its first acquisition: 2011 graduate ThinkNear, a hyperlocal mobile ad startup, was acquired by GPS purveyor Telenav for $22.5 million. The startup will be incorporated into a newly launched mobile ad platform called Scout Advertising. It's the largest TechStars acquisition thus far.

Not too shabby. 

ThinkNear started out peddling a yield management tool, with the idea that businesses would run ads to attract customers when sales were slow, and quickly picked up a $1.6 million round with IA and Google Ventures. But when that turned out to be an uphill battle, the startup shifted to a broader hyperlocal model, and now here we are.

Here's what the acquisition will allow:

Now, advertisers will be able to use ThinkNear’s location targeting to reach consumers within 100 meters of any location. But the ads will tap Telenav’s Drive-To Advertising platform to provide browser-based GPS turn-by-turn directions to lead the person to the place that’s being advertised. That’s important for advertisers who want to measure their advertising ROI because they can see if someone arrives at a place after seeing an ad.

Advertisers who want any more guarantees than that will have to hire someone with a cattle prod to harass sidewalk passersby.

Mr. Ehrenberg

IA Ventures, the New York City-based firm with a big data fetish, just announced that it raised $105 million towards a second fund. That's more than double the $50 million seed fund IA Ventures founder Roger Ehrenberg raises in 2010.

With this new fund, Mr. Ehrenberg told TechCrunch, IA Ventures will be able lead seed rounds as well as series A and B rounds and follow a company through its growth. Previously, IA gravitated towards pre-revenue companies “between a Powerpoint and a prototype.” Those companies, says TechCrunch, require more "hands-on work," and with Fund II, IA Ventures will be able to diversify its portfolio into both seed-stage and later-stage companies.

TechCrunch's post on the new fund set off a chain of negative responses on Twitter, unrelated to IA Ventures, but rather to do with a theory Erick Schonfeld slipped into the piece about the difference between East Coast and West Coast investors below.

In fact, there seems to be a divide between East Coast and West Coast superangels. “There is a huge ideological argument right now at play,” says Ehrenberg. Investors like Ron Conway, Dave McClure, and even Clavier make a lot of small bets—60, 100, or more per fund—hoping a few of them will pay off massively. They know that somewhere in their portfolios could be the next Google or Facebook. The East Coast seed investors are a little bit more cautious (they would say “disciplined”). Ehrenberg models IA Ventures more like a small Union Square Ventures or Foundry Capital—a more concentrated portfolio where the investors use their contacts or domain expertise to help take some of the risk out of the companies.

“The optimal point on the risk-return frontier,” says Ehrenberg, “is putting small amounts early, being close, and being in a position to put in more money when there is an opportunity to de-risk as opposed to holding a portfolio of lottery tickets and hoping that one of those lottery tickets looks like Google or Facebook.”

The idea that East Coast investors were risk-averse in particular, did not sit well with some, including Mr. Ehrenberg and IA Ventures's Ben Siscovick:

The contradiction Mr. Dixon seems to be getting at is the idea that small, pre-revenue investments supported by a hands-on approach are at odds with the idea of getting in on the ground floor with the next Google when it still looks like a long shot.

Reached by email, Mr. Dixon said, "Just look at the investments by Betaworks, Founder Collective, Highline, Thrive, Lerer, etc. Some examples companies: Tumblr, Tweetdeck, Pinterest, Uber, Fab, Artsy, Birchbox, Warby Parker, Makerbot, Buzzfeed, etc. It is a long list of great tech companies. In almost all cases these firms invested in the first financing round."

Sorry, Schonfeld, Conway vs. Ehrenberg is no Biggie vs. Tupac.

Visual Revenue offers media companies a unique Front Page Decision Support System for online Editors. The solution can predict the performance of a piece of content about 15 minutes into the future and provides editors with real-time recommendations on what content to place in which position on a Front Page and for how long.

Sounds like something BuzzFeed would be interested in. Wait, it sounds like something every web publisher would be interested in. But are we petty web readers really that predictable?

IA Ventures and Softbank Capital think so. The firms led Visual Revenue's $1.7 million round, which will be used to hire front end and back end engineers, a lead designer, customer engagement manager and business development manager and build Visual Revenue into the "Bloomberg terminal of the newsroom," as the company puts it.

"We've done REALLY well, since we spoke last," Mr. Mortensen said in an email, pointing us to the company's long list of customers: Forbes, Time.com, De Telegraaf, NBC, CNN Money, and Cox Media, among others. Visual Revenue appears to be doing exactly what it was doing in January of last year, we noted. "We are pretty proud of that," he said. "No 'pivot' for us!"

A year, a roster of more than 35 global media partners, and an endorsement from big data mogul Roger Ehrenberg? We're starting to worry this company may be able to predict the future or something.

Techies love high value dining.

The most interesting part of today's news that mobile advertising startup Place IQ had raised $4.2 million was that the Boulder, Colorado based company is packing its bags and heading to New York. Roger Ehrenberg, whose IA Ventures has been backing Place IQ since the seed stage, says it's the natural evolution of the company. "The partners and the clients are here. The engineering talent is here. They did a great job building out the core tech and finding some traction. But when it's time to scale, you want to stop living on an airplane."

New York as a hotbed for engineering talent is becoming a familiar refrain. But if Facebook is also opening an office in Silicon Alley to try and tap into these in-demand workers, won't hiring here become an absolute nightmare? "I think its actually two very different kinds of people," Mr. Ehrenberg said. "There are folks who appreciate the stability and scale of a Google or a Facebook and then there are want to be the big fish in the little pond and make their mark on a company."

Mr. Ehrenberg hinted that future funding announcements would be paired with a move to New York (okay, that's two; three times is a trend story). "The old line is that Silicon Valley VCs only want to fund companies in their backyard. We try and take a more flexible approach."

Having startups relocate to New York does give Mr. Ehrenberg a chance to flex his muscles as a recruiter. "I work with the engineering and data science folks at Columbia, so we can tap a ton of great young talent coming out of there."

There are outliers of course. TechStars NY grad ThinkNear, also backed by IA Ventures and working in the mobile advertising space, decided to head for Los Angeles after graduating from the accelerator. But with foursquare, Hyperpublic, Localresponse and many others, New York stands out as the nation's biggest hotbed for location-based tech companies.

Sisco kid

Roger Ehrenberg started with a career on Wall Street, but he's become one of the most respected and sought-after investors in the New York tech scene. He is the founder of IA Ventures, which recently raised a $50 million fund and invests "on the belief that managing and extracting value from massive, occasionally unstructured, often real-time data sets is a competitive advantage."

Ben Siscovick, a member of the investment team at IA, gave a talk at General Assembly this week to a packed house on the topic of big data. He was nice enough to throw the video up on his Tumblr, so for everyone who was stuck in the office and missed out, let Betabeat drop a little knowledge on ya.

IA Ventures - The Business of Big Data at General Assembly 7/12 Part 1 of 2 from IA Ventures on Vimeo.

Check out the rest of the session over at Mr. Siscovick's blog.

Justin Singer, a VC at IA Ventures in New York, has stepped into the ongoing debate between whether we're all extras in Dotcom Bubble: The Redux or merely in the middle of  "a blubble," which Michael Arrington loosely defines as that irrepressible whining sound perpetuated by early stage VCs and angels and regurgitated by the press. (We guess that makes Mr. Arrington  part of the press since a month later he took most of it back.) Now, in a post on his Tumblr, Trying and trying again, Mr. Singer predicts a tech bubble will happen in the next 15 years. It would be easy to lump it into our bubble watch, if Mr. Singer's prediction wasn't accompanied by a rather alarming graph  . . . and blame an leading indicator that's unlikely to change: human instinct.

Unless in the last 15 years we’ve managed to outgrow our humanity, there will be a tech bubble. Of course, it will be fueled by technological and economic factors (ubiquitous connectivity, low interest rates, foundational FOSS), but it will be motivated by human instinct. We will herd. We will follow. We will discount downside risk in favor of upside potential. We will focus on the positive and ignore the negative. We will see others grabbing cash or the promise thereof and we will run that way with ever increasing glee, all while repeating to ourselves the four most dangerous words in finance: this time is different. We will do these things because that’s what we’ve always done, each time shouting that some emerging dynamic will make it work this time around. The problem isn’t the technology or the economics—they likely are better, faster and stronger than last time—the problem is us. We don’t change, not even when the bubbles burst and we run away in panic. In time, we just reach down and invoke another instinct—resilience—and we do it all over again.

Resilience, optimism, herding, fear; that’s what makes a bubble. Everything else is details.

Any start-ups out there with a game-changing technology that helps disrupt human nature, we have a feeling you could score some funding and a pretty sweet valuation.

Mr. Suster, miming wrapping his hands around Twitter's data stream.

GRP Partners' Mark Suster announced yesterday that he and Roger Ehrenberg, at IA Ventures in New York, are co-leading a $6 million investment in DataSift, a London-based data platform for third-party developers, brands, and publishers to capture real-time data. Although based out in L.A., TechStars just named Mr. Suster as a mentor for its new New York class. Mr. Suster has certainly made no bones of tweeting his pom-poms at local start-ups. Mr. Ehrenberg, on the other hand, has had his heart set on data mining. "As a former hedge fund guy, Roger immediately saw the value in helping companies better sift through the masses of data; often to gain better insights into financial information," writes Mr. Suster on Both Sides of the Table.

News of the funding came just as Twitter announced that it hit the one-million-mark for registered apps, which the company says is "fueling a spike in ecosystem growth" in areas like analytics. Indeed, Mr. Suster described his investment in DataSift as "doubling down on the Twitter ecosystem." Although DataSift provides multiple live data feeds from sources like Facebook and LinkedIn as well, Mr. Suster says Twitter is by far the most dominant source of "the real-time publicly available data that exists on the Internet today." Twitter has granted DataSift "re-syndication rights," which means DataSift has access to the electronic fire hose of data that is Twitter and can sell subsets of the stream to interested parties.

According to PaidContent, Twitter has only granted those rights to one other company, but DataSift "might be one of the only ones making money off it." You may recognize DataSift from the green "Retweet" button you see on third-party sites and Tweetmeme.

Kohort, the new startup from Mark Davis, just raised $3 million from folks like IA Ventures, RRE, FF Capital, David Tisch and David Cohen. It's going to be offering a suite of tools to help groups do things like organize events, collect dues and enlist new members.

But the secret sauce, says one investor, is the way in which Kohort will help groups to interact with one another. "Meetup is essentially providing a platform for anyone to create a group, but its not tapping the network effect that comes from tying those organizations together."

Kohort will have ways for groups to organize around a shared passion. So the 28 soccer clubs in New York could host a round robin tournament, pool their members and easily split the entry fees between all the participating groups.

When Meetup.com launched its redesign back in January, angry users took to the comment boards and forums to try and find an alternative. Some pointed at Facebook Groups and Groupspaces, but no one seemed satisfied with these choices. Kohort is planning to fill that vacuum, although it shouldn't count on Meetup to drop the ball and drive users its way.

Turns out Kohort is taking aim squarely at one of New York's oldest start-ups, Meetup, with a new set of community management tools.

Interestingly, the lead investor on this business is IA Ventures, which has a thesis built around the value of big data. On the surface Kohort seems to be focused on a platform that helps people organize and communicate--email lists, questions forums, membership directories, etc.

Perhaps underneath the activity Kohort will be working to generate recommendations for how to structure groups based on what they derive from all of the engagement data.

Davis acknowledged that this is a crowded space with a lot of big entrenched competitors. He thinks Kohort's advantage will be its diversity of tools. Seeding the space will be TechStars, Startup Weekend and the enormous Arizona State University.

Roger Ehrenberg is the managing partner at IA Ventures. Prior to the tech world, Ehrenberg was an investment banker and at Citibank and Deutsche Bank.

Q: You always remember the ones that got away. Tell us about the startup you regret passing on the most.

A: During my angel investing days, probably Foursquare. Not yet enough data to discuss regrets at IA Ventures. But I will say that I regret misses far less than I regret poorly-selected investments. While I find the "anti-portfolio" concept interesting, I am much more focused on my success in picking and nurturing winners than scrutinizing the ones that got away.

Q: The last thing you want to hear from a founder is...

A: "... I have some bad news. And I should have told you about it two months ago but didn't." Lack of communication and transparency is the death knell. As an investor, I prize honesty, humility and disclosure more than words can express. Bad news first. Acknowledgement then analysis of mistakes made. Then good news. I do this with my venture LPs and expect the same from my portfolio company CEOs.

Q: What “me too” trend should we avoid or invest in?

A: Lightweight "social shopping" applications. Some will succeed, most will fail, almost all are features and are neither products nor companies. We have literally seen dozens of these. We've also seen a steady stream of "social media monitoring" dashboards and applications. An important tool? For sure. But enough already.

Q: What’s the weirdest pitch you ever heard?

A: I honestly haven't heard too many weird pitches because I've always screened so rigorously both as an angel and as a venture investor. By the time someone comes in for the face-to-face pitch, we already have a very good sense of the vision, the early plan and the key questions that need to be answered for us to invest. Nothing totally wacky. Now for ideas submitted via email, that is an entirely different story! Perhaps I'll have to come up with a Top 100 list sometime.

Q: What’s the best way to ride out a bubble?

A: Be ruthlessly disciplined about sticking to one's investment mission, avoiding temptation to be caught up in the frenzy. If prices are moving away from you to the point where you're asking yourself "Are things really different this time?," put your wallet back in your pocket and sit down. Rationality doesn't change just because some subset of the market has seemingly re-defined it within a narrow slice of time. Perhaps more importantly, ensure that you are holding ample reserves against your development-stage companies to ride out a difficult fund-raising period. Bubbles are generally followed by busts, and you want to be in the position to support your companies and to take advantage of others' inevitable liquidity problems.

Q: Explain, without jargon, what the word pivot means to you?

A: Pivot is a hackneyed and non-descriptive term. What I think people are trying to say is in the course of bring a product or service to market, it become clear that the product/service is not what potential customers want. Company founders then work to find the right product/service for the targeted customer set leveraging existing IP, or to discover a new customer base against which to test market interest. Sometimes the change is incremental (targeting a different vertical - countless companies), sometimes it is significant (Buddy Media => FB AceBucks => FB App Development => FB Pages platform) sometimes it is massive (Odeo / podcasting => Twitter / messaging). This is what I think people mean by "pivot," which as you can see is too general to be useful.