VC Roundup: VCs that can kill and the carried interest tax moves along

Welcome to the VC Round-up, where we’ll parse through venture capital news related to Philadelphia-based private equity firms and the companies they fund. Subscribe to the roundup as an email newsletter. If you have any VC-related news to pass along to us, please drop us a line.

MUST READS

As we wrote about this morning, our pals at Phillymag wrote a detailed expose on Mike Burns of Guggenheim Venture Partners. The story details the military-like workflow of the under-the-radar firm that focuses on buying distressed assets. We’d link to it, but as of Monday Night it appears the story hadn’t made it online yet. When its up be sure to give a read for an inside look into the only local investment firm that could also kick your ass. The story also had a sidebar of prominent local VC funds including First Round, Gencast and DreamIt.

The National Venture Capital Association continues its fight against a Senate Bill that it says would discourage investment activity. The bill, which would increase taxes on “carried interest” barely passed the passed the House and observers expect the Senate to make significant changes to the bill.

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Phillymag hearts our technology community

The June issue of Philadelphia magazine puts the technology, investment and entrepreneurial communities of Philadelphia on full display.

The Phillymag feature led with an Editor Larry Platt-penned profile on King of Prussia VC military man Mike Burns, of Guggenheim Venture Partners — as of Monday night, the piece didn’t seem to be available online.

The piece was interspersed with pieces on three groups we’ve been so proud of helping bring to the forefront — “the funders, like GoodCompany Ventures and DreamIT Ventures; “the scenesters” like Indy Hall, Philly Startup Leaders, Roz Duffy and others and “the startups” like Azavea and 123LinkIt.

During the past year, we’ve seen a growing number of legacy media stories covering our areas of interest. It’s the collision of a number of factors, not the least of which is the growing awareness around the richness of our communities.

(The edition also included a profile of a more professional segment of the rich DIY movement afoot, though, like the Burns profile, the link doesn’t yet seem to be live.)

We might even humbly suggest Technically Philly’s 16-month existence — with many a story left untold — is further evidence of that.

[Full Disclosure: We write weekly about the technology and innovation communities for the Philly Post daily blog from Phillymag.]

Technically Philly offering tech insight for Philadelphia magazine’s Philly Post

Please give a warm welcome to our new readers.

Yesterday, by way of a link, we forged an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog. From here, we’ll be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals, first hinted at last week. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

I’ll be writing as Philly Mag’s online tech columnist, offering a fresh and often more in-depth and behind-the-scenes look at the goings-on of Technically Philly’s daily news. For those of you who have been following along regularly, the weekly column at Philly Post will be a different taste of what you already likely read between the lines in our news entries. For those just joining us, we hope you’ll enjoy the breadth of technology content that we’re humbly able to offer here.

Be sure to check out the first column, on the City of Philadelphia’s pitch for Google ultra-high speed Internet, at Philly Post.

Ten Philadelphia competitors and their January Web traffic

Click to enlarge.

Perhaps one of the most influential realities of the Web is metrics. The details of traffic and audience online have so rapidly become expansive that they have likely not yet been entirely harnessed.

Arguments still rage around the accuracy and importance of a myriad of Web analytics, but, away from page views, an increasing standard is to compare sites by their monthly unique visitors, though that number’s efficacy has no doubt come into question.

Until now, very little attention has been paid publicly to comparing Philadelphia’s many competitors by way of traffic comparison. With the first numbers for 2010 released this month by public Web analytics company Compete, Technically Philly decided to compile the first such digest.

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