SG Corporate & Investment Banking (SG CIB) announced that it has completed the acquisition of Bank of America’s Structured Investments business, which provided institutional investors focused on hedge funds with lending and structured product solutions. The deal includes certain proprietary technology related to the business and the transfer of client financing transactions and related assets, including structured products linked to alternative investment funds of funds.

19 sales, marketing and support staff that comprised Bank of America’s Structured Investments business will join SG CIB’s equity derivatives platform in both New York and London. SG CIB’s equity derivatives platform in the Americas, headed by Francois Barthelemy, will comprise over 100 front office staff, complementing SG CIB’s 800 strong global equity derivatives team.

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FeedBurner, the RSS tracking service used by many sites, including MarketingVOX, announced it won $7 million in second round venture financing. Mobius Venture Capital led the round that included Sutter Hill Ventures as well as previous FeedBurner investors Portage Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. FeedBurner said it now manages 40,000 RSS feeds. It also intimated it has a bunch of interesting deals and partnerships that should soon break. FeedBurner’s tracking is currently free, although it said in its release that it plans to charge for premium services.

News Source: http://www.marketingvox.com

By Garnet Heraman

The wealth generated by India’s fast-growing information technology and business-process-outsourcing industries shows that the country has started living up to its economic potential. Unfortunately, they produce just 3 percent of GDP and employ less than one-half of 1 percent of the nonfarm labor force. By contrast, most sectors of India’s economy remain shielded from global competition by high tariffs and restrictions on foreign direct investment and are thus woefully uncompetitive. Although some might argue that removing these barriers would threaten social objectives such as the protection of jobs and incomes, a robust economy would be more likely to realize them.

The take-away

If India is to replicate the success of its IT and outsourcing industries elsewhere in its economy, its leaders must lower barriers to trade and encourage foreign investment in other sectors.

By ERIC BELLMAN, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BOMBAY, India — New York property company Tishman Speyer Properties, L.P. is creating a joint venture with ICICI Venture Funds Management Co. of India to invest $600 million in India’s booming property market, The new joint venture, TSI Venture Ltd., will be one of the first companies to take advantage of the recent deregulation of India’s real-estate market. Each company will contribute $300 million, from their own funds and from outside investors, to be invested in developing residential, office and retail properties in India’s largest cities. ICICI Venture, a venture fund-management company, is a unit of ICICI

By Garnet Heraman

In their zeal to attract foreign investment, governments in emerging markets offer tax breaks and subsidies that can cost them millions. Simultaneously, they enforce rules to protect inefficient domestic companies and to ensure that local economies benefit from the new business. McKinsey research finds that these incentives and restrictions are unnecessary, ineffective, and, in some cases, counterproductive.

The take-away

Foreign investment benefits the local economy in almost all cases. Moreover, foreign investors say that government funds would be better used to improve the local infrastructure than to provide investment incentives.

I saw a very interesting blog from Brad Feld from Mobius Venture which is very interesting as it encapsulates his understanding of how he made a series of investments.    A snippet from his blog is posted here and the complete blog can be found at the link below.

"When I dug in and started trying to understand RSS and blogging in the spring of 2004, I identified eight segments that I believed existed: Content Management Systems (CMS), Aggregators (Readers), Tools, Hosting, Content, Search, Analytics, and Advertising.  I used this as the framework for both exploring the impact of RSS and identifying companies that I might be interested in investing in.  My framework has evolved in the past year, especially once I realized that my technical analogy for how RSS evolved was going to be similar (but not equivalent) to how SMTP evolved.  I was a very successful investor in email-related technologies (and continue to enjoy being an investor in two successful email-related companies – Return Path and Postini), but also learned some “interesting” lessons about how quickly the dynamics could change as I had a huge financial win at one point in the “email direct marketing segment” with a company called MessageMedia that ultimately got slaughtered (more on that some other day)."

http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2005/04/im_hot_on_feedb.html