The Business And Technology Network

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Paul Graham of Y Combinator is putting on an event called AngelConf that hopes to show prospective tech and business investors how it all comes together. The event will be held on March 5th at Y Combinator’s office in Mountain View, Ca. and will be free of charge, although you’ll need to request an invitation from its homepage.

Silicon Valley has many wealthy tech veterans eager to try their hand at funding a new startups. Unfortunately, most never get off the ground due to the complexity of the business. Graham believes only a small fraction of people capable of investing actually do so. And he’s found through experience that the number of startups emerging is directly related to the amount of angel funding available. Even a slight boost in the number of angel investors could be a boon to the startup community as a whole, especially in light of the economy.

According to the conference’s website AngleConf will bring together some of the Valley’s most prominent investors and hopefully help give rise to a new wave of startups. Some of the questions the gathering aims to answer will be; how much are you supposed to invest, what legal agreements do you need, where do you find startups to invest in, and ultimately, how do you pick winners?

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Beet.tv picked up on a story in USA Today about Blip.tv paying emerging video producers as as much as $40,000 in advertising revenue.

Andy Plesser,  executive producer at Beet.TV says they use Blip as their primary video publishing platform and as a non-exclusive advertising representative.  Blip’s sponsors include Adobe, Holiday Inn Express and Akamai.  Different sources put blip’s video streams somewhere between 30 and 60 million per month.

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Back when the Internet was young there were all sorts of schemes to monetize content and sell digital goods. One of the most talked about was the concept of micro-payments, where users would be charged incrementally based on how much content they consumed.

The idea never really caught on. And ever since, micro-payments have remained on the back burner for a host of reasons, including lame technology, lack of interest from big media and the difficulty convincing consumers to pay for info in a “nickel and dime” fashion.

But content has a long history of being paid for by end-users (magazines, books, etc.). And in today’s challenging ad environment, coupled with the realization that almost all media is (or will soon be) digital and interactive, publishers are again looking at micro-payments as a way to shore up diminishing bottom lines.

SILICON ALLEY INSIDER had an interesting piece yesterday on a number of media veterans who’ve come around to the conclusion that some type micro-payment solution has to be included in the mix—as well as a number of other observers who think it will never happen.

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