Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) founder Paul Allen has been diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma which is a cancer of the white blood cells. This is 26 years after Allen fought Hodgkin’s disease which is another type of white blood cell cancer.

Jody Allen, Paul’s sister, sent an e-mail to employees at private asset management company Vulcan Inc. She is the CEO of the company and it was founded by Paul Allen. Below is the e-mail that was sent out by Jody:

To employees of Vulcan and affiliates:

I want to let you know that Paul was recently diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

He received the diagnosis early this month and has begun chemotherapy. Doctors say he has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a relatively common form of lymphoma.

This is tough news for Paul and the family. But for those who know Paul’s story, you know he beat Hodgkin’s a little more than 25 years ago and he is optimistic he can beat this, too.

Paul is feeling OK and remains upbeat. He continues to work and he has no plans to change his role at Vulcan. His health comes first, though, and we’ll be sure that nothing intrudes on that.

We would ask you to respect Paul’s privacy and not discuss this outside of the office.

If you have any questions, please ask your EC member.

Thank you in advance for what I know will be all your good thoughts for Paul.

Jody

Bill Gates also issued a statement regarding Allen’s diagnosis:
“Melinda and I have Paul and his family in our thoughts and prayers. Paul is among my closest friends, and I know to him be a strong and resilient individual.”

Gist is a startup that takes a client and aggregates all the pertinent information about them.  This includes news about their company, recent links, blogs posts, e-mails from them, and attachments.  Paul Allen’s company Vulcan Capital is incubating Gist.  Gist’s engineering team is comprised of people from Jobster, Microsoft, Go2Net, Infospace, and Whitepages.com. 

“Gist is all about simplifying and focusing attention and giving you the ‘gist’ of what you need to know about your key contacts and companies,” stated T.A. McCann, CEO of Gist.  McCann used to work at the Exchange Server Group division for Microsoft.

Gist has about 5 employees.  One of them is Steve Newman, former VP of Software Engineering at Go2Net.  Gist is based in Seattle, Washington.  Some of the other companies Vulcan invested in includes Evri.com, Redfin.com, Radar Networks, and ZoomInfo.com.

VoxPop Network Corporation is based in San Francisco, CA.  Voxpop is an online entertainment company which is short for Vox Populi (”voice of the people” in Latin).  Voxpop.tv is a contest website startup that has basketball conference contests and also publishes its games on third party websites such CBS Radio and Entertainment Weekly. The investor is David Shen and he is a former VP of User Experience and Design Team at Yahoo! for 8 years. Other companies that Shen has funded in include Outspark Inc. (see below)Meetro Inc., Search Physics Inc., and Fanlib Inc. 
Some of the featured games on Voxpop include:
- Logo Showdown, a game where you choose and vote for your favorite SEC /ACC/Big 12 sports team logos and create a bracket.
- Angelic Angelina, a game where you create a bracket of Angelina Jolie’s best acting movies.
- Several others that involve creating a bracket of your favorite type of sandals, handbags, Brad Pitt movie, etc.
Some of the prizes include cash and a copy of the movie that won the bracket.

 

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Another company that was angel funded by Yahoo! alumni, David Shen is OutSpark Inc. [website currently unavailable].  Other investors include Altos Ventures and Doll Capital Management.  Outspark is expected to develop casual Adobe Flash games of all types.  OutSpark Inc. is currently in “stealth mode.”

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Hypertext Solutions, LLC considers itself, “the first Internet application to tap the potential of ‘intelligent’ data on the Web.”  Steve Hall of Vulcan Capital is an investor.  The company is actively seeking computer engineers in the areas of A.I., data mining, and JavaScript.

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Rooftop Comedy is a San Francisco, CA based company that has recently raised angel funding.  The company won the the award for best investment idea at Investorfest 2006.  The company was created and run by Will Rogers, former Senior Vice President of Icon Medialab’s Web Development group.  RooptopComedy has been partnering with comedy clubs in different areas to put their skits online.  They include Funny Bone (St. Louis, MO), Go Bananas (Cincinnati, OH), Crackers Comedy Club (Indianapolis, IN), San Francisco Comedy Club (San Francisco, CA), and Chicago Underground Comedy (Chicago, IL).

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TheOnion.com is taking their parody news services to the world of video.  The company invested $1 million into the idea of the Onion News Network (ONN) and will be a parody of news program channel, CNN (The Cable News Network).  Below is a video teaser of the upcoming programming:
 [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2C0ZZIKi3Y[/youtube]

 

 

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IceBreaker Inc.is a Seattle based mobile software company that outsources development to Beijing, China.  IceBreaker Inc. is the parent company of Crush or Flush which was launched on January 16, 2007 with the purpose of providing a way to flirt, chat, and meet people with similar interests in your area on mobile phones.  When browsing Crush or Flush on your mobile phone, you can click on “crush” if you think the profile picture is attractive or “flush” if you think that the profile picture is not very aesthetic.Investors of Crush or Flush are several angel investors and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The founders of Crush or Flush are Michael Robinson and Eric Hennings, both former Microsoft employees.  Robinson has previously created a website in China called renren Media.  renren Media has previous funding by News Corp.

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Glimpse.com is a website for centralizing fashion shopping offers.  The target audience of Glimpse.com is for women that shop at stores such as Banana Republic, eLuxury, Macy’s, DKNY, etc.  The company was founded by Frank Han (general manager of HSN.com), Jane Saltzman (Executive Vice President in Creative and Merchandising at Discovery Channel), and Steve Lemon (Vice President at Symantec).  The amount of funding is not disclosed, but is supposedly a large amount.  The funding was provided by Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

 

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[Information Source: alarm:clock]