Technology

Blogger, the blogging platform Google acquired back in 2003, is somehow still alive and kicking, even though few people remember it still exists. But alive it is — and iteven getting some updates to its Google+ integration that will see all those 20 people still on Google+ rejoice.

After a year of inactivity, Blogger own news blog sprung to live this morning with a brief update that lays out the changes. Google calls this a &spring cleaning,& and we all know what that means: shutting down features.

You probably don&t care, but gone from Blogger are support for third-party gadgets, the Next Blog feature and the polling widget. Soon, OpenID support will be gone, as well, and Textcube.com is also shutting down. What is Textcube.com, you ask Ita Korean blogging service Google acquired back in 2008.

But there are also new features, which I&m guessing the sole two engineers still working on this project slaved over for the last year.

BloggerGoogle+ widget integration (yes, try not to laugh) will be transformed into HTML widgets to &give you more flexibility in how you share and see your followers.& Fifteen years after acquiring the service, Blogger now also supports logging in with multiple accounts. Google also today noted that the Blogger infrastructure has moved to Cloud Spanner, Googlenewest database service.

In the near future, you can expect a new video management feature, too. Exciting stuff.

Itsurprising that Blogger is still around. I can&t remember the last time I saw a Blogger site in my searches, and it sure doesn&t have a lot of mindshare. Google also has let the platform linger and hasn&t integrated it with any of its newer services. The same thing could be said for Google+, too, of course. Google cuts some services because they have no users and no traction. That could surely be said for Blogger and Google+, but here they are, still getting periodic updates. I think the writing is on the wall, though, and I wouldn&t expect them to survive the next major Google spring cleaning.

French premium cable television company Canal+ is slowly moving away from building its own set top boxes. As Next INpact spotted, you can now subscribe to Canal+ and get an Apple TV 4K with Canal+myCanal app already preloaded.

Canal+ has been around for decades and was the first premium TV channel in France. Over the years, the company started distributing all sorts of premium channels through satellite, cable and partnerships with internet service providers.

While you had to get your own Canal+ set top box to receive Canal+ 15 years ago, the companyown box has slowly become irrelevant. As all the main French internet service providers give you a set top box, Canal+ has partnered with them to offer multiple add-ons to receive Canal+content.

When Canal+ announced its most recent device, Canal+ already said that you&d get a better experience with the myCanal app on the Apple TV.

Thatwhy Canal+ is betting everything on over-the-top distribution. If you don&t subscribe to Canal+ through your ISP, you can get an Apple TV 4K for €6 per month in addition to your TV package. If your internet connection isn&t fast enough or you&d rather use satellite TV, you can still get a Canal+ set top box.

But the writing is on the wall. Most people will soon watch Canal+ through myCanal on Android TV, tvOS, iOS, Android, a Samsung TV and desktop computers.

In France, Molotov and myCanal have been some of the top performing apps for tvOS and Android TV. This partnership could boost the Apple TV in France.

Sarah Guo didn&t necessarily set out to become a venture capitalist. She certainly didn&t imagine she would become one of the first general partners at one of the oldest venture firms in the country. Yet Guo is both of these things today. Indeed, the venture firm Greylock Partners, which Guo joined five years ago as a principal, is announcing her promotion this morning.

Greylock, which closed its current, 15th, fund with $1 billion in October 2016, now has 12 general partners altogether.

For Guo, the appointment caps a lifetime spent in the world of startups. Before joining Greylock, she worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, where she led much of the bankcoverage of business-to-business tech companies and advised public clients, including Twitter, Netflix, Zynga, and Nvidia.

A graduate (for both her undergraduate degree and MBA) of the University of Pennsylvania, Guo also worked previously at Casa Systems, a 15-year-old tech company that develops asoftware-centric networking platform for cable and mobile service providers and that — in a twist that we think is pretty neat — was founded by her parents. (Her father, CEO Jerry Guo, took the companypublic earlier this year.)

In a conversation earlier this week, Guo said that growing up around entrepreneurship gave her an &understanding of how difficult& starting a company truly is. It also occurred to her early on that &something related to company building was what I wanted to do in the future.&

Guo also said that not much will change with her promotion. Broadly speaking, she focuses on B2B applications and infrastructure, cybersecurity, AI, AR, and healthcare. She already sits on the boards of several companies, including the security startup Obsidian, which was founded by ex-Cylance and Carbon Black execs last year and quickly raised $9.5 million led by Greylock.

She said she does hope to mentor more up-and-coming investors like herself, however.

Guo first became acquainted with Greylock through Aneel Bhusri, a partner at Greylock and the cofounder and CEO of the software giant Workday. The two talked occasionally when Guo was covering internet and software startups at Goldman, and he&d encouraged her to meet some of his venture partners, she said. &I came in, not necessarily ready to be in venture forever. But I&m now very excited about it obviously,& she added with a laugh.

Guoother deals to date include Aware Networks, a 15-year-old, Buffalo Grove, Il.-based company thatdevelops collaboration applications for mobile communities, and a still-unannounced company.

We didn&t talk about the fact that Guo just became one of Greylockfirst female general partners, but itvery much worth mentioning, considering the firm was founded in 1965.

Greylock had lost another senior female investor — Sarah Tavel — to Benchmark last year. Tavel was the first female general partner at Greylock; she went on to become Benchmark&sfirst female GP.

Altogether, women still represent just 15 percent of decision makers at Silicon Valleymajor venture capital firms. Their ranks are growing slowly however.

Meanwhile, many other investors are choosing to launch their own female-founded venture firms. Among the newest of these is Breakout Ventures and a fund we reported on last night thatbeing created by life sciences investor Beth Seidenberg, long of Kleiner Perkins.

Correction: This story briefly mischaracterized Guo as Greylockfirst female GP. Based on the nomenclature used by Greylock, we were under the impression that Tavel was a partner but not a general partner — a seemingly small but important distinction within venture firms. Tavel had been hired at the GP level at Greylock, we&re told.