Google Inc. does direct investments from time to time. Also they have their growth investment arm, Google Capital, which has invested some large sums recently in Glassdoor, etc. (but surely not $1B in one company unless they acquired that company). Perhaps Google Inc. is leading the investment with the round consisting of many undisclosed players across private equity, etc.

I'm really enjoying the healthy debate here. It's certainly a divisive topic with people seemingly very strong on either side.

Great service with huge players using their product to serve up documents/files to millions using HTML5.

If I were Arrington, I would have posted this story first thing Monday morning.

Oh, don't worry, I'm sure there's going to be a glut of these stories queued up for about 2am Tuesday morning.

John Doerr is clearly a visionary, but it seems he's trying to play catch-up with the likes of Fred Wilson's USV, Sequoia, Benchmark, Accel, etc. as Kleiner has taken a backseat when it comes to recent hot deals. His enthusiasm is almost a marketing tactic to get entrepreneurs excited about the iFund and sFund (further marketing attempts to generate interest, vs. having their main fund focus on social and touch-screen technologies regardless of having specific funds that should do that).

John Doerr is clearly a legend, and if anyone can race back to the top in this current "bubble", it's him.

The higher numbers re: valuations I've seen and heard are just under $10M (recent YC startup). Potentially rumors of $20M (Instagram, but was apparently untrue). Not sure which startups are seeing the $30-50M range that Fred Wilson mentions. Clearly, he sees a lot of deal flow, but you'd assume the major tech blogs would cover these startups.

Ideally, something like annotations (if/when it launches) could provide the necessary metadata for further filters. Agree that a small subset of Twitter users actually have a need for something like this.

In the meantime, check out an interesting startup that helps you curate time-boxed tweets: http://curated.by

What about Search/Discovery? Sure, Facebook's Open Graph is being cultivated by all of us as we like and share stuff, but currently, there's no way to search through my feeds, what I've liked, what my friends have liked, the most popular liked items, and any slicing/dicing of that data. I'm sure they're working on it, but it seems like a major gap right now.

Where does Flipboard fall in this chart?

Social? Flipboard is primarily a consumption experience with limited commenting and sharing mechanisms. Granted, those features exist, but are not the key focus.

Mobile? Because it's on an iPad? I wonder if Ron is actually talking about in-your-pocket iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. and not larger laptop replacement products such as tablets.

Basic HTML/CSS and marketing copy.