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@Dropbox is excited to welcome Bono & The Edge as investors. Thanks for the support and look forward to great things!

Revealed: Bono And The Edge of U2 Are Dropbox Investors  In the annals of celebrities investing in tech startups, this one’s looking especially smart. Bono and The Edge, the singer and lead guitarist of Irish rock band U2, got into Dropbox’s $250 million second round last year, they said in a tweet today. It’s the first individual, publicly announced startup investment for the vocalist, to our knowledge. And unlike grandly-conceived social media startups or late-stage investments that celebrities have gone after in recent years, Dropbox is still in its early days. I imagine some khakis-and-blue-shirt VCs are a little jealous of the multiples ahead. Bono, of course, has something of a track record in tech investing already. He’s the co-founder and managing director of Elevation Partners, which has bet widely over the years with money in Palm, Forbes, gaming companies, Yelp and Facebook. Never mind some of those others, results from the last two have inspired the team to go raise a new $1 billion investment fund, according to reports. But until now, Bono’s role has been more high-level, not so much in sourcing deals with the latest startups growing out of the Valley floor. The Dropbox investment — and the backstory — suggest that this is could change. Bono and The Edge seem to have gotten into the deal via a relationship that developed years ago, in a different era. Back in 2007, entrepreneur brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi had just launched a fast-growing music app called iLike on Facebook. They had a new feature they wanted to launch, a way for artists to post videos to fans through the app, so they went through some mutual friends to reach out to U2. The result: a video interview with Bono and the band about a previously-unreleased track, Wave of Sorrow. The relationship has developed from there, it appears. The Partovis were early angel investors in Dropbox, and have maintained contact. Judging from the photo recently posted to Twitter, they introduced the band members to founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Even if Bono doesn’t get deeper into other early-stage companies, he has a lot of work left here — doing follow on rounds on Dropbox, possibly via Elevation. Dropbox@Dropbox @Dropbox is excited to welcome Bono & The Edge as investors. Thanks for the support and look forward to great things! pic.twitter.com/17lpnfx2 2 Apr 12   CRUNCHBASE DROPBOX Company: Dropbox Website: dropbox.com Launch Date: June 1, 2007 Funding: $257M Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi.

Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments. Drew created a demo of Dropbox and showed it to fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, who dropped out with only one semester left to help make Dropbox a reality.

Bono’s PE Firm Seeking $1bn for Second Fund

U2 grossed a whopping £451million for their 360° tour, making it the most successful in history.

Bono and the band played to 7.1 million fans in 30 countries. They started the world tour in 2009 and finally finished on Saturday in Canada.

It is estimated to have cost more than £60 million to stage.

The Rolling Stones held the previous tour record after grossing £342million earlier this year.

U2′s tour producer Arthur Fogel said: “The tour was a brilliant success, everyone involved should be very proud. U2 once again have set the standard for achievement – perhaps for all time.”

U2 360° By Numbers

• 7,100,000 concert goers
• 10 million people watched a live stream of U2 360 at the Rose Bowl on YouTube
• 320,000 Fans saw 360 in Mexico City
• 92,270 Meals fed to working staff and guests
• 29,000 Tee shirts given to local stagehands
• 9,760 Guitar strings utilised
• 7,100 Miles – approximate distance travelled by space station while talking with U2
• 5,200 Years – collective touring experience of U2 tour personnel
• 400 Tons – weight of the fully loaded claw
• 134 Crew members
• 126 Truck drivers
• 110 Concerts
• 53 Gigs attended by a single fan
• 33 Flemish speaking crew members
• 30 Countries
• 12 Bus drivers
• 11 Babies born to crew
• 7 Astronauts attended
• 4 Appreciative Irishmen
• 2 fairytale crew weddings
• 1 Singer in surgery
• 1 World leader released from house arrest during tour

Source: The Sun & Salt Lake Tribune

The Edge wrote a letter to Baltimoresun.com to respond to a recent article by Simon Moroney, who claimed that U2 and Bono are tax evaders.

The recent letter to the editor entitled, “Senator Cardin’s affection for Bono’s foundation is indefensible,” (July 7) by Simon Moroney contains so many inaccuracies that it is pointless to attempt to correct them all.

But the most serious inaccuracy is the totally false and possibly libelous accusation that U2 and Bono have, by moving a part of their business activities to Holland, been involved in tax evasion.

For the record U2 and the individual band members have a totally clean record with every jurisdiction to which they are required to pay tax and have never been and will never be involved in tax evasion.

Contrary to what Mr. Moroney writes, Ireland is, thankfully, not bankrupt.

Had he bothered to contact the Irish Ministry of Finance, as did Spin magazine journalist Steve Kandrell for his March 25th 2009 feature on U2, he would have discovered that they have no problem with U2 basing some of their business activities in Holland.

“People complained at the time,” says Owen Durgan of the Ministry of Finance. “But we have companies moving here from the rest of the EU, so it all evens out. We wouldn’t make an issue of it.”

Furthermore, since he is a federal worker, it might interest Mr. Moroney to know that U2 and its members have paid many, many millions of dollars in taxes to the United States Internal Revenue Service over the years.

I hope that his fears of an Obama tax increase affecting him personally turn out to be as unfounded as his statements about U2′s tax affairs and Bono’s ONE campaign.

The Edge

Source: The Baltimore Sun

Paul McGuinness claims that internet service providers can bring an end to ‘the age of free’

U2 manager Paul McGuinness has claimed that the “age of free” and illegal downloading of music is coming to an end.

In a column written for The Daily Telegraph, he welcomed internet service providers (ISPs) in North America for “taking on obligations to stop copyright thefts on their networks” as “good news”, and insisted that the move from illegitimate to legal methods of purchasing music “will happen over time”.

McGuinness, who has managed U2 since the start of their career, was writing in response to the news that some of the US’s biggest ISPs are set to introduce a system of “copyright alerts” with the music and film industries, which will urge broadband users “away from piracy towards downloading and streaming music from legitimate services”. There will also be the prospect of “deterrent sanctions for those who repeatedly ignore the warnings.”

He compared the new system to the ones currently used in France, South Korea and New Zealand, and also suggested that the UK, which recently passed its Digital Economy Act, would “go down a similar route.”

McGuinness, who has been campaigning on this issue for the past three years and has previously called for ISPs to help stop illegal downloading, said: “This has been agonisingly slow in coming, but it is an important step forward in the international debate over music in the digital age. The idea of ISPs taking on obligations to stop copyright theft on their networks is moving into the mainstream.”

He also claimed that “fighting free with free” was not a viable route to combating illegal downloading, and said that services such as Spotify and We7 had “not much hope of long-term success”.

“For some years, ‘fighting free with free’ seemed the answer to all our problems,” he said. “Today, that honeymoon is over. Spotify, in many countries the champion of the free-to-consumer music streaming service, is now cutting back on its free offering. It is trying to migrate its fans into payers, offering a £10 monthly subscription. That is a huge challenge.”

Source: NME