Fund teams AT&T with Hollywood and Silicon Valley

AT&T will join Hollywood talent and literary agency William Morris and Silicon Valley venture capital firms Accel Partners and Venrock in a new investment consortium formed to seed and grow Web 3.0 startups in Southern California. William Morris Agency, Accel and Venrock will team on a joint fund dedicated to discovering, funding and building small companies focused on consumer media technology innovation. AT&T will join in selected investment opportunities as a limited participant, with the joint fund managed by Los Angeles-area angel investor Richard Wolpert, who previously served as president of Disney Online and chief strategy officer of RealNetworks.

"AT&T is focused on driving innovation that enables people to do more and get more from their connectivity," said AT&T senior vice president of business development Susan Johnson in a prepared statement. "We are excited about working with this venture to accelerate the pace of innovation so that consumers can benefit from next-generation services and capabilities."

According to The New York Times, AT&T is not entering the consortium in search of only content opportunities; the operator is also seeking to invest in technologies enabling its mobile advertising and social networking efforts. The NYT adds the fund signals a tacit agreement between wireless operators, software developers and content producers that a failure to join forces now could leave them vulnerable to upstarts seeking to upend their traditional businesses: "The ethos of this fund is about reducing the friction," said Venrock general partner David Siminoff. "Hollywood people are not stupid. They are just not technology people."

For more on the Web 3.0 joint fund:
- read this release

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