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Aug 1, 2012 11:20 AM   Cramming everything you need for a vacation or business trip into a carry-on friendly suitcase is the best way to avoid checked baggage fees. It's a refined skill that bag maker Briggs & Riley has just made a little easier with its Baseline luggage featuring a clever compression mechanism to ensure your bag always fits in an overhead bin. Instead of using a vacuum system which is hard to re-compress when you're away from home, the Baseline series employs a rather ingenius ratcheting mechanism on either side of the suitcase's interior. When filling it with clothing you expand the case giving you about 33 percent more capacity, and when you've closed the lid and zipped it shut you can then compress it back down to carry-on approved dimensions. It maximizes how much clothing you can travel with, and should also serve to hold everything firmly in place in your bag. It's just too bad the cheapest and smallest model comes in at $400—but you...

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More New Enterprise Associates, the global venture capital firm with headquarters in Silicon Valley, confirmed today that it has raised $2.6 billion for NEA 14, its fourteenth venture capital fund. TechCrunch reported it was raising the fund back in May. NEA is known for raising large funds, but this one takes the cake: It’s easily NEA’s largest ever, and it may well be the largest in venture capital history. The only one that comes close is the $2.56 billion fund that Oak Investment Partners raised for its twelfth fund back in 2006 — but that was arguably not quite a ventu...