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Craig Barrett Takes On Vivek Wadhwa In The Tech Education Debate

Editor’s note: The most valuable employees of any technology company are the engineers and scientists, which is why everyone in Silicon Valley does whatever they can to ensure the continuous supply to this talent pool. The size of the talent pool is ultimately determined by the number of people who graduate from colleges and [...]

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Sun, March 14 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

It’s Hard To Watch The Newsosaurs Turn A Blind Eye To Their Own Extinction

Sometimes it is obvious where the world is headed, but some people and industries become frozen in place and time. They are like the duckbilled dinosaurs happily munching on the still-abundant plants around them when the meteor strikes instead of the small furry mammals underfoot who take cover every day by natural habit. [...]

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Sat, March 13 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Milo’s Response To Google’s Blue Dot Specials: A Picture

This morning Google announced a new Blue Dot feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search that shows whether a product is in-stock at nearby stores. This seems to pose a threat to startup Milo, which highlights local inventory in product search results both on the web and mobile devices. Milo’s co-founder Ted Dziuba [...]

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Fri, March 12 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Brazil: The New Home of Financial Innovation?

Brazil is sort of a strange country to throw into the “emerging market” category. It’s not a particularly young country like India or Israel, nor is it a country like China or Russia that embraced capitalism fairly recently. Brazil is as old as the US and has had a decently built out infrastructure of things [...]

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Mon, March 8 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Can Entrepreneurs Be Made?

Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said [...]

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Sat, February 27 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Ron Conway Raising $10 Million Angel Fund To Expand SV Angel

Super-angel Ron Conway, who is one of the most prolific and successful investors in Silicon Valley, is expanding his SV Angel fund to include outside investors (recently he has invested only his own capital in startups). He is raising a new fund of around $10 million, we’ve confirmed.
Conway, who was called the “Godfather of Silicon [...]

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Fri, February 26 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Facebook Checks-In On Loopt

Facebook has been doing background checks, known as due diligence, on the location-based social network Loopt, a source with knowledge of the talks tells us. Generally speaking, due diligence of this kind is only performed when a company is in acquisition or fundraising talks.
Loopt won’t comment on this story, and a Facebook spokesperson says “As [...]

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Thu, February 25 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Twitter Connects With Two From LinkedIn

Back in December, LinkedIn released a slick-looking update to the iPhone app. That looks to be the swan song for the man largely responsible for it, Bryan Haggerty. Because today’s he’s leaving LinkedIn for Twitter. [Update: And we hear he's not the only one leaving LinkedIn for Twitter today — more on that below.]
As he both [...]

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Thu, February 25 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

What’s Better: Saving the World or Building Another Facebook app?

Running on just sugar and caffeine, 32 teams of students worked non-stop for 18 hours to develop applications that they hoped would blow the judges’ socks off. This was at the UC-Berkeley Hackathon, last weekend. Indeed, many teams succeeded in their mission. They built some amazing software: to provide server-side rendering of games, convert website [...]

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Sat, February 13 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Win A Mentoring Session With Founders Of Digg, Flickr, Mint, Ning, Slide Or Zynga

Are you a budding Web entrepreneur who would like some pointers or advice from seasoned company founders? MayField Fund and First Round Capital are sponsoring a raffle to give away mentoring sessions with the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flickr (Caterina Fake), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Ning (Gina Bianchini), Slide (Max Levchin), and Zynga (Mark [...]

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Mon, February 8 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments