This week, my column takes a look at the growth of regional centers of innovation. Although Silicon Valley still creates the most software startups and takes home the lion’s share of venture capital, other cities are growing startup scenes of their own.

Take, for instance, Chicago: Home of Groupon and, in 2011, another 128 new tech companies. One of the major players in the Chicago venture capital scene is wealthy Hyatt heir J.B. Pritzker, whose New World Ventures has funded a large handful of local companies including Zinch, Active.com, Aircell and others. But venture capital alone won’t make a company into a Silicon Valley rival.

I had dinner with Pritzker and a group of venture capitalists and journalists recently, where the conversation focused on what it takes to create regional innovation hubs. According to Pritzker, Chicago’s entrepreneurial scene has taken off in the past few years, and it’s not just thanks to the recent success of Groupon’s initial public offering. It’s not just having a rich guy bankroll things, either, though clearly that helps.

Rather, the VCs at that table agreed, what it takes to create a startup ecosystem–whether that’s in Chicago, New York, Salt Lake City, Detroit, or Boulder–is the presence of serial entrepreneurs. Someone has to take that first leap, start a company, recruit talent, and then stick around long enough to do it again.

Serial entrepreneurs can provide capital, by becoming angel investors or even venture capitalists. Their employees form a base of recruitable talent: people who have worked at startups before and understand that the work is not like a job at an ordinary company. Serial entrepreneurs also provide leadership, by serving as an example and as a magnet for talent: Smart people want to hitch their wagons to a rising star, in other words.

Full story: Dylan’s Desk: What it takes to compete with Silicon Valley | VentureBeat.

In other news at VentureBeat, the staff went out for karaoke last night, as a reward for hitting a traffic milestone I set last fall. Not only did the team hit that milestone, they smashed through it, delivering record traffic several weeks in a row. I had promised them that I would sing a really embarrassing ballad if they did well, and, well, I had to follow through. All I can hope now is that my performance does not wind up on YouTube.

Here are a few other recent stories (not by me) on VentureBeat that I think are particularly good:

• Yelp advertising is a rip-off for small advertisers by frequent contributor Rocky Agrawal
• Famous hackers discuss Zuckerberg’s “Hacker Way” comments — comments from Eric S. Raymond, Richard Stallman and others, written up by Jolie O’Dell
• How Camera+’s John Casasanta made millions off a $1 app — A nice look inside the app economy by Rob LeFebvre

Got news? As always, I’d love to hear from you. You can always reach me at dylan@venturebeat.com or dylan@tweney.com, or tip our news team at tips@venturebeat.com.

At VentureBeat’s offices, the writing staff kicked into high gear and cranked out a series of smart, informed and well-sourced stories on the IPO. Don’t miss Jolie O’Dell’s story about how Mark Zuckerberg has managed to retain overwhelming control of the company he started.

My own contributions included a brief on Facebook’s revenue and another piece on “the hacker way.” Also, I wrote my column this week on Facebook. It appeared the morning of the filing, so it’s missing much of the information that was revealed later in the day, but it’s a good introduction to the basic issues:

The offering will probably raise $10 billion in cash for the company and will value Facebook at somewhere between $75 and $100 billion, making founder Mark Zuckerberg, who holds an estimated 24 percent of the company, a billionaire many times over.  (Update: Zuck holds 28.2 percent of the company.) That valuation is not far off the implied valuation of about $80 billion that the company currently has on secondary market Sharespost.

It’ll likely be priced to pop, unlike Zynga’s IPO. In other words, the underwriters will set a share price that’s slightly lower than what they figure the true market valuation will be, so the stock will pop up to its “natural” level on the first day of trading, like an air balloon held underwater and then suddenly released.

But, like a balloon, what happens to Facebook next will depend on many factors.

Read the full story: Dylan’s Desk: 6 things you should know about the Facebook IPO | VentureBeat.

I was also on KQED radio this morning, on Michael Krasny’s “Forum” show, talking about the Facebook IPO. The high point: when someone called in to say how much he liked VentureBeat and that he spent more time reading our site than he spent on Facebook itself. I couldn’t have asked for a better endorsement of what we’ve been doing.

As the San Francisco 49ers fumbled their shot at a Superbowl appearance on Sunday, you could almost hear the Monday-morning quarterbacks warming up their complaints.

It’s no different in Silicon Valley, where the competitive sport is tech business instead of slamming heads together. Just like in football, anyone who’s not on the field has a strong opinion about how each play should have gone down. That’s especially true for the plays that end badly.

Take Research in Motion, for instance, which this week announced that its two CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, would be stepping aside. Everyone in California, where software is king, has been chortling about how slow RIM has been to wake up to the new reality. To be honest, we’ve been shaking our heads about RIM for over a year now. At a panel I spoke on at CES earlier this month, the moderator asked us whether Microsoft should buy RIM. My answer was “Why?” I honestly couldn’t think of any reason why Microsoft would benefit from that acquisition.

But it’s easy for me to say that Lazaridis and Balsillie have driven the company down the wrong road. If I were in charge of RIM, what would I have done differently?

Read the full story: Dylan’s Desk: It’s the season for Monday-morning quarterbacking | VentureBeat.

MakerBot from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

Is there anything more American than a robot that can create anything you want out of a spool of plastic and some electricity?

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that 3D printers offer levels of Jeffersonian self-reliance that our founding fathers only dreamed of.

“We have a consumer product that’s anti-consumerist,” MakerBot Industries founder Bre Pettis told me at CES 2012, where I captured the short video above. “When you get a MakerBot, you have an alternative to buying things. You can download them … or you can design something and make it custom yourself.”

The new MakerBot Replicator is a $1,750 box that can print three-dimensional objects by melting and fusing bits of plastic line, layer by minuscule layer. A version that prints objects in two colors costs $2,000. It’s one of several new, affordable 3D printers that are hitting the market this year.

Read the whole story: Dylan’s Desk: Saddle your horses and fire up the 3D printer | VentureBeat.

CES is and always has been a buyer’s show, first and foremost. It’s where buyers for retail stores like Best Buy go to schmooze with sales reps for manufacturers like Panasonic and Sony. Sure, there are lots of new products here, but that’s hardly the point. The point is to put buyers and sellers together in one big, lavish, decadent city, get them all drunk, and then send them home with new purchase contracts in hand.

The press events are important, but they’re a sideshow, and I think that’s why members of the press like to complain about it: We’re not having our asses kissed quite enough.

Plus, CES is big, uncomfortable and noisy. It’s hard to get around the town, the hotels are all packed, the taxi lines are impossible, and you can barely walk a hundred yards without someone bumping into you or stepping on your foot.

Still, it’s where the electronics industry shows off its agenda for the coming year, and even with some significant missing players, CES still matters.

Read the whole story: Dylan’s Desk: 6 must-watch trends for 2012 | VentureBeat.

Anyone can pick most interesting phones of 2011, but it takes real foolhardiness to predict the most revolutionary products of the coming year.

Call me a fool. I’m placing bets on these five products that will revolutionize technology in 2012.

I made these predictions recently in a TV segment on Bloomberg West with host John Erlichman. See above if you want to watch the video. And now, on to my predictions. Here’s the summary:

5. Lytro camera

4. Kindle Fire 2

3. Tesla Model S

2. Nokia Lumia

1. Apple’s iTV

Read the full story: Dylan’s Desk: The most revolutionary products you’ll see in 2012 | VentureBeat.

Meltwater Group is 10 years old, and has been almost entirely self-funded. Lyseggen started the company in Oslo with $15,000 of his own money and has been growing it through revenues ever since. The company now employs 900 people, is headquartered in San Francisco and will post $114 million in revenues in 2011, Lyseggen told me recently.

Lyseggen himself is a bit of an unusual character: A Korean-born adoptee with a ready smile, he grew up on a farm in Norway and speaks with a Norwegian accent. He enjoys salmon fishing in his hometown fjords and reading Viking sagas, according to his company’s website, but he also knows how to work a crowd and has obviously inspired his workforce with a charismatic vision of what Meltwater’s culture is all about.

Meltwater has never taken venture capital. That makes it an anomaly among tech firms in Silicon Valley. If Lyseggen succeeds in reaching a billion dollars in revenues, he’ll have done something very few have accomplished. SAS Institute, HP and Best Buy appear to be the only modern tech companies to have reached this milestone unaided by VC investments.

Full story: Dylan’s Desk: Meltwater aims to build a billion-dollar business without venture capital | VentureBeat.

It probably hates you, too.

The breaking point came today when I tried to use my phone to Google the word “Edsel.” Instead of delivering the answer, my phone — a cheap LG model from Virgin Mobile — spontaneously rebooted itself.

I wasn’t exactly surprised, since my phone has a tendency to reboot without warning at least once a day. The irony didn’t escape me, however.

Read the rest: Dylan’s Desk: Android hates me, and it doesn’t like you much, either | VentureBeat.

This column starts with the $3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors by SAP, ties together “the cloud” with mobile computing, throws in a dash of futurism and somehow winds up with a reference to Glee.

Want to give your CEO an iPad? You probably also need web-based applications so she can do something with the tablet besides play Infinity Blade II. And that’s where the cloud comes in.

Of course, it helps that our mobile devices have unheard-of amounts of computing power. As Michio Kaku wrote in his book, Physics of the Future, a musical greeting card has more computational power in its tiny, disposable chip than all of the Allied forces commanded in 1945. A cellphone has more processing power than NASA had in 1969, and the PlayStation 3, which costs $300, has computing power comparable to a multi-million-dollar military supercomputer in 1997.

Kaku’s book came out in March, so those analogies are probably already obsolete by now.

“The old paradigm (a single chip inside a desktop computer or laptop connected to a computer) is being replaced by a new paradigm (thousands of chips scattered inside every artifact, such as furniture, appliances, pictures, walls, cars and clothes, all talking to one another and connected to the Internet,” Kaku wrote. “The destiny of computers is to become invisible.”

Read the whole thing: Dylan’s Desk: Pick up the phone now! Supercomputers are standing by | VentureBeat.

As I write, the VentureBeat offices sit enveloped by a cloud. In all directions, the fog wraps our office building in a soft, gray fuzz, obscuring the views of downtown San Francisco, the bay, and the ocean.

It’s not unlike the cloud of marketing and hype surrounding “cloud” technologies. A fog of jargony words and needlessly ugly acronyms obscure understanding and make everything look like the same, soft grayish fog.

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, cloudware, private clouds, cloudsourcing, utility computing … even the word “platform” gets overused and abused, rendering it nearly meaningless. What do all these terms mean? It’s easy to get lost in them if you’re not already deeply wrapped up in the cloud.

So I’ll be honest: Even though VentureBeat has a cloud channel and we’re planning a cloud conference that’s happening later this week (you should go!), I started out as a serious skeptic of all things “cloud.”

Continue reading: Dylan’s Desk: How I learned to stop worrying and love “the cloud” | VentureBeat.

via Caterina.net: Working hard is overrated.

Things you wouldn’t ordinarily think twice about, like incorporating and taking care of our nearly nonexistent finances took up a huge amount of time, as we realized that we were out of our depth. We then spent too long talking with lawyers and accountants who cost way too much. Eventually, we realized we didn’t really need such heavy-duty firepower helping us, but by then we had spent thousands on them.

We were convinced we needed to raise a lot of money, and quickly, so we could “get big fast” and then figure out our revenue model. In reality, that was exactly backwards: For our kind of business, we should have stayed small, kept the company simple, built a product that we understood and could sell, and then grown the business once we had some idea what we were doing.

Eventually, we ran into one too many roadblocks including the dot-com bust and wound the company down. We didn’t make ourselves or our investors rich, but we did return more than half of what they’d invested to them — which is more than you can say about Pets.com or Boo.com.

Read the whole column: Dylan’s Desk: The time to start a company is now | VentureBeat.

I previously described on my blog one simple change I made to the hiring process at my last company. I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates – even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process. If you’re screening resumes, or evaluating applicants to a startup school, I challenge you to adopt this procedure immediately, and report on the results.

Related anecdote: When I set up a blind submissions system for tinywords, the result was an almost immediate diversification in the number of authors. Instead of reading bylines first, we had to concentrate on the poetry itself. It turns out that even people with respected names can write bad poems — and people with no name could write poems that would blow you away.

Now, many hires are made through recommendations and social networks, so the implicit bias problem won’t go away overnight.

But I think I am going to implement something like this the next time I make a public call for job candidates or interns.

via Racism And Meritocracy | TechCrunch.

Glam Media founder Samir Arora thinks he knows the future of media.

The secret, he is betting, is brand advertising displayed against high-quality, premium content.

That stands in stark contrast to the advertising model that’s worked best for the past decade online, in which increasingly specific text advertising is targeted at potential customers’ immediate desires, largely via search engines.

Glam Media aggregates content from a large network of vertical publishers. And Arora paints an alluring picture that might appeal to many print publishers, that are wondering where their profits have gone in the move to the web.

Read the whole column: Dylan’s Desk: How the Internet is dividing publishers into two camps | VentureBeat.

When Halvor Gregusson got off the stage, an audience full of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors was cheering and the moderator was giving him a high-five.

Pretty good for a two-minute pitch about a time-tracking tool from a Norwegian startup.

Gregusson’s company, Yast, took the top prize in the Fast Pitch competition today at Under the Radar, a conference held in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley headquarters. The competition, co-sponsored by VentureBeat, gave eight startups (selected from a field of more than 100 applicants) just two minutes to make their case before a panel of four judges, one of which was me. The judges then had two minutes to give their feedback. We showed our votes by holding up one of three pictures of David Hasselhoff, ranging from “Oy vey!” to “Awesome!”

Gregusson’s pitch won the near-unanimous approval of the panel. How did he do it? Impeccable timing, a sense of humor and a continuous soundtrack (taken from the movie The Rock, he told me) that was perfectly integrated into the points of his slides, which auto-advanced as he spoke.

Read the rest of the story: Norwegians take top prize in startup competition, with a killer presentation | VentureBeat.

Image via Wikipedia

Minted, a marketplace for community-sourced paper products like custom stationery and wedding invitations, has raised a big pile of the green kind of paper — the kind you can spend.

For anyone whose parents told them to stop doodling Celtic knots or obsessively repetitive graphic designs and focus on doing schoolwork so they could get a decent job, that must come as encouraging news.

“I love the creativity of the community,” cofounder Mariam Naficy told me today.

Read the full story: Art can pay: Minted raises $5.5M to expand graphic design and stationery business | VentureBeat.

The week in review: Jobs’ last words, Siri’s rough week & Google+’s last stand | VentureBeat.

Apple understands it. Amazon understands it.

But nearly every other gadget manufacturer is missing the point: It’s not about the specs any more. It’s about the ability of devices to deliver a seamless, integrated, easy-to-use experience that combines plenty of desirable content and useful services, with a minimum of hassle.

Call it “vertical integration” or whatever you want, it’s the strategy employed by successful companies like Apple, Amazon, Nike and Microsoft to make some of their products nearly unbeatable in the market.

Apple’s iPad is not the world’s most successful tablet because of its hardware engineering (though that helps). It’s successful because it’s locked into the iTunes marketplace, giving it a vast, built-in library of music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks and apps. That connection is often restrictive, but it also offers many people more than enough content to choose from, and it’s easy to use.

Read the rest of the story: Dylan’s Desk: Welcome to the age of integration | VentureBeat.

Silicon Valley has a race problem.

You don’t need a Twitter fight to tell you that. And, while it’s great that CNN has made waves with previews of its upcoming show on the subject, you don’t need cable TV to tell you that, either. (For two smart views on the controversy, read Hank Williams and Angela on BlackWeb.)

Just look around. Anyone who works in the Valley for any length of time will have noticed the alarmingly large number of white guys occupying positions of power. There are a few women, and there are sizable contingents of Asian entrepreneurs among the entrepreneurial and venture capital classes. But there are not many women and there are almost no black or Hispanic entrepreneurs.

The White House photo of Barack Obama having dinner with a table full of Silicon Valley titans in February is the perfect illustration of this. Look at the table: It’s almost all white guys. There are two women, one of whom (I think) is the wife of the host, and the other of whom is Carol Bartz, then the CEO of Yahoo, who is known — and criticized — for being loudmouthed and aggressive. And there’s just one black guy: the President of the United States.

This picture is probably 100% representative of dinners among Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors, except that the black guy isn’t usually there.

If you’re black, Hispanic or female, I can’t tell you anything about racism that you don’t already know. You’re going to need an extra dose of moxie, persistence and determination to make it here. You may want to consider, as Vivek Wadhwa did, hiring a white man to be the public face of your company. (Wadhwa also points up the importance of building your own networks.) These decisions will have to be up to you and whatever friends and allies you can recruit to your side.

But I can tell you what I’m doing about Silicon Valley’s race problem. And if you’re one of the white guys who run things around here, you should consider that you have a responsibility to do the same things.

I’ve hesitated about writing this post. But I decided I couldn’t keep silent about this, because one of my career goals, for the past 10 years, has been to make Silicon Valley more accessible to people like my daughter, who is both black and female. I hope this post helps advance that agenda.

So, here are my tips for white guys on how to fight racism and sexism.

First, educate yourself. You don’t know squat about racism or sexism. Period. End of sentence. So read. Watch movies. But most of all, talk to people. Find people who are trained in anti-racist education and invite them to educate you.

In my case, I have spent many, many hours in anti-racism seminars, educational programs about race and culture, and dinner table discussions with my family, extended family and friends. It’s a topic that is never far from my mind.

Second, make an effort to connect with people who are different from you. Make friends with people. Extend your social circle.

And really make friends. A friend once told me, early in my education, that the diversity of your circle of friends is best measured by who comes to dinner at your house. You may work with people who aren’t like you, but if you’re not having them over to dinner, you’re not really getting to know them.

In my case, work is now the least diverse part of my life. My family is multiracial, my kids go to a school where there are people from diverse racial and economic backgrounds, my neighborhood is all over the map, and I live in one of the most diverse areas in the country. It’s only when I start talking to PR people and Silicon Valley executives that the diversity level drops. But it’s taken me a decade of conscious decisions to get to this point.

Third, when you’re recruiting, widen the circle of candidates. Make decisions about who to hire (or invest in) based on merit. But make sure the pool is diverse, so you can at least make fair choices.

I try to follow this principle whenever I hire people. I’ve reach out to professional associations like the National Association of Black Journalists. I ask people I know to recommend talented women they know. I ask for help from my existing networks wherever I can get it.

Once I get that pool of candidates, I evaluate everyone on their merits. I’ve never given a job to anyone because I wanted to increase the diversity of my team. But I have gone to lengths to make sure that the pool of candidates is diverse.

This is, I think, the most important thing that white people in positions of power can do.

There’s a real benefit to this diversity, too, beyond some abstract notion of fairness. A diverse workforce is going to better at producing products that appeal to a broad range of customers.

And diversity breeds creativity. People who come from different backgrounds are more likely to have different approaches to problems, or different ideas. Bring them together and yes, there can be conflict and misunderstandings. But out of that conflict can often come much better ideas than you’d get from a roomful of people who have the same backgrounds.

Finally, be willing to talk about race. Realize that you are going to sound like a clueless idiot much of the time. But also know that for people of color, race and racism are constant topics of discussion. Race is an incredible taboo only for white, middle-class people. We are embarrassed to talk about it, or even to acknowledge it. But until we do, we can’t really learn.And yes, I am sure it sucks when someone holds you up as an example of white-guy cluelessness.

But when you refuse to talk about racism and race, whether from fear of embarrassment or out of ignorance, you can’t learn. If you pretend that it’s just a meritocracy, or that the problem is too mysterious to be addressed, or that you yourself are not racist, you can’t learn.

More importantly, you can’t do anything good about it.

I don’t expect that most white guys in power will follow these steps. It’s too uncomfortable and too difficult to do, unless you’re motivated by someone you love. But I can say that it’s something very much worth doing.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized there were good reasons for this. But there’s still something a little off about the relationship between wealth and social responsibility here.

Here’s an excerpt from the column. Let me know what you think.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit confused by the movement and its targets — but the answer, I think, has to do with the way finance works in Silicon Valley versus Wall Street.

In broad strokes, Silicon Valley investors are focused on building huge, billion-dollar companies. While you can get to a billion dollar valuation, at least temporarily, with a really weak, unscalable idea, you can’t stay there long without creating something of real value. You certainly can’t create a billion dollars in revenue without doing something meaningful — and, by the way, employing a lot of people along the way.

Wall Street, by contrast, defines “innovation” in terms of new financial instruments: investment vehicles that are increasingly complex and hard to understand and that do little for the country besides generate record profits for the banks that invented them.

Full story: Dylan’s Desk: Is it time to occupy Silicon Valley? | VentureBeat.