Dylan Tweney

More than 6,000 hopefuls from around the world entered Facebook’s programming challenge, the Hacker Cup, in January. Three months later, just 25 finalists went head-to-head in a three-hour battle for supremacy today at Facebook’s new Menlo Park campus. The winner will have his name (all 25 finalists

Lloyd Reynolds | The Guild of Book Workers’ 100th Anniversary Exhibition – Retrospective Entries.

If the mobile market is a war, the battlefield is shifting. As VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar recently wrote, it’s no longer a contest between the Apple iOS and Google Android mobile operating systems. Microsoft is about to shake things up in the tablet arena with the introduction of the Windows 8

Last year’s big fashion trend was the color block, and this year’s tech trend follows suit: It’s the square. More precisely, it’s the big, colorful rectangle filled with a solid color (like Windows 8) or a photograph (like Pinterest). Mondrian would have been proud. via Dylan’s Desk: Design goes min

In Microsoft’s vision of the future, Kinect sensors are everywhere: In your living room, your kitchen, at school, and even in the supermarket, above the fruit display. And why not? The $150 motion-sensing device provides a cheap way to add gesture and voice controls to any application. Plus it’s got

For a startup, a lot is riding on the home page. You might be surprised, then, to learn that startups vary wildly in how quickly and reliably their website home pages load. That’s especially true when you look at load times on mobile devices. An increasing number of people use smartphones and tablet

I’ve been using Windows Phone for several weeks now, first on a Samsung I borrowed from VentureBeat’s CTO Chris Peri and lately on a Nokia Lumia 800 loaned to VentureBeat for review. I really like the operating system in many ways. The Metro interface is frankly charming, with its flipping tiles and

As everyone knows by now, iPhones and iPads are built in huge Chinese manufacturing plants where tens of thousands of people work 12-hour shifts for little money, have little privacy, and are exposed to toxic chemicals and unsafe conditions every day. We’ve been hearing similar stories across other

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 a

Facebook filed its paperwork for an initial public offering this week, putting it on track to be the largest tech IPO so far. The company hopes to raise $5 billion with the offering. At VentureBeat’s offices, the writing staff kicked into high gear and cranked out a series of smart, informed and wel

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 foo

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