Hold your friends close, and your enemies closer. That might be the thinking behind the White House’s appointment today of Ed Felten, a Princeton computer science professor, as its deputy U.S. chief technology officer. “Ed joins a growing number of techies at the White House working to further Presi

OPINION:   Last week I wrote about the way specific technologies have lowered the barriers to entrepreneurship worldwide: Amazon Web Services, Google Drive (and Google Search), mobile devices combined with widespread wireless Internet service, and Facebook. Most of these tools are what author Jonath

This week on What to Think, we talk to Etan Lightstone, the vice president of design for New Relic, about design trends in enterprise software. Editor’s note: This is the last episode of VentureBeat’s podcast — in this format, at least. Use the comments below or email me if you would like to be noti

This week on What to Think, we speak to John Koetsier, the vice president of research at VB Insight, VentureBeat’s new market-research arm. VB Insight is taking a very data-driven approach to research. Case in point: For its latest report on social media management tools, VB Insight surveyed over 1,

OPINION:   A handful of technologies have contributed to an explosion of entrepreneurship in the past decade, making the prospect of starting a tech company — or tech-enabled company — more accessible to people around the world. Amazon Web Services makes it possible for anyone, anywhere, to set up a

In the future, you might not own a car. Instead, you’ll get around town by hopping into one of many autonomous 3-wheeled pods swarming the streets. To get a picture of how we’ll get there, we invited Xerox executive David Cummins to talk to us about the company’s efforts to improve parking — yes, pa

With $2 billion worth of solar panels installed on 70,000 customers’ homes across 12 states, Sunrun is well on the way to proving that its model for solar power generation can work. But it wasn’t always so clear. When the company started, in February 2007, cofounder and chief executive Lynn Jurich s

Marc Andreessen thinks venture capital is great for entrepreneurs. That’s no surprise, coming from the entrepreneur who cofounded Netscape, Ning, Opsware — all venture-backed companies — and then went on to cofound Andreessen Horowitz, one of the biggest VC firms in Silicon Valley right now. More to

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Twice a year, the most influential incubator in the world, Y Combinator, holds a demo day for its most recent batch of companies. This year, the largest batch ever — 114 companies — is taking the stage for a few short minutes each, hoping to connect with an audience of an

If you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you’ve got to be thinking about ways of expanding Facebook’s share of people’s time and attention. Now that the site reaches 65 percent of the American public, and almost 1.4 billion people worldwide, every month, growth can’t just come from getting more people on the plat

When tech-media company Gigaom abruptly shut down March 9, it didn’t look good for the company’s upcoming Structure Data conference, due to be held March 19-20 at New York’s Chelsea Piers. In fact, the conference was canceled, though you can still find it on the Gigaom events website. But some of th

When Apple announced its new MacBook last week, I was initially excited. A Retina display — with resolution of 2,304 by 1,440 pixels — and a hugely promising 9 hours of battery life with active Web use sounded like exactly what I wanted. Plus, it weighs only slightly more than an iPad, at just 2 […]