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

I wrote this column sitting on a floor in a hallway of a big Vegas hotel, the Venetian, as members of the press and bloggers swarmed past me en route to one press conference or another. It was my seventh year covering the Consumer Electronics Show, a huge tradeshow that is both an endurance test […]

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 Blo

This column is a profile of independent Norwegian entrepreneur Jorn Lyseggen. 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

I’ve come to the conclusion that my Android phone hates me. 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 ex

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 somet

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 j

Caterina Fake: “Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.” via Caterina.net: Working hard is overrated.

In my latest column for VentureBeat, I wrote about my experiences as an entrepreneur during the dot-com boom, and why it’s so important not to delay if you think you’ve got a startup in you. The only way to learn how to start a company is by going out and actually doing it. There are […]