VentureBeat

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 […]

Take a look at this photo. Cute, right? That’s the profile photo for an ostensibly 25-year-old female named Ava on Tinder, a popular dating app. The profile has been popping up for Tinder users at SXSW this week. But after swiping right and making a connection with Ava, the conversation takes a stra

For many of us, our lives are an endless feedback loop, punctuated by clicks and likes. Wake up. Check Facebook. Check Twitter. Click on a few links. Post one of those links on Facebook with a funny comment. Brush teeth. Check to see if anyone liked your post on Facebook yet. Commute to work, checki

OPINION: For about two hours today, all the Internet wanted to talk about was the FCC’s historic net neutrality decision. (They’re in favor of it.) Then, suddenly, all work stopped as the digerati focused their collective attention on two runaway llamas scampering around Phoenix. Short attention spa

OPINION:   There’s a deep shift in the way we communicate happening, and it’s about to turn media and marketing businesses upside-down. In short, the Web-based world is about to become secondary to the message-based world. Messaging apps like WhatsApp (now part of Facebook), WeChat, Line, Snapchat,