Silicon Valley

Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel has a temper. The tech industry better get used to it, because he's looking north toward Silicon Valley. Emanuel has built a respected and feared reputation as one of the leading power brokers in Hollywood. The head of the William Morris Endeavor agency, he's the inspiration for the foul-mouthed, quick-to-anger agent in NBC's "Entourage. " And when he spoke to a crowd of technorati at the 10th annual All Things Digital conference last night in Rancho Palos...

FREMONT, Calif. — In a busy factory, machinists move sheets of aluminum roll in the back door to be molded, stamped, twisted and notched into high-tech electric cars that sell for more than $60,000 each. Down the road in another plant, crews slice solar cells, place them under glass sheets and create panels that ship by the boxful to Europe. Elsewhere in this town, industrial workshops and laboratories buzz with workers building everything from robots to microprocessors. Welcome to...

The United States is still the premier destination for high-growth businesses, but several cities in other parts of the world are climbing the rankings. The Startup Genome recently released new start-up ecosystem rankings based on data collected from 50,000 young companies around the world. Researchers took into consideration each city's total start-up output, availability of funding, wealth of talent, and other components considered vital to launching new businesses. Silicon Valley , long regarded as the greatest...

Quit your technology job. Get a PhD in the humanities. That's the way to get ahead in the technology sector. That, at least, is what philosopher Damon Horowitz told a crowd of attendees at the BiblioTech Conference at Stanford University in 2011. Horowitz is also a serial entrepreneur who co-founded a company, Aardvark, which sold to Google for $50 million. He is presently the In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering at Google . Wait , you say, that's insane . At a time when record numbers of people, among them...

This column has been updated. In 2003, Freada and Mitch Kapor attended a fundraiser at the Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, for (MS)2 , a program that brought 100 disadvantaged African American, Latino, and Native American students from select public schools across the U.S. to the highly elite prep school for the summer. The program, which had changed the lives of hundreds of children, showed the students what they could achieve if they worked hard. Given the program's results, the Kapors didn't hesitate to make a...

Silicon Valley contributed more to President Barack Obama's re-election campaign than Wall Street and Hollywood, according to a Nov. 3 San Francisco Chronicle report . The Valley contributed $14.7 million compared to $14.5 million from New York City and $6.3 million from the Beverly Hills crowd. The data were compiled for the Chronicle by the nonpartisan organization MapLight.org . During his many trips to Silicon Valley, the President made a number of promises. Now that he has won , the Valley expects him to...

The San Jose Mercury News reports that a 47 year old man named Jing Hua Wu, after being laid off from his job at a fabless digital radio semiconductor startup in Santa Clara called SiPort , came back to the office on Friday afternoon with a gun and killed three people. Sid Agrawal, the company's CEO, and Brian Pugh, VP Operations, were killed along with one other as yet unidentified woman. Wu is still at large according to the latest reports. This is obviously a very sad day in Silicon Valley, and our heart goes out to the...

The Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (aka SVASE ) has set up a new seed funding program for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in conjunction with newly established early-stage investment firm Cambridge West Ventures . On the East Coast, meanwhile, things are in motion too, with the introduction of a new seed startup fund dubbed IA Venture Strategies that was founded by New York angel investor Roger Ehrenberg ...

In the way that really only an online discussion can, the debate over which place is better, Seattle or Silicon Valley, has spun into a gloves-are-off, let's-take-this-outside kind of brawl. It got kicked off with a brief New York Timesarticleabout Seattle becoming the next Silicon Valley. Shortly after, Seattle-based Redfin's CEO Glenn Kelman wrote a blogpostabout his experiences with startups in both locations. It was met with a harshresponsefrom Michael Arrington, who has worked at a number of startups, on TechCrunch.

The new CEO of a struggling Fortune 500 company in need of a turnaround recently decided to kill a popular flexible work program, even though it boosted employee productivity and morale, reduced turnover, cut costs and eased stress. Marissa Mayer , you say? The 37-year-old Silicon Valley wunderkind and new Yahoo CEO, whose decision to ban telework has been met with howls of outrage, accusations of betrayal and endless dissection in the media? Try Hubert Joly. Who? Exactly.

Not always concerned with the same issues in Washington, small businesses and technology start-ups suddenly find themselves united on immigration reform. Small Business Majority, a lobbying group run by business owners, has released a new poll that shows an overwhelming majority of small employers believe the current immigration system is broken and support the recent push for a comprehensive solution in Congress. More specifically, three-fourths think the government...

Silicon Valley is finally starting to pay more attention to Washington. In recent years, proposals for new anti-piracy laws and Internet privacy and open-access policies have caused many companies to fatten their lobbying budgets and seek a greater voice at the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission and Capitol Hill. That will continue, even as a new set of regulators comes in for President Obama's second term. Internet attorney Markham Erickson was one of the handful of people the FCC...

Dozens of entrepreneurs and investors gathered at the White House this week to update administration officials on the progress of start-up ecosystems in their hometowns and pitch policy recommendations for the coming year. But they didn't fly in from traditional innovation hubs like Boston and Silicon Valley; they came from cities like Lincoln, Neb., Nashville, Tenn., and Iowa City, Iowa. "In the last couple years, there's really been a groundswell of...

Ever wondered what it would have been like to randomly strike up a conversation with the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs? This is one of the many weird and wonderful questions that have been posed on a website called  Quora . In response to this particular question, one user shared a memory of his car breaking down in front of Jobs' Silicon Valley home. The post received 60 comments, 4400 "up votes" (Quora's Reddit-style system relies on the community to push the highest-quality content to the top)

In the years ahead, Steve Case expects there to be much more dice rolling in Las Vegas. Not by gamblers in the casinos, but by outside investors betting on the city's start-ups. "Some of the things that are happening in Las Vegas... are remarkable," said Case, chief executive of Washington-based Revolution LLC and chairman of Startup America . Case outlined his predictions during a media call on Monday, forecasting what he calls the...

Things could be looking very green in Silicon Valley, thanks to an influx of cash that could come from Facebook's initial public offering. Even the state of California is expecting a windfall from the filing — saying that hundreds of millions of dollars could help the cash-strapped state in the coming year. Though the company is simply expected to file to go public Wednesday, according to a report from the San Jose Mercury News , the possibility of a big IPO from Facebook has generated some excitement for Silicon...

Cardmunch founder Bowei Gai quit his cushy job with LinkedIn two months ago. He sold his business to LinkedIn in 2011 , and is only now jumping ship to travel the world and find the next Silicon Valley, along with the help of Valley heavy-weights Dave McClure of 500 Startups and Brad Feld of the Foundry Group. "I don't know whether he's the advance scout for us or we're the advance scout for him," said McClure in an interview with VentureBeat. "We've got our separately planned trips...

The United States is still the premier destination for high-growth businesses, but several cities in other parts of the world are climbing the rankings. The Startup Genome recently released new start-up ecosystem rankings based on data collected from 50,000 young companies around the world. Researchers took into consideration each city's total start-up output, availability of funding, wealth of talent, and other components considered vital to launching new businesses. Silicon Valley ...