AirBnB, a fast growing person-to-person real-estate rental company, will soon be moving into new digs. It has snagged 170,000 square feet in office space. Its new neighbors include Zynga and Pinterest. The cost of keeping this elite company: about $97 million over 10 years. Read more »
Facebook is buying Spool, a mobile app company and shutting down the app. While it seems like an acqua-hire, in reality this deal is about the technology built by this tiny startup. And that is why Dropbox, Twitter and Google also came calling on the company. Read more »
I have spent my past week away from the city crowds on a quiet beach in Northern California, trying to catch up on reading and walking and, more importantly, thinking. So this week’s recommended reading list is a lot more eclectic. Hope you enjoy. Read more »
Digg was one of the most iconic of web companies. In between its supersonic rise and meteoric fall, Digg changed the media landscape forever. And it did one more thing – it seeded many more startups by fostering talent. And in doing so, it lives forever. Read more »
For nearly a decade and a half, Internet companies have been accorded nosebleed valuations by the stock markets. Despite shaky business fundamentals, Internet companies have often gotten premium in the markets. One banker finds valuations of LinkedIn and Facebook insane, especially when compared to Apple & Microsoft. Read more »
The launch of Google and Microsoft public clouds is looking well timed, as the corporate demand for public cloud services is about to go through a steep growth curve, research group, Gartner forecasts. Like Amazon, Both companies have been lustfully eyeing corporate customers. Read more »
As you might know, I am on a bit of a “staycation.” As a result, I am spending less time in front of the computer. However, I do read a lot these days — both on and offline. Here are some stories you might find enjoyable. Read more »
I have been saying this for a while – Google is forgetting its core DNA and instead chasing competition. It isn’t going to end well. Others such as influential publisher & technology observer Tim O’Reilly are starting to wave the red flag as well. Read more »
The smartphones of today suck up nearly 128 minutes of our daily attention. We use them to surf the web, play games, read books, as a camera and alarm clocks. What we don’t do – make phone calls. Should we even call it a phone? Read more »
After months of speculation, it is finally confirmed that headphones maker Beats Electronics is buying online music service MOG. Beats is the company behind Beats by Dre series of iconic headphones and is part owned by handset maker HTC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Read more »
With Google I/O, it has been busy week for me to focus on doing a lot of reading. I spent a lot of time with smart people and writing. So this week there are only 6 stories to read this weekend. Read more »
For second time in less than a month, Amazon’s Northern Virginia data center has suffered an outage and is impacting many popular services such as Instagram, Pinterest & Netflix. Amazon previously suffered an outage in its Northern Virginia facilities on June 14, 2012. Read more »
The founders of ComputeNext had a simple idea – soon there would be growing number of cloud service providers, and as more cloud services came online the marketplace would become rife with inefficiency. So they started ComputeNext and launched at our Structure event. Read more »
It has been five years since Apple and Steve Jobs introduced us to arguably one of the more revolutionary devices ever, the iPhone. It success can be traced to a combination of factors, but the most important reason for its success: touch. Here is why! Read more »
Google has announced plans to start offering a compute-on-demand service that rivals Amazon’s EC2 service. The company will initially offer this as a limited preview to larger customers. It is a strong and logical move by the company as it continues to view for developer affection. Read more »
Google celebrated day one of Google I/O 2012 conference with a slew of new products and more announcements. Stand back a little and you start to see a company has pitch battles on its hand on many fronts, despite being strong on search, advertising and android. Read more »
Google I/O got off to an eventful start thanks to keynote delays, pre-release of news on Google’s websites before it was announced on stage and an epic skydiving stunt. Here is a quick run-down of day one by the numbers: Read more »
It was a busy week around our offices. You might have heard that we hosted our Structure 2012 conference. Nevertheless, between all the talk of clouds, SDNs and big data, I did manage to read some good articles and wanted to share those with you. Read more »
Amazon has been the king of cloud services for nearly six years but now the company has new deep pocketed competitors – Microsoft and Google. And while Microsoft announced its plans earlier this month, Google is likely to launch its new, improved platform at Google I/O. Read more »
The growing number of devices in our daily lives means that we are consuming more and more electricity. This is something that worries lots of people, including me. A new study from a Palo Alto-based not-for-profit group takes a look at thte iPad’s energy consumption habits. Read more »
Sonos, a ten-year-old company that makes networked connected music hardware has raised a $45 million in new investment from the likes of Elevation Partners, KKR and has added some heavy weights such as John Maeda , president of the Rhode Island School of Design to its board. Read more »
It has been fairly obvious for a few years that the search-driven, URL-centric web would converge with the web of social objects. It’s something that drives Google’s paranoia and something Facebook dreams about. However, the company most likely to capture the opportunity is Twitter, Read more »
Songza launched in 2007, and put to rest a year later. In 2011, it was reincarnated as a mobile music discovery service and a mobile app. By marrying algorithms with human curation, the service wants to challenge Pandora and others in battle for music-app supremacy. Read more »
In late 2007, in a conversation with my colleagues I pointed out that over the next decade or so, the Internet’s infrastructure was going to be transformed in a very fundamental manner. It would start with the proliferation of Amazon Web Service-style core cloud computing and […] Read more »
This is going to be a busy weekend for me. While the weather in San Francisco threatens to be “summer-like,” I am going to be sitting at home and preparing for our Structure 2012 conference. Here are 7 stories that might be worth reading this weekend. Read more »
Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor is going to leave the company later this year, he announced via his Facebook Timeline today. He is leaving Facebook to start a new company, he said on his timeline. Read more »
Amazon web services are having trouble this evening and in the process are taking down some major sites. Among sites being impacted are Quora and HipChat. In addition, the Amazon outage has had an impact on Heroku, a division of Salesforce. Read more »
To say that Silicon Valley real estate market is hot would be an understatement. Start-ups are are pushing the rents to stratospheric heights in parts of Silicon Valley. Thanks to fast growing companies like Pinterest, the real estate market is going to get even hotter. Read more »
On Thursday, the U.S. President will sign an order that would make it simpler and easier to build networks on federal property. In addition, US Ignite will help develop apps to use fast broadband. Here is what I think of this news. Read more »
Are you worried about privacy on your iPhone and iPad, because of new Facebook integration into iOS 6.0 and Mountain Lion OS X? Your can avoid the single sign-on all together, but Apple says you don’t have to because of the precautions they have taken. Read more »
The summer is here and, if you are like me, you want to spend all of your weekend outside, enjoying the sunshine. I, for one, will read a book or two. That said, here are seven stories that might be good reading for you. Read more »
With its own Camera app and, now, Instagram too, Facebook essentially controls both the public and private social graphs for mobile photo sharing. And, given how much we love taking and sharing pictures, that means Facebook has huge commercial opportunities in this space. Read more »
Felicis Ventures, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture fund started by early Google employee Aydin Senkut has raised a new $70 million fund. The investment group is well known for its investments in Angry Birds’ parent, Inkling and Shopify. This is their second institutional seed fund. Read more »
Both Path and Airbnb suffered data breaches and were quick to respond to the fallout. LinkedIn, like most publicly traded companies has been slow to respond. It eventually posted its response and outlined the next steps to take. Read more »
In this era of ever more social networks, it is hard to connect with one another. Pipe hopes to fix that. It sifts through your social graph and encourages you to get in touch with one person on your list. The rest is up to you. Read more »
It has been a slow week because I have been nursing a flu that has knocked me out completely. Nevertheless, it gave me an opportunity to do some reading and think about the world at large. Here are seven stories for you to read this weekend. Read more »
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare .. these were hot destinations for job seekers. Pinterest, is the latest to join the elite club, except that it is sucking up talent from Facebook in droves and others such as Quora and Twitter employees are not immune to its allure. Read more »
So by all counts, Skype is doing fine under Microsoft ownership. The software giant has kept its paws off the baby. However, the current success isn’t enough to mask the fact that Skype is facing increased competition from upstarts looking eat into our attention to Skype. Read more »
