San Francisco new hub for venture capital

San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge

San Francisco has surpassed Silicon Valley as the nation's top hub for venture capital. Greater San Francisco, including Oakland, attracted some $7 billion in VC money in 2012, compared to nearly $4 billion for the San Jose-Silicon Valley area. The Bay Area as a whole attracted over $10 billion in venture capital, about 40 percent of the nationwide total, reports The Atlantic Cities.

Designers in vogue in Silicon Valley

Pinterest and Flipboard, the two hottest startups in Silicon Valley, owe much of their success to sleek graphic design. They are dressed for success. The tech hub has taken notice. Designers are now in high demand.

Shannon Callahan, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's leading talent scouts, has taken heed, reports Advertising Age.

"It's important to realize that designers in general have elevated themselves to being equivalent to engineers," she said.

The CIA and Silicon Valley after the Cold War

Former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden

During the Cold War, the National Security Agency helped to create the Internet and pioneer the computer industry.

"We were America's Information Age enterprise during America's Industrial Age," Michael Hayden, retired general and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency told The Atlantic recently. "We had the habit of saying if we need it, we're going to build it."

By 9/11, however, things had changed. "In the outside world there was a technological explosion in the two universes that had been at the birth of the agency almost uniquely ours: telecommunications and computers," Hayden said.

As a result,  NSA turned to Silicon Valley and private defense contractors to attract the best and brightest scientific minds. Read more

Related articles:

• Bush-era NSA chief defends PRISM, phone metadata collection - NPR
• Silicon Valley's long history of government codependence - Bloomberg

China's Silicon Valley connection growing

Stanford grads Tarun Pondicherry, left, and Josh Chan, founders of startup LightUp.

There is a growing relationship between startups in China and Silicon Valley.

For example, China has become the third-largest source of downloads for the popular Silicon Valley-based Flipboard app.

Evernote, the hot Redwood City-based startup,  gained some four million customers for its personal organization app in its first year in China.

The startup scene in China has strong ties to Silicon Valley. Four startups that have recently found success in China are evidence of this new trend, reports the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Can Silicon Valley help rebuild America's crumbling infrastructure

Dilapidated bridge in Virginia

The urgent need to repair America's crumbling infrastructure was documented in a recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Can Silicon Valley fix the public network?

Crowdfunding groups such as Kickstarter are a popular method in Silicon Valley for funding startups, films and other projects.

The civic crowdfunding platform Neighbor.ly and the solar energy crowdfunding site Mosiac have started to address the problem of repairing the country's infrastructure, reports the Washington Post. Read more

Finding dates for busy Silicon Valley geeks: There's a dating service for that

Amy Andersen

Amy Andersen is SiliconValley's renowned matchmaker. Hard-working geeks get lonely too.

"There's just not enough time to be out meeting people," George Shaw, a Silicon Valley tech worker  looking for love told ABC7 News.

Shaw travels and works day and night as the head of research and development for a hot Silicon Valley startup. He sought the services of Linx Dating.

Linx is a premium service. Membership starts at $2,500. For all the bells and whistles, you can spend up to $50,000.

Andersen conducts gatherings at the Fours Seasons in Palo Alto for her elite members. She handpicks a select few from a group of hundreds to introduce to her top members.

Related article:

• High-tech sex workers thrive in Silicon Valley - CNNMoney

Silicon Valley learns from high-tech Alabama vision screening program

Silicon Valley plans to duplicate a model vision screening program for children in Alabama that uses high-tech cameras.

"Photo optic scan cameras take pictures of children's eyes so they don't have to wait until there're old enough to read an eye chart to get a fair assessment of their vision," explains Stephen Black, president and founder of Impact Alabama. "We start screening at 16 months of age."

"If one eye has a serious problem the other eye doesn't have, your brain literally starts to shut that other eye down," said Black. "You have a window of opportunity to fix it at the end of which, there's no repairing it."

There is now a similar eye screening program in Silicon Valley, reports CBS Francisco. Read more

I have a daydream

Dr. King delivering his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech.

Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. I too have a healthy imagination. Even though I don't buy lottery tickets, a recurring theme in my daydreams is to one day be wealthy enough to throw money at a worthy cause. Near the top of my list of important movements is the effort to find a cure for cancer.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Silicon Valley dreams bigger than the rest of the country, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of LinkedIn profiles.

People who use the keywords "change the world" in their professional profiles are much more common in the Bay Area.

The Bay Area "has long attracted people who in a way believed that they are doing visionary work, almost doing God's work through technology," said Chuck Darrah, head of the anthropology department at San Jose State University and co-founder of the Silicon Valley Cultures Project.

What prompted me to pontificate on this subject is a Forbes piece I read today entitled "Hope, Hype, and Health in Silicon Valley." The writer, David Shaywitz, suggests that Silicon Valley could have a powerful impact on crucial healthcare problems if it were so inclined.

David is not alone. James Temple recently vented in a San Francisco Chronicle article about "The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation." The media pays little attention to the tireless work of scientists, notes Temple, instead focusing on the latest trending app.

"Let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer," says Temple.

Canada poaching frustrated immigrant tech workers in Silicon Valley

Jason Kenney, Canada's immigration minister, is touring Silicon Valley and San Francisco in an effort to promote his new visa initiative for startup entrepreneurs. The above video, a classic Silicon Valley elevator pitch, is part of an aggressive effort by Kenney, a member of Canada's ruling Conservative Party, to lure talented immigrant tech workers away from the San Francisco Bay Area.

"I think everybody knows the American system is pretty dysfunctional," Kenney said in an interview in Vancouver, B.C., before he embarked on his tour. "I'm going to the Bay Area to spread the message that Canada is open for business; we're open for newcomers. If they qualify, we'll give them the Canadian equivalent of a green card as soon as they arrive."

"Pivot to Canada" suggests a billboard that appeared off Highway 101 on the route from San Francisco to Silicon Valley days before Kenney's tour.

(Government of Canada)

Canada's startup visa policy stems from an idea first proposed but never passed by the U.S. Congress. Canada will now grant permanent residency to an entrepreneur who can raise enough venture capital and start a Canadian business. Under current U.S. law, skilled foreign workers are only eligible for temporary H-1B visas.

"I met a guy who had been here for 12 years who couldn't get his green card," Kenney told the Silicon Valley Business Journal. "It personalized the frustration that exists with the dysfunctionality of the immigration system here."

Related articles:

• Silicon Valley's battle for tech talent and immigration reform;
• Canada comes to Silicon Valley to poach high-tech workers struggling with immigation problems

'Delightful' is the new trend in Silicon Valley

Steve Jobs left an indelible imprint on Silicon Valley. Part of Jobs' Silicon Valley legacy is the concept of wanting to "surprise and delight" people.

The new campus Apple is building in Cupertino, California, is a shrine to delight. In an official planning document, the company says it wants the new "campus to provide an on-site venue for the introduction of Apple's new products that will generate surprise and delight."

Yahoo, Square, Instagram, Dropbox and many other Silicon Valley companies are following suit, reports the Los Angeles Times. Read more

Related article:

• How Intuit became a pioneer of 'delight' - latimes.com

Silicon Valley and Detroit reinvent the car

Google's cutting edge self-driving car technology has thoroughly disrupted the auto industry worldwide. The race is on to develop the car of the future and the carmakers in Detroit, in particular, do not want to be left behind.

Detroit has its guard up, like an anxious, aging prizefighter. They want to avoid a knockout punch after suffering a devastating knockdown at the hands of the upstart Japanese automakers years ago when they ate Detroit's lunch with the introduction of maintenance and fuel efficient cars.

Self-driving cars are part of an automotive revolution that may be the most transformative since Henry Ford's assembly line, reports Forbes. Read more

Former king of venture capital in Silicon Valley trying to reclaim his crown

John Doerr

John Doerr is to venture capital in Silicon Valley what Tiger Woods is to professional golf - the former undisputed champion trying to reclaim his tarnished crown.

Doerr is the driving force behind Kleiner Perkins, for many years the top dog on Sand Hill Road, the equivalent of Wall Street in Silicon Valley for private equity. Many astute Silicon Valley observers are wondering if the aging star of venture capital has lost touch after Kleiner admittedly missed the boat on recent bellwether IPOs - namely, Facebook, LinkedIn and Groupon.

But Kleiner has proven recently that it can take a punch. The battered legendary 41-year-old firm has been the biggest booster of Flipboard, the very popular magazine-style, news aggregation app for Andriod and iOS.

The Kleiner portfolio also touts Square, social network Path, and online education startup Coursera.

Details of the Flipboard saga and more are detailed in the Forbes article The Kleiner mojo: still alive and well in Silicon Valley.  Doerr also appears on the May 27 cover of Forbes. Read more

Related article:

• Kleiner Perkins' Next Generation: Mike Abbott and Megan Quinn

Silicon Valley's startup machine

An in-depth New York Times report tells the story of Michelle Crosby, an energetic 37-year-old lawyer in Boise, Idaho, who applied for a loan last November from a local bank, Western Capital. She proposed to use the money, $10,000, to help start a new business, Wevorce, which could be described most reductively as an H&R Block for divorces. The bankers liked the idea, and Crosby was a strong candidate. They had even given her an earlier loan to open Wevorce’s first office. But after four weeks, the bank was stalling and Crosby had yet to receive a cent. At the height of her frustration, she received an e-mail from a small group of private investors in Mountain View, Calif. They invited her to an interview and, after listening to her story, promised her $100,000 in exchange for a 7 percent stake in Wevorce. Crosby accepted on the spot. The next day, she found a condo for rent, at $2,500 a month, in Mountain View, and left Boise, and her boyfriend, behind.

Silicon Valley battles Wall Street for talent

Nicole Shariat Farb, a former VP at Goldman Sachs

Silicon Valley is raiding Wall Street, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Large and small technology companies, from Square Inc. to Rackspace Hosting Inc., with deep pockets and a pressing need to broaden their workforces are snagging top talent from financial firms.

LinkedIn: A cautionary tale about the need for speed in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has a long-running obsession with speed. Ever since Intel co-founder Gordon Moore formulated what would become known as Moore's Law, the tendency has been to make things go quicker, get smaller, and cost less, reports Businessweek.

This used to apply mostly to hardware, like chips and storage devices, but it now seems to be carrying over to the software side of the world. Read more

Silicon Valley's battle for tech talent and immigration reform

Michael Solomon, agent for elite Silicon Valley programmers

"The dirth of talent is the big bottleneck in Silicon Valley and in technology," proclaims Michael Solomon, co-founder of 10X Management, a recently formed recruiting firm that represents Silicon Valley's top programmers.

"We're seeing horrible statistics about the shortage," Solomon said in a Bloomberg interview.

Two top Silicon Valley recruiters on the frontlines of battle for elite talent

Juliet de Baubigny

The competiton for top tech talent in Silicon Valley is a serious pursuit for two women who are shaping startups and high-growth companies. Fast Company sat down with Shannon Callahan, who runs the talent  network for Andreessen Horowitz, and Juliet de Baubigny, partner at Kleiner Perkins, to get their take on hiring trends and what makes a candidate standout. Read more

Who's hot and who's not in Silicon Valley

The SV150 is Silicon Valley's report card, an annual performance review, a bucketful of numbers that begins to answer the questions: Are we up? Are we down? Who's in? Who's out? Read more

'Facebook freshman class' storms the ranks of Silicon Valley's largests companies

Workday founders and company executives ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange last October in celebration of their IPO

Nearly 10 percent of the names on the latest list of top-grossing Silicon Valley tech companies weren't there a year ago because they weren't yet public. But with outfits like Workday, Yelp and Palo Alto Networks - not to mention Facebook - having scored initial public offerings in 2012, other companies from last years SV150 index compiled by the San Jose Mercury News have been shoulder asisde. Read more

Startups scout elite programmers for Silicon Valley companies

In the past few years, half a dozen recruiting startups have figured out how to entice elite software engineers with programming competitions. These firms make money by sharing the results for a fee. Fast-growing companies in Silicon Valley and San Francisco are prime customers, reports Forbes. Read more