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