I was out of the country for much of 2009, so it wasn’t until I spent two months back in San Francisco that I noticed a big change in the Web community. Babies. I’m not talking about whiny Millennials coming out of college and demanding venture capital for their iPhone app. I’m talking...

Efficiency is a business school idea that suggests a company is running smoothly. It’s absolutely terrific when you’re talking about a coal mining operation or a Supercuts. But when it comes to a company like Yahoo it’s not a positive. The Internet is still in its wild west days, and...

We wanted to take a minute to thank all of our readers and sponsors. Because of you, we have been able to grow explosively in the past year, now getting over 30 million pageviews and reaching more than 9 million unique visitors per month across our network! Thanks for keeping our lights on! Crucial...

FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time , but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore . Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes...

This is an anonymous guest post from a well known startup executive: When we split the atom, Einstein remarked that everything changed but our way of thinking. You could make the same argument about acquisitions and option pools. As Mark Suster recently noted , employees will never see a big payday...

There are plenty of collaborative document editors out there, but when it comes to getting input about a new document or PowerPoint deck, many businesses still rely on the tried-and-true method of printing them out, handing them around the office, and asking people to scribble their notes directly onto...

When I was at school, I almost never took sick days. This wasn’t because I enjoyed going to school – I really, really didn’t. Rather it was because I knew exactly what would happen if I dared to skip even a day of classes. A duck would somehow get into the school dining hall. Or an...

Women, Hispanics and blacks have always been underrepresented in the ranks of the Valley’s tech companies.  A new analysis by the Mercury News shows that from 2000 to 2008, the proportion of women tech workers in Silicon Valley dropped from 25.3% to 23.8%, and that the national numbers dropped from...

The past couple of days have seen some brouhaha over location privacy issues. Please Rob Me brought up the potentially troubling issue of tweeting out your location updates (and Foursquare responded ). But actually, Google is doing something that’s perhaps even creepier. While their Google Location...

The team behind the hot location-based service Foursquare took the time tonight to write a rare longer post about location privacy. Their basic stance: we take privacy very seriously and understand it. Also, that service Please Rob Me should shut up. In fact, it seems the entire impetus behind Foursquare’s...

Last September, while the Apple/Google Voice fiasco was still in full swing, an interesting application called Line2 was allowed into the App Store. The application acts as a mix between Google Voice and Skype, allowing small businesses to add a separate, dedicated business line to their iPhones in...

It’s been a long and winding road for Yahoo and Microsoft since Redmond’s first attempt to buy Yahoo for $45 billion two years ago, which ended up in the two companies a greeing to a complicated search deal in July, 2009. Today, the last hurdle to that deal has been removed, with government...