I’m a reporter for VentureBeat. I report on business and technology with a special focus on and web development and design. I spend a lot of time covering Google, Facebook, and Twitter — not just their consumer-facing web products, but their inner workings as large and rapidly growing tech companies.

If you email me a pitch about your company, please copy tips@venturebeat.com. I get a lot of email and don’t have time to reply to every message I receive.

Before coming to VentureBeat, I worked at Mashable. Before that, I was a daily reporter at ReadWriteWeb. And before that, I did print journalism at magazines and newspapers.

I wholeheartedly support VentureBeat’s ethics statement. I don’t own shares of any company in the tech sector or any company that I’d have occasion to write about. Aside from one small stuffed fox from Mozilla, I don’t generally accept gifts, including trips or other such experiences, from the companies I cover. I have done only a few gadget reviews in my career, and I do not keep the hardware that is sent to me for review.

When I’m not doing journalism about technology, I’m either riding my bike around Golden Gate Park or baking something.

stories by Jolie O'Dell

Google’s Marissa Mayer is Yahoo’s new CEO

In what may be understated as a surprise move for all parties involved, prominent Googler Marissa Mayer may soon be announced officially as Yahoo’s new CEO.

UPDATE, 1:32 p.m. Pacific: Yahoo confirms the news in an investors’ release, saying that …

How to get your own preview of Office 2013

We got some advance warning on Microsoft’s new Office 2013 and even had some hands-on time with the software. Here’s how you can get a preview version of your own.

Just go to the Microsoft landing page for the new …

Cisco snaps up stealthy security startup Virtuata

Virtuata, we hardly knew ye. Ye never publicly launched, and now ye have been folded into the megalithic monster that is Cisco.

Here’s what we did know about ye: Virtuata was a Silicon Valley startup based way the heck down …

Tech sector layoffs spike to a 3-year high; HP, Sony lead the way in pink slips

While startups scramble to hire the best engineers, tech workers at many companies this year have received the dreaded — and perhaps unexpected — pink slip.

Survey results show that layoffs at tech companies in the first half of 2012 …

Twitter hosts hacker open-house, not-so-secret recruitment event

Twitter is opening its doors to open-source hackers for a few hours next Thursday night.

The OSS-themed open house will bring some of the brightest software engineers and developers to Twitter’s fancy new Art Deco headquarters for the “Twitter Runtime …

LinkedIn finally shakes the ugly off its homepage, here’s the redesign

LinkedIn has unveiled a pretty new homepage today. The redesign strips away all the clutter, leaving you with news from your network and a chronological and algorithmically weighted stream of updates from your professional contacts.

In short, it’s looking a …

Apple gives in to green pressure, calls EPEAT breakup “a mistake”

Apple made a bit of a whoopsie last week when it withdrew from EPEAT’s green certification program. Now, the MacBook maker is back on board with the environmental organization and is eager to get its seal of approval for Apple …

Swrve talks A/B testing, design by committee, and mobile app ROI at MobileBeat

Swrve, a product for A/B testing for web and mobile apps, pretty much lives at the corner of pretty design and profitable apps.

At MobileBeat 2012, which was all about mobile design, we took a few moments to chat with …

Finally, an incubator that doesn’t treat entrepreneurs like expendable ‘spaghetti’

Every incubator has a formula, and most of those formulas involve throwing “spaghetti” of some kind against the proverbial wall to find out what will stick.

Trouble is, most of the time, the entrepreneurs are the spaghetti themselves. And if …

Need a favor? New app lets you give and get favors from folks you know

We all need a helping hand every now and then, and Favortree is the app that will make sure you have that hand when you need it — or that you can offer that hand when someone else is in …

Why GitHub abandoned the bootstrapper’s ship for a $100M Series A

After half a decade of preaching about the virtues of bootstrapping, the GitHub founders are finally getting in bed with a major VC firm to the tune of $100 million — that’s $1 million per employee at the still-small startup.…

KnowledgeTree takes a few mill to bring businesses better document tools

KnowledgeTree, a company that does business-specific cloud-based document management, has just taken a $4.75 million round of funding from a collection of East Coast and international VCs.

KnowledgeTree isn’t quite like Google Docs; rather, it has some very specific tools …

Ban be damned, Galaxy Nexus selling now online and unlocked

If you’ve been following the Apple/Samsung legal battle, this will raise at least one of your eyebrows: The new Galaxy Nexus is selling right now on Google Play.

You can snap one up for $350, and the units will start …

Apple withdraws from green gadget certification program

Apple products will no longer bear the EPEAT seal of approval that adorns environmentally friendly tech products.

The iDevice maker has backed away from EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) because Apple products such as the new Retina display MacBook …

If you use a smartphone, you’re a bigger jerk than you think

Not to get all Emily Post on y’all, but have you ever considered how many times a day you’re inadvertently rude because of the ways and moments in which you use your smartphone?

From texting while driving to Words With 

Ex-Nokia guys start mystery company to build Linux-based phones

A six-man group of open-source diehards from Nokia have teamed up to form Jolla Mobile, a company focused on building phones using the Linux-based MeeGo operating system.

Rather, MeeGo will be a sort of jumping-off point. On its Twitter page, …

Twitter is the common dude’s RSS reader, new discovery tools show

It’s the worst-kept secret on the Internet today, but Twitter has just announced some new search and discovery tools for its microblogging service (they hate it when we call it that).

On the company blog today, we read that Twitter …

Facebook engineers used Pokémon to test new Timeline features

Facebook did a fair amount of internal testing before it unleashed Timeline on the world, and its engineers also tested out how apps would be able to access and publish to Timeline.

But instead of dogfooding Open Graph features with …

NASA and CERN just made Larry and Sergey look like Jay and Silent Bob

It’s been a big news week for us, but not because of tech leaders. Rather, it’s the science community that’s been keeping us on our toes lately.

This week, just before Independence Day, the eggheads at CERN accidentally posted then …

Eric Schmidt wants you to try gadgets before you buy them

TomorrowVentures, Google chair Eric Schmidt’s VC firm, has just led a $1 million round of funding for YBUY, a Los Angeles area startup that offers a subscription gadget service, allowing tech fiends to try before they buy.

From iPads to …