Every year, my family looks forward to Maker Faire, a family-friendly celebration of DIY mayhem, with eager anticipation. But when venture capitalists get involved in the maker movement, you know something new is afoot.
One such VC is Brad Feld, …
People often say Silicon Valley is not like the rest of the world. We’re more tolerant of failure, embrace risk-taking more eagerly, get more enthusiastic about technical solutions, and have a huge, deep pool of engineering and marketing talent to …
Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s army of pieceworkers, ready to help you blend computation with human tasks in web apps.
What I didn’t know is that MTurk is also a powerful tool for testing and refining ideas. I learned this while …
Now that Planetary Resources has unveiled its plans to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new deposits of platinum and water, and to strip-mine them and shuttle them back to secure facilities back on our home planet, I think …
Andreessen Horowitz realized a terrific return on its investment in Instagram, turning $500,000 into an estimated $100 million in about two years.
I’ve never made $100 million, let alone had $500,000 to invest, so I decided to turn that into …
Editor's Pick
A lot of people were scratching their heads yesterday at the news that Facebook is acquiring photo-sharing site Instagram for $1 billion.
The allure of retro-styled photo filters is pretty weak justification for a price tag that high. But of …
Editor's Pick
Frustration.
That’s the dominant note sounded by commenters at this week’s Mobile Summit, an invitation-only conclave of mobile-industry executives and investors sponsored by VentureBeat.
It’s polite frustration, to be sure. But again and again, I’ve heard on-stage speakers or members …
Editor's Pick
For someone who’s lived through one tech bubble, it’s hard not to see signs of another one every time the market starts edging upward.
Besides, no one wants to be the rube who’s the last one to realize the party’s …
To predict the future, look at what really smart people are doing for fun.
That’s the advice from Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and a proven futurist and coolhunter. O’Reilly started making manuals for Unix long before Unix was …
If the mobile market is a war, the battlefield is shifting.
As VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar recently wrote, it’s no longer a contest between the Apple iOS and Google Android mobile operating systems. Microsoft is about to shake things up in …
Last year’s big fashion trend was the color block, and this year’s tech trend follows suit: It’s the square.
More precisely, it’s the big, colorful rectangle filled with a solid color (like Windows 8) or a photograph (like Pinterest).
Mondrian …
In Microsoft's vision of the future, Kinect sensors are everywhere: In your living room, your kitchen, at school, and even in the supermarket, above the fruit display.
And why not? The $150 motion-sensing device provides a cheap way to add gesture and voice controls to any application.
The tech business deserves a better press corps.
By “better,” I don’t mean “friendlier.” I mean journalists and bloggers that treat technology with the same serious and critical eye that is (or should be) afforded to presidential candidates and Fortune …
If you’re angry about Apple’s manufacturing process, you should be. But don’t stop with Apple.
As everyone knows by now, iPhones and iPads are built in huge Chinese manufacturing plants where tens of thousands of people work 12-hour shifts for …
You don’t have to live in Palo Alto to become a software billionaire, though it can help.
For decades, people with ideas, programming talent, and the ambition to make their fortune as entrepreneurs have been moving to Silicon Valley, just …
If you subscribe to my newsletter you can read these columns a whole day before they appear on our website. And check out my other essays in the Dylan’s Desk series.
As the San Francisco 49ers fumbled their shot at …
Is there anything more American than a robot that can create anything you want out of little more than a spool of wire and some electricity? It's only a slight exaggeration to say that the MakerBot offers levels of Jeffersonian self-reliance that our founding fathers only dreamed of.
Last week I looked at the revolutionary products that will change the tech sector this year. This week, I’d like to give you a preview of several key trends we’ll be following carefully at VentureBeat in 2012.
It’s fitting that …
Anyone can pick most interesting phones of 2011, but it takes real foolhardiness to predict the most revolutionary products of the coming year.
Call me a fool. I’m placing bets on these five products that will revolutionize technology in 2012.…
Can you build a billion-dollar business without venture capital?
Jorn Lyseggen thinks he can. He’s the founder and CEO of Meltwater Group, a major player in marketing intelligence services.
I spoke at a Meltwater event recently, and got to know …
