The deal announced Monday represents Mayer's boldest move yet since she left Google 10 months ago to lead Yahoo's latest comeback attempt. It marks Yahoo's most expensive acquisition since the Sunnyvale, Calif., company bought online search engine Overture a decade ago for $1.3 billion in cash and stock.

Yahoo is paying all cash for Tumblr, dipping into some of its remaining stash from a $7.6 billion windfall reaped last year from selling about half of its stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Holdings Group. Taking over Tumblr will devour about one-fifth of the $5.4 billion in cash that Yahoo had in its accounts at the end of March.

While hailing Tumblr as fount of creativity that attracts 300 million visitors per month, Yahoo pledged "not to screw it up." David Karp, a high school dropout who started Tumblr six years ago, will remain in control of the service in an effort to retain the same "irreverence, wit and commitment to empower creators," Yahoo said.

Continue Reading...

Zuckerberg is registered to vote without picking a political party affilation and has been a participant at events with Obama where he put on a jacket and tie instead of a hoodie. But there seem to be a series of signs that he is drifting toward the GOP side of the aisle—and not just because he held a fundraiser for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie earlier this year.

Continue Reading...

Could the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act unintentionally create a safe haven for corporate hacking?

Amidst all the clamour over what CIPSA means for civil liberties, with its emphasis on allowing tech companies and the government to more easily share information about Web users, there are cries of hypocrisy about those who'd be exempted from the potential new law.

Mark Jaycox of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes CIPSA, says language in the bill gives exempted companies too much leeway in deciding who can be labeled a cybersecurity threat and pursued with the new powers that would be granted by the legislation. Although an amendment added to the bill would limit companies' information gathering to their own networks, other parts of the bill would allow "wide ranging acts" to combat any potential cybersecurity threats.

Continue Reading...

Instead, he quit his job and spent his savings to enroll at Dev Bootcamp, a new San Francisco school that teaches students how to write software in nine weeks. The $11,000 gamble paid off: A week after he finished the program last summer, he landed an engineering job that paid more than twice his previous salary.

"It's the best decision I've made in my life," said Shimizu, 24, who worked in marketing and public relations after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. "I was really worried about getting a job, and it just happened like that."

Dev Bootcamp, which calls itself an "apprenticeship on steroids," is one of a new breed of computer-programming school that's proliferating in San Francisco and other U.S. tech hubs. These "hacker boot camps" promise to teach students how to write code in two or three months and help them get hired as web developers, with starting salaries between $80,000 and $100,000, often within days or weeks of graduation.

Continue Reading...

Zuckerberg announced the formation of Fwd.us (pronounced "forward us") in an op-ed article in The Washington Post late Wednesday. In it, he said the U.S. needs a new approach to these issues if it is to get ahead economically. This, he wrote, includes offering immigrants a path to citizenship.

"We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants," Zuckerberg wrote. "And it's a policy unfit for today's world."

The move comes as a bipartisan Senate group is expected to roll out a comprehensive immigration bill in the coming days. Zuckerberg's goal echoes the proposed legislation. Zuckerberg, whose great-grandparents were immigrants, said he wants "comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security, allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born."

Continue Reading...

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, Calif., issued a ruling Friday concluding that the companies' alleged collusion may have affected workers in too many different ways to justify lumping the individual claims together. She denied the request to certify workers' lawsuits as a class action and collectively seek damages on behalf of tens of thousands of employees.

The allegations will be more difficult to pursue if they can't be united in a single lawsuit. Koh, though, will allow the workers' lawyers to submit additional evidence that they have been collecting to persuade her that the lawsuit still merits class certification.

"Plaintiffs appreciate the court's thorough consideration of the evidence and are prepared to address the court's concerns fully in a renewed motion," employee attorney Kelly Dermody wrote in a Friday email.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

In San Jose, which Businessweek dubs the "Bay Area capital of medical marijuana," 106 medicinal marijuana dispensaries span the city's 177 square miles, more than adequately serving its 967,000 residents. One of those dispensaries, Pallative Health Center, told Businessweek that tech workers make up an estimated 40 percent of clients.

“We’re seeing people from some semiconductors, lots of engineers, lots of programmers,” Ernie Arreola, 38, the assistant manager, told Businessweek, which noted, "That makes sense, because the shop is an easy shot from some of the area’s biggest employers—Cisco Systems, Google, Adobe Systems, Apple, EBay—and a short drive from dozens more. Also, people in Silicon Valley do like their pot."

Continue Reading...

For every growing start-up flush with VC cash, there is an opportunistic NPE (non-practicing entity) hoping to capitalize on its success by enforcing patent claims for products or technologies it has no ultimate plan to manufacture. Often these claims are broad and malleable -- not unlike alleged troll Personal Audio's podcasting patent (to wit, an "apparatus for disseminating a series of episodes represented by media files via the Internet as said episodes become available").

Continue Reading...

It's an odd thing to hear. If you have even a passing interest in the history of computing, you've likely run across some portion of the tale told in "Silicon Valley." How the "Traitorous Eight," a group of brilliant scientists frustrated by the erratic behavior of their boss, Nobel prize–winning physicist William Shockley, defected to start their own company and launch the silicon chip revolution is the foundation stone of Valley myth-making. Every book -- and there have been many -- that strives to recount the story of how the computer chip changed the world, or how Silicon Valley's venture capital-funded start-up culture, with all its love of risk and innovation, broke the old way of doing business in America returns, over and over again, to the brave young physicists and chemists who abandoned their corporate cocoon in 1957 and kicked off the future.

Continue Reading...

Silicon Valley, by and large, spends Democratic with its fundraising cash, and overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama last November. The numbers brook no dispute. In the last presidential cycle, 91 percent of campaign contributions by Apple employees and 97 percent by Google employees went to Obama. In Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, Obama crushed Romney by margins of over 40 percent. The gap is so bad that Nate Silver even suggested it could potentially be blamed for the poor performance of Romney's campaign in the technological arena. The best geeks just didn't want to work for him.

Continue Reading...

By most indications, tech companies in this hub of innovation are humming along, even as two of its rising stars endure steep declines in their stock prices that have wiped out more than $60 billion in wealth in the past six months.

Companies catering to mobile devices, business software and data management products are thriving, while longtime Silicon Valley stalwarts such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. remain among the most revered brands in the world.

"Nothing has fundamentally changed about the opportunities that are possible," says Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, an online data-storage company based in Los Altos, Calif.

The optimism in Silicon Valley can be seen in a variety of ways in this area that covers roughly 40 miles from San Jose to San Francisco:

— Entrepreneurs are still pursuing big ideas and raising millions of dollars.

Silicon Valley startups raised $3.2 billion from venture capitalists during the April-June quarter, far more than in any other part of the U.S as tracked by the National Venture Capital Association. Venture capital flowing into Silicon Valley increased by 4 percent from the same time last year, while it dropped 12 percent nationwide.

Continue Reading...

This is a great move for Yahoo, which has stewed in mediocrity for years.

Mayer, a big shot in Silicon Valley and a perfectionist product-type executive, could legitimately make Yahoo respectable again. At the very least, she will command attention and could recruit people that were previously unrecruitable for Yahoo.

Yahoo's problem has never been having enough users — it boasts more than 700 million in Mayer's hiring announcement — but its products have lagged in quality behind those of Google, Facebook and other Web companies for years.

Have you tried to use Yahoo Mail, Finance, Sports or Flickr lately? They haven't had a positive update in what seems like forever. Flickr should have been Instagram! Why did no one mention Yahoo Maps as an alternative to Google for Apple's iOS Maps app? Because Yahoo Maps is weaksauce. Yahoo Mail is laughable next to Gmail. But it doesn't have to be. Et cetera.

Continue Reading...

Any doubts about the credentials of Old Street were put to rest this month when the Silicon Valley Bank — which claims a role in seeding Californian tech brands such as Cisco and Mozilla — announced it was launching a full UK service to capitalize on this burgeoning start up scene.

Continue Reading...

The correct response: "What is the computer IBM developed to become a 'Jeopardy!' whiz?"

Watson, which IBM claims as a profound advance in artificial intelligence, edged out game-show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Thursday in its first public test, a short practice round ahead of a million-dollar tournament that will be televised next month.

Later, the human contestants made jokes about the "Terminator" movies and robots from the future. Indeed, four questions into the round you had to wonder if the rise of the machines was already upon us -- in a trivial sense at least.

Watson tore through a category about female archaeologists, repeatedly activating a mechanical button before either Ken Jennings or Brad Rutter could buzz in, then nailing the questions: "What is Jericho?" "What is Crete?"

Its gentle male voice even scored a laugh when it said, "Let's finish 'Chicks Dig Me.'"

Jennings, who won a record 74 consecutive "Jeopardy!" games in 2004-05, then salvaged the category, winning $1,000 by identifying the prehistoric human skeleton Dorothy Garrod found in Israel: "What is Neanderthal?"

Continue Reading...

Meanwhile, Facebook gets the capital to keep buying talent and startups, and to fuel its expansion in all kinds of other ways -- and it gets to sell stock in what amounts to a shadow stock market that's growing faster than regulators seem willing or able to understand, much less deal with.

Continue Reading...

(Please see the note at the bottom of this piece.)

Yahoo says it will try to sell its Web bookmarking service, Delicious. This news, posted on the Delicious blog, comes a day after widespread reports -- unchallenged until now by Yahoo -- that the company was shuttering the service.

One result of the earlier reports was a frenzied search for a new social bookmarking service to replace what many people, including me, have used over the years to stockpile and organize links to online material we've found interesting. A second result was a further hit to Yahoo's declining reputation.

Continue Reading...

These changes appear to make plenty of sense for Netflix, because the company will avoid the cost of buying and then mailing the millions of DVDs customers like me have been receiving. And, indeed, on Monday Netflix announced it was going to offer customers an all-online streaming plan for $8 a month.

I suspect there's been a misstep, however, if I'm any example of the Netflix customer base. I'd been paying $17 per month for a plan that allowed us to have three DVDs out at a time, plus being able to view streaming content anytime. But Neflix has raised our rate by $3 a month, or about 18 percent.

Continue Reading...

The new option announced Wednesday will allow Gmail users to choose whether they prefer their incoming messages stacked in chronological order, instead of having them threaded together as part of the same electronic conversation.

Gmail has been automatically grouping messages by topic or senders since Google rolled out the service six years ago.

But this so-called "conversation view" confused or frustrated many Gmail users who had grown accustomed to seeing all their newest messages at the top of the inbox followed by the older correspondence. After all, that's how most other e-mail programs work.

The complaints grew loud enough to persuade Google to revise the Gmail settings so users can turn off conversation view and unravel their messages.

Continue Reading...

In little more than half a decade, Arrington has founded and built TechCrunch into one of the most -- maybe the most -- influential technology news companies. Now he's decided to cash out.

As speakers like Google's Eric Schmidt held forth on the conference stage, buzz in the conference center was about the confirmation of rumors that Arrington has sold the operation, which includes what appears to be a highly profitable conference arm, to AOL. The terms weren't disclosed.

AOL has been bulking up on content for some time now. A few years ago it bought a collection of blogs, including the popular tech blog Engadget, and it's investing what looks like serious money in Patch, one of many competitors in the local-news site category that's growing like topsy.

Continue Reading...