The Bay Area and Silicon Valley expect the windfall from a stock offering to make their in-demand region even hotter.

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California Housing Market Braces for Facebook Millionaires

In Silicon Valley, wearing flashy socks is more than an expression of your personality. It signals that you are part of the in crowd.

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In Silicon Valley, Socks Make the Tech Entrepreneur

In Silicon Valley, wearing flashy socks is more than an expression of your personality. It signals that you are part of the in crowd.

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In Silicon Valley, Socks Make the Tech Entrepreneur

Operating on money and equipment scrounged from the public and from Silicon Valley millionaires, a band of astronomers recently restarted the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Life Out There | Starry Dreams and Financial Woes: SETI Research Is Revived – Life Out There

Creating a mid-Atlantic version of Silicon Valley is a noble pursuit, but it may take something less tangible than venture capital.

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Big City: New York as a Tech Hot Spot: Is It Just a Sci-Fi Dream?

The private memorial will be held at Stanford on Sunday.

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Bits Blog: Memorial Service for Steve Jobs at Stanford

Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names are on the guest list.

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Steve Jobs Memorial Slated for Sunday

The day after a senior Energy Department adviser was told to avoid discussing Solyndra’s application for a $535 million federal loan, he defended the solar company’s reputation in an exchange with a White House aide. Steven J. Spinner, a major fundraiser for President Obama and a Silicon Valley investor tasked with helping the government invest in clean-technology companies, had an ethical conflict: His wife worked for Wilson Sonsini, a California law firm that represented Solyndra, the solar-panel maker, in its applications for the government loan. Read full article > >

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Government adviser defends Solyndra despite ethics agreement

Technology giant Hewlett-Packard announced Thursday that it was naming former eBay CEO Meg Whitman as its new chief executive in the latest plot twist for the storied Silicon Valley firm, which has recently been beset by scandals and turnover at the top. The tech firm’s current chief executive, Leo Apotheker, lasted less than a year in the job. Whitman, famed for her work leading eBay and her failed run for California governor last year, takes over as the company tries to reinvent itself — away from selling traditional computers and printers to consumers to pitching technology services and products to businesses. Read full article > >

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Meg Whitman named CEO of Hewlett-Packard

Facebook pushed the privacy line again by automatically turning on a feature that enables facial recognition in photos on the Web site.

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Bits: Facebook Changes Privacy Settings to Enable Facial Recognition

I was watching Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel (think Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and Yelp) on CNBC last week talk about why some college kids might be better off quitting and starting a company. His Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 each to 20 young men and women under 20 who are willing to follow his advice. I wasn’t born with the entrepreneurial gene and so I didn’t have the risk profile to do what Thiel is promoting. But it got me thinking about the story of Chad MacDonald, an entrepreneur I met a few months ago who did quit college to launch a business. Read full article > >

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From college dropout to Prince of Porcelain

I have been awarded a golden ticket to the heart of Silicon Valley: the Thiel Fellowship. The catch? For two years, I cannot be enrolled as a full-time student at an academic institution. For me, that’s not an issue; I believe higher education is broken.

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Opinion: College is a waste of time

Facebook denied that hiring a firm to push for critical articles about Google amounted to a “smear campaign.”

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Bits: Facebook Plays Down Campaign Against Google

Take a look at OrganizedWisdom.com and you see a strange mix of ambitions. The website’s category pages (acid reflux, erectile dysfunction, IBS) and general clickable clutter might make you suspect that it’s a content farm intent on picking up WebMD’s scraps. But under the hood, there’s an interesting idea cooking. OrganizedWisdom is creating a way of evaluating the authority of health-related social media users, which they can layer over Google’s relevance algorithms, so that they can surface useful health information from vetted sources. As doctors and other health experts increase their output on social media, Organized Wisdom thinks they can scoop up that information and turn it into the backbone for their site. As explained by new board member and former Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin, the site wants to “correct an algorithm frenzy” by which people search for health information online and find only perfectly search engine optimized content written by people who may or may not know what they’re talking about. OrganizedWisdom has verified more than 6,000 social media accounts as having some kind of expert knowledge. Levin sees their output on Facebook, blogs, and Twitter as “a treasure trove that needs to be organized.” Of course, that is the hard part. Unity Stoakes, one of the company’s co-founders, described their mission as building a “trust filter for health and wellness, something that’s never been done.” He compared their task to eBay’s — connecting sellers (patients) with respectable buyers (doctors/experts). His other corollary was Quora , the Silicon Valley question-and-answer site, which has morphed into a community filled with technology experts. But eBay had the advantage that sellers had a far greater incentive to be vetted and verified on the site than do the doctors OrganizedWisdom’s collecting. And Quora established a very strong early community that was dedicated to maintaining the quality of the information on the site. Organized Wisdom’s relationship with its experts is one step removed. They’re scraping what doctors and experts do on other sites and re-presenting it in ways that they think are more useful. Though Levin and Stoakes contend that doctors will see value in what their website does, I doubt the good ones will work as hard as eBay sellers or Quora users do to make sure that their reputation on the site will be well-maintained.  The germ of an idea represented by OrganizedWisdom is fascinating. Distilling and storing useful health information from the social web would be a valuable service indeed, but I’m not sure it’s going to be easy or even doable.

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Can Curating Doctors’ Tweets Improve People’s Health?

Twitter still faces one more San Francisco vote before it gets a tax break for staying in the city.

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Bits: Twitter’s Tax Break Clears One Hurdle