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excerpt: In China, the red-hot tech scene seems dominated by a small group of entrepreneurs who paid their dues in Silicon Valley before returning home to create successful Internet and software startups. Aside from finding fame and fortune, these "returnees" are also laying the foundation for a startup culture that will allow grassroots entrepreneurs to flourish as well. Returnees - Chinese nationals who studied or worked the U.S. - head up just 3 percent of all tech companies in China, yet they represent nearly 70 percent of all startups that go public in the U.S. market (still the largest measure of success in the industry), according to an internal study by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital firm GSR Ventures, which deals exclusively in China. The firm also found startups created by returnees were much likelier to become financially successful and hire more employees than startups founded by Chinese entrepreneurs who never worked in the U.S. Part of that may be cultural: a culture Jack Jia, a partner at GSR sees changing, albeit slowly. he still sees a "drastic" disparity between startups founded by home-grown entrepreneurs and their returnee counterparts during pitching sessions and business plan competitions all across China. Thus, he rarely funds companies headed up by Chinese engineers without managerial-level experience at tech companies in the U.S., even though he would like to encourage the growth of Chinese entrepreneurs who have stayed at home. "Most have no clue what they are doing. The basic expertise, the passion and experience is often lacking," he said. "And it's not that they don't have the same talent or ability, it's just they haven't been exposed to the same things as their American counterparts."

AngelList is turning Silicon Valley upside down. It's basically Match.com for startups and business angels, and startups are raising millions from angels on the site almost every day, leaving VCs to scramble for dealflow and paying higher valuations. Not everyone likes it: last week O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures partner and Foursquare investor Bryce Roberts publicly left the site, saying it encourages a herd mentality. Meanwhile prolific startup investor Dave McClure says it's the most innovative thing to happen to startup funding since Y Combinator in 2005.

"One of the strangest things about Stripe - or perhaps, one of the strangest things about Paypal - is the list of people who are funding Stripe. Three of its biggest individual backers are people who played a key role in making PayPal a success: cofounders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, along with Elon Musk, who joined PayPal through an acquisition. Why would Thiel, Levchin, and Musk fund a machine built destroy their baby? Probably because, in Silicon Valley, PayPal is viewed as a lost cause. We've heard a lot of complaints about how awful and hard it is to implement. " Stripe isn't the only well-funded startup going after what it views as a decrepit, disrupt-ble incumbent. Jack Dorsey's Square is too, and it's now worth billions of dollars. Another heavily funded startup, Braintree, owns the technology millions of people use to pay for things inside apps like Uber. Finally, some of eBay's bigger rivals such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are gunning for PayPal too.

Good intro to LeanLaunchLab.com.  Great idea for startups! excerpt: Entrepreneur Steve Blank has spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about how ineffective old-fashioned board meetings are when it comes to building and scaling startups.

This years list is all about infrastructure, again.  Very interesting though.  Next year will the year of productivity, with business systems and business process migration services leading the way.  Maybe :) "The Top 10 mixes track record with potential. Some startups, such as Aryaka Networks and HyTrust, are more established and have long lists of customers wins. The list also includes more recent startups that are included more for their potential than their current status in the market. Several of these newer companies are helping determine just how the cloud computing market will evolve. They include dinCloud, Nebula and SaaS Markets."

Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman has a great post where he lists the tools he used to get his company off the ground. We're using it with our own amendments and suggestions to give you the best tools to get your startup off the ground.  Business Insider has a slide show for the 11 tools.  Good stuff!

Today's high-tech entrepreneurs have at their command more than just the ability to invent new technologies - they have mastered the discipline and the methodology required to harness those technologies in order to serve customers. Such a combination of new technology and new understanding is unlocking new opportunities. In order to maximize such opportunities, this generation of entrepreneurs combines extremely low costs with faster cycle times to produce what I call lean startups.

Excellent report on Crocodoc and their ability to convert MANY different document file types to HTML5.  Including all MSOffice formats - OOXML, ODF, and PDF. " Crocodoc, and took on the much larger problem of allowing groups to collaborate on editing a document online, no matter what the document type: PowerPoint, PDF, Word, Photoshop, JPEG, or PNG. In the process, they had to build an embeddable viewer that could take apart any document and reassemble it accurately within a Web browser. And as soon as they'd finished that, they had to tear their own system apart and rebuild it around HTML5 rather than Flash, the Adobe multimedia format that's edging closer and closer to extinction. The result of all that iterating is what's probably the world's most flexible and faithful HTML5-based document viewer: when you open a PDF, PowerPoint, or Word document in Crocodoc, the Web version looks exactly like the native version, even though it's basically been stripped down and re-rendered from scratch. When I talked with Damico in February of 2011, the startup had visions of building on this technology to become a kind of central, Web-based clearinghouse for everyone's documents-a cross between Scribd, Dropbox, and Google Docs, but with a focus on consumers, and with prettier viewing tools. In the last year, though, Crocodoc's direction has changed dramatically. Damico and his colleagues realized that it would be smarter to partner with the fastest growing providers of document-sharing services and social business-tool providers than to try to compete with them. "The massive, seismic change for us is that we had a huge opportunity to partner with Dropbox and LinkedIn and SAP and Yammer, and let them build on top of Crocodoc and make it into a core piece of their own products," Damico says. In other words, every time an office worker opens a document from within a Web app like Dropbox or Yammer, they're activating a white-label version

"Startup Numecent has come out of stealth mode today with some of the most impressive enterprise technology we've seen in a decade. Plus the company is interesting for other reasons, like its business model and its founder. Numecent offers something it calls "cloud paging" and, if successful, it could be a game-changer for enterprise software, video gaming, and smartphone apps. Red Hat thinks so. It has already partnered with the company to help it offer Windows software to Linux users. "Cloud paging" instantly "cloudifies" any software, even an operating system like Windows itself, says founder and CEO Osman Kent. It lets any software, with no modification, be delivered from the cloud and run as fast or faster than if the app was on your desktop. Lots of so-called "desktop virtualization" services work fast. But cloud-paging can even operate the cloud software if the PC gets disconnected from the network or Internet. It can also turn a smartphone into a server. That means a bunch of devices like tablets can run the software -- like a game -- off of the smartphone. Imagine showing up to a party and letting all your friends play the latest version of Halo from your phone. That's crazy cool. Cloudpaging can do all this because it doesn't use "pixel-streaming" technology like other virtualization tech. Instead it temporarily downloads bits of the application itself (instructions) and runs them on the device. It can almost magically predict which parts of the app the user will need, and downloads only those parts. For business owners, that's not even the best part. It also helps enterprises sidestep extra licensing fees associated with the cloud. For instance, Microsoft licenses its software by the device, not by the user, and, in many cases, charges a "Virtual Desktop Access" fee for each device using a virtual version of Windows. (For a bit of light reading, check out the Microsoft virtual desktop licensing white paper: PDF) Cloudpaging has what Kent calls "f

For enterprises considering moving their IT operations to the cloud, the market can feel a little overwhelming. In addition to the major players like Salesforce, Amazon and Google, a bewildering array of startup firms offer tools and services for cloud computing -- and their numbers seem to grow by the day. Here, we have highlighted 15 promising cloud computing vendors that are carving out a niche for themselves in this emerging arena. Though by no means comprehensive, this list serves as a primer for some of the innovative startups whose offerings range from cloud security and storage to apps and infrastructure.

Interesting, but lightweight interview with Ray Ozzie.  Look at the productivity comment in particular.  He also mentions "social productivity" as being an aspect of "communications".  My guess is that his new startup, Cocomo, will gear up towards a Cloud Productivity Platform where this new capability of integrated web communications is woven deep into collaborative productivity applications.  With enough juice to blow the legacy Windows - MSOffice Productivity environment out of the water.  We shall see. excerpt: When he joined Microsoft he thought it had a "tremendous history," he said, with great technology assets and people. But it was a company struggling to adjust to changes in the PC and server markets, he said. "I tried my best to communicate with various groups what their purpose in life was," he said. For instance, he tried to convince the Office group that it should focus on selling productivity, as opposed to selling PC-based productivity products, and the Xbox group that it should sell entertainment, not boxes or discs.

Fascinating story about Chris Kemp of OpenStack fame, and his recent effort to commoditize Cloud Computing hardware/software systems - Nebula excerpt: "Though it doesn't look like much, (about the size of a four-inch-tall pizza box) Nebula One is the product of dozens of engineers working for two years in secrecyin Mountain View, Calif. It has attracted the attention of some of Silicon Valley's top investors. The three billionaires who made the first investment in Google-Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, and Ram Shriram-joined forces again to back Nebula One, betting that its technology will invite a dramatic shift in corporate computing that outflanks the titans of the industry. "This is an example of where traditional technology companies have failed the market," says Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems (ORCL) and famed hardware engineer. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Comcast Ventures, and Highland Capital Partners have also backed Kemp's startup, itself called Nebula, which has raised more than $30 million. The origins of Nebula One go back to Kemp's days at NASA, which he joined in 2006 as director of strategic business development. In 2007, he became a chief information officer, making him, at 29, the youngest senior executive in the U.S. government. In 2010, he became NASA's chief technology officer. Kemp spent much his time at NASA developing more efficient data centers for the agency's various computing efforts. He and a team of engineers built the early parts of what is now known as OpenStack, software that makes it possible to control an entire data center as one computer. To see if other companies could take the idea further, Kemp made the software open source. Big players such as AT&T (T), Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Rackspace Hosting (RAX) have since incorporated OpenStack into the cloud computing services they sell customers. Kemp had an additional idea: He wanted to use OpenStack as a way to give every company its

Very interesting article describing the near market ready potential of "supercapacitor" batteries.   This is truly game changer stuff, and very interesting to me since i've been following the research and development of "graphene technologies" for some time.  The graphene superconductor targets the future of both energy and computing.  But graphene is also at the cutting edge of "faster, better, cheaper" water desalinization!  Nor does it take a rocket scientist to see that a graphene nano latice will have an enormous impact on methods of separating water (H2O) atoms to create an electical current - a cost free flow of electons.   Very well written research! excerpt: "an article in the recent issue of Nature Communications on a novel way to mass-produce so-called superconductors on the super-cheap - using no more equipment than the average home CD/DVD burner. Hacked together by a group of research scientists at UCLA, the ingenious technique is a way of producing layers of microscopically nuanced lattices called graphene, an essential component of many superconductor designs. It holds the promise of rapidly dropping prices for what was until now a very expensive process. You see, we've known about the concept of supercapacitors for decades. In fact, their antecedent, the capacitor, is one of the fundamental building blocks of electronics. Long before the Energizer Bunny starting banging its away around our television screens, engineers had been using capacitors to store electrical charge - originally as filters to help tune signals clearly on wireless radios of all sorts. The devices did so by storing and releasing excess energy, but only teeny amounts of it... we're talking millions of them to hold what a simple AA battery can. Over the years, however, scientists worked on increasing their storage capacity. Way back in 1957, engineers at General Electric came up with the first supercapacitor... but back then there were no uses for it. So, the technology

new startup, looking to be a contender in the mobile sync-share-store content sector.  Not sure what separates them from the Dropbox sector though.  big time funding.  Sandhill road.

Interesting, but do they have a plan to implement ODBC at the Cloud level?  It's one thing to provide connectivity, exploration and analysis to non Cloud data and transaction servers.  And another to connect the data feeds into next generation compound documents.  Seems to me this is an effective first step, but the value remains elusive.  Left a comment on this page. exerpt: The startup's offering, which has not been released yet, will connect to data stored in databases as well as the web and other sources, and adds a visual discovery component to make it easy for users to parse through this data and make sense of the information. The beauty of ClearStory is that it allows businesses to analyze internal and publicly available data at the same time and make this data easy for the masses to understand.

"Y Combinator-backed startup, Grid, is based around the idea that a tablet should be a great place for spreadsheets. Indeed, as Leong told me earlier this week, his idea is to reinvent the spreadsheet around touch, all the tools and sensors available on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, and the way normal people (as opposed to Excel power users) actually use them. "

It's game on between Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.  Interesting price configurations indicate that Cloud Computing is now a commodity.  One point in the article worth noting is that Cloud applications and services begin as "Cloud" apps - not desktop or client/server.  Bad news for Microsoft..... Excerpt: Microsoft, with its flagship operating system and rich line of related tools and applications, is watching the Windows developer community migrate to the cloud, but often not to its Azure cloud. AWS and Rackspace have offered cheaper raw online computing power. VMware-backed Cloud Foundry offers a development platform to build apps that can deploy on a number of vendors' clouds, and VMware recently made Cloud Foundry more Windows-friendly. Hewlett-Packard, which is just entering the cloud infrastructure market, is emphasizing its own development platform. To keep cloud app developers engaged, Microsoft must put the right resources on Azure's platform-as-a-service--developer tools, database services, and messaging services--but also make it affordable. Today's most creative new software projects often begin in a cloud, and a big reason is to keep startup costs low. Cloud computing is critical to the future of the Windows franchise.

Nice catch by Jason.  The lesson learned is one we've seen time and again.  excerpt: Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way. Do you remember Flickr's tag line? It reads "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world." It was an epic humble brag, a momentously tongue in cheek understatement. Because until three years ago, of course Flickr was the best photo sharing service in the world. Nothing else could touch it. If you cared about digital photography, or wanted to share photos with friends, you were on Flickr. Yet today, that tagline simply sounds like delusional posturing. The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought. Want to share photos on the Web? That's what Facebook is for. Want to look at the pictures your friends are snapping on the go? Fire up Instagram.

Byron Deeter is right, but perhaps he's holding back on his reasoning.  Silicon Valley is all about platform, and platform plays only come about once every ten to twenty years.  They come like great waves of change, not replacing the previous waves as much as taking away and running with the future.   Cloud Computing is the fourth great wave.  It will replace the PC and Network Computing waves as the future.  It is the target of all developers and entrepreneurs.   The four great waves are mainframe, workstation, pc and networked pc, and the Internet.  Cloud Computing takes the Internet to such a high level of functionality that it will now replace the pc-netwroking wave.  It's going to be enormous.  Especially as enterprises move their business productivity and data / content apps from the desktop/workgroup to the Cloud.  Enormous. The key was the perfect storm of 2008, where mobility (iPhone) converged with the standardization of tagged PDF, which converged with the Cloud Computing application and data model, which all happened at the time of the great financial collapse.   The financial collapase of 2008 caused a tectonic shift in productivity.  Survival meant doing more with less.  Particularly less labor since cost of labor was and continues to be a great uncertainty.  But that's also the definition of productivity and automation.  To survive, companies were compelled to reduce labor and invest in software/hardware systems based productivity.  The great leap to a new platform had it's fuel; survival. Social applications and services are just the simplest manifestation of productivity through managed connectivity in the Cloud.  Wait until this new breed of productivity reaches business apps!  The platform wars have begun, and it's for all the marbles. One last thought.  The Internet was always going to win as the next computing platform wave.  It's the first time communications have been combined and integrated into content, and vast dat

Excellent interview from 2010. Still worth reading. excerpt: "In December 2009 Jobs beckoned Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) and his partner, Arash Ferdowsi, for a meeting at his Cupertino office. "I mean, Steve friggin' Jobs," remembers Houston, now 28. "How do you even prepare for that?" When Houston whipped out his laptop for a demo, Jobs, in his signature jeans and black turtleneck, coolly waved him away: "I know what you do." What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. Houston cut Jobs' pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn't selling, no matter the status of the bidder (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius). Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market. "He said we were a feature, not a product," says Houston. Courteously, Jobs spent the next half hour waxing on over tea about his return to Apple, and why not to trust investors, as the duo-or more accurately, Houston, who plays Penn to Ferdowsi's mute Teller-peppered him with questions. When Jobs later followed up with a suggestion to meet at Dropbox's San Francisco office, Houston proposed that they instead meet in Silicon Valley. "Why let the enemy get a taste?" he now shrugs cockily. Instead, Jobs went dark on the subject, resurfacing only this June, at his final keynote speech, where he unveiled iCloud, and specifically knocked Dropbox as a half-attempt to solve the Internet's messiest dilemma: How do you get all your files, from all your devices, into one place? Houston's reaction was less cocky: "Oh, s-t." The next day he shot a missive to his staff: "We have one of the fastest-growing companies in the world," it b