Citation Index

What's wrong with European venture capital?  By Richard Titus
For most [Silicon] Valley-based VCs, if a firm is generating profits it's a sign they are not growing fast enough- and often this is viewed as a signal to engage in M&A to exit, often to private equity, a competitor or a larger corporate. Valley VCs want growth- double digit, quarter on quarter, growth- with a view that this growth leads to a bigger customer base, bigger market and a stronger defensible competitive advantage, which almost but not always leads to a bigger exit. Often these exits, both IPOs and to bigger corporates, are pre-profit if not pre-revenue. Contrast this to firms in Europe. I've heard board members hammer on businesses of less than two years of age, with double digit growth, to 'slow down that growth and make us some money'- a strange instruction when you contrast the internal rate of return of a dividend with the exponential returns of a double digit growth. This is particularly true amongst consumer internet companies, where 'scale' is really the goal before you can monetize effectively / More Europe's High-Tech News   111

Shares of Apple slipped 1 percent in premarket trade...   By Patricia Zengerle and Gabriel Madway[because] a report in the National Enquirer with pictures purporting to be of a thin Jobs arriving at the Stanford Cancer Center. The report is unverified. The report cites doctors, who are not treating Jobs, saying he has six weeks to live based on the photos. News   115

Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg to Meet With President Obama   By Jake Tapper  ... among many  business leaders in [Silicon Valley]  technology and innovation the president will sit down and talk to, as he continues to sell his State of the Union message.   110

Mobile Wars! Apple vs. Google vs. Those Other Guys By Peter Burrows
After Nokia's software surrender, the five-way struggle for mobile dominance heats up
It's been a big couple of weeks in mobile. Verizon Wireless finally got the iPhone. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) unveiled the first fruits of its Palm purchase last year. Nokia (NOK), the world's biggest handset maker, abandoned its once-dominant Symbian mobile software system and demoted itself to a kind of glorified contract manufacturer of Microsoft (MSFT)-powered devices. The struggle for mobile dominance has entered a new phase... / More 'Mobile Wars News'   19

Has Silicon Valley Relocated To Tel Aviv?  Chris Barth
Tech oracle George Gilder is not a fan of investing in alternative energy- he sees it as a worthless side pursuit that is diluting the power of Silicon Valley. So the chip guru is looking elsewhere for investment opportunities, namely Israel. 'Israel has become a new Silicon Valley just as our own Silicon Valley gets paled over by green goo,' he puts it bluntly. 'Israel is where it's at in the Middle East,' Gilder told Steve Forbes during his Intelligent Investing interview. 'And the leading edge of the U.S. economy today is in Israel, surprisingly enough. I was surprised to discover it, but in the last five years I've been increasingly turning to Israel for my new companies.'   18

Silicon Valley News Flash: Angel Investors Like To Make Cash  By Erik Sherman
... a secret meeting of 'super angels,' or high profile individual Silicon Valley investors... the super angels were 'colluding' to achieve such ends as counteracting the growing power of early stage venture firm Y Combinator, reduce valuations of new companies (so angels could invest less for a given percentage of a company), and work together to keep other investors from breaking into the market... if the claims are true then ... there could be some serious breaches of federal law...     17

The New $300 Million Silicon Valley Data Center 
Vantage Data Centers, a new company backed by Silver Lake, unveiled plans for a $300 million data center that is under construction in the heart of Silicon Valley. The company has completed construction of the first of three buildings located at a former Intel facility in Santa Clara, California. The 18-acre facility is the largest wholesale data center project on the West Coast. Vantage Data Centers is pursuing a wholesale data center model. The new facility uses the latest in energy efficiency technology and is designed for global Internet and semiconductor companies that need to scale their cloud-based data centers quickly and cost-effectively.   16

Start-Up 100: The Europe vs Silicon Valley debate is outdated and irrelevant By Sarah Lacy
First off, there is no comparison. Silicon Valley has an order of magnitude more companies, more big hits and more money flowing into them, and Silicon Valley - a fifty-mile stretch of land in California - can hardly be compared to a whole, nuanced continent. Europe has several natural disadvantages, most notably the fact that it's not a single large market, but rather a collection of small markets with very different cultures and languages. So each country in Europe has the same drawback from the get-go that any small to mid-sized, mature market has: It needs to sell elsewhere to build huge companies. And much of Europe has unfriendly labor laws that encourage start-ups to move elsewhere.   15

Entrepreneurship in Germany: what should be learned from Silicon Valley?
The new German government initiative 'Grunderland Deutschland' (startup nation Germany) aims to increase the number of business startups and looks to the US Silicon Valley for inspiration... the US has the highest share of startups of any industrialised country. Especially in the most interesting high-tech sectors, the US managed to expand its startup activity in the last few years, while the trend was negative in Germany (see chart).

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Why Berlin Needs To Become Europe's Silicon Valley  Dean Fankhauser
There's an exciting list of start-ups in this city and they're growing more rapidly than elsewhere in Europe. Is this a sign of things to come? It probably should be. Some of the most exciting start-ups include SoundCloud, Aka-Aki, Babbel, Twinity, SongBeat, My City Deal and the recently purchased Dopplr.   13

Working in France, in the Style of Silicon Valley    By JOHN TAGLIABUE
After the Internet bust, the number of European start-ups in the computer and telecommunications sectors began growing again in 2003, according to the Center for European Economic Research, in Mannheim, Germany.  

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Where in the world is the UK's silicon valley?   Chris Williams
Defenestrating the UK tech scene. The UK tech industry has never boasted a throbbing heart to match Silicon Valley... Decades of attempts to address the lack of a physical place for bright young minds to congregate have fallen flat: technology triangles, innovation incubators, and a hundred other EU grant-funded initiatives have failed to create anything remotely comparable   11

500 Startups Launches New Silicon Valley Incubator  By Ryan Lawler
Modeled on other startup incubators such as YCombinator and TechStars, the 500 Startups Accelerator program offers young companies work space in downtown Mountain View, Calif., as well as distribution and design help and access to more than 120 mentors... Typical funding in the program will range from $25,000 to $100,000 for approximately 5 percent of common stock    10

Failure is key to Silicon Valley's success  By Peter Day
No matter how many other places in many other parts of the world seek to emulate its success in spawning ideas and businesses, there really is nowhere else quite like it: not for balmy climate, not for energy, not for the confluence of really bright people, money, advice, marketing nous and successes that everybody knows about, off by heart. There's also nowhere like it for failures, ...   1