Everybody knows that Bono — the legendary leader of the multiplatinum rock band U2 — hails from Ireland. Yet, his ties to Silicon Valley are almost as thick as his Dublin brogue.
Biotech funding: Companies searching for cures for cancer and testing treatments for crippling genetic diseases are capturing the interest of venture capitalists — and their money — more than any time in the last seven years. Also see the VC funding survey, 1st quarter 2015.
Troy Wolverton writes: Smartphones store a wealth of personal data and have access to sensors that can track users movements, making them tempting targets for scammers of all stripes, but consumers can protect themselves by taking a few fairly easy steps.
Lyft on Friday announced $150 million in new financing, the lion’s share of which came from Carl Icahn, an outspoken and influential investor. The deal proves, say experts, that the ride-hailing market is big enough for two companies — and Uber’s global domination is not as inevitable as Uber and its investors would like the world to believe.
There was no glitzy birthday party for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he turned 31 years old last week, but he did get plenty of questions at a town hall and a $1.2 billion gift from Wall Street.
Larry Magid writes: Yahoo’s Flickr, which has been around for 10 years, just had a major upgrade transforming it from an also-ran service to the best cloud-based photo storage and sharing service. Flickr now lets you store a massive number of photos for free and has some pretty amazing image-recognition technology, which does bring up some privacy questions.
Q&A: UC Berkeley’s Carol J. Galante, whose new charge is the formation of a housing center to serve as laboratory and catalyst for innovations in housing affordability in California and the rest of the nation, talks about making housing affordable.
Pigs gone wild: Silicon Valley engineers and others take aim at learning how to hunt.
Graduation speaker: Salesforce.com CEO, philanthropist and social justice advocate Marc Benioff challenged the UC Berkeley Class of 2015 to use the values the university instilled in them to change the world for the better.