venture capital

The mayors of San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland, Calif., have joined with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the Bay Area Council, and mobile network-technology provider Better Place to foster the development of plug-in electric vehicles and other elements of green infrastructure.

We first wrote about Bloom Energy back when there was next-to-nothing to know about them. The mystery surrounded why one of the nation's largest venture capital firms was funding a guy who had invented a new kind of ultra-efficient fuel cell.

Given that he was ousted from the top job at a struggling AOL, Jonathan F. Miller might not seem a natural candidate to advise its Internet rival Yahoo Inc. But Miller was instrumental in transforming AOL into an advertising company, giving him expertise in a field Yahoo must master.

In his four-plus years as chairman and chief executive of Time Warner Inc.'s AOL LLC, Miller made key acquisitions, including Advertising.com for $435 million in 2004, along with a crucial decision to shed AOL's roots in dial-up Internet access and give away content once reserved for paying subscribers.

Wait. Scroll. Scroll. Tap-tap. Wait. Wait. For many years, that was the typical experience of someone surfing the Web using a mobile phone or PDA, at least in the U.S. Although some content providers offered stripped-down versions of their sites specially designed for mobile users, most did not, and reading a page designed to be viewed on a PC on the small screen was about as much fun as sitting in a dark room reading a newspaper by flashlight.

Apple won't crank up the hype machine about all the new things an iPhone can do until its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9, but here's a small taste of what's in store: finding things to do in the neighborhood when you're at a loss.

Amazon Web Services, or more simply AWS, provides a wide range of web services for building technical infrastructure. It's not a replacement for having an ISP (or a data center, if your firm is that large), but it's a great way to avoid spending too much money on infrastructure before you even have a proven business model. It's also a brilliant way to scale up resources on demand, even if – and sometimes, especially when – you already have a successful business model.