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Business strategists and government officials routinely visit Silicon Valley in hopes of learning how to emulate the area's wildly successful startup culture. Now, thanks to a new book by LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha, the curious can save themselves the plane ticket ...

A Swedish hospital recently announced that a cancer patient was saved after doctors grew him a new windpipe in the lab using a synthetic structure and the man's own stem cells. That might have sounded like science fiction just a few years ago, but today it is landmark news. Regenerative medicine has the ability to usher in radically longer and healthier lives, yet few are considering the implications...

The European Commission released a new report this week on privacy and social networks. Neelie Kroes, EC vice president for the digital agenda, expressed concern that most social networking sites don't make younger users' profiles private by default ...

Facebook is having a tough month. First, it was revealed that the company hired a PR firm to portray competitor Google in a negative light, and now it is facing an even worse scenario: government regulation. ...

Last week, media giants including the Associated Press, The Washington Post, and Dow Jones sent a cease-and-desist letter targeting the iPad app Zite, which aggregates news based on a user's Twitter and Google Reader activity. It may not be legal or fair for apps like Zite to collect content and present it absent the originator's advertisements, but many observers argue that this is where the industry is headed, whether anyone likes it or not...

Many of the world's largest tech companies were started by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but that doesn't mean that the startup mecca of the world will remain dominant forever. Instead, some argue that Silicon Valley stands in danger of losing its competitive edge to entrepreneurs in other parts of the world. ...

California is facing budget problems yet again, and once again state lawmakers are hoping to shake down Internet retailers as a fast source of revenue. A bill introduced by Democratic Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (AB 153) proposes to force out-of-state businesses to collect tax if they use an in-state company to generate leads. It's an idea that has been tested in New York and led to significant losses in that state...

In the latest WikiLeaks data dump, around a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables were published online. "Cablegate," as it is being called, has revealed some rather startling information. Among the tech-relevant secrets, the State Department tasked agents to collect DNA and other biometric information on foreigners of interest ...

By all accounts, cloud computing is the future. The market will grow at five times the rate of traditional IT products, IDC has predicted, estimating it will be worth US$55.5 billion by 2014. While the future should be rosy, some policy groups are warning that without proper protections, the sector could stumble hard ...

Cloud computing, technology delivered over the Internet, has become a hot area in the last few years. The technology marketplace moves at breakneck speeds, but it is still shocking when innovation almost completely wipes out squabbles like those over open source (OS) vs. proprietary software. ...

The genomics industry, which provides reports about disease risk, ancestry, and drug reactions based on one's DNA, came under fire last week as a Congressional Committee held hearings and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an unscientific "study" of the sector ...

Personal computing altered the world forever, and now the digitization of biology is poised to bring about sweeping change. Craig Venter's recent announcement of the first synthetic genome was a huge milestone, but many outside of Silicon Valley remain unaware of the "do-it-yourself biology" movement (DIY bio) ...

This week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised users that better solutions for privacy concerns will be released soon. It's the young executive's most recent attempt to quell anger over the company's decisions to force users to delete information if they wish to keep it private and to automatically share some data with third parties. Such moves have sparked outrage from many, and while all outrage might be equal, the strategies for dealing with Facebook are not...

During his homily this Easter, Pope Benedict argued that medical science, in trying to defeat death, is leading humanity toward likely condemnation. It's a position at odds with the value of life, one that the Church will likely revise years from now, replaying the institution's embarrassment over censoring Galileo ...

Silicon Valley is known for innovative ideas in technology, and now some of the area's greatest minds have come up with a new way to solve one of their biggest operational problems: securing foreign talent. It's called the "startup visa" and it's getting a lot of attention in both California and D.C., because it would help create new jobs ...

This year's Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference showcased a wide variety of gadgets and ideas, one of the most interesting being Microsoft's new "augmented reality" mapping technology. Clearly, exponentially growing technologies are set to change social communications, bringing up a number of touchy privacy and control questions ...

The Personalized Medicine World Conference in Silicon Valley last week showcased huge opportunities for new advances in medicine and personalized health. What remained unclear was who will take the lead, what techniques or products will win, and whether the medical establishment will go along or stand in the way ...

At the third annual U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum last week, top government and technology leaders gathered to discuss business and policy topics of mutual interest, such as online child protection and intellectual property issues. The United States and China are the world's two largest Internet communities, so the conversation has broad implications for the Net as a whole...

While Congress debates an US$850 billion healthcare bill with questionable benefits, leaders in the technology industry are quietly creating products and services that will truly reform healthcare. This Thanksgiving, for example, Americans can be appreciative of the incredible price decline in genome sequencing, one of the most important health advances.

This column is a response to "How to Solve the Net Neutrality Issue," by Sonia Arrison Free marketeers' primary argument against Net neutrality is that a government watchdog role in protecting neutrality is bound to be "political" -- and that any government agency will ultimat...