Silicon Valley | featured news

Facebook has filed papers for what's expected to be the largest initial public offering ever to come out of Silicon Valley and one of the largest in U.S. history. Ending months of breathless speculation, the 8-year-old social networking company has submitted registration documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that set preliminary goal of $5 billion. Facebook had discussed raising as much as $10 billion. Final pricing will not be set for months, and the size of the IPO probably will increase with investor demand. The filing sets the stage for an IPO in May.

When Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976, he couldn't have known the incredible footprint that Jobs would leave on the consumer electronics landscape.

Investors pile into Internet IPOs and start-ups, making overnight millionaires. House prices and salaries soar. Another dot-com bubble? Maybe, but with differences. As she unloaded groceries in the driveway of her Palo Alto home, Lisen Stromberg was approached by a real estate broker who asked whether she'd be willing to sell her five-bedroom house to a senior Facebook executive.

I have been awarded a golden ticket to the heart of Silicon Valley: the Thiel Fellowship. The catch? For two years, I cannot be enrolled as a full-time student at an academic institution.

The U.S. housing market may be struggling to regain its footing, but the $100 million sale of a single-family home in the heart of Silicon Valley shows that luxury properties are still in demand....

Google Inc co-founder Larry Page will take over as CEO from Eric Schmidt, a surprise that signaled Silicon Valley's most powerful Internet company was taking the offensive against fast-moving rivals like Facebook.

Many worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just like the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries. Google revolutionized the way people access information. Now it wants to transform how people get entertainment.

Most everyone in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street agrees: The eventual IPO of social-networking site Facebook could make its founder the world's richest 25-year-old. Yet CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems intent on deferring that multibillion dollar payday.

One of the creators of a technology that underpins millions of websites is asking people to protest against Oracle's attempted takeover Silicon Valley rival Sun Microsystems.

Finnish entrepreneur Michael Widenius - known as Monty - says that the European Commission must block the $7bn deal as a way to protect the future of MySQL, the database company he helped found in 1995.

How badly does the newspaper industry need new ideas? Here's the story I often tell when that question comes up.