California,United States

Gustavo Arellano of the OC Weekly has been stay­ing on top of the sto­ry about the Dervaeses of Pasadena, California, a fam­i­ly of ur­ban farm­ers who have trade­marked the term "Urban Homestead." (See pre­vi­ous post). A week ago, the Dervaes Institute sent out a num­ber of DCMA take­down no­tices to Google, Facebook, and other sites no­ti­fy­ing them of "Allegedly Infringing Material" -- that is, web pages that use "ur­ban home­stead" with­out indi­cat­ing it is a li­censed trade­mark of the Dervaes (...)

The year 2050 is what the year 2000 was to fu­tur­is­tic thinkers like Walt Disney and Arthur C. Clarke. It's the new year that ev­ery­thing will change: robots will out­per­form us on the field of play, com­put­ers will outwit us in mat­ters of rea­son, and nerds will nev­er be lone­ly again. It's al­so the year that 100 per­cent green en­er­gy will be pos­si­ble ac­cord­ing to a bunch of neo-maxi zoomd­wee­bies from Stanford and the University of California-Davis. That's right, in 40 years we could be say­ing (...)

Above, a 2004 cat­a­log from an ap­ple tree com­pa­ny called Urban Homestead. Will they have to cede to the de­mands of the Dervaes Family to stop us­ing the term "ur­ban home­stead?" The Dervaes Family, who run a great ur­ban farm in Pasadena, CA, is catch­ing a lot of heat from ur­ban home­stead­ers. They are ob­ject­ing to a let­ter the Dervaes Family sent out a cou­ple of days ago to let blog­gers know that the terms "ur­ban home­stead" and "ur­ban home­steading" are trade­marks owned by the Dervaes (...)

Yesterday, I an­a­lyzed the Massachusetts IPO ecosys­tem.  To­day, I look at NY.  Unlike MA’s ro­bust pub­lic com­pa­ny ecosys­tem, where I count­ed 33 com­pa­nies with greater than $1 bil­lion in mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion, I was shocked to dis­cov­er how very few pub­lic com­pa­nies in the Innovation Economy that ex­ist in the Big Apple.  If you re­strict the geog­ra­phy to 30-45 min­utes driv­ing dis­tance and part of the “scene” (which en­cour­ages min­gling and pro­duc­tive tal­ent and idea shar­ing), you have to elim­i­nate CA, (...)

The web­site FormDs.com has post­ed a very in­ter­est­ing map with a break­down of in­vest­ment dol­lars over the course of the past year. The map caught the eye of Boulder-based ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Jason Mendelson - not sur­pris­ing­ly, as the map points to Colorado as one of the most en­trepreneuri­al states. FormDs.com bas­es its find­ings on the fil­ings, as the name sug­gests, Form D, an SEC re­quire­ment when star­tups and other pri­vate­ly-held com­pa­nies raise ven­ture cap­i­tal. By track­ing the­se fil­ings, (...)

This post is brought to you by Yahoo!, spon­sor of the Mashable Awards’ “Most Influential Social Good Champion” Category. Yahoo! keeps more than half a bil­lion con­sumers world­wide con­nect­ed to what mat­ters to them most. Learn more on the com­pa­ny’s blog, Yodel Anecdotal. Social good may be an am­bigu­ous term, but one thing is very clear — on­line giv­ing needs cham­pi­ons to help pro­mote, gal­va­nize and in­spire peo­ple to join in the cause. The Mashable Awards honors all sorts of achieve­ments, like (...)

‘Tis the sea­son for next-year fore­casts, so VentureBeat asked a few clean­tech ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists for their thoughts on clean en­er­gy trends to watch in 2011. Nat Goldhaber of Claremont Creek Ventures tells us that next year is The Year for some good old IPO ac­tion in green (we list a few of the com­pa­nies he thinks are good can­di­dates be­low) — as long as there’s not an­oth­er glob­al down­turn. In that case, “all bets are off,” he cau­tions. Peter Wagner of Accel says he sees next year as a year (...)

Earlier this week there was some con­fu­sion about out­lets re­port­ing that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss had filed an­oth­er law­suit again­st Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for steal­ing the so­cial net­work­ing idea they had asked him to de­vel­op for them back when they were all stu­dents at Harvard. While the Daily Mail sto­ry on the mat­ter has been tak­en of­fline, Radar post­ed a PDF court fil­ing of a Facebook brief to the U.S. District Court in California, where the Winklevii had ap­pealed their ar­gu­ment (...)

Back in the good old days ev­ery­one knew how many plan­ets there were, then sci­en­tists came along and screwed ev­ery­thing up. How could some­thing that was al­ways a plan­et sud­den­ly not be one? It made no sense. Chaos en­sued, peo­ple protest­ed, and sci­en­tists were thrown in pris­on. I'm not mak­ing up that pris­on part, ei­ther. It was dan­ger­ous be­ing one of the first sci­en­tists to go again­st the tra­di­tion­al view of what was and was not a plan­et. But, re­gard­less of the dan­ger, 467 years ago, (...)

If you are like most Americans, you live in a ci­ty or re­gion with a choice of two home land­line Internet ser­vice providers, if that. Over here in my corner of the Ars Orbiting HQ—San Francisco, California—I often won­der whether to switch from my AT&T DSL "up to 3 Mbps" plan to Comcast. I get the itch to do this dur­ing pe­ri­ods when my AT&T con­nec­tion in­ex­pli­ca­bly needs to be restart­ed ev­ery day for about a week, then goes back to per­form­ing smooth­ly for no iden­ti­fi­able rea­son. This (...)

<img align='left' src="http://pho­tos.mac­nn.com/news/1012/no­vatelmi­fi2372-sm.jpg" bor­der='0' width='176' height='120' /Novatel on Friday filed a law­suit again­st both Franklin and ZTE for al­leged­ly vi­o­lat­ing five patents re­lat­ing to its MiFi routers. The Southern District of California com­plaint ar­gued that Novatel in­vent­ed the core con­cept of a portable 3G router. Both Franklin and ZTE were try­ing to prof­it off of Novatel's suc­cess by copy­ing the ar­chi­tec­ture and func­tion­al­i­ty, (...)

Yahoo to­day launched a be­ta ver­sion of Yahoo Local, a ser­vice that pro­vides neigh­bor­hood-speci­fic news and other lo­cal con­tent. Limited in this ini­tial launch, Yahoo Local sup­ports 30 neigh­bor­hoods and ci­ties in the U.S., in­clud­ing San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale, Calif.; Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Royal Oak, Mich. In­stead of build­ing an app for this rich, high­ly fo­cused con­tent, Yahoo opt­ed to cre­ate it as a web app for both Apple iOS and Google Android de­vices as well as (...)

Lee Calderon was born in Southern California, where he lived, dreamt up de­signs, and cre­at­ed art, un­til mov­ing to col­or­ful Colorado about four years ago. His cre­ative jour­ney be­gan, per­haps like most bud­ding artists, close­ly sur­round­ed by a stack of pa­pers and loads of crayons. In fact, even to this day, those he en­coun­ters swear he smells like a box of crayon­s—or, at least, to his kids any­way. Shortly after study­ing ar­chi­tec­ture, Lee’s pas­sion for Gothic arch­es and fly­ing but­tress­es gave way (...)

Sorry for the ab­sence. The Pandia ed­i­tors have been out trav­el­ling (from ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the Korea con­flict in Seoul to tak­ing part in the Online Information Conference in London). Now we are back onhspace=”4″ track, how­ev­er, with a new list of search engine rel­e­vant ar­ti­cles and posts from around the Web. Making Copyright Work Better Online Google Public Policy Blog: We will pre­vent terms that are close­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with pira­cy from ap­pear­ing in Autocomplete. We’ll act on re­li­able copy­right (...)

This mon­th at Yahoo! Search you kept us busy with queries about who was lead­ing the pack in sports, pol­i­tics, mu­sic, and mat­ri­mony. Here’s a look back at a busy November and what peo­ple searched for on Yahoo! Search. The first big win­ners of the mon­th ar­rived on the very first day when the San Francisco Giants tri­umphed in the World Series, scor­ing their first cham­pi­onship since 1954. Searches for the Giants rose by more than 160% from the day be­fore their win, while those for their ri­val (...)

Six years ago this mon­th, First Round Capital was start­ed. &#xD;  It start­ed with a sim­ple thought – that while the world had changed tremen­dous­ly over the last 30 years, the ven­ture cap­i­tal in­dus­try had not .  So we asked our­selves a sim­ple ques­tion - what would a ven­ture fund look like if the mod­el was in­vent­ed in 2005 rather than 1975?    And over the last six years, we’ve learned sev­er­al things:&#xD; &#xD; That a small fund size is good and brings align­ment.  Alignment be­tween in­vestors and (...)

While Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s de­ci­sion to drop out of Harvard and move to Silicon Valley was a plot point in in the movie “The Social Network,” it looked like a wa­ter­shed event to many in the lo­cal tech­nol­o­gy com­mu­ni­ty. It was a call to arms for all who want Massachusetts to re­main a com­pet­i­tive en­vi­ron­ment for en­trepreneurs to build ven­tures that change the world. Over the last five years since Zuckerberg’s em­i­gra­tion, there has been a trans­for­ma­tion in the lo­cal start-up (...)

Kineto Wireless, de­vel­op­er of soft­ware that lever­ages Wi-Fi tech­nol­o­gy for mo­bile phones, has raised $3 mil­lion in equity and debt fund­ing, ac­cord­ing to a fil­ing with the SEC. Based in Milpitas, Calif., Kineto al­lows mo­bile phones to work on both cel­lu­lar and Wi-Fi net­works. Last mon­th, T-Mobile an­nounced plans to preload its Android phones with Kineto’s app for Wi-Fi call­ing. The com­pa­ny last raised $9 mil­lion in fund­ing in March. Investors in­clude Venrock Associates, Sutter Hill (...)

Zetta, a com­pa­ny that pro­vides cloud stor­age to busi­ness­es, has raised $11.5 mil­lion in a sec­ond round of fund­ing, ac­cord­ing to a fil­ing with the SEC. Existing in­vestors ­Foun­da­tion Capital and Sig­ma Partners con­tribut­ed to the round. Founded in 2007, Zetta pro­vides in­stant data re­cov­ery to en­ter­pris­es in the health­care, tech­nol­o­gy, en­er­gy and ed­u­ca­tion sec­tors. The com­pa­ny is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and has raised $22.5 mil­lion to (...)

A num­ber of de­vel­op­ments have un­fold­ed at the OpenStack Design Summit this past week in San Antonio. We've been fol­low­ing the news, see­ing a grow­ing ex­cite­ment about an ef­fort that looks like it re­al­ly is be­com­ing a full-fledged move­ment that pro­vides the foun­da­tion for an open cloud in­fras­truc­ture. Perhaps the most sig­nif­i­cant news comes from Eucalyptus Systems Co-Founder Graziano Obertelli who said he had been in dis­cus­sions with Rackspace and OpenStack about how to work to­geth­er. (...)