The smartphone has changed the way we do a lot of things, from consuming online content to communicating and taking photos on the fly. It’s important to note however that it has changed all of those things but has obliterated far fewer technologies than we once thought it would. Perhaps the most visible of the technologies it’s failed to transplant is the TV. The truth is we still love watching TV, especially if we have our smartphones next to us. That’s why so many TV outlets are investing big in making sure that they have a huge presence on social.

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Glassdoor already told us the happiest workplaces, and on Thursday it released its list of the best tech companies to intern at. Facebook has knocked Google from the top spot, which the search giant has held the last two years.

The list was compiled based on at least 20 former and current intern reviews from January of 2013 to 2014. The top 25 companies featured in the chart below were still hiring for interns as of Feb. 1, according to Glassdoor. Overall, there are 900 employers in New York City still looking for interns, 500 companies in Los Angeles, and more than 450 in San Francisco.

It’s been a few weeks since Qualcomm Ventures kicked off the fourth edition of its international QPrize competition, an initiative that seems to be taking on a life of its own.

The contest began in 2009 as a kind of global hunt for innovation—a way to find the next generation of promising, early stage companies developing new mobile and Web technologies. It is now open to startups in seven regions—North America, Israel, Latin America, South Korea, India, Europe, and China. Each regional winner gets a $100,000 loan (which converts into an equity investment), and a chance to win another $150,000 in a final round of the Q Prize competition.

“Everyone at some point has gotten a job only because they knew the right person — and those are usually the better jobs.”

This is Patrick Ewers, early LinkedIn director and relationship-building expert. Today, he makes his living teaching tech's most successful professionals how to get what they want by forging the right connections. What’s different about Ewers is that the bulk of his advice can’t be found in Networking for Dummies-style guides. It’s designed to be simpler, more genuine and effective at the same time. Case in point: You’ll never hear him say, “Fake it till you make it.”

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Last week, thirteen teams of government entrepreneurs made pitches in a "shark tank" environment to continue funding for their innovation programs through a new initiative at the Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) called HHS Ignite.   The HHS Ignite program "catalyzes early-stage project ideas that can be completed within very compressed time frames. Teams selected into HHS Ignite are guaranteed an appropriate amount of their time to complete the project. HHS Ignite provides a space in which small teams of employees can try something new in a start-up environment by exposing them to networks of innovators and equipping them with the methodologies and tools used by successful start-up companies.

Our love affair with chocolate is nothing new, but in recent years scientists have tried to uncover the source of our cocoa cravings. Scientific American editor Dina Fine Maron digs through the available evidence, looking for a morsel of truth.

Angel and venture capital firms invested more in seed and early stage companies last year than any time in the past decade (for details see the related Useful Stats article). Seed and early stage companies appear to be generating a great deal of attention from the venture capital industry, even as overall U.S. investment activity remains steady. Both seed and early stage investment continue to grow, a development that a recent CB Insights report attributes to the proliferation of new micro VC funds and multi-stage venture firms. Though year-end numbers are not yet available for angel investing, which represents a major source of financial support for seed and early stage companies, early reports indicate that activity levels continue their trend of steady growth.

Developing markets are advancing along trajectories that might seem scary to outsiders. Success will come to those willing to ride out uncertainty.

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Comcast announced on Thursday an agreement to acquire Time Warner Cable for more than $45 billion in stock, a deal that would combine the biggest and second-biggest cable television operators in the country.

For Comcast, which completed its acquisition of NBC Universal, the television and movie powerhouse, from General Electric less than a year ago, the latest deal would be its second big act to radically reshape the media landscape in the United States. And the merger is almost certain to bring to an end a protracted takeover battle that Charter Communications has been waging for Time Warner Cable.

There are many conflicting opinions about what troubled Web giant Yahoo must do to turn itself around, but critics and company leaders at least agree on one thing: fresh ideas must be part of the solution. As a result, Ron Brachman, head of the research division Yahoo Labs, finds himself working closely with new CEO Marissa Mayer, who took charge of the company in 2012. “There is a lot of two-way dialogue with Marissa and her senior staff,” Brachman says. “They expect us to be the thoughtful leaders in innovation that can tell you where the world and technology are going.”

Image: New direction: Marissa Mayer, seen giving the keynote at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, has renewed Yahoo’s research focus since becoming CEO. 

A microbiologist at the UCLA School of Dentistry has developed a mouthwash that successfully destroys the harmful bacteria that is the principal cause tooth decay and cavities.

In a recent clinical study, 12 subjects who rinsed just one time with the experimental mouthwash experienced a nearly complete elimination of the S. mutans bacteria over the entire four-day testing period.

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The pharmaceutical industry’s dependence on universities and small biotechs as the source of innovation is laid bare in an analysis of the origin of all the novel drugs approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in the three years from 2010 – 2012.

The analysis shows that 49 per cent of the products granted marketing authorisation during this time were originally discovered by the in-house efforts of pharma companies, with the remaining 51 per cent originating elsewhere. However, of the 94 products that received approval, 87 per cent were owned by pharma companies at the point the license was granted.

Image: European Medicines Agency headquarters in London 

Australian venture capital and later-stage private equity funds had a total of $5.95 billion available to spend on new businesses as of June 2013, as funds struggled to raise new capital after a particularly strong 2011-12.

Data released by the ABS today showed a total pool of 19.8 billion in venture capital and later-stage private equity funds, up 2.5 per cent from the previous year.

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SAN DIEGO, Feb 12, 2014 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Illumina, Inc. ILMN +3.04% today announced the launch of the Illumina Accelerator Program, the world’s first business accelerator focused solely on creating an innovation ecosystem for the genomics industry. Its goal is to speed the time to market and lower the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs, start-ups and early stage companies working on scientifically and commercially promising next-generation sequencing (NGS) applications.

Two of the most popular legal structures for small businesses are the LLC (Limited Liability Company) and the S corporation. Many small business owners have struggled over which is best for them. However, you may not realize that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s possible to have your cake and eat it too by forming an LLC and then electing S corporation status.

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If you own or manage a website, you probably refer to analytics to track performance, and help you strategize. It may surprise you, however, that 61.5% of all web traffic around the world comes from bots — both good and bad.

According to a recent report from Incapsula, a cloud-based application delivery platform, less than 40% of global web traffic comes from humans. In fact, 31% of traffic comes from search engines and other "good bots," while the rest comes from malicious bots.

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When looking at the no-ager, it’s worth bearing in mind that these are the people that reframing what it means to be old. Despite their actual age, these people don’t box themselves into an age category and approach life and technology with as much enthusiasm as a 21-year-old. The added advantage of the no-ager is that they have a wealth of life experience that younger people simply don’t.

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TechConnect is pleased to host 2014 TechConnect World, June 15-19 in Washington DC. The event, co-located with the 2014 National Innovation Summit the 2014 National Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Conference, delivers the world’s largest showcase and accelerator for industry-vetted emerging-technologies ready for commercialization. SBIR/STTR Phase II awardees planning to attend the SBIR Conference should consider the Innovation Showcase & Accelerator opportunity.

Don’t miss this opportunity to place your technology, your company, or your agency’s awardee portfolio into the TechConnect Innovation Showcase and Accelerator program to be matched with the world’s largest gathering of potential investment and corporate partners.

Thanks to a new community platform, hardware inventors, design and manufacturing experts, and financial backers have a new tool for bringing their next-generation hardware devices to the market. This new consumer electronics platform from HWTrek could change the way crowdfunded electronic devices and technology go from idea to prototype to funding to market.

By providing an opportunity to showcase new innovations in electronics, to interact and engage with industry experts, and to connect with hardware manufacturers, this platform offers a variety of benefits to inventors, including the ability to use crowdfunding to raise the money to launch their product.

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Entrepreneurship is glorified in our society today. I have enough experience under my belt to remember the “before” picture of entrepreneurship and it wasn’t always this way.

When I came out of school in the 80s, you were almost a misfit if you started your own company. Sentiment toward entrepreneurs at the time was like brackish water; they weren’t disdained but they weren’t heroes either.

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