… a study by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh … indicates that the number of venture-capital-backed startups that do not return investors’ money is actually closer to 75 percent.

How Your Failures Can Help You Succeed BY Christopher Hann, Entrepreneur Media.

Source: High-Tech Challengers to Silicon Valley. By Richard Florida, The Atlantic Cities.

UCLA, USC and Caltech collectively graduate more engineers annually than Stanford and Berkeley, major feeders of Silicon Valley. And L.A. tech staffers tend to possess more interdisciplinary skills than their northern counterparts, having developed expertise in cinema, communications, music, design and entrepreneurialism while pursuing engineering degrees… Silicon Beach culture, unlike Silicon Valley’s, is more consumer-oriented, drawing on art, entertainment and commerce to explore the intersections between technology and gaming, fashion, advertising and video… Hollywood studios are using profits from their cash cows — cable and television — to invest in digital entertainment. And Los Angeles is at the center of 21st century video production. YouTube has opened new production studios in Playa Vista to capitalize on the number of content channels originating here. According to PwC’s Global Entertainment and Media Outlook, annual revenue generated by film and video entertainment delivered online is expected to double from $5 billion in 2012 to more than $10 billion in 2016. Companies based in Los Angeles produce most of that content…

L.A.’s future: ‘Silicon Beach’. By Lucy Hood, LA Times.

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For Apple CEO Tim Cook, an idea … any idea for God’s sake. Apple has been hammered for months for not innovating anymore. Coming up with a pink iPhone just doesn’t cut it … For Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, a chance to take a deep breath. You probably read that the husband and wife — he of Google, she of 23andMe — are on the outs… For Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, how about another woman or two to serve on the newly public company’s board? … For Mark Zuckerberg, … Remember how he dropped $30 million in October to buy four of his neighbors’ houses so he wouldn’t have to worry about how some stranger might redevelop his neighborhood? … For Marissa Mayer, … passing out employee smartphones and instituting a free food policy (Who says there is no free lunch?), Yahoo recaptured a certain cool factor — almost enough cool factor, in fact, to negate Mayer’s move to ban her troops from working from home… – read more.

By Mike Cassidy, Mercury News Columnist.

Balaji Srinivasan, co-founder of San Francisco–based genetics company Counsyl, gave a talk to aspiring entrepreneurs about “Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit,” which outlined his vision of a tech world free of the constraints of government. “We need to build opt-in society, outside the U.S., run by technology,” Srinivasan said. This techno-utopian vision of a world insulated from big-government intrusion is not new to Silicon Valley, which has some deep libertarian roots. Google CEO Larry Page, during his Google I/O keynote in May, spoke of his desire to set aside a place in the world where technological experimentation can be conducted unfettered by regulation. (“There are many exciting things you could do that are illegal or not allowed by regulation,” Page said.)  Investor Peter Thiel has championed the “seasteader” movement, which would create floating societies off the coast of California just beyond the clutches of the U.S. government.  And the Blueseed project wants to put foreign-born workers on a cruise ship off the coast of Northern California in international waters to evade immigration laws.

Some 40% of Fortune 500 firms were founded by immigrants or their children… So were the firms behind seven of the ten most valuable brands in the world. Although the foreign-born are only an eighth of America’s population, a quarter of high-tech start-ups have an immigrant founder (see left-hand chart)… it is worrying that the proportion of start-ups in Silicon Valley founded by immigrants has fallen from 52% to 44% since 2005 … In America as a whole, the proportion has stopped climbing for the first time in decades… America has benefited enormously from immigrants’ resourcefulness and penchant for risk-taking, … But it lets in only 225,000 foreigners with special skills a year. This amounts to less than 0.1% of the total labor force.

~ Economist. From print edition.

Warns that the technology can be used to spy on — and record — your private activities. By Philip Elmer-DeWitt, CNN Money.

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Google’s mystery barge caught in Coast Guard red tape. By Andrew Couts, Digitaltrends.com
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In the past 90 days, thousands of people worldwide have opened a seemingly innocuous link to track a holiday package. Suddenly, all the files on their computer are encrypted… And that is exactly what happened last month at the Swansea Police Department. Cryptolocker ransomware took over the department’s entire computer system and the police were forced to pay a $750 ransom to get back control… That means purchasing a key, or software, to reverse the process. And victims must do that using the online virtual currency known as bitcoins … “Once you have purchased a bitcoin, then the transaction that you use that bitcoin in is encrypted, and therefore you cannot trace it,” … it appears to be the perfect crime.

Cryptolocker Ransomware Being Described As ‘The Perfect Crime’ By Chief Correspondent Joe Shortsleeve, WBZ-TV