Frédéric Filloux, better than anyone else before, on the troubles affecting news publishers’ business:

“The essence of what we’re seeing here is a transfer of value. Original stories are getting very little traffic due to the poor marketing tactics of old-fashioned publishers. But once they are swallowed by the HuffPo’s clever traffic-generation machine, the same journalistic item will do tens or hundreds of times better traffic-wise.

Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world? Is it the virtuous author carving language-smart headlines or the aggregator generating eye-gobbling phrases thanks to high-tech tools? Your guess. Maybe it’s time to wake up.”

The hackers and engineers of Y Combinator are doing what hackers and engineers do to any industry, they’re efficiently and ruthlessly disrupting the traditional model of venture capital and are going to destroy far more more wealth for their contemporaries than they create for themselves, as broadband did to entertainment, Craigslist did to newspapers, and Amazon did to traditional retailers. This is what outsiders, by definition, do.

Cloud computing is advancing faster than our ability to secure systems. Companies are rapidly moving their most critical data and information from file cabinets and secured servers to shared servers on the Web. Cloud computing provides significant cost savings and operational advantages. But it also unleashes a Pandora’s box of security concerns.

the party’s over for investors and startups in this space. The big growth is behind us. Revenues from social media have not lived up to the promises, and the vast majority of those thousands of startups are either dying or on th

Facebook, which has more than 800 million members and is expected to go public next year, currently employs some 3,000 people Sandberg said Facebook had plans to dramatically expand its overall workforce. “We will be adding thousands of employees in the next year,” she said.