Goldman Sachs and a Sale Gone Horribly Awry  —  THE business deal from hell began to crumble even before the Champagne corks were popped.  —  The deal, the $580 million sale of a highflying technology company, Dragon Systems, had just been approved by its board and congratulations were being exchanged.

In Defense Of Free  —  I have written so much about free here at AVC that it should be called AVFree.  In fact, I've even written a post with this exact same title (almost exactly seven years ago, the summer we invested in twitter, zynga, and tumblr).  —  I haven't touched this subject …

Microsoft Isn't The Only Tech Company Doing Forced Employee Ranking  —  Microsoft has been taking a lot of heat over its employee review process known as “forced ranking” or “stack ranking.”  —  But Microsoft is far from the only tech company doing it.  —  We've heard from employees at Dell …

Finland team uses Earth's magnetic field for phone indoor positioning system  —  (Phys.org) — Finland-based engineers have worked up a novel approach toward an indoor positioning system (IPS) inspired by the way certain animals—from homing pigeons to spiny lobsters—navigate their way with the help …

Zuckerberg Says Mobile Shift Is His Biggest Challenge  —  Facebook Inc. (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said his hardest job right now is figuring out how to adapt the world's largest social network to mobile devices.  —  Bringing Facebook's features to handheld gadgets …

How Kate Middleton's Wedding Gown Demonstrates Wikipedia's Woman Problem  —  According to Wikipedia's 2011 Editor Survey, just 9 percent of Wiki editors are women.  While the gender gap is better than it was—in the early '00s, it was more like 3 percent—and the proportion of new editors …

What Exactly Is GitHub Anyway?  —  Andreessen Horowitz announced a whopping $100 million investment in GitHub this week.  You can read commentary and speculation all over the web about what GitHub will do with the money, whether this was a good investment for Andreessen Horowitz and whether taking …

Nokia Cuts U.S. Price of Flagship Phone in Half  —  The price of Nokia Corp.'s flagship Lumia 900 Windows phone has been cut in half in the critical U.S. market, a little more than three months after the launch of the smartphone at AT&T Inc. stores.  —  The Lumia 900 hit the market …

Facebook endorses Google's SPDY networking protocol  —  Facebook has settled on a networking protocol for speeding up web content delivery.  In a W3 mailing list post titled “HTTP2 Expression of Interest,” Facebook engineer Doug Beaver outlined why the company has started implementing the SPDY protocol …

Requiem For A Digg  —  To me, the most interesting aspect of the Digg story is just how much of a central role the service has played in the larger story of our current tech scene.  It was a key catalyst in the era of social that we now live in.  And the company's diaspora has seeded many of the current crop of services we all use.