VCs are feeling pretty enthusiastic right about now. At least, that’s what the latest data show. In fact, the $13 billion invested in the second quarter of 2014 marks the largest quarterly investment total since the $13.1 billion invested way back in the first quarter 2001. All of this info is thanks to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data provided by Thomson Reuters.

Salesforce.com, already a big dealer of enterprise software, looks set to launch a whole new product line at its Dreamforce conference next month. The name: Analytics Cloud. Continue Reading via VentureBeat.

The CrunchBase dataset has now captured more venture exits than ever, so we decided to take a closer look at what successful startups can tell us about venture investing and the startup landscape.

This is a terrific article explaining the ins and outs of stock options, Continue Reading via CNN Money.

New research analyzing the log data churned out by applications developed on the Heroku platform as a service shows just how little of that data is actually useful to developers or devops personnel running those applications.

Combined Smartphone And Tablet Revenue To Exceed Entire Consumer Electronics Market This Year (IHS) Research outfit IHS recently compared the history of combined smartphone and tablet revenue to revenue from the broader consumer electronics (CE) market to compare future revenue trajectories for both markets. In doing so, IHS found that smartphones and tablets will combine for about $355 billion in revenue this year, which is 3% higher than the expected revenue for the entire CE market, which is roughly $344 billion.

Bay Area companies topped Forbes' list of the World's Most Innovative companies, taking three of the top 10 spots and six spots overall on the list of 100 companies, released by the business magazine Wednesday. Salesforce.com, the San Francisco cloud computing company in sales software, was named the world's most innovative company for the third year in a row. The company has used the money its high-valued shares afford it to purchase startups doing similar things for marketing groups.

When you start adding up all the IT budgets of every company and government agency, you start talking about, as they say, real money. Here’s the figure: $3.8 trillion. That’s the new figure that research firm Gartner said global IT spending will reach next year. And good news if you’re in the business of selling IT products and services, it amounts to a rise of nearly four percent from 2013. Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s head of research, made the prediction in a speech at an event in Florida today.

When comparing average annual software engineer base salaries and the number of employers currently hiring for software engineers across 20 of the largest U.S. cities, the West Coast leads the way. Software engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area earn the highest average annual base salary ($111,885), followed by those in Seattle ($103,196) and San Diego ($93,993) to round out the top three. Interestingly, 17 of the 25 highest paying companies are based in the San Francisco Bay Area.