The AlwaysOn Global 250 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the Global Silicon Valley. Not only is the startup market thriving, creative new incubators, accelerators, and venture capitalists are ensuring that every stand-out idea has a chance to become a viable business model in the global technology marketplace. The massive technology shake-up led by the surge in on-demand and mobile innovation has blurred the lines between computer, laptop, tablet, and smartphone, giving rise to a complex world of interconnected, sophisticated data being used by voracious consumers and sophisticated business users.

The GoingGreen Global 200 list represents the top private companies that are taking maturing greentech research and pairing it with innovative technology solutions to produce the products and services that will become the next, great wave in greentech. The major greentech themes we’re continuing to explore this year include resource sharing and refining efficiency in almost all categories, especially in the areas of transportation and data-center power consumption.

The AlwaysOn Power Players in Greentech list honors the most influential people in the banking, government, venture capital, R&D, legal, and accounting world who support on-demand entrepreneurs that are bringing massive technology breakthroughs to the green technology marketplace. These individuals and their firms are the infrastructure workhorses behind the ideas that make the Global Silicon Valley an incubator for success, creating strong greentech companies that are building forward-thinking, indispensable, sustainable products.

The OnMobile 100 represents the top emerging companies that are creating new business opportunities in the world of mobile technology. While intense operating system wars have been raging during the last several years, mobile hardware adoption is continuing to make strong inroads into the computer technology userbase. Continued competition on the software side has led to a maturing mobile application industry that’s brought incredible breakthroughs, especially in the enterprise users. Smart and savvy application designers have learned that smartphones and tablets are sophisticated devices for all user levels and are becoming a de facto standard in the business environment.

The AlwaysOn Mobile Power Players list honors the most influential people in the banking, venture capital, legal, and accounting world who support technology entrepreneurs that are bringing massive technology breakthroughs to the mobile and wireless world. These individuals and their firms are the infrastructure workhorses behind the ideas that make the Global Siliconn Valley an incubator for success, creating strong companies that are building forward-thinking, indispensable products.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about how I process random inbound email and I thought I ought to share this with everyone. So here it goes.

I get a ton of unsolicited inbound email from people I don’t know. If the mail is from a person, it generally gets into my priority inbox and I see it. I expect that I get between fifty and a hundred emails in my priority inbox every day that are unsolicited and from people I don’t know.

Think about all of the amazing technology innovation that has impacted businesses over the last three years. Since 2011, we have seen an explosion in cloud computing, in mobile, in technology-enabled business services and in globalization. All of us feel more productive as professionals and our businesses feel more productive instutionally. As a nation, the US must be cranking in productivity. Killing it — particularly after rebounding from a recession, right?

Now look at the latest US productivity statistics (Q1 was just released last week):

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio ended the week down 0.8%, the NASDAQ was down 1.3%, and the S&P 500 declined 1.0%. Year to date, the AO X Fund is up 19.0%, the NASDAQ is up 13.4%, and the S&P 500 is up 14.1%.

Yogawear leader Lululemon surprised investors after announcing that its long-term star CEO Christine Day will be leaving at the end of the year. The news overshadowed a solid Q1 report with +21% revenue growth, +7% same store sales growth, and an upward revision for 2013 expectations.

In an interview with GigaOm a Youtube spokesperson said that 40pct of Youtube videos are coming from Mobile devices.

That is incredibly interesting to me. Why ? Because it means that Youtube has done a great job of training its users. They have trained them to understand that there is no reason to watch Youtube video on any device other than mobile. Watching video on a mobile device is good enough . That is great news for Youtube mobile monetization . Advertisers want to reach mobile users and Youtube can deliver.

There are 9 Gua Gua Guacamole Pits.

They house 2-7 recipes for “gua gua guacamole.” These are recipes engineered to double shareholder equity for no cash. For example, this recipe.

There are 13 recipes.

I spoke this past week at the LeWeb conference in London, which was a superbly well run event with a very quality production team. Kudos. The 20-minute video of my presentation is here if you’re interested.

And it was convenient for me because we also held our annual London board meeting of DataSift, who helps companies processes and analyze large volumes of social plus enterprise data in realtime.

The topic of the conference was “The Sharing Economy” and as I read many of the session title descriptions I realized that people would be talking more about “collaborative consumption” (think airbnb, taskrabbit, uber) than about why people are sharing more on Instragram & Snapchat.

For the last 10 years China essentially closed its search, media and social network software market to foreign companies with the result that Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Dropbox, and 30,000 other websites were not accessible from China. This left an open playing field for Chinese software startups as they “copy to China” existing U.S. business models. Of course “copy” is too strong a word. Adapt, adopt and extend is probably a better description. But for the last decade “innovation” in Chinese software meant something different than it did in Silicon Valley.

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio ended the week down 0.9%, the NASDAQ was up 0.4%, and the S&P 500 advanced 0.8%. Year to date, the AO X Fund is up 20.0%, the NASDAQ is up 14.9%, and the S&P 500 is up 15.2%.

Last week, yogawear leader Lululemon began selling its popular black Luon pants again after resolving the issues with the see-through material. The popular pants, which make up around 17% of all women’s pants LULU sells, were recalled in mid-April for being too sheer and resulted in former Chief Product Officer Sheree Waterson stepping down.

Today, Seamless and Grubhub announced the signing of a definitive agreement to merge two of the nation’s premier services for ordering takeout online. As Benchmark is a large institutional investor in Grubhub, we were actively involved in the merger process, and we are quite excited about the potential of the two companies coming together. There are many synergies – different geographic strengths, different core customer bases, and different product strengths. And of course, we are afforded the advantage of greater scale.

This is a five-article series on optimizing, leveraging, and relishing in being Canadian and entrepreneurial.

I’m calling the series WestVanPreneur because there is so much equity, engineering talent, and potential JUST sitting in basements all over WestVan (and downtown and Richmond…).

Who am I?!

Gerard Tellis will be presenting a keynote on “Creating a Culture for Unrelenting Innovation” at Silicon Valley Innovation Summit. Dr. Tellis is an award-winning author, Professor of Marketing, Neely Chair of American Enterprise, and the Director of the Center for Global Innovation at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He will discuss how incumbent firms often become too comfortable with their previous success, stumble and fail. His presentation will describe how to overcome this incumbents’ curse by creating a culture of unrelenting innovation in the workplace.

Recently, Salesforce.com announced plans to buy email company ExactTarget. I wanted to take a moment to provide a few thoughts on what I think this development means for Marketo customers.

Importantly, for those of you that are also Salesforce.com customers, there will be no change in our strategy and support for our best in class integration with Salesforce.com’s CRM platform. As recently as this year, Salesforce.com customers have rated Marketo as the best marketing solution, continuing a five-year streak of similar affirmation from the Salesforce.com customer base.