How important is the technology sector to the US economy? According to George Friedman, the author of the New York Times bestselling The Next Decade: Where We’ve Been…and Where We’re Going, technology is American culture. Rather than Coca-Cola, it has been the personal computer that has swept the world, spreading the American language and distributing the central American values of individual freedom and empowerment around the world.

It has been well over a year since we first looked at Glitch , a new massively multiplayer online game from Tiny Speck . At the time, they were in their very early alpha stage , but co-founder Stewart Butterfield expected a full beta to happen later in the year. Obviously, that never happened

Google continues to make its cloud-based Microsoft Word competitor-Google Docs more feature rich. And one of the goals for Google was to recreate the editing and writing experience in desktop applications within the Docs interface in the browser. Last year, Google upgraded its document editor that added new functionality to the browser-based application and today the company is bringing pagination to Google Docs.

The Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf are enjoying lots of free publicity right now. Each of their unique approaches to cleaner mobility has drawn a lot of hype

In the digital world we live in, there’s still something nice about postcards. They’re tangible, yet cheap

There were hires all around this week, from business development to interns, on our new weekly post covering hires among non-gaming companies on the Facebook platform. In particular Buddy Media hired a Director of Business Development and General Manager of Lifestyle brands. Nanigans hired a Vice President of Client Partnerships, TBD Digital hired a Managing Director of France and two VPs of Business Development and Vitrue hired a General Counsel, as well as a Director of Business Development.

The second most senior Democrat in the U.S. Senate, Dick Durbin, will propose a new scheme that would force online retailers like Amazon and iTunes to collect local taxes for each and every transaction

Inadco is launching today as a cost-per-lead ad network for display advertising. The startup is similar to an “AdSense for Leads.” The company is also announcing that Dave Zinman , previously the general manager of display advertising at Yahoo, is joining Inadco as the Chief Operating Officer.

Online booking and reservation system BookingBug has been bootstrapped for some time now, but today it announces the inking of a solid Angel round to the tune of $350,000 from a small group of Angels.

One of the largest exits of a venture-backed company based on the East Coast was when Right Media sold to Yahoo for $850 million in 2007. In this episode of Founder Stories , Mike Walrath tells host Chris Dixon how Right Media got started in the middle of the online ad bust, lost its biggest customer and almost went out of business, just before it launched its eventual business idea of an online ad exchange