In its ninth iteration, some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley will come together for the Founder Showcase, an event that has helped launch some previously unknown startups into success.

Along with discussing some of the coming trends for 2012, the most savvy investors of last year will be recognized during TheFunded.com‘s Entrepreneur Investor Award show. The awards are chosen by prominent entrepreneurs, and will be announced at the event on January 19th.

Only 175 tickets have been made available to the public, making this installment of the event the most exclusive in its history. You can buy your ticket now and get 15% off by using the code TNW.

Founder Showcase:

When: January 19th, 2012
Where: Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus, 1065 La Avenida Street, Bldg 1, Mountain View, CA
Tickets: Buy your tickets here, and use the code TNW for a 15% discount

During the event there will be a seed-stage pitch competition featuring companies that are younger than two years old and have received less than $250k in funding to date. The application period has ended, but if you have a startup and would like to be a part of the action, you can still buy a table at the event and have a shot to be included in the table pitch competition, that will feature the top three startups as voted by attendees.

The lineup of speakers is quite impressive, and include:

Mark Suster, General Partner at GRP Partners and Writer at Both Sides of the Table
Mike Maples, Jr., Managing Partner at FLOODGATE
Dave McClure, Founding Partner at 500 Startups
Adeo Ressi, Founder of the Founder Institute and TheFunded.com
Bruce K. Taragin, Managing Director of Blumberg Capital
Scott Hartley, Venture Investor, Mohr Davidow Ventures

Being so early in the year, this is a perfect opportunity to network with the brightest minds and most powerful investors in technology on the west coast. Grab your tickets now and we’ll see you there!

This year will be forever remembered as the year that we lost the most creative mind that Silicon Valley has ever seen, as well as one where a few rough Tech IPOs scared away potential future investors. We also said goodbye to some CEOs and tech founders, and Facebook stayed in the social networking driver’s seat.

Lets get into the year that was in Silicon Valley.

Steve Jobs

What can we say about Steve Jobs that hasn’t already been said? The founder and most memorable leader of Apple resigned as CEO in August, making way for the Tim Cook era. In his resignation letter, Jobs didn’t give an actual reason for leaving Apple, but suggested that Apple move on with its succession plan:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

Many assumed that the reason for Jobs stepping down was his failing health, and unfortunately that turned out to be the case when he passed away on October 6th. As a Silicon Valley icon, Steve Jobs brought Apple back to life, which launched the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 this year, showing that hard work and determination can indeed pay off. Even after his death, Jobs continued to make headlines, with his biography shattering records and topping charts.

Read all about Apple’s entire 2011 in our rewind.

IPOs

2011 was a big year for going public in the tech space. With much of the year being filled with rumblings about whether Facebook would go public or not, four other companies took the huge step of going for the IPO.

Here’s a timeline of big-name 2011 IPO filings:

• January: LinkedIn found a way to make money, so the time came to go public.
• February: Pandora went from nearly being toast, to becoming to the toast of tech.
• June: Groupon took the world by storm with its group buying model, but is the sizzle gone?
• July: Zynga relies heavily on Facebook for its revenue and game players, but that didn’t stop them from going for the IPO hailmary.

Unfortunately, most of these public offerings ended up tanking, but that shouldn’t stop companies from taking the leap next year.

Facebook and Yelp are the two companies to watch out for in IPO land next year.

Silicon Shuffles

A few major notable founders and CEOs left or were booted from their positions in 2011. Some of them included companies that were synonymous with “Web 2.0″, which was the beginning of the social web.

In March, Kevin Rose decided to resign from the company he started in 2004, Digg. After a short stint as CEO of the company in 2010, Rose decided to give the big goodbye to Digg this year. In many ways, Kevin Rose was a symbol of how cool it was to be an Internet entrepreneur, serving as a way more social and popular version of Mark Zuckerberg. His resignation came after an unsuccessful attempt to revive Digg’s community with a new version that everyone ended up hating. Don’t worry about Rose, he got funding for his new startup, Milk.

In September, Carol Bartz was fired as CEO of Yahoo!, over the phone no less. With Yahoo! seemingly having no leadership or direction, the rest of the year was filled with speculation on when Yahoo! would sell, and who it would sell to. Some of the names thrown around? Google, Microsoft, Aol, and Alibaba. No sale yet, and don’t hold your breath in 2012.

HP, which Steve Jobs had noted was “being dismembered, destroyed” fired its CEO this year, Leo Apotheker. However, Apotheker’s tenure didn’t even last a year and was replaced by former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

But it wasn’t all about high profile departures, as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey came back to the company in March to split time as an adviser as well as CEO of his Valley startup Square, putting 8 hour days in at both companies.

Facebook gets competition, remains king of social

The existence of a Google social network had been rumored for years, but this year we finally got to see what the company had come up with. In a huge direction change for the company, Google has decided to go all-in with social by launching Google+. In doing that, it shut down previous social failure Google Buzz.

Even though Google+ shows strong growth, Facebook remained the king of social in 2011. The company told us that they had 800 million users, but what was more impressive, it had 500 million users on the site at once.

Facebook didn’t stand pat amidst numerous privacy issues and launched numerous new features this year including Timeline. But what made Facebook the real king of Silicon Valley in 2011? The fact that it could bank 1 billion dollars in net revenue this year. Growth in users is one thing, features are another, but bringing in that type of bank puts it light-years ahead of Valley darlings like Twitter.

These are the stories that in one way or another narrated the entire year of innovation in 2011 on the left coast. What were your most memorable moments in Silicon Valley this year? Share them in the comments!

In a 2009 talk, here’s what he has to say about what it’s really like to start a tech company. Watch the whole thing, especially for the part about his conversation with Michael Jackson on a specific moment in the movie “The Wiz”.

Horowitz also discusses what it was like during the dot-com bubble and eventual burst, blaming it on technology not being quite there yet to support all of the great ieas.

It’s a fascinating must-watch for entrepreneurs at any stage of their career.

Silicon Valley is the term used to describe the region in the San Francisco Bay Area home to the world’s largest technology corporations. As Wikipedia says, ‘Silicon Valley refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California’. But now many of the Valley’s hottest high-tech companies are choosing to base their offices in San Fransisco instead of San Jose, Mountain View and Palo Alto.

DropBox, Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb and Square have all chosen San Francisco over the South Bay to house their company offices, many in the warehouse district of SOMA where rent is slightly cheaper than other neighborhoods and the architecture is often large industrial warehouses over Victorian structures. 

San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee recently announced he would give tax breaks for startups like Twitter and Yelp to keep them in the city and the city’s Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on a proposal that would grant payroll-tax exemptions for companies that relocate to a run-down section of Market Street and the seedy Tenderloin neighborhood nearby.

Many of Silicon Valley’s high growth startups are still coming out of  the South Bay — Palo Alto based Stanford, Mountain View based accelarator 500 Startups or Sunnyvale’s Plug and Play give birth to many high-tech startups. A large part of the investment climate is still based towards the south bay, but once the startups are launched they are choosing to live and work in San Francisco.

Venture Capitalist Shervin Pishevar recently launched Menlo ventures based in Sand Hill Road. The firm invested in Techcrunch Disrupt winner Shaker, but chose to base its office in SOMA’s Startuphouse – a new co-working space launching this year.

“San Francisco has a more diverse range of people doing interesting stuff, SOMA particularly has an exciting energy at the moment. It’s like a stack effect, the  silicon chip manufactures of the 70′s are based deep in the South Bay, the system manufactures of the first dot.com are based further north around Mountain View and Palo Alto and the high-tech companies of today are up in the city, “says Shaker’s Bear Kittay.

However, once a company grows to a certain size it would have a hard time finding real estate big enough to house its staff. Google recently bought more buildings by its Mountain View based campus and Facebook has outgrown its offices in Palo Alto, moving instead to Sun Microsystems’ old offices based in Menlo Park.

Many of the companies that were booming in the first dot.com era still base their offices in the South Bay. The area is also populated by silicon chip manufactures like Intel which still base its HQ in Santa Clara, and Adobe Systems, founded in 1984 is in San Jose.

Elias Bizannes, co-founder of StartupHouse says the secret to Silicon Valley is the people –

“The relationships made are the secret sauce. Because the cost of innovation has come down so much, younger people are able to start companies so it becomes more about the relationships made and it’s easier to weave the social fabric where there are more like minded people so young entrepreneurs are choosing San Francisco for the lifestyle.

During the first .com boom rental prices got too expensive in Palo Alto so it pushed people up to the warehouse district of SOMA where rent was cheaper. Now the heartbeat of the city’s innovation is in SOMA.”

As many startups move their data storage into the cloud, physical space for servers is also becoming obsolete. And co-founders in the early days are choosing co-working spaces over offices to deal with business.

But there is still plenty of activity happening south with the incubator Black Box Mansion based in Atherton and the accelerator for black entrepreneurs NewMe based in Mountain View. But as entrepreneurs from all over the world flock to Silicon Valley they are choosing San Francisco over the South Bay as the line between work and play becomes more blurred at a time when we are always switched on and available.

Do you think San Francisco is the new Silicon Valley? What do you think are the benefits are of the South Bay over the city?

Arktan, a small Silicon Valley based startup launched a new LiveBlogging tool today; the next evolution of event coverage, allowing publishers to incorporate their various social media accounts into a live blogging platform.

Arktan is the first startup to build a company powered by Echo StreamServer, a commenting and ratings engine we’ve previously featured, which is the technical backbone for Arktan to seamlessly scale its product in realtime.

“This product comes from the realization that the social web and its existing services like Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, TwitVid, Instagram, etc. are going to be the future of live blogging. It’s the first product to take the social web into the live blogging platform,” says Chris Saad, Echo’s VP of Strategy.

According to Rahul Aggarwal, CEO and Co-Founder of Arktan, this is the first Live Blog product that utilizes such a wide range of social media tools including Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, TwitVid, Instagram, etc. Writers can use the tool to tweet or post from the aforementioned networks and those items are streamed into an embeddable widget on the publisher’s page in realtime.

Arktan’s widget is simply the next evolution of current live blogging tools. It allows writers to say, “OK, I want these three Twitter accounts, this Tumblr and this Instagram account to be the sources for my LiveBlog.” It also lets writers include photos and videos from TwitPic, Yfrog, Tweetphoto, YouTube, TwitVid, and more right in their stream.

Arktan says their platform is designed to keeps visitors on the site with inline media. It gives publishers the ability to pull in nested comments like Facebook comments and @replies from Twitter, which is a first in the industry. All posts are highly social, including the ability for visitors to Like, Reply, Share and Flag.

Publishers can customize the look and feel of their live blog to match the colors, fonts and other styles of their existing website. Multiple journalists can stream onto one platform and moderation and spam detection capabilities are in-built so that site owners can control the conversation.

USA Network uses Arktan LiveBlogging to power Live Blogging on their “Character Chatter” sites to drive user engagement during popular TV shows such as Psych and Burn Notice. Recently, the artist known as Dr. Dre used the LiveBlogging platform to promote his latest album and Newsweek used it for its Oscars 2011 coverage.

The service, which will be constantly updated, costs $200 per month for now and is sold through Arktan.com or through the Echo App Store.

It sounds pretty cool to us- we’ll be giving it a whirl at our upcoming The Next Web Conference, taking place April 27th-29th in Amsterdam, Netherlands. More info here.

In this month’s issue of Wired Magazine, writer Ted Greenwald described the trending Silicon Valley meme, “WDYDWYD or Why Do You Do What You Do?” calling it the “hottest team-building meme since Outward Bound.”

The meme originated in 2004 at Burning Man by artist Tony Deifell who posted photos of strangers answering the questions on the Ning social network. The inspiration behind the meme originated with a call he received late one night from a young student working on a school project. She blurted out, “Why do you do what you do?” Deifell was quite taken a back, and like many people faced with the question, he embarked upon an existential meditation.

I couldn’t get the words out in a clear way. I tried to refigure how to make my answer more essential. I realized I needed to be more deliberate in my choices in the world. It haunted me.

Deifell has since carried WDYDWYD from the festival to the Silicon Valley boardrooms of the National Holistic Institute, Google and Twitter. The site, which he describes as an open-sourced art project, is still growing steadily on Ning.

Student Joe Moloughney founded the WDYDWYD Facebook group, calling it a worldwide community art project with 1,500 members. Their Twitter page has over 1,000 followers. Artists like photographer Bill Kennedy, author/cartoonist Hugh MacLeod and French performance artist Séverine Carminati have all got involved.

But this meme is still primarily just on the West Coast. So, what would the East Coast answer? I asked a few prominent East Coasters, “Why do you do what you do?”

Here are their answers:

“To someday be able to answer this question.”

- Ashley Casselman, Senior Associate at the World Economic Forum.

“I am an insecure short girl from Florida. I never considered myself enough.”

-Laurel Touby, Founder and SVP, mediabistro.com

“I do what I do because of the thrill of discovery. And becuase the world is changing at an incredibly rapid rate, and somebody needs to be there to chronicle it.”

- Seth Porges, an Editor at Popular Mechanics

“I love the Internet, sure, but I mostly do what I do because of the people in my industry.  It’s a world of movers, shakers, api-makers.  Everyone is smart, and on the cutting-edge of what’s next.  It’s simply the most exciting industry to work in, and also the most fun.”

-Soraya Darabi, Co-Founder of Foodspotting.

“Because I can’t stop…and I’m not sure I want to.”

- Julia Kaganskiy, Editor of The Creators Project and Founder of the ArtsTech Meetup.

“Because making the world suck less is SO MUCH FUN.”

- Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder of Reddit and Head of Marketing for Hipmunk

“I do what I do because I’m a huge nerd.  At RJMetrics, we use technology to solve complex, interesting problems for some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.  This makes for nerd paradise, and I wouldn’t trade it for any other job.”

-Robert J. Moore, CEO of RJMetrics.

“In my case, the answer comes down to “enlightened self interest”.  I am truly focused on the long-term goal of leaving the world a better place than I found it (the wonderful concept of ‘tikun olam’). As a pragmatic capitalist, I believe that can best be done by harnessing the powers of free market forces, and as a believer in democracy, I believe that society then needs to work collectively to tweak the margins to guide humanity in the right direction. As a result, I have created a unique and strange personal world surrounding me…like a high tech PeeWee’s Playhouse. I am an entrepreneur, angel investor, teacher, mentor, speaker, father, futurist and political activist, all of which taken together occupy me 16 hours a day, seven days a week, with an insane work and travel schedule. But I truly believe that I am having more pure fun in life than almost anyone else I know, and this combination of pleasure and purpose is Why I Do What I Do.”

- David S. Rose, Managing Principal of Rose Tech Ventures and founder and Chairman of New York Angels.

What makes our New York answers resemblant of our city? A touch of irony perhaps? A grittier sense of responsibility? A necessity to be edgier?

After asking so many of my peers, I gave it a think. I do what I do because every writer requires inspiration. So my fellow East Coasters, WDYDWYD?