Tech

Ding. Ding. It's 3 a.m., and your cellphone starts making its instantly recognizable, impossible-to-ignore you-just-got-a-text sound. Your heart starts pounding. Is a loved one hurt? Is there some crisis at work? You reach for the nightstand, pick up the phone and read: "Your number was selected as our iPad winner of the day! Enter 'IPAD' here to redeem!" As you probably know, you are not really a winner of the day, you are the victim of mobile phone spam, a modern, insidious annoyance growing at an unacceptable rate.

NationBuilder — a Los Angeles start-up that helps politicos and social causes build support for their campaigns — has gotten some big backing of its own. The company this week announced that it got a $6.25-million investment led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Former Facebook executive and Silicon Valley veteran Sean Parker participated in the investment and joined the board of NationBuilder along with Andreessen Horowitz's Ben Horowitz. Founded by Jim Gilliam of Brave New Media, NationBuilder combines technology and the Internet to help politicians and others organize and gather support for their campaigns or causes.

Google Inc. is about to add some muscle to its Southern California operations. On Thursday afternoon the company is hosting an opening event for its new 100,000-square-foot campus, located just a few blocks from Venice Beach. Speakers at the event will include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who plans to hail the new Google campus a sign of the progress of the city's technology industry, which advocates have begun to call "Silicon Beach. " Google first opened an office in L.A. in 2003 when it acquired Santa Monica-based Applied Semantics, and at that time had only a dozen employees in the area.

SAN FRANCISCO - Dropbox can now tick off one of the major benefits of being a booming tech firm - fabulous new digs, complete with cafe, gym and music lounge. Founder and Chief Executive Drew Houston gave the city's tech-friendly mayor a tour of the company's sleek new headquarters that sports major-league views of the San Francisco Giants' ballpark and the San Francisco Bay. The tour came just a day after Google introduced its own competing cloud storage service that lets users load photos, documents, and videos and access them from Web-connected devices.

Tim Sae Koo had an idea for a tech start-up, but the first-time entrepreneur had no idea what to do next. In January, at the advice of a friend he joined the inaugural class of tech accelerator StartEngine, hoping to turn his vision for Hypemarks - a website at which users create collections of their favorite links - into a bona fide business. Within three months Koo launched the website, and is now talking to a local investor about a substantial investment in the company.

Alexis Ohanian's company, Reddit, was based in New York four years ago when it decided to follow the yellow chip road to Northern California. "New York didn't feel like a place where things were happening," Ohanian said. "There weren't a lot of people having conversations about start-ups, frankly. " But this year, Ohanian headed back east. New York now has a hot Internet scene. There are marquee start-ups such as social networking service FourSquare and fashion website Gilt.

The gig: Andrew Bosworth, 29, is the director of engineering at Facebook Inc. and inventor of the social networking site's News Feed, a feature that broadcasts what your friends are doing on Facebook. He created the Palo Alto company's engineering boot camp, which helps new recruits get up to speed on Facebook's computer code and culture. A photographer who takes snapshots of company events, he's also something of an unofficial Facebook historian. Lucky encounter: Bosworth met his future boss at Harvard University in 2004.

It helped software and Web developers find jobs and attracted investors to Los Angeles. Now Twiistup, the event series created by entrepreneur Mike Macadaan to showcase the L.A. tech community, has been sold to an undisclosed private investor so it can expand. Tech communities in places such as Colorado, Florida and Switzerland have written to Macadaan asking for his help in creating Twiistups of their own. Twiistup, which debuted in February 2007, showcases promising start-ups at a twice-yearly bash that has been a change from more conventional technology meet-up events.

James Robert Hornbarger's high school counselor hated to break the news to him, but when she saw the misspelled word tattooed across his back, she felt he needed to know. "Angle," she said. The hand-sized tattoo was meant to refer to Hornbarger's nickname, Angel — unlikely though that sometimes seemed for the free-spirited young man from the small town of Elko, Nev. "He was so excited to show me his new tattoo," Maribeth Cassinelli recalled, laughing. "When I told him ... oh, he was devastated."