The landscape of cloud technology has changed significantly since we started selling Google Apps in 2006, and our breadth of offerings has changed with it. Today, millions of companies and schools around the world turn to Google’s products to help them launch, build and transform their organizations in the cloud. Our commitment to bringing the best of Google to work has also grown substantially.

Most of us never think about the apps people use on the other side of the planet, but Dan Rover does. The Vermont native recently moved to Guangzhou, China, after getting hired as a product manager by WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app, as a product manager. As part of his move, Rover decided to go native, replacing the apps on his iPhone with equivalent Chinese ones. And as he details on his blog, it’s an entirely different universe of user interface and user experience design over there.

Richard Socher carries a resume that would seem to make him rather attractive to the giants of the internet.

Imagine you?re on your way to work. You walk up the stairs from the subway, and your coffee order is put in automatically. You walk into Starbucks, past the line, tell the barista your name, and she hands you your tall latte with skim.

If investors continue to funnel money into online lending companies at their current pace, 2014 may be the year that startup lenders finally break the bank ? or at least banking?s hold on the lending market.

It’s nice to be talented, but the old saying is true: “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”

The story of Facebook?s first decade was one of relentless, rapacious growth, from a dorm-room side project to a global service with 8,000 employees and 1.35 billion users, on whose unprotesting backs Zuckerberg has built an advertising engine that generated $7.87 billion last year, a billion and a half of it profit. Lately, Zuckerberg has been thinking about what the story of Facebook?s second decade should be and what most becomes the leader of a social entity that, if it were a country, would be the second most populous in the world, only slightly smaller than China.

Businesses can afford you. Other people are charging more than you, and they?re not necessarily doing more than you. There are programmers/designers/writers out there charging rates that would make your head explode. If they can do it, what?s stopping you?

Studies have shown the traits that correlated most powerfully with CEO success as well as the most common failures of bad leaders. Avoid extremes of assertiveness or passivity. The best leaders are supportive, not controlling, even in the military. Find a balance between tough and nice. Your leadership style must adapt to the environment around you.

?Tis the season” for giving presents – and giving back. Maybe lucky for you, a new IndieGoGo campaign can help you do both at once.

BUILD Boston, a four-year program designed to turn disengaged kids at risk of dropping out into full-fledged entrepreneurs, just launched a Holiday Giving initiative that?s running through Dec. 31.