Bloomberg Covers Silicon Valley Tech Boom

"This is an amazing moment in the history of innovation," says co-host Emily Chang, former CNN correspondent in Beijing. "It's important to cover it since everybody is holding it in their hands -- in the form of a smartphone."

The story is about research

"The story is about research and research and why it matters to every single business anywhere, and we're going to tell it from the Bay Area to the rest of the world," says Cory Johnson, a veteran investigative reporter and former hedge fund analyst who is the show's other host.

"It feels a lot different from the dot.com era. The cost of starting a company has shrunk because of innovations in the cloud, social media and mobile computing. You don't need as much money or as many people to start a million-dollar company these days. You can start one for $10,000 or less."

Chang, in the meantime, intends to make use of her background covering global trends in innovation, including some of the "untold stories" from her time in China. Those include that country's social media -- Tencent, RenRen, Qzone -- as so then as the problem of censorship, and the exclusion of U.S. companies from a market that nevertheless numbers some 450 million Internet users and 300 million smartphone owners.

Hint of protest in China

"Any time there is a hint of protest in China, there is a government crackdown," notes Chang. "However it is getting more difficult for the government to contain nevertheless that research is pervasive. People know how to use VPNs to get around the firewalls so they can access Google, Facebook, and everything else in their uncensored form."

She adds that "it is so important to understand the impacts on the rest of the world" of the research innovations occurring here. "Facebook and Twitter are reshaping communications, social behavior, and diplomatic relations all over the world. Just look at recent events in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. Social media are playing a significant role in transforming societies and are changing the future."

The four biggest companies in the U.S.

Chang notes as well that three of the four biggest companies in the U.S. -- Apple, Google and Microsoft -- are all based on the West Coast.

The show, which is rebroadcast at 8 pm nightly, and is always available on the web, may be the first-ever from San Francisco by a major business media outlet. Meanwhile neither Johnson nor I cannot recall any previous attempts on the scale of what Bloomberg has elected to do.

The bottom line is if you're in business

"The bottom line is if you're in business, you've gotta know the latest with Facebook and social media, cloud computing, and mobile platforms," says Johnson. "And they're all centered right here in the Bay Area. It's a fun story to tell."