You’ve probably heard that Dell’s planning on spending $1 billion to open 10 research and development centers around the world. One of them’s going to be in Santa Clara. The company’s aggressively expanding into networking, storage and cloud computing. In Santa Clara, it’ll hire “several hundred” people in engineering, sales, marketing and services. By the end of year, Dell expects 700 people to be working there, and a total of 1,500 within five years. There’s growing interest in green technology at big companies. About three quarters of global corporations are looking at investing in clean tech ventures. Ernst & Young says just under half would spend more than $50 million, and 12 percent would spend more than $250 million. More than 75 percent expect the R&D focus for their clean technology ventures to grow. They’re not just thinking of investment returns. They think clean tech can help make their companies run better.

Real-time Web analytics measures website traffic so companies can understand and optimize a site’s usage – fast. It used to be this was a specialized area. But no more. Today, the ability to collect and view data in real-time allows more people to get their arms around it. Sound interesting? If you’re a programmer you may already have the skills to hit the ground running here. For some companies, the core of their real-time engines are built in C. Then they add in things like Python and other tools that are more conducive to real-time situations. It’s a growing field of expertise. That’s a good place to look for opportunities.