silicon

The one thing everyone wants to know about Christian Gheorghe's life is the one thing he won't talk about.

In Silicon Valley, where the top talent at the hottest companies -- the Zuckerbergs, the Brins, the Cooks, and so forth -- are household names and paparazzi bait, Gheorghe's name isn't in play. Though he is a Silicon Valley CEO, his company, Tidemark, makes enterprise-focused performance and financial management applications, certainly not the sexiest of products.

But to a category of people who matter a lot in Valley -- the VCs -- Gheorghe is a bona-fide hero, … Read more

To their shock and horror, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn realize that by landing an internship at Google, they are actually "looking at some sort of mental 'Hunger Games' against a bunch of genius kids for just a handful of jobs."

This scene is shown in the recently-released trailer (see below) for the upcoming movie titled "The Internship." The film features the two "Wedding Crashers" stars as they try to make it in the world of Google's high-tech interns. The only catch is that they're "so old" and aren't … Read more

Fame is an insidious little thing.

It seems like the only current currency. Get it and you're made. Keep it and you can get a maid, and a butler.

That appears to have been part of the thinking of Shirley Hornstein, who not so long ago made much of Silicon Valley believe she was an It Woman.

Sometime later, it transpired she was full of It.

Should the tale not be tattooed on your cranium, Hornstein was a dab hand at Photoshop. She dabbed her face into pictures of famous stars like Justin Timberlake, and Silicon Valley, known for … Read more

The dichotomy of reactions by Silicon Valley and Wall Street to Apple's most recent quarter are so far apart it's comical. At least, it would be comical if it didn't involve tens of billions of dollars flying out the proverbial window.

Apple posted a monster Q1, logging a whopping $54.5 billion in revenue and $13.1 billion in earnings. The company sold 47.8 million iPhones and 22.9 million iPads in the quarter, all records for Apple.

Apple's reward? A brutal sell-off on Wall Street that dropped the company's share price by 12 … Read more

As Manti T'eo and Lance Armstrong have discovered this week, you attain true credibility only when people make jokes about you.

Credibility -- true, natural recognition from the man in the tram -- is something Silicon Valley has craved for quite a few years.

Sadly, its first attempt -- Bravo TV's "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" -- delivered all the credibility of a rubber cowboy boot.

Here were vacuous people uttering vacuous thoughts in a vacuum.

It was not a hit. Indeed, Bravo says it currently has no plans to revive the corpse.

HBO, though, is undeterred by the interred. Indeed, it has ordered a pilot of a show currently named "Silicon Valley." … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Touch screens are so last year.

These days, touchless gesture control is the hot thing. Just last week, San Francisco startup Leap Motion, which developed a motion-control technology with sub-millimeter accuracy, announced a $30 million B round of funding. And at CES here, there are multiple companies showing off technology that lets users control their computers with little or no physical contact with a screen or a mouse.

One of them is Palo Alto, Calif.-based Elliptic Labs, which has pioneered an ultrasound-based touchless gesture control system. In a demo for CNET, Elliptic showed off its Windows 8 Gesture … Read more

Somehow "Mad Men" just sounds cooler than "Sili Men." Still, there's no telling what sort of martini and microchip soaked show some wild-eyed TV exec might concoct after seeing PBS' upcoming "American Experience" documentary on the origins of Silicon Valley.

Take a peek at the photo above. Just look at that chrome-y Fairchild Semiconductor logo in that oh-so-midcentury interior. Check out those natty suits and spectacles. And (sigh) look at that dreamy, tieless rebel in the foreground -- he makes Don Draper look like a wuss.… Read more

Last night saw some history in "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley."

Yes, given its rather tawdry ratings -- 20 percent of those of "Real Housewives," so rumor has it -- this could be the last episode ever. So the excitement was more palpable than that for the discovery of the tomb of a hitherto unknown ancient Egyptian king.

We began with grunting. Yes, Sarah (blonde lifecaster, recently recovering from not having breast cancer) and David (gay, vaguely sane) are working out.

Sarah has found a wonderful sponsor for the launch party of David's app. It's called … Read more

As "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" staggers toward an uncertain future, it's easy to wonder that the protagonists are in a similar position.

This evening's penultimate episode began with lots of dynamic speak from these partying entrepreneurs. There was talk of the coding/entrepreneurship axis, which sounds like a very dangerous alliance indeed.

But, within seconds, we had David (gay, relatively sane) visit Sarah (blonde lifecaster) in order to find out what had happened in the last episode.

No, he clearly hadn't watched it. So here he learned that Sarah had a fight with Hermione (Brit, blonde, … Read more