Ad: Manage updates with the Download App
ie8 fix

valley

New Mexico, L.A., new rivals to Silicon Valley venture growth

Silicon Valley still dominates the venture capital world in deals and dollars, but it's got some young rivals.

A new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Financial, showed that the funding amount for deals in Silicon Valley grew 120 percent in the last 10 years--from $4.7 billion in 1997 to $10.4 billion in 2007. The number of companies funded also grew 41 percent, from 705 companies in 2007 to 993 companies last year.

New England, the No. 2 market for venture capital, experienced comparable growth over that time. In … Read more

The Silicon Valley 'high school cafeteria'

Ah, a breath of fresh air from a former Financial Times reporter:

We spend way too much time inside our small Silicon Valley worlds. It often feels as if I constantly see the 400 or so people that run this place, and that drive the main conversations here, it is like a high school cafeteria.

I liked it a lot last year, I still like the life here, but increasingly I think the best advice is to get out into the real world occasionally. Yet I know plenty of people that hardly ever, except for family occasions, spend any time outside of the closeted worlds of Silicon Valley.

What do you discover outside the valley and the technology world it venerates?… Read more

Newt Gingrich opens office in Silicon Valley

Newt Gingrich's conservative advocacy group, American Solutions, is coming to the modern home of American liberalism: the San Francisco Bay Area.

American Solutions' David Kralik told me Tuesday afternoon that the group is opening a technology office in Menlo Park to be close to companies like Google, Yahoo, and unnamed Web 2.0 firms. It's all about "embracing the latest technology and being there," he said. (American Solutions is a "527" political research and advocacy group.)

Right now the office is just Kralik, who says he may live in downtown San Francisco, but American … Read more

Silicon Valley's disappearing middle class

It might not seem like a big deal that Silicon Valley is losing its middle class - defined as those who make between $30,000 and $80,000 per year. That is, unless you want to create a company that employs normal people who make normal wages, which is just about every company on the planet.

By most accounts, Silicon Valley is doing very well, adding jobs faster than the US national average. But this lack of reasonably paid employees is worrisome:

The consequence of the shift may undercut some of the basic mechanisms of the Valley economy, according to the authors of the report, by making upward mobility more difficult. "If you lose the middle, it's harder to support the top," said Doug Henton, an economist at Collaborative Economics, a research and consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif., that helps prepare the annual report.

It's also hard to support some of the basic mechanics of open-source companies (inside sales, technical support, etc.). I suppose this is why MySQL "near-shores" its lead generation and inside sales to Boise, Idaho, and other companies do the same in Austin, Salt Lake City, etc. … Read more

Silicon Valley: Land of funding, partners, acquisitions...and few customers

Fabrizio makes a good point in his blog highlighting Openbravo's success but potentially also a shortcoming: The company is based in Barcelona, not Silicon Valley. For people in the Valley, the Valley Fetish is very strong. It is, after all, the source of all light and truth.

Fabrizio's point is unintentionally cynical: If you want to get bought for a "gazillion dollars," move your company to the Valley:

Why Silicon Valley for open source? Beside funding and partnering, think for a second about the open source companies that have been bought lately for gazillion of dollars: MySQL, Zimbra, Xensource, Trolltech. Where were they based? Utah? Barcelona? I do not thing so. They maybe started somewhere else, but they were headquartered in the Valley.

Where are the customers in that statement? The primary concern seems to be the exit. That's very Silicon Valley. This is why I encourage Silicon Valley denizens to take field trips to the real world where technology is a nice complement to life, but not life itself.… Read more

A personal nuclear reactor? Not so fast!

I enjoy reading the personal blogs of Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) and John Dvorak (PC Magazine columnist and host of Cranky Geeks), but I don't expect to learn anything there. The entertainment is value enough.

Today, however, I was surprised to see these two gentlemen linking to the same story on Next Energy News covering Toshiba's announcement of a "200 kilowatt" nuclear reactor only "20 feet by 6 feet" in size. Such a reactor could be installed in a garage-sized building and shared among the houses on just one residential block, the … Read more

Making whatever you want at TechShop

After covering three Maker Faires over the last year and a half, one thing has become clear: there are one heck of a lot of people out there who like to make things.

For many people, this means toiling away in a garage, or a small workroom, using whatever tools they have handy. But there are limitations on what most people can make simply because they don't have that many tools and certainly don't have easy access to industrial fabrication tools.

Well, if you're in or near Silicon Valley, you may not know that you already have … Read more

Open source and anti-hype

The Wall Street Journal notes the increasing frothiness and hype of Silicon Valley in today's paper. What it doesn't point out is that none of the companies mentioned are open-source companies. They're all "Web 2.0" companies with silly names and sillier business models.

Why no open source? In large part, open source doesn't crack the "hype-o-meter" indices because it's hard to sham an open-source company.

From the article:

The froth indicator that tech veterans cite most often is the befuddling business plan.… Read more

Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Alley: The cheat sheet

Yeah, yeah, we know. Tech's natural home is the Bay Area. New York is for everything else. But as TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and Silicon Alley Insider founder Henry Blodget blog their way into a full-on catfight over which one has the authority to predict the future of the dot-com industry, we figured it was time to give our readers around the world an understanding of two very different cities' very different tech scenes. From hot babes to tasty food, here's what you need to know about the fundamental differences between the Bay Area and the Boroughs.

Valley … Read more