silicon

It's been a hellish year.

I have experienced more disappointments than Kate Middleton in a Motel 6. I have even been told by a gnome that everything in the garden wasn't rosy.

But I never thought it would come to this: I heard a rumor that Bravo TV was going to cancel "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley."

Should your obsession with gazelle documentaries have kept you away from this opus, it involves six supposed tech entrepreneurs who go to a lot of parties and occasionally kiss each other and dance around with strap-ons.

Yes, all while trying to … Read more

Last week, we left our protagonists on "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" hanging on the end of a strap-on.

No, wait. It was Hermione (blonde, British, boozer) who was hanging on to a strap-on at the end.

Her brother Ben (short, pretty, pretty short) was livid with her, even though it was her birthday party. One doesn't play with sex toys in front of VCs.

Not unless those sex toys are social and can entice 100 million users within a week.

Ben reveals to Hermione something more important than whether they lost $500,000 to her dildo dancing: he … Read more

IBM has advanced the technology of silicon photonics, fabricating a microchip that has built-in components to send and receive data over optical links.

Researchers have built optical data links into chips before, but IBM's move is notable because it uses conventional chipmaking equipment geared for chips with 90-nanometer features. Today's chips use metal wires to exchange data, but optical links offer the potential of higher transfer speeds over longer distances.

The chip can include several optical components including wavelength division multiplexers that let the chip send and receive signals with multiple frequencies of light, an approach that lets … Read more

The other night I met someone who is utterly riveted by "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley."

It was Windsor, the stellar barperson at my local restaurant, Sushi Ran.

"Why do you like it?" I asked.

"Because it's great," was her excited reply. I probed. She insisted it was great "because it is."

I wonder how great she would have found last night's episode 5. It began with Hermione (British, blonde) embarrassed at her drunken psychotic behavior last week.

It's just the stress of getting funding, explains her brother Ben (short, pretty, … Read more

From the outside, it looks like a typical California suburban home: garage, driveway, tidy yard. But walk down the path leading to the front door and you'll find your first clue that a traditional family of four does not live inside. On the front porch are dozens and dozens of pairs of men's shoes, all removed before entering in order to keep the house as tidy as possible.

When we knocked, Carlos De La Lama Noriega, the manager of the house, greeted us and welcomed us inside for a tour. The main living space was clean and airy … Read more

Those watching "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" will have learned many things over its first three weeks.

They'll have learned that you can't get money from VCs just by knowing their phone numbers and fluttering your acronyms. They'll have learned that doing a start-up is so hard that you need to party a lot. And they'll have learned that date-cheating just isn't on if you're a lifecaster.

Last night's Episode 4 began with Sarah (fake blonde lifecaster) kissing her dog. This was presumably to make up for the fact that last week she didn't get to kiss Jay, … Read more

Superstar angel investor Ron Conway will no longer be part of the team of investors giving money to the dozens of startups taking part each year in Y Combinator, one of the world's most prestigious incubators.

Y Combinator said today that it is sharply reducing the amount of venture funding each startup coming through the program is given. For the last two years, each team was seeded with $150,000 in funding from Conway, of SV Angel, Yuri Milner, and Andreessen Horowitz. Starting today, that amount has been slashed to $80,000 per team, the incubator said, as it … Read more

I spent a little time last week trying to persuade my colleague Shara Tibken to audition for the second, New York series of "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley."

She seemed reluctant. I'm not sure whether it was the compulsory bikini shots or having to access a vast egotistical madness within that seemed to put her off.

Worryingly, viewers seem to be increasingly put off too. The Bravo Ratings site, which monitors performance, suggested that a fulsome 50,000 fewer bright young things cared to watch last week's second episode.

This led to Randi Zuckerberg, the show's executive … Read more

With the success of companies like Tumblr, Foursquare, and Kickstarter, New York's startup scene has gotten a lot of attention recently.

But despite the influence of those outfits and venture capitalists like Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, the Big Apple is a backwater when it comes to the world startup scene, according to a new report from the Startup Genome project.

In the study, New York City came in as just the fifth-ranked startup ecosystem in the world, trailing Silicon Valley, Israel's Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

To come up with its rankings, the Startup Genome -- … Read more