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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

Ten irrelevant technology companies

The great corporate graveyard is filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of technology companies that managed to go public and then fizzled. Still, most of them weren't going anywhere and never should have gone public to begin with.

But venture capitalists funded them, investment banks underwrote them, analysts wrote glowing reports about them, and you and I bought into it, gullible lemmings that we are. Sorry for being such a negatron; that's just the way it is.

Anyway, what's different about these 10 companies is that they were once important, maybe even exciting. And now, for one reason or another, they're fading slowly and tediously into obscurity. Like people, most companies go out, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Depressing, isn't it?… Read more

Which fast-growing NYC start-up is getting some googly love?

Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider has started a little guessing game: which anonymous New York tech start-up is getting backed by influential ex-Googler Chris Sacca, who left his job as head of special initiatives to become an angel investor?

On Sunday, Sacca wrote on his blog that he's looking for a "Web geek" for an "edgy little content company" based in Gotham, which "needs its first full-time tech lead."

This is a big deal, because powerful ex-Google executive muscle would mean both great press and deep-pocketed connections for the start-up in question. … 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

Gotham mayor tops blog's list of NY tech influencers

For the past few weeks, New York's tech scene has been semi-quietly anticipating the Silicon Alley Insider's inaugural "Silicon Alley 100" list for 2007.

Local entrepreneurs and enthusiasts have recently traded plenty of jabs, guesses, and "if I make it to the list, you owe me a drink" bets. Nate Westheimer, founder of start-up BricaBox, even launched a "people's choice" version.

The full list is set to officially go live later Tuesday, but CNET News.com managed to dig it up before its official debut.

In the No. 1 spot? New … 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