Citation Index

Another Try by Google to Take On Facebook. By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
But Google+ may already be too late. In May, 180 million people visited Google
sites, including YouTube, compared with 157.2 million on Facebook, according to
comScore. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of
375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent
231 minutes.  Fac

Google isn't just taking on Microsoft...   By Cade Metz
It's turning Microsoft's aging Office business against itself. In addition to plugging Microsoft Office into Google Apps via Cloud Connect, Google has turned Gmail into a Microsoft Exchange backup service. It's offering a plug-in that transforms Outlook into a Gmail client. And, now, as Microsoft prepares to launch its latest online business productivity service - Office 365 - Mountain has called on Sinha to tell the world why the new Redmond suite pales in comparison to Google Apps.  ggl

The Silicon Valley guide to success in business By JOHN COLLINS

Get over failure and venture boldly forth: California's technology hotbed sets an example ... Here are five pieces of advice ... 1. EMBRACE FAILURE. In ... Europe there is a stigma attached to having set up a company that subsequently failed. In Silicon Valley, failure is seen as giving you experience - if you haven't failed a couple of times you are probably not ready to succeed. 2. IMPORT TALENT. ... the San Francisco Bay area and Silicon Valley are a melting pot of nationalities, largely due to talent being attracted to work in tech. 'All these great founders weren't from here. We imported them,' says Don Wood... Silicon Valley has always embraced diversity and celebrated great engineers.' 3. BE CONFIDENT. In California there is little fear of leaving a big employer such as Facebook or Google to pursue a start-up... And, ironically, in the Valley, doing your own start-up can actually be a good way to get a senior position with one of the big players. Google thinks nothing of paying $20 million for a fledgling firm simply to acquire its engineering and executive talent ... svg

Apple, Intel, Google, Others Allegedly Conspired to Stiff Workers. By Damon Poeter
A former Lucasfilm software engineer on Wednesday filed a class-action lawsuit against a who's who of Silicon Valley tech giants, alleging a conspiracy to fix employee pay and not poach staff away from each other in violation of anti-trust laws...The suit claims that an alleged "no-solicitation" agreement between the named companies resulted in employee compensation being reduced by "10 to 15 percent" as compared to "what would have prevailed in a properly functioning labor market where employers compete for workers." In addition to an alleged pact between the companies to avoid actively recruiting each other's employees, the suit alleges that the firms agreed to notify each other when making an offer to another company's employee without the employee's consent or knowledge. Another alleged agreement between the companies set a cap on pay packages offered to prospective employees...The suit alleges that Lucasfilm and Pixar first entered a "no solicitation" agreement with regards to each other's workers in 2005. The practice allegedly spread to the other companies named in the suit later...  cls

Will Israel's Electric Cars Change the World? By Karl Vick / Ramat Hasharon
The pricing will be in two parts: First there's the car itself, which the consumer buys outright, except for the battery. That ... comes with the "subscription," which is what ... access to the power infrastructure to run the car. The model is cell-phone coverage, with a variety of rate plans that vary with how much you drive. Rates for Israel are not yet final, but in Denmark, where the company is also setting up, the lowest rate is equivalent to about $300 a month for mileage of 6,200 miles (10,000 km); the highest rate - for unlimited miles - is about twice as much. The customers also pay a one-time fee equal to $2,000, but even so, in both Israel and Denmark where gas runs about $9 a gallon,..   the typical customers would stand to save 10% to 20% against a comparable gasoline car - and enjoy most of its satisfactions. "The car is very, very, very fun to drive," ....   car
 

Tech jobs boom like it's 1999. By Jon Swartz
The jump in tech hires highlights what some economists see as a bounce-back in the $805 billion U.S. tech industry that could eventually make a dent in the national unemployment rate of 8.8%. 'The majority of the lost jobs in California were in construction and manufacturing, so gains in tech may help,' says Doug Henton, CEO of market researcher Collaborative Economics... Nearly 150,000 tech jobs are expected to be added this year, says Sophia Koropeckyj, an economist at Moody's Analytics. In February, there were about 6.1 million tech jobs in the U.S., up 2.4% from a year ago. Yet there's a lot to make up for: From the second quarter of 2008 through the first quarter of 2010, during the economic swoon, 308,000 tech jobs were lost.'  job

Obama, Zuckerberg meeting highlights importance of Silicon Valley. By Cecilia Kang
President Obama and 26-year-old Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, a billionaire college dropout, may seem like an unlikely duo. But ... Obama was introduced to much of the nation through Facebook and Google's YouTube... Meanwhile, Facebook needs to have good relations with Washington regulators and lawmakers. It is under increased scrutiny by federal officials over how its social networking business - where information is the currency for business online - could curtail the privacy of consumers... Zuckerberg, who wasn't personally engaged in Obama's 2008 campaign like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, joins his business contemporaries relatively late. He and Apple CEO Steve Jobs only began to interact more closely with Obama in the past year. In February, both were part of an exclusive presidential dinner with a handful of CEOs .... /See also:  $Trillion scale of dinner. In other words Obama desperately needs a  Facebbok channel. 'Meanwhile, Facebook needs to have good relations with Washington regulators and lawmakers. It is under increased scrutiny by federal officials ...'   As it was told by someone  from Chicago, "you can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."  zuk

HP management shakeup continues
Hewlett-Packard named Martin Homlish to the post of chief marketing officer on Tuesday, the latest attempt by CEO Leo Apotheker to reshape management at the world's largest computer maker. Homlish was formerly marketing chief at Apotheker's last company, SAP, the German software giant. /See also: NDA experiment set up by Mark Hurd   nda

Seagate buying Samsung's disk business
Seagate, based in Scotts Valley, will pay $1.38 billion in cash and stock for the division. Seagate is playing catch-up with Western Digital, which became the industry leader last month when it agreed to buy Hitachi's storage business. /See also: Western Digital buys Hitachi's storage unit for $4.3 billion. .sea  

2010 was the most profitable year in history of Silicon Valley. By Brandon Bailey and Jack Davis
The combined stock market value of the SV150 hit $1.55 trillion ...  the highest level since the Internet boom of 2000... . But after laying off thousands during the downturn, many were cautious about adding new jobs...  While unemployment has been easing, state officials say the rate is still 10.3 percent in Santa Clara County, the geographic heart of Silicon Valley... Big companies also gobbled up scores of smaller firms last year,.. Net cash spent on acquisitions rose 47 percent, to $22.6 billion. All told, SV150 members bought 170 companies in 2010... companies from startups to giants are moving into social networking and mobile computing ... "a renewed level of energy and optimism in Silicon Valley." / See also:  Silicon Valley Top 150 Companies  prf

Microsoft Could Lose More Than Consumer Market To Tablets. By Paul McDougall
Businesses are starting to ditch Windows PCs and notebooks in favor of mobile devices from Apple and others, triggering little response from Redmond. The iPad and other tablets are taking a big bite out of consumer sales of Windows PCs, but Microsoft's dominance of enterprise computing is safe from slates, right? Wrong. New research shows that, contrary to what many pundits first believed, tablets are making significant inroads in the business market as companies look to give employees more technology choice and flexibility. That Microsoft won't have a true slate OS for at least a year could create even more space for Apple, Google, Research In Motion, and others to get their tablets on workers' desks...  tablets are headed to the enterprise in a big way.    tab 

Mobile-App Makers Face U.S. Privacy Investigation
Federal prosecutors in New Jersey are investigating whether numerous smartphone applications illegally obtained or transmitted information about their users without proper disclosures... The criminal investigation is examining whether the app makers fully described to users the types of data they collected and why they needed the information-such as a user's location or a unique identifier for the phone ... Collecting information about a user without proper notice or authorization could violate a federal computer-fraud law... The Journal tested 101 apps and found that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device identifier to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent a user's age, gender and other personal details to outsiders. By AMIR EFRATI, SCOTT THURM and DIONNE SEARCEY

app

Smartphone Platform Market Share:

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 When Is a Tech Company Dead? By Om Malik
Yahoo is dead. Microsoft is so dead. Nokia is dead... when a company will no longer be involved in generating the next round of real energy in the tech/internet world, and when they hit that point, they never come back to be an energy creator and so they are 'dead' in West Coast minds... What about Oracle and IBM as examples of large undead companies...? ....  IBM, despite its size, has managed to reinvent and reboot itself many times - from a typewriter maker to mainframe computers to desktops to a services-driven company. IBM has used its massive R&D spending to become young again and again... Oracle is an exception mostly because of its leader, Larry Ellison, who is a businessperson at heart, and who knows technology and perfected a buy-and-grow strategy for his company. What these two examples show is that even an older company can thrive if it: Successfully reboots and redefines itself for the future, so it can attract the talent to get it to the future. Is run by a technologically-savvy founder. mal 

Statistics offer glimpses into how Silicon Valley lives. By Scott Herhold
Sixty percent of the engineering and scientific talent in the [Silicon] valley is born outside the U.S. Nationally, that's the case for only 21 percent of workers. Of the total number of engineers and scientists in the valley, 28 percent comes from India, up from 20 percent a decade ago. sta   

You can't call "time out" in Silicon Valley. By Rob Enderle
Microsoft vs. Apple. When Apple announced the iPad, it declared war on the PC... Microsoft could finish and field Origami on tablets more quickly, or scale Windows Phone 7 up like Google initially did with Android to provide an interim alternative, and then market the result on advantages like full Flash support, better security, and better compatibility with more traditional applications. But, by not doing this, the battle may be over before Microsoft can field its alternative, as the iPad is now being integrated as standard in consumer electronics... Google vs. Apple. The news this week is that Motorola is thinking of building an OS and abandoning Android. Several other vendors are considering similar moves, and HP was the first to act on this problem when it bought Palm to avoid Android... If Android loses, it won't be because of Apple, it will be because Google starved it to death, Apple will just be the biggest beneficiary. amg  

Silicon Valley unemployment rate falls.
The unemployment rate in the Silicon Valley was 10.6 percent in February 2011, down from a revised 10.8 percent in January and below the year-ago estimate of 11.9 percent. This compares with an unadjusted unemployment rate of 12.3 percent for California and 9.5 percent for the nation during the same period. / See also: Tech Revival Lifts Silicon Valley  ; ...  layoffs shrink Silicon Valley total pay, but average pay per job rises   ; Dice's Tech Salary Survey Results: Silicon Valley 2009-10  une 

The first business incubator CzechAcclerator in Silicon Valley, USA,
has been a success and the Industry and Trade Ministry wants to expand the business incubator network as of next year... New business incubators are to start working in Singapore, Israel and Switzerland. "In the pilot round, we have covered for participants the lease of offices and related services in Silicon Valley," said CzechInvest CEO Miroslav Krizek. "In the new programme, we will cover participation in conferences and training courses, and buying licences. We will also provide some money for professional advisers and will partly cover stays and transport," Krizek said. As of July of the year there will be two business incubators available in the USA for Czech firms, one on the western coast and the other on the eastern coast of the USA...  cze   

UK startups benefit from Silicon Valley Web Mission. By by Matthew Finnegan
For the past few years a number of promising web technology companies have been invited to travel to Silicon Valley ... And this March another set of the UK's best growing companies set out to meet with industry leaders, investors and potential business partners... 'The original Web Mission was designed purely to get investment, however it quickly became clear that other benefits were there to be had from the firms in the US, ... It gives the possibility to meet competitors and collaborators and vitally establish business links ... In Europe particularly there is much more of a hierarchy and atmosphere in which people are less willing to learn or to share knowledge...This is certainly not the case in the Valley'...ukm  

The Search for Ingredients to Replicate Silicon Valley. By STEVEN M. DAVIDOFF
The truth is, there is no consensus on how to create this community ... many are trying and few are succeeding. France, Norway and Malaysia have all failed despite fervent efforts. In the United States, California still dominates. Thirty-five companies on The Wall Street Journal's 2011 list of the top 50 venture capital-backed investments are based in California. Mr. Zuckerberg started in Boston but went west to Palo Alto... No government is going to create the next Google, Microsoft or Facebook. The race is really one to create systems to nurture the next superstar company... While the payoff is uncertain, the rewards can be spectacular. dav   

Reality Check: Seven trends to track in mobile handset market. By Mitch Cline
1. Smart phones invading the enterprise... Security threats will be big factors in determining which companies aggressively deploy smart phones. 2. Smart phones in China ... more than half (53%) of Chinese respondents in urban areas currently own a smart phone, which exceeds the percentage of ... the United States. 3. Super phones ... can be thought of as the next generation smart phone, boasting a more powerful chip than current generation smart phones... 4. Mobile OS battles... 5. Smart phone and tablet convergence ... 6. Payments and banking go mobile... 7. Embedded features... Some of the biggest business opportunities in the smart phone business this year will be in providing smarter, more versatile and more reliable embedded software.  7tr   

Made in America: small businesses buck the offshoring trend. By Brendan I. Koerner
Labor costs in China and other developing nations have been so cheap that as recently as two or three years ago, anyone who refused to offshore was viewed as a dinosaur, certain to go extinct as bolder companies built the future in Asia. But stamping out products in Guangdong Province is no longer the bargain it once was, and US manufacturing is no longer as expensive... 19 percent of the companies that responded to an October survey by MFG.com, an online sourcing marketplace, said they had recently brought all or part of their manufacturing back to North America from overseas, up from 12 percent in the first quarter of 2010. This is one reason US factories managed to add 136,000 jobs last year - the first increase in manufacturing employment since 1997.

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Bring High-Tech Manufacturing Back to Silicon Valley. By Henry R. Hank Nothhaft
... the myth still persists ... that so long as America is strong in R&D and services, we can let others do the manufacturing. Unfortunately, there are three things wrong with that theory. First, our R&D and services are also being outsourced to China and elsewhere along with manufacturing. Which leaves us where, exactly -  other than in ever-increasing debt? Second, R&D de-coupled from manufacturing eventually results in the loss of incremental innovation which occurs on the factory floor and, inevitably, a leadership position. Just ask anyone in the semiconductor business. But third and most importantly, manufacturing is the most powerful economic force multiplier in the world, creating up to 15 additional jobs outside of manufacturing for every job on the factory floor... mnf 

New Rules for the New Internet Bubble. By Steve Blank
Paths to Liquidity: a quick history of the four waves of startup investing. * The Golden Age (1970 - 1995): Build a growing business with a consistently profitable track record (after at least 5 quarters,) and go public when it's time. * Dot.com Bubble (1995-2000): 'Anything goes' as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability. * Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO's, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels 'lean startup' era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity. * The New Bubble: (2011 - 2014): Here we go again ...  bln   

 Forrester Research CEO George Colony ... predicts Net links for billions of products
...  from 750 million devices connected to the Internet today to 14 billion by the end of this decade... With OnStar, GM has tagged 10 million or 15 million vehicles... GM knows every gauge in your car real-time. They know what CD you're playing, and they know what CD track you're playing. And, of course, your location and speed, how much gas is in your tank, et cetera. They aren't doing anything with it because they haven't figured out how to monetize it. for  

'The Start-Up Visa Act'
A group of lawmakers and prominent technology investors are trying to ease bureaucratic hurdles for thousands of foreign-born entrepreneurs as part of a broader effort to create jobs in the United States and spur innovation. A new bill - introduced ... by Senators John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat; Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican; and Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat - aims to give two-year visas to foreign entrepreneurs if they secure at least $100,000 in financing from qualified investors. After two years, the start-up must have at least five employees and $500,000. See more at Silicon Valley Backs Effort to Help Foreign Entrepreneurs  By EVELYN M. RUSLI    vis 

 
Five overhyped tech trends for 2011. By Bill Predmore
1. Google Chrome OS ... as businesses will ignore Chrome OS and consumers will be too busy playing Angry Birds on their iPad 2 to care. 2. Internet TV... Until the cable companies can be removed from the equation (or they deliver some innovative set-top hardware of their own) nothing in this category will live up to the hype. 3. The iPad as the savior of magazine publishers. While we should applaud (some) magazine publishers for reinventing their content to take advantage of all the iPad has to offer, it won't be enough to save them... 4. Tablets will eliminate the market for single-purpose devices. Despite any magical power it may have, the iPad revolution won't eliminate consumer demand for great single-purpose devices like the Kindle or Nintendo DS...  5hp   

INTEL® 4004 PROCESSOR CELEBRATED 40TH ANNIVERSARY
On November 15, 1971 Intel created the world’s first microprocessor: the Intel® 4004.