Citation Index

10 tips for dealing with difficult people. By Calvin Sun.
Some people are just plain hard to get along with. But you don't have to let them get under your skin. Calvin Sun offers advice for surviving your encounters with vexing customers and colleagues...   3: Have supporting evidence in writing...   5: Use appropriate phrases when needed * 'That's not what I said.' * 'That was not my question.' * 'Please let me finish.' * 'We're [actually] saying the same thing.' 6: Use 'I' rather than 'you' ... For instance, instead of saying, 'You never sent me that email,' consider saying, 'I never received that email.' 7: Separate the issue from the person ... 9: Turn the tables Difficult people like to take the offensive, and they like to put other people on the defensive. ... For example, if someone says, 'We can't do that,' ask, 'What CAN you do?'... 10: Express appreciation when appropriate. One hint: if you do thank or express appreciation to such a person, do it without smiling, because your words will sound more sincere that way. dif 

Apotheker Seeks to Save HP's `Lost Soul' With Software Growth By Aaron Ricadela
Leo Apotheker ..., shielded from the afternoon Bangalore sun by a vast white tent... vowed that as chief executive officer of Hewlett- Packard he would treat India more as a market than a source of low-cost labor for product development, as it did under his predecessor Mark Hurd... The new CEO says he's likely to buy more companies with software expertise, following HP's Feb. 14 acquisition of data- analysis company Vertica for an undisclosed price. ... 'I happen to know something about software,' said Apotheker, who spent more than 20 years at SAP, the world's largest maker of business-application software...he also wants to make better use of WebOS, the computer-operating system acquired last year when Hewlett- Packard purchased smartphone maker Palm Inc. for $1.2 billion. Starting next year, every one of the PCs shipped by HP will include the ability to run WebOS in addition to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)'s Windows... The move is aimed at enticing software developers to create a wider range of applications that would differentiate HP PCs, printers, tablets and phones from those sold by rivals./  See also:  NDA Experiment Set up by Mark Hurd   apn 

Work Like It's 1999: High-Tech Incubators. By Anita Hamilton
On the top floor of an ugly office building in Mountain View, Calif., a dozen entrepreneurial dreams are taking flight... If all this seems a bit 1999, it is... That's one reason new incubators like 500 Startups call their businesses accelerators instead. These new accelerators tend to invest less money in each start-up and receive a smaller stake of the company in exchange. For example, 500 Startups trades office space, mentoring and up to $100,000 in capital for 5% of each new venture it backs. TechStars, which was founded in Boulder, Colo., gives companies just $18,000 over a three-month period before showing entrepreneurs the door. The old-school incubator Idealab (founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Gross back in 1996), on the other hand, invests a minimum of $250,000 and keeps a 70% share of each firm... Incubators are spreading their money around as thinly as possible for good reason. The tech landscape is changing so fast ... that investors who want a piece of the next big thing must hedge their bets. "It's awfully hard to pick winners or losers at this stage," notes equity analyst Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital Markets. For every 10 investments, chances are only one will prosper. ink

Is Mr. Schmidt going to Washington?  By Levi Sumagaysay
... Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose 10-year reign ends next month, is on a list of possible successors to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.... Critics of Google have accused Schmidt, who has donated money to Obama, of having too cozy a relationship with the president./ See also:  Google's presence in Washington has never been stronger.   shmt  

Between 2001 and 2008, employment in high-tech industries in Silicon Valley ...
declined by about 17 percent, representing a loss of slightly more than 85,000 jobs:

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Market: Frothy, but no Bubble. By Olivia Oran
...  if we're experiencing days similar to the ones leading up to March 10, 2000, when the Nasdaq peaked at 5,048.62 before tanking a short time later. The subsequent dot-com collapse led to the liquidation of dozens of Silicon Valley start-ups, many of which were worth billions just months before. Today, 11 years later, Facebook's worth has jumped 30% to $65 billion just six weeks after Goldman Sachs(GS_) invested in the company at a $50 billion valuation... Unlike Internet pioneers ..., many of today's high profile start-ups are profitable, possess solid business models, experienced management teams and hundreds of millions in revenue. Facebook's revenue, for example, jumped as high as $2 billion in 2010 and its profit topped $400 million, according to media reports... Venture capital investments peaked in 2000, when firms poured in more than $100 billion to fund nearly 8,000 deals, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Total VC investment has declined steadily since then, with venture capitalists investing $21.8 billion in 3,277 deals last year. mrp  

Microsoft's Top Dog In Silicon Valley Talks ...   By Matt Rosoff
... Dan'l Lewin joined Microsoft to head up its Silicon Valley office in 2001 .. Lewin's efforts have helped Microsoft improve its relationships with its California competitors like Google  ... , and the company  [Microsoft]  now has about 2,200 employees there, including about 400 working on search...  He was a classmate of Google CEO Eric Schmidt at Princeton.  pth

Google's presence in Washington has never been stronger.   By David Hatch
Even though it didn't have a D.C. office until 2008, the company spent nearly $5.2 million on federal lobbying last year, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. That amount dwarfs the $2.2 million that Yahoo spent last year and puts Google in a money chase with Microsoft, which shelled out $6.9 million. Eric Schmidt, who steps down as Google CEO in April but will remain as chairman, is on President Obama's Technology Advisory Council and served as an informal adviser to his presidential campaign. Andrew McLaughlin was head of global public policy before being tapped as the White House deputy chief technology officer in 2009. And Sonal Shah, formerly head of global development, leads the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation... Consumer Watchdog asked House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., to examine Google's close ties with the Obama administration. It also wants a broader Justice Department investigation of Google along the lines of the years-long antitrust probe of Microsoft, which culminated in a 2002 settlement with the government / See also:  Is Mr. Schmidt going to Washington?  The Dirty Little Secrets of Search , Google 3G  xad

IPOs start partying like it's 2000. By Dan Primack
Initial public offerings in the U.S. are off to their strongest start than in any other year since 2000, according to data from Thomson Reuters... there have been more IPOs this year than in 2008, 2009 and 2010 combined.... More than half of the total offerings have been for VC-backed companies ...

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Google 3G. By Gregory Gromov.
Yahoo switched to Bing-powered search results in August 2010. Shortly thereafter, search specialists at Google began noticing that many of the results for Yahoo! searches were the same as those Google searches of the same terms... When Google published the search experts' findings, their colleagues at Microsoft only shrugged, essentially saying that such things happen, that it was no big deal. However, they immediately stopped copying Google's results. Yahoo! somehow skirted the debate altogether. However, it was not until later that the most interesting part of the story emerged. At the outset, Google's experts were very vocal in complaining about the abovementioned results. They then did an abrupt about-face, apparently accepting Microsoft's explanation. As if on a signal, all the once-spirited grumbling ceased. Both sides suddenly stopped discussing the story. The reason for this is that with the search engine market so out of balance, Google really needs at least a nominal competitor in the business... Conjoined twins Yahoo and Bing hold second and third places in the search engine market, protecting Google from allegations of monopoly, and making Bing more useful to Google than to Microsoft. / See also: Google Faces Another Antitrust Complaint in Europe   cnt

Whatever Happened to Silicon Valley Innovation? By Steve Hamm
... Meteoric rises and catastrophic collapses are the norm in Silicon Valley, of course. It's all part of the process of creative destruction that's one of the Valley's strengths. But ... things have changed in the information technology capital. Venture firms are shying away from ... large and risky bets they made in the 1990s,...The venture model for capital-intensive companies is "broken" ... The result is that venture firms are putting much less money into tech startups than in the past, and the money they do invest goes into less expensive, less risky deals, including social networking startups such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Digg... What really infuriates [Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel] is the concept of the "exit strategy." That's when leaders of startup companies make plans to sell out to the highest bidder rather than trying to build important companies over a long period. "Intel never had an exit strategy," he tells ... "These days, people cobble something together. No capital. No technology. They measure eyeballs and sell advertising. Then they get rid of it. You can't build an empire out of this kind of concoction. You don't even try"...  /See also: McNealy on the decline of Silicon Valley bcs

Making friends and influencing investors in Silicon Valley By Richard Tyler
British digital media companies head to Silicon Valley in search of investment, business partners and enlightenment... Mr Lawn says the concerns are valid based on his experience from three trade missions to the Valley. 'If you go to Silicon Valley as a UK company to get investment you probably will not get it. If you go out to set up a US operation, build a partnership or drive your US customer base you will probably get money alongside European investors.The US market is a big market for UK web companies. If you are not thinking about moving into it then in one sense what are you doing?' Mr Lawn says travelling in a group to Silicon Valley makes a difference. 'It's about strength in numbers, the British coming to the Valley'...   / More   Silicon Valley News"   cfg

China plans to build Zhongguancun into another "Silicon Valley"
Zhongguancun, a technology hub in Beijing, will be as synonymous with IT innovation in ten years as Silicon Valley is, according to a draft of the country's 12th Five-Year Plan... According to the zone's development plan, the total revenue of Zhongguancun is targeted at 10 trillion yuan (1.5 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2020, a big jump from the 1.3 trillion-yuan-revenue in 2009...The total revenue of nearly 20,000 companies in Zhongguancun was 1.55 trillion yuan last year, up by 20 percent year on year. The area accounted for 19.2 percent of Beijing's GDP. ggf

Why Silicon Valley Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Returning Home
... At a time when our economy is stagnating, some American political leaders are working to keep the world's best and brightest out. They mistakenly believe that skilled immigrants take American jobs away. The opposite is true: skilled immigrants start the majority of Silicon Valley startups; they create jobs. Meanwhile, entrepreneurship is booming in countries that compete with us. And more than half a million doctors, scientists, researchers, and engineers in the U.S. are stuck in 'immigration limbo'. They are on temporary work visas and are waiting for permanent-resident visas, which are in extremely short supply...gkm

In YouTube, Google finds a nimble model to compete with Facebook. By Mike Swift
... YouTube is emerging as a model for the more nimble, faster-paced company Google co-founder Larry Page hopes to foster as he takes the reins as CEO. That's quite a shift. While YouTube was a cultural phenomenon when Google bought it in 2006, for years it was bleeding money -- losing nearly half a billion dollars as recently as 2009, by one estimate... But now, YouTube's revenue has grown dramatically. Many Google employees increasingly see it as an attractive place to work, with a less bureaucratic environment that lets them run with their ideas. Page, by all accounts, is looking to inject that same energy into Google, spurring the mother company to innovate more quickly in its rivalry with fast-moving Facebook... The shift comes as the online video site is increasingly focused on revenue. Analysts disagree whether YouTube is profitable, and Google won't disclose YouTube's finances except to say revenue more than doubled in 2010. Critics of its $1.65 billion purchase have melted away...The site hopes to be as revolutionary as cable television, which reshaped TV a generation ago ... "I think 995 of the next 1,000 TV channels will be created on YouTube," said Hunter Walk, YouTube's director of product management. gzd

With a Little Help: New York, Meet Silicon Valley. By Cory Doctorow
This is what Silicon Valley can teach New York: make experiments cheap. Don't hire a pricy, outsourced IT company to design a new, exciting book-service for your company. Why not hire your own developers and a visionary tech person and try something. Wait until it fails, learn from that failure, and try something else. Your outsource IT company will hate you if you call them every 30 minutes asking to try a new feature, or to tweak or remove an existing one. But your in-house people will love the challenge and freedom of being allowed to fail fast, iterate, and learn. / As it was told by Robert Metcalfe, 'Silicon Valley is the only place on Earth not trying to figure out how to become Silicon Valley'. gdd

Silicon Valley's jobless rate climbed in January from the month before as employers trimmed seasonal jobs, the California Employment Development reported today [03/04/2011]. The unemployment rate in the beautiful (if bureaucratically named) San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan area was 10.8 percent, up from a revised 10.6 percent in December. The report for Silicon Valley came on the same day the U.S. Labor Department reported national job numbers for February... Nationwide, employers added 192,000 jobs and the unemployment rate dropped slightly to 8.9 percent. Unlike the local data from the state, the national job numbers are seasonally adjusted... By Frank Michael Russell   / See also:  Silicon Valley News  gde

/ According to some, this graph shows  the current technology boom that is centered in and around San Francisco.  For the latest on that projected 2011 upswing, please see  Silicon Valley's jobless rate climbed in January ...

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Israel: Leader of Business Innovation
Dan Senor, co-author of 'Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle,' discusses with CNBC how Israel has managed to become a leader in business innovation.rts

Bloomberg Covers Silicon Valley Tech Boom. By MATHEW LUSCHEK   138
How big is the current technology boom that is centered in and around San Francisco? Big enough that New York-based Bloomberg Television has hired 65 reporters and editors to cover it, as well as launched a new daily program that is broadcast live at 3 pm every day ... three of the four biggest companies in the U.S. -- Apple, Google and Microsoft -- are all based on the West Coast. /   Silicon Valley's next boom? Tony D'Altorio does not think so ... ftu