November 20th, 2009

Tech Awards: Al Gore's a bore, "cash prizes" . . . and amazing laureates

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 2:35 pm

Categories: Culture

Tags: Speech, Al Gore, Sales Channel, Financial Services, Entrepreneurship, Sales, Finance, Management, Tom Foremski

Last night I attended the Tech Awards Gala, which celebrates technology benefiting humanity, with the award of five $50,000 “cash prizes.”

Technology in the service of humanity seems a better description because all the 15 laureates chosen, communicated a quiet humility, patience, and a stubborn purpose in making a big difference in the lives of people. It was awe inspiring.

Many of the ideas were simple but powerful: distributing camping lamps with rechargeable batteries and recharging them every day at a central location so that kids can do homework and parents can read or work; attaching a code to medicines to check their validity through a simple text-message; and much more.

Unfortunately, only five of the laureates won a prize yet each of them deserved it and more.

Country-sized GDP ballroom

The Tech Awards are grand affairs, full of Silicon Valley “royalty” with some 2000 people decked out in black-tie and glittering gowns. If that ballroom were a country, it would vault into the top 100 in terms of GDP, for that evening.

Which is why it always strikes me that $50,000 per prize is a bit stingy, it hasn’t changed since 2001. But I have a solution:

- Place a pen and paper at every dinner place setting and play a game of picking the laureate you think will win.

- You get to see a short video focused on each laureate, you tick the box next to the one that’s your favorite.

- If you pick all five correctly your table congratulates you and you take home the central flower setting.

- At the end of the awards, you then have an opportunity to make a contribution to your favorite laureates. You fill out your credit card number, fill in the amount of your contribution and the money is divided among the laureates.

It’s a great opportunity to raise money because everyone is emotionally moved by the story of the laureates. The organizers are literally letting money walk out the door when it could be left on the table, collected, and donated. That’s my 2 cents.

The rest of the evening wasn’t as good as hearing the stories of the laureates. The presenters of the awards, big names like Michael Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, which founded the Tech Awards, were tedious attempts at inspirational speeches. All the right words but lacking in anything else.

The worst of the lot was former vice-president Al Gore, who received the Global Humanitarian Award.

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November 19th, 2009

Rewarding tech that benefits humanity

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 2:39 pm

Categories: Culture

Tags: Fuel Cell, India, Mobile, Battery, Health Care, Tech Awards 2009, Driptech, Fuel Cells, Healthcare, Benefits

The Tech Awards 2009 features a grand gala where five prizes of $50,000 each will be given to the best examples of technology used to benefit humanity.

Also, Al Gore will recieve the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award.

You can watch it live at 6.45pm this evening: The Tech Awards 2009 | NBC Bay Area

These are the The Tech Museum Awards - Technology Benefiting Humanity | Press Room“>winners:
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November 5th, 2009

GOOG Chief: Silicon Valley's secret is its weather

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 9:24 am

Categories: Culture

Tags: Silicon Valley, Google Inc., Weather, Venture Capital, Investment, Finance, Financing Startups, Tom Foremski

Silicon Valley has a solid history of 40 years of innovation, it has the best public and private universities plus numerous colleges; and it has the largest venture capital investment community. But what is it’s real secret?

“When I’m asked about this, and I’ve been asked this for years, I answer this the same: It is the weather. There’s a reason why generations of young people who are willing to challenge assumptions and so forth have ended up in the Bay Area, and the weather is not a small part.”

That’s what Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google told the Wall Street Journal.

I think the weather is a nice cherry-on-a-cake thing to enjoy. But I think people are here for the cake, the layer cake of fine universities, venture capital, and the smartest collection of people on the planet.

I’ve never had anyone tell me that they are here for the weather. Yes, people do say how nice it is that they don’t have to dig their car out of the snow each winter day, as they did in Michigan or elsewhere.

But if the weather is the draw then shouldn’t Silicon Valley be concerned about innovation centers springing up in Hawaii or in the Caribbean? Is the secret to innovation as simple as that? I don’t believe it.

For starters, San Francisco weather, where I live and where a lot of startups are based, isn’t that great. We get four seasons in one day, and three of them aren’t anything to write postcards home about. Some districts, like the aptly named Sunset, might not see the sun for months in the summer. Its residents have a pasty white sheen, no matter what their ethnicity.

So we will see Google recruitment posters on campuses promoting the good life: sun, fun, and php? It would seem so.

October 31st, 2009

GOOG is not making phones or buying newspapers

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 2:10 pm

Categories: Culture, Uncategorized

Tags: Google Inc., Phone, Telecom & Utilities, Tom Foremski

Google’s Andy Rubin, head of the company’s Android development, would like to clear something up: Google is not in the phone-making business.

Google: We’re not making Android hardware

On October 20 I wrote: There is no Google phone

I didn’t need to call up Google to ask, I knew there was no Google phone because I have been reporting on the company since its very beginnings and know and have met their founders and most of their top executives.

Every company has a core philosophy and culture and once you understand it it helps to guide your reporting.

The Street.com originated a story that Google is working on a phone. It clearly does not understand the company.

Google is not building an Android phone, nor will it buy a newspaper, like some have said it should buy the New York Times. Google doesn’t need to be in the phone business or in the newspaper business — it can benefit from other companies being in those businesses.

People think that companies can jump from one business into another. Companies are like trains on a track — once they are on one track it is very difficult to shunt them onto another track — even if it is an adjacent track. Even if it makes good business sense (which in both these Google examples does not make good business sense.)

October 27th, 2009

CultureWatch - traditional cafes or cafe office-spaces?

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 12:44 pm

Categories: Culture

Tags: CAFE, Cafe, Wireless LANs, Wi-Fi, Wireless And Mobility, Tom Foremski

Most of the cafes in my San Francisco neighborhood have people staring into their laptops, they are like libraries with piped music. Yet for hundreds of years cafes used to be centers of debate and interaction.

Some of the first newspapers grew out of the newsletters associated with cafes.

Today there is little conversation in cafes and when I do chat with friends or business contacts, I feel self-conscious, I feel I’m disturbing the screen focused concentration of other patrons.

It’s largely because many cafes are being used as cheap office space. Our modern workforce is rapidly turning into independent “consultants” and contractors performing digital work. But cafes weren’t designed for such uses.

If they are to be used as an office space why not have an area set up as a meeting room that could be rented by the hour? Or small booths for meetings? Why not have a fax and a printer available?

These days cafes seem caught in a limbo, they are neither good office spaces or good at fulfilling their traditional neighborhood roles.

But things could be changing. Some cafe owners are discouraging the laptop crowd by turning off the Wi-Fi and blocking power outlets.

Margaret Rosas pointed me to a Santa Cruz cafe whose owner has done just that and caused a local controversy.

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October 19th, 2009

Is there an East Coast tech revival?

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 3:03 am

Categories: Culture

Tags: Silicon Valley, East Coast, New York, NYC, Semantic Web, Mergers & Acquisitions, Advertising & Promotion, Corporate Law, Internet, Investment

There’s an East Coast tech revival underway, I’m told. The publicists for TechStartsUps.com say that Hulu and Etsy have been “overwhelmingly successful” and this is propelling New York City into “once again becoming a hot spot for creative people who make inventive and viable technologies.”

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September 11th, 2009

HP's Social Computing Lab and its fascinating research into Internet user behavior

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 12:04 pm

Categories: Culture

Tags: Hewlett-Packard Co., Attention, Social Computing, Internet, Social Networking, Marketing Research, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Tom Foremski

Is it possible to describe aspects of human behavior through algorithms? Hewlett-Packard’s Bernardo Huberman believes you can and he has the studies to prove it.

Mr Huberman has one of the more interesting jobs in the computer industry. He heads up the Social Computing Lab within HP Laboratories. It’s a team of about a dozen researchers studying how people behave on the Internet.

They look at fairly ordinary activities such as the number of YouTube downloads, the number of “Diggs” a web page receives, or the number of times people upload and share content. From such mundane activities his team can derive algorithms that seem to uncover aspects of human nature and provide a glimpse into things about ourselves that could be universal, that could very well be possibly hard-wired into our very being.

The key to this research is that the studies are extremely large, the sample sizes are in the many tens of millions. The larger the samples, the clearer are the patterns of human behavior that emerge.

“We did a big study of 70 million YouTube video downloads and also millions of Digg stories. From that we can now tell which content is about to go viral,” says Mr Huberman.

The study is part of the Social Computing Lab’s work on what holds an Internet user’s attention.

“Attention is a limited resource. We cannot produce more attention. It will be forever limited.”

The study showed that attention is a function of novelty. And that attention will decay in a predictable pattern as novelty decreases.

“We see the same graph, time and again. All content has the same graph of attention and decay.”

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September 2nd, 2009

Burning Man and geek culture

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 4:06 am

Categories: Culture

Tags: Burning Man, Internet, Development Tools, Advertising & Promotion, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Marketing, Tom Foremski

This week is Burning Man week, and in many ways, this is Silicon Valley’s unofficial alternative festival in that there are tremendous numbers of people from the Bay Area attending.

This is where Silicon Valley blows off steam. Yet Burning Man is far from a relaxing place. It is located in one of the most inhospitable places in the world, a huge dried out lake bed two hours drive outside Reno, Nevada.

Nothing grows here. This could be the surface of Mars. The temperatures at this time of year range from scorching hot, to teeth chattering freezing. Dust storms can leave you chocking on alkali dust and disoriented. And sudden rainstorms will leave you waddling through mud.

Yet out of this hellish place rises Black Rock City, which for about a week, it becomes one of the largest cities in Nevada. It has multi-story buildings, daily newspapers, dozens of radio stations, and an entire infrastructure of people and services.

And then it disappears leaving no trace at all.

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August 29th, 2009

Where have all the blogs gone?

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 2:15 pm

Categories: Culture

Tags: Media, Blog, News Magazine, Blogging, Advertising & Promotion, Internet, Marketing, Tom Foremski

When I started as a journalist/blogger five years with the launch of Silicon Valley Watcher, there were lots of blogs around. Om Malik with GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, etc. I was a newbie. But that was fine with me because that meant I didn’t have to get into tiresome “religious” debates about using strikeouts, commenting policies, updating protocols, and much more.

The blogs at the time were news-like but also very personal. I wanted to be less personal, I wanted to publish an online news magazine.

So it is with a sense of irony that five years later, the “blogs” have become news magazines and SVW has become more personal, more blog-like.

GigaOm, Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and others, have become online news magazines with reporters, editors, production staff. Just because they publish using a blogging platform doesn’t make them blogs.

They look the same as the traditional media publications of 2004, such as CNET’s News.com. The new media now looks pretty much the same as the old media it replaced.

Does this mean that the “new” media might be vulnerable to displacement by a new generation of “blogs” in the same way they themselves displaced the older generation of news sites? Maybe.

August 14th, 2009

Delete the hate - don't ban anonymity

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 3:31 pm

Categories: Culture

Tags: Anonymity, Internet, Web 2.0, Tom Foremski

There’s been a fair amount of discussion of online anonymity lately. Paul Carr, a columnist at Telegraph.co.uk wrote that there is no place for anonymous comments on the Internet. [‘Rascal! Your name!’: Schopenhauer vs the Internet trolls]

I’m in no doubt that if we forced everyone who wanted to respond to a blog post or online article to use their real name, the Internet would be transformed.

Andrew Keen, also writing at Telegraph.co.uk, is a supporter of banning anonymity and pseudonyms.

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