Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Want to geek out to the iPad? Check out http://www.ipad-answers.com Thoughts?
This is a little sister site of Mahalo.com that is focused just on the iPad. http://www.ipad-answers.com/
Thoughts?
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt are getting coffee at Starbucks right now!
Genius.... pure genius. The technology industry is know setting up
photo opps like Paris Hilton having lunch at the Ivy.
The daily London -- video fridays
Sent from my iPhone, but I'd rather be using my blackberry frankly.
OH PLEASE GOD YES!: Abba reunion http://bit.ly/9XxAD0
Former ABBA members hint at reunion. Will it happen?
http://www.mahalo.com/abba-reunion
STUNNING: SharesPost Launches Venture-Backed Index (Zynga 2.6B!)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: SharesPost <sharespost@sharespost.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 8:00 AM
Subject: SharesPost Launches Venture-Backed Index
To: " 
From: SharesPost <sharespost@sharespost.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 8:00 AM
Subject: SharesPost Launches Venture-Backed Index
To: "
Greetings from SharesPost:
This is a quick update on our community's recent progress. Since November, we've doubled the membership again - you're now connected on SharesPost to over 15,000 fellow buyers and sellers of private equity. Activity on the bulletin boards is also ramping up significantly - just since the beginning of the year, members have directly connected in negotiations for the sale of over $276 million worth of stock. In short, SharesPost is solidifying its position as the largest, most active marketplace for private company shares.
Launch of the SharesPost Venture-Backed Index
We are pleased to announce the launch of the SharesPost Venture-Backed Index, the first index to track changes in value of leading, private companies.
| VENTURE-BACKED INDEX |  | COMPANY INDEX VALUES | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| | | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Our index uses our transaction and research data to track changes in the value of a portfolio SharesPost listed companies. To learn more, visit the Index on SharesPost or read about in any of these articles:
- Dow Industrials for Startups? Pre-IPO index open (Associated Press)
- Facebook Valued at $11.5 Billion in SharesPost Index (Bloomberg)
- SharesPost Index Tracks Blue Chip pre-IPO Stocks (VentureBeat)
New Research Providers
We have also added three new research providers to our platform: Blueshift, GigaOM and Research 2.0. Now you can gain insight from seven different research firms representing more than 60 different analysts and more than a hundred different research reports.
Highlighted Bulletin Boards
In addition to the SharesPost bulletin boards you're probably already familiar with (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), we wanted to call your attention to these recently added companies: Digg, eSolar, Eventful, Lifelock , Playdom and TheLadders.
We hope to see you on SharesPost soon!
Best regards,
Greg Brogger, Founder & CEO
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
New York City Video Studio for This Week in Startups on April 8th?
I will be in New York City for the first Open Angel Forum on April 8th. Was hoping to do a This Week in Startups taping... does anyone have a studio or auditorium with webcasting in New York City? We could make an event out of it maybe :-)
ping mark@thisweekin.com and cc jason at calacanis.com
SHOCKING VIDEO: College student takendown by campus police in middle of class http://bit.ly/studentarrest
FROM MAHALO PAGE MANAGER: College student gets takendown and arrested by campus police for disrupting class; caught on video by another student.
http://www.mahalo.com/student-arrested-in-classTuesday, March 23, 2010
Excellent article on How to use frequent flyer miles http://bit.ly/9U0hGo
Some of our contributors in the how to group are making exceptional
pages these days.... this one one using your frequent flyer miles is
really well done. http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-use-frequent-flyer-miles
pages these days.... this one one using your frequent flyer miles is
really well done. http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-use-frequent-flyer-miles
Monday, March 22, 2010
Tomorrow is Starbucks Free Pastry Day http://bit.ly/bkkFIQ (coupon!)
from:
http://www.mahalo.com/starbucks-free-pastry-day Starbucks is offering its customers a free pastry as part of its FreePastry Day on the morning of Tuesday, March 23, 2010. Throughout the
U.S. and Canada, between opening and 10:30 a.m., all participating
Starbucks stores will offer free pastries to customers who ordered a
handcrafted, brewed coffee or iced beverage. Free pastries will be
given out until they are gone.6 In order to get the free Starbucks pastry, customers will need to have
a special Starbucks coupon. The coupon can be printed out via a home
or office computer or it can be shown to any Starbucks barista on a
mobile device.7 Information about Free Pastry Day is available on the
official Starbucks website and on the Starbucks Facebook page.8 9
Free Pastries from Starbucks
Starbucks customers with coupons will be able to choose from a wide
variety of free pastries when they order a beverage. These options
include croissants, muffins, bagels, breads, pound cakes, scones,
rolls, doughnuts, coffee cakes and cheese danishes. Pastry selections
may vary by store location. The offer, while officially good until
10:30 a.m. on March 23, 2010, will only be valid while supplies
last.10 On its official blog, Starbucks was promoting the fact that it has
made several modifications to its pastry recipes, including the
elimination of any artificial flavors and dyes from the food. In
addition, Starbucks has claimed that its pastries do not have any
artificial trans fats and also contain no high-fructose corn syrup.11
Jibe's killer feature (and why I angel invested)
Here is Jibe.com's (formerly LocalBacon.com) killer feature: it logs
into your social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn and let's you see
the connections you have in relation to job openings.
will send you an invite! http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/22/jibe-localbacon-relaunch/
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Friday, March 19, 2010
Steve Jobs ridding '66 BMW motorcycle in NatGeo feature:HIGH TECH,HIGH RISK,& HIGH LIFE IN Silicon Valley Oct-82
brilliant.... found at
HIGH TECH, HIGH RISK, AND HIGH LIFE IN Silicon Valley
By MOIRA JOHNSTON
Photographs by CHARLES O’REAR
SILICON VALLEY appears on no map, but this former California prune patch, an hour’s drive south of San Francisco, is the heartland of an electronics revolution that may prove as far-reaching as the industrial revolution of the 19th century.
It is a place where fast fortunes are made, corporate head-hunting is profitable sport, and seven-day workweeks send cutting-edge technology tumbling over itself in its competitive rush to the marketplace.
Not surprisingly, flying—fast, challenging, and risky—is a sport that appeals powerfully to Silicon Valley men such as Bob Noyce, who snatches every chance to fly his twin-engine Turbo Commander to Aspen to ski, to his Intel plant in Phoenix, or just to wheel in the sky around Silicon Valley.
At age 54, he is one of the grand old men of an industry so young that its pioneers are scarcely in their 50s, yet so powerful that it is fast becoming known as the oil business of the eighties. Noyce had a key role in inventing the integrated circuit, the tiny computer chip that is the brains and basic building block of virtually all of today’s electronic equipment, providing the quantum leap that created much of the wealth that spreads below his wings in a golden tide of purring Mercedes-Benzes and half-million-dollar homes in the hills. From the air the valley itself, with its grid of roads and rectangular buildings, has taken on the look of an integrated circuit.
Fifty years ago it was a landscape of orchards supplying half of the world’s dried prunes. Even through the sixties, it bloomed with plums, pears, apricots, and cherries, one of the nation’s most bountiful agricultural regions. Today only 13,000 acres of orchards survive out of an original 100,000. By the late 1960s, as industry surpassed agriculture as Santa Clara County’s economic base, buildings of the valley’s many semiconductor companies were beginning to fill the region from Palo Alto to San Jose, named in 1980 as the nation’s fastest growing city.
Yet this dynamic growth happens behind a deceptively sedate facade. Driving through Silicon Valley, I am flanked by a monotone sprawl of low rectangular buildings, on which corporate nameplates display fusions of high-technology words that give few clues as to what goes on inside: Siltec, Avantek, Intersil, Signetics, Intel, Synertek. Inside, an intense concentration of brains, innovation, and enterprising zeal creates products that have captured one-fifth of the estimated 16-billion-dollar worldwide semiconductor market. And, despite recession, more of the aggressive little start-up companies that are the valley’s backbone are constantly being born.
Befriending the computer, and putting it to work and play in daily life a decade before most of us found the courage to touch a keyboard, Silicon Valley and its families may well be a glimpse of a computer-and-communications culture that is the prototype of the future.
The freewheeling egalitarianism that has replaced the rural pace is nowhere more visible than at Intel, one of the valley’s most innovative semiconductor companies. Leisure-time pilot Bob Noyce, a physicist, and Gordon Moore, a chemist, run Intel from modest cubicles separated from a surrounding sea of cubicles only by head-high movable partitions. Here, at the highest executive level, sport shirts and accessibility have replaced corporate pinstripes and wood-paneled boardrooms. Noyce says of his Spartan habitat, “It makes you feel as if you’re in touch with what’s going on.”
The “Intel culture,” as they call it, fanned with messianic zeal by co-founder Andy Grove, has produced the microprocessor, an all-purpose “computer on a chip” that can be adapted to infinite uses, the chip that opened the era of personal computers.
This innovative spirit not only is the life-blood of Silicon Valley but also may be the key to its survival in an increasingly intense trade war with Japan, the competitor it perceives as a mortal threat in the international marketplace. Maintaining Silicon Valley’s creative lead as chips grow so complex that computers increasingly help design them is one of Noyce’s principal challenges. With a certain wistfulness for the days of the individual breakthrough, he says, “Now it’s a team effort. In 1970 Federico Faggin designed the 4004 microprocessor chip by himself at Intel in nine months; our 32-bit microprocessor took 100 man-years!”
But the individual can still star as an entrepreneur. Competitive energy vibrated from Sandy Kurtzig as she told me, “I have taken a bet that ASK Computer Systems will be doing 100 million dollars in annual sales in four years. We will.” Sharing a quiet brunch after tennis with her husband, Arie, a research manager at Hewlett-Packard, and their two young sons, this lively brunette in slacks and sweater is president of ASK, which she founded with $2,000 in the back bedroom of her apartment in 1972. Since ASK went public last year, the worth of the company’s stock has soared to more than 75 million dollars.
Sandy, 35, entered the industry with a mathematics-and-chemistry degree as well as a master’s in aeronautical engineering. Aware of the nation’s productivity crisis, she shrewdly saw that “the technology of the chip had far outstripped our capacity to put all that potential to work.” Sandy targeted software, the programs that tell computers what to do. She developed software systems for minicomputers and sold them as easy-to-use packages to accomplish tasks such as inventory control and accounting in manufacturers’ factories and offices. Her strategies have been so successful that, while chip stocks plunged in 1981, ASK’s rose to make the firm perhaps the nation’s fastest growing public software company.
Yet Sandy, like most of Silicon Valley’s successes, does not wallow in hedonistic excess. True, she recently purchased a baronial Tudor-style home, but says, “We didn’t buy the house to show off. It was mainly to be on the flats where the kids could ride their bicycles.”
But in a valley characterized by venture capitalist Don Valentine as “a pocket of entrepreneuring that attracts a breed of buccaneer capitalists and high-risk takers—an area barely big enough to contain the egos,” there are some Silicon Valley winners who revel in flamboyant display.
“Money is life’s report card,” says a laughing Jerry Sanders, a street-wise kid from Chicago who parlayed an engineering degree and intuitive salesmanship to the presidency of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and to a reputation as the valley’s highest flying businessman. Exuding brio and self-confidence, he measures his success in a string of homes, hand-tailored suits, a Rolls-Royce, and a Bentley. In good years he makes grand gestures to employees: a $350,000 Christmas party in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium; in a lean year he served hot dogs and sauerkraut with panache that won cheers.
But for Sanders, as for Silicon Valley, work is the thing. The valley was born in 1955. Dr. William Shockley, Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Telephone Laboratories, sent out a call to a dozen handpicked young Ph.D.’s in physics and chemistry to join him in a warehouse in Mountain View, at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.
Noyce and Moore answered the call. There they would exploit the properties of silicon, a semiconductor of electricity whose conductivity could be modified by the addition of minute amounts of chemicals, allowing on-off electric signals—the very basis of computers—to occur at mind-boggling speeds. As transistors replaced vacuum tubes, the computing power of an unwieldy roomful of metal boxes ultimately could be contained in a hand-held calculator.
Ironically, Shockley’s pioneering laboratory failed. “His ideas were too far ahead of the still primitive silicon technology, and he never produced a manufacturable product. What he did was to spawn Silicon Valley,” says Shockley alumnus Harry Sello. Believing they had something—a better transistor—Noyce, Moore, and six others got financial backing from Fairchild Camera and Instrument to develop it. Since the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor in 195 7, the valley’s first viable semiconductor company, no fewer than two dozen companies have spun off from it, including the present leading triumvirate: Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and National Semiconductor, all started by former Fairchild men.
The start-ups and spin-offs could never have flourished without infrastructure, the valley’s vital support system that has built up south of Stanford University. Born before Silicon Valley, it began in 1939 with Hewlett-Packard, granddaddy of the area’s electronics firms. Today it is an incestuous network of suppliers, customers, venture capitalists, brains, research institutes, computer and software companies, schools, and headhunters, the executive recruiters who move men around the valley at a dizzying rate in a tradition of musical jobs that is a key to the valley’s contagious vitality.
With the convergence of infrastructure, innovative minds, and venture capital in the sixties, dramatic improvements in integrated circuitry (which basically masses many transistors on a single chip) brought prices plummeting. Noyce and Moore sold their first transistors to IBM for $150 apiece; today the price would be a fraction of a penny.
Toward a More “Personal” Computer
Steve Jobs is pleased with the falling prices. He hopes that his computer will become the Volkswagen of the industry, the computer every family can own. The 27-year-old co-founder of Apple Computer, whose typewriter-size instrument is pioneering the incorporation of the computer into daily life, bristles a little, too, as he reminds, “We’d rather call the Apple a personal than a home computer.” Although 1981 and 1982 have been the “years of the personal computer,” with giants like IBM jumping into the market and about two million now in use in the United States, predictions that computers would be the nerve centers of our homes by the early 1980s have proved premature.
“It’s no more difficult than learning to cook, but people are afraid they can’t handle it,” says Jobs’s Silicon Valley neighbor Dan Fylstra, whose VisiCorp software packages are simple enough for use in the home. The machines are just not yet “user friendly” enough. Though research labs all over the valley are struggling to solve the elusive problem of speech recognition, we are a long way from marketing a computer that can respond to ordinary conversation—the ultimate friendliness.
So Jobs and his growing host of competitors have directed their sales efforts to office uses. But the Apple has inspired a dedicated cult of hard-core enthusiasts who trade new uses for the computer in the columns of Apple magazines; one engineer has programmed his Apple to activate a small motor that rocks the crib when his colicky baby cries or wriggles. And Jobs has become a potent role model for a new breed of bright kids who are writing and selling software programs and, with their arcane computer skills, gaining the prestige formerly tasted only by the high-school football team.
Over herb tea in a vegetarian restaurant, Jobs explained to me, “For us, computers have always been around. That’s what separates us guys from you guys. You were born B.C.—Before Computers. And it’s because of this place. I was born here. When I was 14,1 was asking famous computer engineers here questions. Apple came out of the microprocessor, created in this valley just five miles from here.”
Jobs’s passion has paid off handsomely. With Steve Wozniak he built his first Apple in 1976 in his parents’ Los Altos garage because they couldn’t afford to buy a computer; now he owns Apple Computer stock worth 100 million dollars. While the chip companies suffered this spring, Apple’s revenues soared 81 percent over last year’s. Apple now occupies 22 buildings in Silicon Valley and plants in Texas, Singapore, and Ireland, which is bidding to become Europe’s Silicon Valley.
Although Jobs drives the requisite Mercedes, success seems not to have spoiled the first folk hero of the computer age. In plaid shirt and jeans, he still prefers, as a friend said, “to drive his motorcycle to my place, sit around and drink wine, and talk about what we’re going to do when we grow up.”
The excitement of Apple’s presence in Cupertino has touched the district school system. Here children are introduced to computers as early as the first grade.
Bobby Goodson, the school district’s computer specialist, believes computer literacy is going to be the next great crisis in education. “If kids don’t understand computers, how can they handle the future?” she asked, as she restrained a class of seven-year-olds eager to get their hands on a computer for the first time.
A little girl with pigtails hunches over the keyboard, fiercely concentrating on following Mrs. Goodson’s instructions. “Type in ‘10 PRINT “BARBARA.” ‘ Now type ‘RUN.’” Her name pops up on the screen. Bouncing with delight, she rushes ahead to execute the next instruction. Barbara fills the screen and begins repeating in relentless rows. Barbara looks up, awed by her own power. She has entered the computer age with the ease of skipping rope.
“The broad integration into society, though, is going to be a 10- or 15-year process,” says Jobs. “But I believe we are already making a little ding in the universe.”
Not All Share the Good Life The social impact and the profits, Jobs notes, scarcely touch the lives of the 120,000 people who work on Silicon Valley’s assembly lines. Most of those who live in ethnically mixed east San Jose—black, Hispanic, and about 18,000 Vietnamese and other Asian refugees—cannot afford to own a home.
But the opportunity that lures entrepreneurs gives some workers, too, a crack at the California dream. Secure in a comfortable home in Cupertino with her husband —Thanh, a computer engineer—Tien Nguyen, a gentle beauty with lush black hair pulled into a topknot, relives her escape from Vietnam in 1975.
“We left with nothing. I had just the slacks and blouse I had on. My father feared that when the Communists came, they would kill the whole family. The police put us—my parents, my three sisters, my younger brother—on a barge in the Saigon River with no shelter, no food, no drink. A tugboat pulled us to the open sea to an American ship we shared with 20,000 people. We slept on deck. My older sister, Dao, almost died of flu.”
Brought to Silicon Valley by the pastor of a suburban church, Tien and Dao had assembly jobs within ten days. They found the route to upward mobility, the valley’s electronics schools, and soon moved up to better jobs at Tandem Computer.
“We delivered papers after work and put our father through electronics school, and he has a job now with a valley electronics company,” Tien says with pride.
The sisters have been upgraded again to office jobs at Tandem. But their smiles and chic clothes screen a deep homesickness. “But I feel strong,” Tien says. “In my country I would stay home and cook. Over there I couldn’t interface with all these people”— the local buzz word that reveals how well she has, well, interfaced.
Even Light Industry Brings Pollution But the job growth that gives the Nguyen family a chance to prosper is compromising the sweetness of success. Straining from a small aircraft to see through the opaque veil of pink-brown smog that obscured the low mountains that flank Silicon Valley, county planner Eric Carruthers cracked to me, “On a clear day you can still see it’s a valley.”
Most of the smog is belched from automobiles. Below us, as rush hour began, rivers of red lights ran south, as Silicon Valley disgorged a quarter of a million people to housing tracts 10 and 20 miles away. “Jobs have grown faster than housing,” Carruthers said. In 30 years San Jose has grown from 95,000 to nearly 660,000.
To deal with such growth, Santa Clara County has embraced a new program for systematic regional planning that it hopes will replace wanton expansion. And the need is urgent. The county recoiled this past winter when it was revealed that hazardous chemicals from 11 of the valley’s major electronics firms had leaked from buried tanks and, in one instance, contaminated public water.
Voicing the shock shared by cities that had assumed the electronics industry was nonpolluting, San Jose’s mayor, Janet Gray Hayes, said, “I remember thinking about smokestacks in other industries. I didn’t expect this problem in my own backyard.”
The county has proposed to have the cities use their powers to limit new jobs as a means of curtailing housing expansion. As mayor of Sunnyvale, Dianne McKenna joined her city council in declaring a four-month moratorium on new industrial building, during which limits were voted on waste water and the number of employees per building for new plants.
Campaigning against the runaway growth that threatens the quality of life that once inspired the nickname Valley of Heart’s Delight, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and 37-year Santa Clara County resident Wallace Stegner cautions, “It happens slyly. You see an orchard go next to you, but there are still a lot of orchards. Then it becomes catastrophic.”
“The problems are the growing pains of any community that grew fast after World War II, plus the breakneck speed of change in Silicon Valley companies,” says Bob Kirkwood, Hewlett-Packard’s manager of government affairs. “The start-ups of the 1960s are just beginning to have the luxury of lifting their heads to look around.”
As they do, some have gained a special view of the universe. Cherry Lorenzini, whose husband Bob’s company, Siltec, produces the silicon wafers from which chips are made, says: “I can point out a satellite to my kids in the night sky and say, ‘You know, there might be some of our silicon up there.’ ” Proud of her role, she says, “For a man to reach his moon, he needs a support team. Bob designed his first crystal-growing furnace on our dining-room table. We were the little guys going in and eating up the competing companies. His dream was to take Siltec from scratch to SO million dollars; now the goal is ISO million. But for the men in this industry, it’s total dedication,” she adds. “I merged my dreams with his, but many women can’t accept their limited roles in their husbands’ lives.”
There are other problems. “It’s a tremendously striving, intellectually oriented population. They tend to be workaholics who can fall prey to alcoholism, divorce, and depression,” says Dr. Rudolph Grziwok, director of the county’s Fairoaks Mental Health Center in Sunnyvale. “Burn out” has become a common valley syndrome, for not all can maintain the winner profile.
In this environment, relationships can suffer. Driving home in his Mercedes-Benz from his weekly dance class, one of the valley’s brightest engineers said: “Stars are rewarded. There are stock options—you’re riding in one! And my house is another. But you’ve just seen my social life. The projects are incredibly interesting, but they’re on your mind seven days a week. Relationships get screwed up. Somebody who was very important to me met somebody who didn’t work every weekend, and that was it.”
Pressure Spawns Drug Abuse
For those on the assembly line, the stress shows in drug abuse. Marijane Esparza, an instructor at a San Jose drug rehabilitation center, described the vicious cycle that gripped her for several years as a board stuffer, soldering chips to the circuit boards that are inserted into computers.
“You start on drugs because the job’s so boring, hour after hour, and you don’t even know what the board is for. You take ‘crank’ [amethamphetamine] and you feel a flash of energy—zzt, zzt, zzt—and do you work!
You do twice as many boards! Then, the technician standing behind you says, ‘Hurry up, you did 100 boards last night.’” The pressure to maintain the drug-induced productivity rate, she and others fear, encourages the use of drugs.
Theft, an estimated third of it to support the drug habit, has been growing by leaps and bounds, according to Patrick Moore of the organized-crime section of the county sheriff’s office. Greed has created an illicit market for the chips, as well as for the tapes and masks from which they can also be copied (page 458). A stolen chip design can save a corporation or nation ambitious for advanced technology millions of dollars and man-years in research and development.
“Integrated circuits are small, extremely valuable products,” says Moore. “Someone can walk out with a fortune in his fist.”
The largest haul yet occurred over the 1981 Thanksgiving weekend—3.5 million dollars in chips from Monolithic Memories. “Truckloads!” said an astonished Doug Southard, Santa Clara County’s deputy district attorney, as he prepared his case against two men arrested. The spectacular recovery of the chips in South Lake Tahoe this past spring confirmed Southard’s suspicions of a connection with the 1980 theft of 11,000 memory chips from Synertek. “It’s organized crime—with a small ‘o.’ Not Mafia, but well-organized rings. The common thread is drugs and violence,” he says.
International Duel Heats Up Other thefts being investigated are increasingly casting the specter of international industrial espionage over Silicon Valley.
“The Japanese are coming awfully close to copying our chips,” said Roger Borovoy, Intel’s chief counsel. “They can buy them off the shelf and make detailed photographs of them without breaking any law. But if we get our hands on a copied chip, we’ll sue!”
It was computer software, not chips, however, that made headlines this year, when the FBI in San Jose and San Francisco arrested nine people, most of them employees of Japan’s Hitachi and Mitsubishi industrial giants. The nine and a dozen other Hitachi and Mitsubishi employees in Japan were charged with attempting to buy stolen data concerning IBM’s new superfast 3081 computer from undercover FBI agents.
The power of the Japanese electronics industry had already been reflected in the tear-soaked balance sheets of Silicon Valley. In 1981, before Silicon Valley had one on the market, the Japanese cornered 70 percent of the world market for the 64K random-access memory (RAM) chip—most of the other 30 percent going to non-valley competitors Texas Instruments and Motorola. The 64K RAM—four times as powerful as the 16K RAM it supplanted—can handle 65,536 bits of information (1,024 per K). Minuscule though it is, the 64K chip, and the early Japanese domination of its sales, will be remembered in Silicon Valley as the technological equivalent of Pearl Harbor.
A conjunction of events—the 64K RAM, the international recession, corporate price wars—sent the valley’s semiconductor profits plunging.
Frustrated but irrepressible, the valley responded with the esprit and determination of wartime.
Lobbying in Washington, Silicon Valley leaders bemoaned the lack in the United States of a national industrial policy similar to that of Japan, which throws its resources behind specific areas, such as chips.
AMD’s Jerry Sanders fumed, “I just don’t want to pretend I’m in a fair fight. I’m not. The Japanese pay 7 percent for capital; I pay 18 percent on a good day. They get hundreds of millions of dollars of free R and D [research and development] paid for by their government. Then their products arrive here in a flood.”
As the trade war escalated into a critical test of the two cultures, Silicon Valley became a metaphor for the American way. “We’ll outcompete the Japanese in the marketplace,” asserted Harry Sello. “After all, we Yankees invented competition. Against the Japanese companies, we offer superiority in infrastructure, software, and, above all, innovation.”
Carrying that confidence into the enemy camp, Intel aggressively launched an advanced new memory chip in Tokyo, breaching the Japanese market, and, this spring, fired its 64K RAM into the fray, announcing, “They’ve won the first skirmish, but we’ll win the war.”
The Valley’s Pulse Beats On But Silicon Valley’s power was being assaulted by other forces. The need for capital to sustain growth is forcing many of the smaller companies to sell out to major corporations, a move an industry financial specialist, Sal Accardo in New York City, believes may strip the valley of its “flair, drive, and creativity.”
And by fouling its own nest with pollution, congestion, and soaring housing and labor costs, Silicon Valley is forcing industry out. Charles Sporck, president of National Semiconductor, flies regularly to Malaysia and Arizona to visit his assembly plants. Apple’s Jobs flies to a June board meeting in Ireland.
Yet Apple and Intel are still headquartered here. Giants like IBM and Hewlett-Packard are committing themselves to expanded research facilities in Silicon Valley. And profit-driven investors are pouring capital into a buoyant new wave of chip, computer, and software companies, the definitive act of economic faith that, in the words of Sal Accardo: “Silicon Valley will continue to be the cerebrum, a magnet for creative minds.”
BREAKING: Divers may have found the body of Natalee Holloway http://bit.ly/9akgV8
Natalee Holloway's body may have been found by divershttp://www.mahalo.com/natalee-holloway
New Mahalo Profile pages based on Cassandra are up!!!
Congrats to our tech team on launching our new profile pages based on Cassandra. Many folks are confused by what we are doing with Mahalo and frankly that's been my goal in the early years of the service: hide what we're really doing. :-)
However, you can't hide the success of top 200 site so I might as well come clean. Human-powered search is just a term I used to describe our first product, which was curated links. Our big picture goal is to build the largest knowledge repository in the world, with the largest base of contributors in the world. A bigger and better Wikipedia with Yahoo Answers and Delicious/StumbleUpon/Google search built into it.
It's a crazy, big ambitious project and we're ahead of schedule! Right now I would say we are 60% done, which means in 2-3 years Mahalo.com will be a top 25 site. We're super excited with the progress to date.
Here is a brief overview of how it is going and what exactly we're making:
1. We are building great reference-style content like Wikipedia, About or Engadget (Topic pages if you will, like www.mahalo.com/ipad )
2. We are attaching that content to a vibrant Questions and Answers forum ( http://www.mahalo.com/answers/tag/ipad )
3. We have a virtual currency call Mahalo Dollars that makes working in these two areas like Farmville for Content Creators. See our upcoming store attached!
4. We now have profile pages like Facebook that allow you to track you and your friends activity in the system. http://www.mahalo.com/member/jasoncalacanis
5. We are tracking what questions and content you are good are answering and creating. Just like Vark and Quora do.
The service is really starting to come together... thanks for all the feedback and support!
Thursday, March 18, 2010
GROUND FLOOR OPP: Mahalo Seeks Community Managers
This is a great entry-level position for someone who is a "web native" and who is strong at writing, proof reading and building communities. If you're a very solid writer (think, you could easily write a Wikipedia page, blog post on Engadget or an About.com page) and you understand the dynamics of online communities (chat rooms, twitter, facebook, message boards, Q&A sites, wikis, etc), than this is a great place to learn and develop those skills into an actual career.
best jason
Mahalo Seeks Community Manager (entry-level to three years experience)
================================Mahalo is a top 200 website that received over 15M unique visitors in February 2010. Our mission is to create "the world's largest content site with the largest and most active base of contributors." You can think of us as 1/3rd Wikipedia/About.com, 1/3rd Yahoo Answers and 1/3rd Google Search/Delicious. We're trying to take the three main modes of knowledge-gathering on the internet--Content, Q&A and Search--and combine them into one seamless product. No one has ever done this, and we're only 50% of the way there ourselves.
In the role of Community Manager, you would work directly with the CEO, Jason Calacanis, the VP of Community Management and the rest of the Community Team to develop strategies and best practices around contributor acquisition, writer education and community development. You will focus obsessively on making Mahalo a positive, fun, engaging and compelling experience for our thousands of freelance writers, team members and users around the world.
Here are some examples of problems we might ask you to solve:
============================
1. How would you make Mahalo Topic pages (such as our iPad page: http://www.mahalo.com/ipad) better?
2. How would you grow and inspire our team of Vertical Managers, who earn 15% of the revenue from the 3,000 pages they manage?
3. Where would you look to find eager new How To writers, and how would you try to get them to try out Mahalo?
4. We currently share revenue on our Mahalo Answers question threads--what are the pros and cons of doing this?
5. Our virtual currency is currently one of the three main motivators in our community--the other two being having fun and recognition. How should a site like ours balance cash, recognition and fun as rewards? In what other way(s) would you motivate our community?
6. How should we evolve the design of our Topic and Answers pages? Who has the best topic pages on the internet today and why? Who has the best answer threads on the internet today and why?
The ideal person we're looking for has the following traits:
============================
a) They inspire the people around them to do great things.
b) They love to debate, are opinionated and look forward to creatively solving problems.
c) They are resilient and resourceful when facing challenges.
d) They are hard-working, helpful to other team members and they are respected because they "bring it every day."
e) They are honest and introspective, with the ability to admit mistakes and move on quickly.
f) They are transparent, humble and willing to share their ideas and skills with others.
g) They are able to come up with multiple innovative solutions to problems.
h) They are organized and able to lead a large, distributed work force.
i) They are positive and go about their mission with a sense of joy and fun.
j) They have demonstrated their ability to grow online communities in the past, and have worked well curating the unique, and sometimes quirky, attributes of freelance writers.
Some additional details on Mahalo:
============================
-- Mahalo offers solid compensation and (hopefully!) valuable stock options.
-- Mahalo has cool benefits, like a private chef who cooks a healthy, organic breakfasts, lunches and two afternoon snacks that are brought to your desk at three and five PM. We also do people's laundry, wash their cars and provide personal fitness training in the backyard. You will get healthy working at this company!
-- Mahalo is a flat organization without politics. We aspire to be a pure meritocracy where people are given responsibilities based on performance--not their age, who they suck up to or where they went to school.
-- We wont insult or belittle you during our interview process by asking you questions like "why are manhole covers round?"
-- Our core product hit breakeven this year and we have many years of capital in the bank. We are fully funded and, with hard work and dedication, should be able to reach our goal of being a Top 25 Site in the USA within the next three years (hopefully with your help!).
-- We're humbled by the list of amazing people who have invested in our company, including Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Sequoia Capital, News Corporation, CBS, Fred Wilson, Mark Pincus, Matt Coffin, John Miller, Sandy Climan, Hubert Burda and many others.
If you're interested in this position, please send a cover letter with some of your thoughts on the six questions/problems we raised above (numbered one to six) as well as where you rank on the personal traits we bring up in the lettered section above (A through J). Write as much or as little as you like--we'll read it all, and if you're in line with our culture, we will have you in for coffee/tea.
More Details:
This is a full-time position in our office.
Salary based on experience (we're hoping you have 1-3 years in online community building or active participation)
Viacomm vs. YouTube/Google legal docs are released! http://www.mahalo.com/viacom-v-google
Viacomm vs. YouTube/Google legal docs are released! http://www.mahalo.com/viacom-v-google
Meet Michelle Bombshell McGee,other women between Sandra Bullock/Jesse James http://bit.ly/michellebombshell
The curse of the best actress rides on with Sandra Bullock
Best Actress Curse?
The break-up of Sandra Bullock and Jesse James happened just two weeks after Bullock won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
This has only fueled speculation about a 'Curse of the Best Actress Oscar' that is gaining steam. Since2000, seven former winners have seen the break-up of their marriages and/or long-term relationships. The theory was first advanced by writer Kate Torgovnick of The Frisky.2
Among those affected are:
- Hilary Swank who won in 2000 and 2005, then divorced Chad Lowe shortly after her second triumph.
- Julia Roberts won in 2001 and left long-time boyfriend Benjamin Bratt
- Halle Berry won in 2002 and divorced Eric Benet a year later
- Charlize Theron won in 2004 and recently broke-up with longtime boyfriend Stuart Townsend
- Reese Witherspoon won in 2006 and divorced Ryan Philippe eight months later
- Just days prior to Bullock leaving James, former winner Kate Winslet from 2007 decided to separatefrom husband Sam Mendes
This list doesn't include Nicole Kidman, who won in 2002 just one year after divorcing Tom Cruise.
The daily London video! #supercute!!!
Sent from my iPhone, but I'd rather be using my blackberry frankly.
BRuTAL VIDEO: Tiger Woods on South Park http://bit.ly/tigerpark
South Park is brutal... but is how we, as a society, deal with societies most brutal hypocrisy, insanity and irony. http://www.mahalo.com/tiger-woods-south-park
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
AMAZING OPPORTUNITY: Mahalo Seeks VP of Community Development
Mahalo Seeks VP of Community Development
Mahalo is a top 200 website that received over 15M unique visitors in February 2010. Our mission is to create "the world's largest content site with the largest and most active base of contributors." You can think of us as 1/3rd Wikipedia/About.com, 1/3rd Yahoo Answers and 1/3rd Google Search/Delicious. We're trying to take the three main modes of knowledge-gathering on the internet--Content, Q&A and Search--and combine them into one seamless product. No one has ever done this, and we're only 50% of the way there ourselves.
In the role of VP of Community Development, you would work directly with the CEO, Jason Calacanis, to develop strategies and best practices around contributor acquisition, writer education and community development.
Here are some examples of problems we might ask you to solve:
============================
1. How would you integrate our topic page on the iPad (http://www.mahalo.com/ipad) with our Answers community tag page for iPad (http://www.mahalo.com/answers/tag/ipad)?
2. How would you grow and inspire our team of Vertical Managers, who earn 15% of the revenue from the 3,000 pages they manage?
3. We're currently producing over 250 How To Articles a week--how would you add a zero to that number?
4. We currently share revenue on our Mahalo Answers question threads--what are the pros and cons of doing this?
5. Our virtual currency is currently one of the three main motivators in our community--the other two being fun and recognition. How should a site like ours balance cash, recognition and fun as rewards? In what other way(s) would you motivate our community?
6. How should we evolve the design of our Topic and Answers pages? Who has the best topic pages on the internet today and why? Who has the best answer threads on the internet today and why?
The ideal person we're looking for has the following traits:
============================
a) They inspire the people around them to do great things.
b) They love to debate, are opinionated and look forward to creatively solving problems.
c) They are resilient and resourceful when facing challenges.
d) They are hard-working, helpful to other team members and they are respected because they "bring it every day."
e) They are honest and introspective, with the ability to admit mistakes and move on quickly.
f) They are transparent, humble and willing to share their ideas and skills with others.
g) They are able to come up with multiple innovative solutions to problems.
h) They are organized and able to lead a large, distributed work force.
i) They are positive and go about their mission with a sense of joy and fun.
j) They have demonstrated their ability to grow online communities in the past, and have worked well curating the unique, and sometimes quirky, attributes of freelance writers.
Some additional details on Mahalo:
============================
-- Mahalo offers solid compensation and (hopefully!) valuable stock options.
-- Mahalo has cool benefits, like a private chef who cooks a healthy, organic breakfasts, lunches and two afternoon snacks that are brought to your desk at three and five PM. We also do people's laundry, wash their cars and provide personal fitness training in the backyard. You will get healthy working at this company!
-- Mahalo is a flat organization without politics. We aspire to be a pure meritocracy where people are given responsibilities based on performance--not their age, who they suck up to or where they went to school.
-- We wont insult or belittle you during our interview process by asking you questions like "why are manhole covers round?"
-- Our core product hit breakeven this year and we have many years of capital in the bank. We are fully funded and, with hard work and dedication, should be able to reach our goal of being a Top 25 Site in the USA within the next three years (hopefully with your help!).
-- We're humbled by the list of amazing people who have invested in our company, including Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Sequoia Capital, News Corporation, CBS, Fred Wilson, Mark Pincus, Matt Coffin, John Miller, Sandy Climan, Hubert Burda and many others.
If you're interested in this position, please send a cover letter with some of your thoughts on the six questions/problems we raised above (numbered one to six) as well as where you rank on the personal traits we bring up in the lettered section above (A through J). Write as much or as little as you like--we'll read it all, and if you're in line with our culture, we will have you in for coffee/tea.
More Details:
This is a full-time position in our office (Santa Monica)
Salary based on experience (we're hoping you have 3-10 years in community building)
Send your responses, cover letter and resume to vpcd@mahalo.com
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
No, I'm not stepping down as CEO of Mahalo (duh?).
Now three journalists/bloggers have contacted me asking if I'm stepping down as CEO of Mahalo. Someone must be looking to stir the pot I guess.
My official response:
Exit Mahalo?! That is absurd, as we are crushing it and firing on all cylinders. I've never been more excited about Mahalo! Perhaps this rumor started because I've been interviewing folks for a President/COO slot to help us keep up with the growth.I am NOT giving up my CEO slot EVER. I have a Steve Jobs/Larry Ellison approach to these things: I'm in charge. Forever. End of discussion.
Our virtual currency is making the site wildly addictive to growing base of contributors that will enable us to build the largest knowledge (aka content) site in the world that combines: Wikipedia/About.com, Yahoo Answers and Google Search/Delicious/StumbleUpon. No one has ever figured out how to blend those three types of services--content, Q&A and curated search--into one product. We are very close to figuring it out. When we figure it out we will have something really special that folks will call Wikipedia 2.0, Yahoo+About or maybe what Google would build if they owned Yahoo Answers and Wikipedia. Something like that. :-)Example:
This simple question will wind up making the asker M$100 (US$75) and the person answering it M$200 (US$150).
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/fashion/is-there-any-uk-equivalent-to-snorg-tees
http://www.mahalo.com/payments/adsense/question/is-there-any-uk-equivalent-to-snorg-tees/answerer So, think about the addictive nature of Farmville layered on top of Yahoo Answers... kind of cool huh?
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/fashion/is-there-any-uk-equivalent-to-snorg-tees
http://www.mahalo.com/payments/adsense/question/is-there-any-uk-equivalent-to-snorg-tees/answerer So, think about the addictive nature of Farmville layered on top of Yahoo Answers... kind of cool huh?
That is all. :-)
Sunday, March 14, 2010
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