Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: silicon valley

  • Daily Links – the poor part of Silicon Valley, Robert Crumb on Charlie Hebdo and life in Managua

    Daily Links – the poor part of Silicon Valley, Robert Crumb on Charlie Hebdo and life in Managua

    Being a Sunday some long reads; an interview with American cartoonist Robert Crumb on his reaction to the Charlie Hebdo murders, life in the Nicaragua markets and the other side of Silicon Valley.

    East of Silicon Valley’s Eden

    Silicon Valley is one of the world’s most affluent regions but it has it’s poor areas, across the road from Facebook’s head office sits one of the area’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. East of Palo Alto’s Eden tells the story of segregation and disadvantage that has left East Palo Alto behind the rest of Silicon Valley.

    Robert Crumb on Charlie Hebdo

    ‘I thought, I gotta do it. They asked me. I gotta do it…Otherwise, everybody’s going to think: “Where’s Crumb? Why doesn’t he come forward? What the hell’s the matter with him?”’

    Legendary US cartoonist Frank Crumb, now resident in France, gives his views on the Charlie Hebdo murders.

    How a family survives on $4.50 a day

    A good story on the tough life of Nicaraguan market traders who live on half the national minimum wage.

    “East Palo Alto PA Airport Moffett Field P1190059” by David.Monniaux – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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  • Where will the next Silicon Valley come from?

    Where will the next Silicon Valley come from?

    In the development of any global industrial hub, there’s always a series of factors that attracted talent, capital and resources to that location. It’s true whether we’re talking about fifteen century Venice or the English Midlands of the eighteen century.

    Silicon Valley is today’s equivalent of those historical powerhouses and what drove California’s Bay Area to be the technological centre of the world was the massive government research spending of World War II, the Cold War and the Space Race.

    Which means declining research and development spending by the United States is going to hurt the region’s position in the medium to long term, a warning made by Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post.

    So the question is ‘if Silicon Valley and the US are in decline, which will be hub of the next business and technology revolutions?’

     

     

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  • Knocking at Silicon Valley’s door

    Knocking at Silicon Valley’s door

    In opening Salesforce’s new London office yesterday, former BT CEO Lord Livingston described the city as “knocking at the door of Silicon Valley.”

    Judging from the Computing UK article that description hasn’t impressed the rest of the British tech community as it confirms in their minds there is, as usual, too much focus on the capital and Livingston’s view also raises the question of whether London really wants to be another Silicon Valley.

    Like all global industrial hubs Silicon Valley the result of a series of happy coincidences; massive defense spending, determined educators, clever inventors and savvy entrepreneurs all finding themselves in the same place at the same time.

    Trying to replicate the factors that turned the region into the late Twentieth Century’s centre of technology is almost impossible – even the United States couldn’t afford the massive defense spending over the fifty years from 1941 that underpinned the Valley’s development.

    Apart from the spending; the culture, economy, geography, markets and workforce of Silicon Valley are very different to that of London’s.

    This not to say London doesn’t have advantages over Silicon Valley; access to Europe and relatively easy immigration policies make Britain a very attractive location for tech businesses. If the local startup community can tap The City’s banking resources then London could well be the next global hub.

    If London is the next global tech centre – history will tell – it will almost certainly be very different to Silicon Valley.

    Strangely, the event Lord Livingston was speaking at reflects how the Californian tech sector is evolving; Salesforce is a San Francisco company and represents a shift in the last five years from the suburbia of San Jose and Palo Alto to the quirky city life of SoMa and the Tenderloin.

    At the same time Silicon Valley itself is evolving into something different, just as it did in the 1990s with the switch from microprocessor manufacturing to software development.

    That shift illustrates the risks of trying to imitate one industrial hub; by the time you’ve build your replica, the original has moved on.

    If you spent your life trying to knock on the door of heroes you want to imitate, it would be shame to finally make it only to find they’ve moved.

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  • Reinventing venture capital

    Reinventing venture capital

    James Temple writing in on tech website Re/Code has an excellent profile of Google Ventures founder Bill Maris and his quest to re-invent the venture capital industry.

    Certainly the Silicon Valley venture capital industry is ripe for disruption; Maris is not alone in pointing out that most investors in the sector and focused on short term incremental gains like shopping apps and online stores.

    Probably the biggest thing that Temple points out in the story is the importance of Big Data to the Google Ventures model, although Maris seems to be acutely conscious of the limitations of relying on algorithms to make decisions;

    Because you can 100 percent use data and statistics in exactly the wrong way. That’s a trap some fall into, one that we really try hard to avoid. But I think it’s important to use that as a tool.

    The data is a support. It’s just like having your other partners there.

    Being skeptical about the infallibility of  Big Data and algorithms seems a very un-Google thing, but it may work well for Bill Maris and his team.

    Whether Maris and Google Ventures can upend the Silicon Valley investment culture remains to be seen; the real message though is that the venture capital industry is just as vulnerable to disruption as any other.

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  • Uber’s Travis Kalanick on the highly valued business of disruption

    Uber’s Travis Kalanick on the highly valued business of disruption

    For a four year old business, hire car service Uber is certainly causing a lot of trouble.

    Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone has an interview with the company’s founder and CEO Travis Kalanick on his plans after announcing a 1.2 billion dollar fundraising that values the venture at $17 billion.

    Seventeen billion dollars is a hefty valuation for the business and many believe it marks the peak of the current tech bubble, although many of us though Facebook’s billion dollar purchase of Instagram two years ago was that marker.

    Kalanick’s views are interesting in his take on that valuation – as he points out the San Francisco taxi market alone turns over $22 billion each year, so Uber’s valuation isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility.

    Uber and Logistics

    Also notable is Kalanick’s view on the logistics market, something that this blog has maintained is the real business of Uber. In that field, Fedex’s stock market value is $44 billion although Kalanick is discounting the company’s potential in that field.

    Right now Uber is on a high, and regardless of any set backs they may get with their ride sharing services, it’s hard to see how the company isn’t going to grab a healthy slice of the global taxi industry and possibly disrupt the logistics industry as well.

    Even should Uber end up being the poster child for today’s tech sector irrational exuberance, the company is a stunning example of how businesses we once thought were immune from global disruption are now being shaken up.

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