SiliconBeat

I’m thinking through a possible column, and I’m looking for some early feedback. I’ve watched in great interest, as have many in Silicon Valley, how President Obama has followed through on his tech agenda since January.

We all know the tech community had impossibly high expectations. Many folks credited his social media savvy (or, at least his staff’s) with getting him elected. He understood tech like no other candidate we’ve ever seen. Even better, he laid out an ambitious agenda that seemed to win the hearts and minds across the valley. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington revealed that he had received hundreds of documents about Twitter sent by someone who had hacked into the company’s system. Arrington said he planned to post some documents related to Twitter’s business. This set off a firestorm of debate about the ethics. With Arrington posting a follow up to his original post here.

I was truly amazed at the overwhelmingly negative feedback from the TechCrunch community about his decision. You can see the harshness continue on Twitter here.

I posted my own thoughts in the comment section, which I’m re-posting here: Read the rest of this entry »

Intel offered up some good news yesterday with its second-quarter earnings yesterday, reporting signs of an uptick in consumer demand for PCs. But executives tempered their optimism by saying they’re not counting on so-called “enterprise” or business customers to increase their buying significantly in 2009.

CEO Paul Otellini said he sees an eventual upside from the fact that many companies have not replaced their employees’ desktop or laptop PCs for three or four years.

 “At some point, those need to be refreshed,” he said, adding that businesses may decide to buy new computers after Microsoft releases its new Windows 7 operating system. But he said he doesn’t expect to see those sales pick up before 2010.

On another somewhat upbeat note, Otellini touted the development of new ultra-low voltage processors for the consumer market, which he said are designed to help PC makers create a new segment of ultra-thin but full-function notebooks. These are aimed at consumers who want portability but also want to do more than access Web-based services on a netbook.

I attended an intriguing dinner in Woodside last night.

The dinner was ostensibly to promote a new wireless router being launched by FON, a Spanish company. The router — dubbed the Fonera 2.0 — is somewhat interesting, adding some neat features that most comparable devices don’t have, such as the ability to upload files to the Internet while your computer is turned off and the ability to offer — and make money off of — a public hot spot without granting the hoi polloi access to files on you home network.

But the dinner was much more interesting for who attended than the product that inspired it. The guest list was a notable cross section of the digerati and tech blogosphere. Among those present: Tech Crunch founder Michael Arrington; Scobleizer’s Robert Scoble; Ryan Block, a former editor at Engadget and more recently the founder of Gdgt, a new tech “community” site; Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a marketing manager at the social networking company; Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager; and Jeff Clavier, founder and managing partner of SoftTech VC.
Read the rest of this entry »

Cannabis Science, the San Francisco company dedicated to developing medicines derived from marijuana, filled in a bit more detail on why it fired former Chief Executive Steve Kubby last week in a filing today with the SEC. The company has authorized an internal investigation and “review by counsel” of Kubby’s “apparently fraudulent Read the rest of this entry »

More than 1.5 billion applications have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store, a sign of how much the one-year-old online site has re-arranged the smart-phone industry.
In just a year since it opened, the App Store lists an inventory of 65,000 free and fee-based apps created by more than 100,000 developers. The applications run on the Cupertino company’s iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”
The Cupertino company’s announcement comes on the heels of its latest iPhone release, the 3GS.

Last year I wondered why Oracle CEO and founder Larry Ellison continued to receive additional stock options when he already had more than 1 billion:

“However, I do have a beef with Ellison’s compensation that should get a sympathetic ear from Oracle’s shareholders: Why is the company doling out more stock to a man who already owns 22.3 percen?”

It’s not like I expected Ellison or Oracle’ s board to listen to me. And guess what? They didn’t!

I came back from vacation today to find this nugget about Oracle’s board awarding Ellison another 7 million stock options for the fourth year in a row.   The four-page report, called “Larry Ellison Rides Again,”  comes from Graef Crystal, one of the most respected voices on executive compensation. In meticulous detail, Crystal breaks down the numbers, and in doing so, points out the absurdity of this latest award.

Perhaps there’s no more room for outrage when it comes to executive compensation, or Ellison continuing to rack up more options, but in any case, here are the highlights of Crystal’s analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we noted that Hewlett-Packard’s longtime VP for government affairs, Gary Fazzino, had moved to a similar job at Applied Materials. This week comes word from HP that former Clinton administration commerce official Larry Irving will take over HP’s government affairs portfolio, working from Washington D.C.

Irving has a background in tech issues and ties to the new Obama administration. As an assistant commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, Irving worked on Internet and telecom policy and the issue of the “digital divide” that puts those without access to electronic information sources at economic and social disadvantage.

More recently, Irving ran his own consulting group and was an Obama transition advisor on Commerce and telecom issues.

HP’s new VP is a Stanford law  grad who also worked as a Congressional staffer in an earlier part of his career. He apparently still has friends on Capitol Hill; the HP announcement includes glowing quotes from GOP Rep. Joe Barton of Texas and Democratic Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts.

T-Mobile myTouch 3G

Google and T-Mobile this morning showed off the myTouch 3G, the second phone in the United States to run on the search giant’s Android operating system.

The companies debuted the phone at a small press event in San Francisco. The event started with a panel discussion that focused on the new phone, Android and the evolving role of carriers in an era of increasingly open phone platforms.

I got some hands-on time with the new phone and got a fairly favorable impression of it. The big difference between the myTouch and the G1, the first T-Mobile Android phone, is that the myTouch lacks a keyboard. Thanks to that, it’s slimmer, sleeker and seemingly lighter than the G1.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cisco Systems, which hopes to grab a share of the sports industry business by providing network technology to stadiums, has signed up to be a sponsor of the 2012 Games.
London Olympic officials announced on today that the San Jose networking giant will replace bankrupt Canadian technology sponsor Nortel Networks. Nortel, as a “tier one” sponsor, had committed $65 million in cash and services. Cisco, on the other hand, will be a “tier two” provider, which means the company will kick in about $20 million less, according to organizers, the Associated Press reported.
“We continue on a path to deliver the most connected Games possible. We part with Nortel on good terms,” London 2012 CEO Paul Deighton said in a statement. “Nortel acknowledges our fixed deadlines and our desire to have a single supplier for our entire network infrastructure have been impacted by Nortel’s decision to move towards standalone businesses. This is in no way a reflection of their capabilities — this is all about meeting our fixed deadlines.“
Organizers hope to raise as much as $1.13 billion in sponsorships. So far, it has commitments of nearly $810 million.