SiliconBeat

On Friday, ground will be broken on the Southwest Hall Lawn of the University of the Pacific’s Stockton campus to kick-off construction of the John T. Chambers Technology Center (artist rendering of the project pictured), a $12 million dollar facility that will serve as the new home to the university’s school of engineering and computer science.

The 24,000-square-foot center, which is to include Read the rest of this entry »

As IBM kicked the tires at Sun Microsystems this weekend, Sun’s assistant general counsel, Bruce Kerr, was busy putting the finishing touches on his latest song parody — “It’s Cloud Computing Now” — madly sung to the tune of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.

Very fun, of course, with witty lyrics aplenty, concluding with:

It’s cloud computing I want now
Who needs a server farm anyhow?

Kerr plays a nice guitar and has nothing to apologize for vocally. Looking into the new song brought us into contact with a couple of his other parodies, including Any Lane, a plaintive cry against bad freeway driving that we couldn’t agree with more.

It’s been a slow season for initial public offerings so whenever we see a new one registered, no matter where its located, we like to take a look. Today, Mayetok, a “development stage” company planning to market Ukrainian vacation properties”, registered its intention to offer 700,000 shares of itself to the public at 5 cents each.

Mayetok, founded in April (the 29th, to be exact, lest you were thinking its inception date might have been April 1), Read the rest of this entry »

In case you were wondering how to obtain a copy of your birth certificate in New Mexico, then you could refer to a new article posted at wikihow.com, which would be the Web sites 50,000th such article, and the occasion for a celebratory press release from the Menlo Park venture begun four years ago by Jack Herrick with the Read the rest of this entry »

Much has been written about the influence of Ayn Rand, who has been called the high priestess of unfettered capitalism, on former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, who was a member of that author’s inner circle during the 1950s when he was in his twenties. He was said to be among those who read her 1957 novel, ”Atlas Shrugged,” before it was published, a work intended “to glorify the real kind of productive, free-enterprise businessman in a way he has never been glorified before,” according to Rand.

In the wake of Greenspan’s testimony yesterday before a Congressional panel, in which he said the current financial crisis had exposed a “flaw” in his concept of a free market, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights felt it necessary to Read the rest of this entry »

Boy, we’re glad the wait is over. AskMen.com’s list of the Top 49 Men of 2008 came out today. (Why 49? No idea. And honestly, prior to today we’d never heard of the site, which includes this quote on its “about” page from a July issue of Time magazine: “Think of it as Cosmopolitan for men … AskMen is the go-to site for single guys on the make.” That is certainly a large target market.)

We went through the list, so you won’t have to, in order to locate the best and the brightest of Silicon Valley who made the list. Coming in at #2 is possibly the Valley’s biggest homegrown legend, Apple’s co-founder and eventually its messiah, Steve Jobs. He moved up in rank from Read the rest of this entry »

Time for a bit of perspective on just how heavily taxed we citizens of California are. Based on total state and local revenues as a percentage of all personal income, California ranked 17th (out of 50, for the very remedial among us,) according to the California Budget Project using figures from 2005-2006, the most recent period available for comprehensive state revenue data comparisons.

But how can this be? Aren’t our personal and corporate income tax rates among the highest in the nation? Read the rest of this entry »

New York Times business columnist Gretchen Morgenson will be speaking Tuesady at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Business ethics? What seemed a quaint notion just a few months ago now seems like a hot topic. Her talk, entitled “Fairness, Financial Markets and the Fallout From the Subprime Crisis,” will be held from noon to 1 p.m. in Room 126 at Lucas Hall, and is open to the public.

Ms. Morgenson was a stockbroker for Dean Witter Reynolds in New York from September 1981 to January 1984,  after beginning her career at Read the rest of this entry »

“The Russian president said in a speech Thursday that the financial crisis in the United States should be taken as a sign that America’s global economic leadership is drawing to a close,” reported the International Herald Tribune, which also pointed out that investors have been fleeing Russia and depositing money in U.S. Treasury bills.

But the sentiment expressed echoed in our heads this morning when we came across an otherwise unremarkable press release announcing a venture funding in a Sunnyvale chip company: Read the rest of this entry »

The Nasdaq stock market said it would cancel some trades of Google stock executed Tuesday in the minutes just before and after the stock markets closed. The cancelled trades were triggered by erroneous orders that were routed to Nasdaq from another market center.

Google’s stock, which fell $50 Monday, or 11.6 percent, to $381.00, reportedly fell another $60.50, or 15.9 percent, to $320.50, prior to Nasdaq’s decision to cancel certain unauthorized trades. Google’s official closing price for Tuesday will now be pegged at $400.52.

“Participants should review their trading activity for potentially erroneous trades outside the above referenced times,” Nasdaq said.

“It’s disturbing to watch the number of these things and there seem to be more and more,” said Laszlo Birinyi in an interview with Bloomberg News. His firm, Birinyi Associates of Westport, Connecticut, oversees more than $350 million. “We’re watching trades more closely.”