SiliconBeat

About a year ago, I started using a service called SlideShare. The idea is pretty simple. You can upload PowerPoint presentations and it converts them into Flash presentations. These new presentations can then be shared and embedded just about anywhere. It’s all very Web 2.0.

I’ve uploaded a few of my presentations here. Very modest stuff, nothing world changing. And over the months, I’ve embedded dozens of presentations over at The Next Newsroom Project.

Since I’ve been using SlideShare for awhile, I was happy to get a chance to chat on Monday with SlideShare co-founders Rashmi Sinha and Jonathan Boutelle. The company is announcing two new services today that are noteworthy, if for nothing else, because they will move SlideShare into earning revenues in ways besides advertising. And since I think ad-supported business models are mostly doomed to fail, I applaud them for moving into new revenue models.

But as we chatted, and as I thought about presentations, I was struck by just how important such presentations have become in our culture. Indeed, corporate presentations have improbably become a form of entertainment. It says a lot about how our relationship to business and celebrity has been transformed in the digital era. Read the rest of this entry »

I had to rub my eyes when someone passed along a link to this story on Tuesday:

Has the world gone made? Was this a hoax?

Just listen to this madness from the Post story:

“A coalition of blue-chip companies on Monday endorsed the idea of voluntarily overhauling executive compensation practices in an effort to restore public confidence in corporate America and to get out ahead of potentially more burdensome rules that could emerge from Washington.

Pay practices such as huge severance payments, personal use of corporate jets and incentives not tied to long-term performance should vanish unless a specific justification exists, according to a task force convened by the business organization the Conference Board.”

Now this is either a radical change of heart, or a phony attempt to head off attempts by the federal government to impose more harsh guidelines. Let’s take a closer look: Read the rest of this entry »

Back in December, I published a column called, “Nine predictions for Silicon Valley in 2009.” Number four on the list was this:

“The South Bay will give up all the jobs we’ve regained since the dot-com bust. Employment peaked at 1.08 million in December 2000 and then fell to 849,500 in January 2004. Job numbers peaked again in June 2008 with 916,500, but fell to 911,100 in November.

With layoffs just kicking in, that number will fall sharply in the first three months of the new year. And with no recovery in site, expect the valley’s job count to get close to the January 2004 level.”

That prompted a lot of emails calling the prediction way to pessimistic. Well, the latest jobs numbers were released Thursday by the state (PDF). Unemployment in Silicon Valley jumped to 9.4 percent in January, up from 7.8 percent in December. Read the rest of this entry »

This coming Thursday (Feb. 19), I’ll be moderating a panel called, “Digital Media Startups - Expectations and How to Achieve Them in the Current Market.” The panel is part of an event being hosted by SVASE, the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs.

The line-up for the panel is excellent and I’m looking forward to a lively discussion:

• Andrew Chen, Futuristic Play
• Ajay Chopra, General Partner, Trinity Ventures
• John Gardner, Partner, Nokia Growth Partners
• Anne-Marie Roussel, Director, Digital Media Strategic and Emerging Business Team, Microsoft Corporation

The schedule for the evening is:

6:00 - 7:00 pm: Networking and hors d’oeuvres
7:00 - 8:15 pm: Panel discussion and Q/A
8:15 - 8:30 pm: Additional networking

LOCATION: Microsoft Conference Center, 1065 La Avenida Street, Building 1, Mountain View, CA 94403

Tickets are still available, and it’s worth getting them in advance as they are a bit more at the door.

In the meantime, if you’re coming, post any questions you might have for the panelists in the comment section here and I’ll try to squeeze some of them in during the conversation.

Last month, I served as one of several judges for the TeleWho? contest being held by Plantronics. The idea was to solicit ideas for a term to replace “telecommuter” with something that reflected the way the digital era had changed our work habits.

Today, Plantronics announced the winner: Cloudworker!

According the Plantronics press release, the winning submission defined a “cloudworker” as:

“somebody who uses on-demand technology and collaboration tools, such as unified communications, to work anywhere and anytime, and uses the resulting freedom to enable a my-size-fits-me career path and lifestyle. The metaphor of the cloud extends well beyond cloud computing and software as a service applications to include work environments, distributed teams, and communication tools.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Being a columnist can be a lot of fun. Except when it’s not. And there’s something about Fridays that can be particularly grim, even at times like this when it seems every day feels a little more bleak. Maybe there’s just more economic data released today. Who knows? There’s just something about the end of the week when the universe seems to want to serve up an extra dollop of bad news.

To demonstrate my point, here is a sampling of the subject lines that greeted me when I just logged into my email:

• Challenger: TECH CUTS REACH HIGHEST LEVEL SINCE 2005
• Financial Market Strategies - November 14 - Economy: Not Pessimistic Enough!
• Consumer Sentiment Stays at Low Levels Last Seen During 1980 Recession
• Retail Sales Decline Sharply for Fourth Consecutive Month
• Telefonica’s sub growth slowdown could lead to price cuts; Pali Research Blog Posting
• Online Consumers Plan to Spend Less in Stores, Slightly More Online
• WSJ TECH ALERT: Sun Microsystems to Cut 18% of Work Force

And that’s just a few choice selections. It goes on.

It makes me long for a nice, heart warming piece of spam from a Nigerian prince.

My Sunday column (”We need to stop sending our e-waste overseas“) called on the U.S. to take two direct steps that would address the export of our e-waste to poor communities around the world.

The column came out of a conversation I had with Sheila Davis, the executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

I had several thoughtful e-mails from readers. But there was one in particular that I wanted to highlight. Ed Malley, of Aptos wrote:

Read the rest of this entry »

Has any large American company been so thoroughly transformed in recent years as Hewlett Packard? I started thinking about this when I heard the company planned to lay off 24,600 employees in the wake of closing its purchase of EDS in August. That represents about 7.7 percent of the combined workforce. On average, post acquisition layoffs range from 7 to 10 percent.

Still, the raw number underlying that percentage represents the latest in a series of dramatic moves to reshape this valley icon. First under Carly Fiorina, and now under Mark Hurd, the company is almost unrecognizable from the company that began this century. The most obvious signs of this are the blockbuster acquisitions: Compaq, Mercury Interactive, Opsware, and now EDS.

But underlying those big moves is the enormous upheaval within the ranks of HP and the companies it has acquired. To get a sense of how profound this has been, I went back to look at some of the numbers related to HP’s various restructuring announcements. By my count, including the enhanced retirement plan offered in 2007 and the EDS cuts, HP has gone through seven rounds of restructuring since 2002.

When the latest EDS cuts are completed, a process expected to take at least three years, the company will have announced lay offs of 57,500 since 2002. The total cost of laying off that many people: $9.01 billion dollars, about half of that in cash. I’ll explain how I got that figure in a moment. Read the rest of this entry »

The 44.6 percent drop in Google stock over the past year has wiped out $104 billion in valuation. How low will it go?

Over the past decade of covering business in Silicon Valley, I’ve periodically written about the annual study of executive compensation conducted by United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies. For most of its 15 years, that report has focused on the gap between the income of the average worker and CEOs.

Today, the groups are changing direction a bit on their report to focus on the amount taxpayers are subsidizing executive compensation. In a report called, “Executive Excess 2008: How Average Taxpayers Subsidize Runaway Pay,” the groups put our annual price tag at $20 billion.

On Friday, I spoke with Sarah Anderson, director of the global economy project at IPS, about the reason for the new focus. Anderson said the groups felt there was a new opportunity to influence the political debate in Washington about executive compensation. She noted that both Barack Obama and John McCain have at times bashed overpaid CEOs on the campaign stump this year.

So to move the debate forward, the groups looked at several pieces of pending legislation in Congress that address executive compensation either directly or indirectly by closing various loopholes. The groups culled through piles of documents amassed by various Congressional committees and other federal agencies to calculate the bill for taxpayers.

The report examines the impact of five different subsidies: Read the rest of this entry »