SiliconBeat

On Monday, President Obama gave a major policy speech announcing his official innovation policy. Countless folks I’ve talked to across Silicon Valley have been urging him to lay out his agenda and address head-on his plans for one of the most important sectors of the American economy.

I’m still catching up on the details of the announcement. And it comes with a long white paper mapping out all the nitty gritty. You can press and the white paper here: Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Paul Holland, a partner with Foundation Capital and a board member of Serious Materials, a maker of green construction materials, got a rare honor this morning. He introduced President Obama to a gathering of 120 cleantech leaders in Washington.

(Yes, I know, Obama needs no introduction, especially to the green crowd who fully expect to capitalize on his commitment to renewable energy and energy efficiency.)

Still, Holland chose his words carefully.

He first spoke of Serious Materials’ highly insulated windows and Ecorock, its green drywall product. He then mentioned the company recently purchased and re-opened a shuttered window company in Pennsylvania.

He also spoke about the role of venture capitalists — and the federal government.

“Over the last 30 years, venture capital-funded companies as diverse as Amazon and Cisco, Google and Microsoft, and Intel and Netflix have employed tens of millions of Americans in high paying, rewarding jobs,” he said. “Simply put, many of these companies would not be where they are today—beginning the reinvention and reinvigoration of American business and American manufacturing—were it not for progressive federal policies such as the Federal R&D Tax Credit and the Stimulus Package.”

Then, after saying U.S. businesses would be at a major disadvantage globally without the Federal R&D tax credit, he welcomed President Obama to the stage.

In our e-mail today was the text of a posting by the director of publications at the RiskMetrics Group, Ted Allen. (It was forwarded to us by Gary Lutin at The Shareholder Forum, which is currently hosting an ongoing forum on “Say on Pay” and acts as a clearinghouse of information on the topic. Allen’s post is titled “A ‘New Opening’ for Investors,” referring to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama. Read the rest of this entry »

Give the accounting firm Deloitte an A for promptness. We received an e-mail from the company with “President-elect Obama and Tax Policy” in the subject field that included a link to its paper titled “Tax Policy Decisions Ahead: President-elect Obama’s Call for Change”.

Noting that most serious observers of Washington “had long since concluded that the tax and spending commitments of the United States are unsustainable beyond the end of the next decade” when the presidential campaign began in earnest in the Spring of 2007, Deloitte reminds us that a few things have happened since, particularly in the last several weeks. Namely, ”a significant economic downturn and extraordinary government spending associated with efforts to promote recovery may have accelerated the potential day of reckoning.” Oh, right. (Wall Street, which seemed to have forgotten about that yesterday, remembered today.)

Deloitte says that the campaign “seems to have given structure to the debate over spending and taxes in four important respects:” Read the rest of this entry »

So the Obama text message experiment at first glance fell on its face. Many people, like me, never got it. And those who did, got it in the middle of the night. Disaster, right?

Actually, no. I say that having read Matthew Stannard’s story in The San Francisco Chronicle on Saturday. Stannard notes that the real goal of the plan may have getting millions of people to voluntarily submit their cell phone numbers to Obama’s database. Read the rest of this entry »

Still catching up from my week in the wilderness. But apparently last week, John McCain released an extended statement on what his technology policy would be. The release comes as polls show the race tightening between Barack Obama and McCain.

I’m still digging into it, but a few items caught my eye as being sure to excite valley tech policy wonks: Read the rest of this entry »