For a place that’s made its bones inventing chips and routers, Silicon Valley has carved out a neat little niche bringing financial services to the masses. Intuit, E-Trade and Mint.com are among those who’ve pioneered ways to give people more control over their money via the Internet. Now a pair of local startups — Motif and Local3 — are getting into the action with platforms they hope will make it less intimidating to buy stocks.
Columnist Troy Wolverton says the new version of Microsoft Office has some cool new features, but it suffers from taking design cues from the upcoming Windows 8.
Carl Guardino isn’t one to let the organization he heads, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, rest on its laurels. He believes much more can be done and he continues to push for new initiatives to improve the local economy.
It doesn’t take four computers to write a newspaper column but, just to prove a point, that’s what columnist Larry Magid is doing as he tries out Microsoft Office 2013 — the next version of Microsoft’s popular and profitable Office suite.
Columnist Steve Butler finds it disheartening: Just when we thought the banks were finally beginning to respond to some collective dictate of conscience, we learn about their interest-rate manipulation whose cost to all of us has yet to be determined.
Google CEO Larry Page has skipped several public appearances over the past month because of an undisclosed malady that interferes with his ability to speak. While executives say he’s still attending meetings and running the company, Page’s absence this week from Google’s quarterly financial conference call prompted some Wall Street analysts and governance experts to call for a better explanation of whatever caused the chief Googler to lose his voice.
The judge in a sex discrimination case that’s rocked Silicon Valley’s staid venture capital world ruled on Friday that Ellen Pao — the junior partner who claims venerable Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers treats women like second-class citizens — does not have to take her legal claim to outside arbitration.
The Bay Area job market roared to life in June, creating nearly 17,000 new jobs last month, with gains propelled by all three of the region’s primary urban centers.
