Facebook’s efforts to develop startups that use its apps are really smart. It has created a $10 million fund called fbFund which helps small entrepreneurs in their first steps. Besides a short funding (not more than 100K), they provide some office space and some asessment from IT and PR experts.
I have spent two months in Silicon Valley trying to understand what goes on in this place and why so many Internet startups are born here. I have talked to many people, I have tried to live as a normal Valley person and have also experienced the flow of energy that lives here. I know [...]
Stanford is the real center of Silicon Valley. This university has so much to do with most things that have happened here! Companies like Cisco, Google, HP, Netscape or SUN would not exist if it were not for Stanford. Its close relationship with companies and VCs is behind some of the most successful IT projects [...]
Some of the best people I have met in Silicon Valley are all great networkers who organize meetups. Curiously, most of them were women and none were programmers but loved being surrounded by engineers. Why do they do this? To contribute to the ecosystem in Silicon Valley.
One of the most interesting lessons we had in the Social Media and Politics class at Stanford was related to the Obama campaign. And the conclusion is clear: his case can not be copied in continental Europe. There will never be an Obama in countries like Germany, France or Spain, because our systems are too [...]
“SMS are going to disappear in 5 years”. This is the most interesting quote I got from Mobile Monday Silicon Valley, a monthly event which gets around 300 people together in San Francisco or Palo Alto. This time the subject was as popular as the monetisation of the mobile web.
The Silicon Valley’s ecosystem is great at saying how good you are. It’s like a bunch of consultants just telling you what you want to hear (without the nice wording from consultants). Luckily, when you launch, you have users and customers that will tell you “the real thing”.
I went last Friday to the Techcrunch summer party in Menlo Park, sponsored by August Capital and many other companies. This is a very different event, compared to all the meetups I have been to. As illustrated by the picture, this is where money meets the Internet. Not what you expect in a geek world, [...]
Seen on today’s The Epoch Times print newspaper: “World’s greatest job. Wholesale distribution company seeking ebay power sellers to sale wholesale products. Must be registered with ebay for at least 2 years and must have 60 positive feedbacks or more with no more than 4 negatives. Also must be paypal verified (…)”. You can see [...]
Silicon Valley is not so big. Along the 101 route, between San Francisco and San José, you find cities like Palo Alto, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Cupertino or Mountainview, in which the big Internet firms have developed. But there are many differences between San Francisco and the rest of the valley.
