Showing posts with label San Francisco Bay Area. Show all posts
Showing posts with label San Francisco Bay Area. Show all posts

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Giant Tech Companies Should Give Money To Individuals And Local Governments

Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Big tech companies like Google should pay money to individuals whose data they cash on, and to governments in whose jurisdictions they make money in. It should be sane amounts and sane percentages, but it can't be zero.

Empire of the geeks
Silicon Valley should be celebrated. But its insularity risks a backlash .... THE English have Silicon Fen and Silicon Roundabout, the Scots have Silicon Glen. Berlin boasts Silicon Allee, New York Silicon Alley. But the brain of the tech world is the ecosystem in and around San Francisco. ...... Airbnb, a seven-year-old firm that helps people turn their homes into hotels, operates in 34,000 towns and cities around the world. ..... American capitalism has a new hub in the west. Wall Street used to be the place to seek fortunes and make deals; now it is increasingly the Valley.

The area’s tech companies are worth over $3 trillion

...... The enormous, disruptive creativity of Silicon Valley is unlike anything since the genius of the great 19th-century inventors. Its triumph is to be celebrated. ....... insularity. The geeks live in a bubble that seals off their empire from the world they are doing so much to change. ..... Many denizens of the Valley believe that tech is the solution to all ills and that government is just an annoyance that still lacks an algorithm.
Silicon rally





Friday, May 22, 2015

Reverse Brain Drain?

Best viewed large. The main terminal of the br...
Best viewed large. The main terminal of the brand new Bangalore International Airport. I was one of the first few people at the airport. My mother arrived on the third flight into this new airport. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Top Indian talent in Silicon Valley moves back home to join star startups
Top Indian talent is moving from globally iconic American technology companies to India's star startups. And homes are being shifted from Bay Area to Bangalore. ...... from Google to Flipkart, from Disney and Facebook to Zomato, from Symantec to Snapdeal ..... Matching dollar salaries and the sheer range of future career opportunities are the hooks India's tech blue chips are offering to Indian talent in Silicon Valley. ...... "The smart entrepreneurs have already returned, tens of thousands more will return over the next 2-3 years" ...... being wooed by at least half-adozen Indian startups valued anywhere between $1 billion and $15 billion. ...... All salaries look handsome and Silicon Valley-competitive in dollar terms, and most assignments involve complex technology solutions for the mobile platform...... startups such as Zomato, whose restaurant discovery app is now present in 22 countries, are articulating their ambitions on a global scale. For Silicon Valley's top talent, nothing attracts more than a mission to dominate the world. "The idea is always world domination, if you speak anything less than that, you are not ambitious enough. ......... Both are being paid Valley salaries too — $5-6 million annual packages. ...... but it's just a whole new level of intensity here ..... "India is at the forefront of the mobile innovation" ...... "I made the decision to move here in less than 30 seconds," said Mani. "Hundreds of millions of Indians will experience the Internet for the first time on a smartphone in the next few years" ........ "India will see a technology boom over the next 5 years that will make the US dotcom boom look lame. There will be dozens of billion-dollar companies emerging from India's ecosystem which will transform business, industry and society." ......... "History is witness to the savviest, smartest and most entrepreneurial people usually going off to crazy places at regular intervals. This is relatively reasonable"

 

Thursday, March 20, 2014

San Fran And New York

Out of fog Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge a...
Out of fog Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco in fog and crepuscular rays. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
San Francisco is not a "city" the way New York is a city. San Fran is not big enough. It is not dirty enough. It is not Delhi/Mumbai enough.

Why San Francisco Is Not New York
For one thing, today’s San Francisco is much more of a company town. Go into any bar in San Francisco and you will hear people talking about their start-up, or a battle they recently had with a line of code. Stop by a coffee shop in some neighborhoods here and you will be surrounded by venture capitalists being pitched a new idea for a new app. All of these people rarely, if ever, interact with people outside the tech world...... In New York, if you meet someone who works in tech you feel like you’ve met a long-lost relative. Bars, coffee shops and restaurants are a mishmash of people from vastly different industries. ..... The lack of diversity between social groups in San Francisco isn’t going to change anytime soon, as the number of tech employees in the Bay Area is only going to continue to rise. ..... in the early-90s, tech workers made up less than 1 percent of city workers in San Francisco. In 2000, tech employees had risen to 3 percent of the workforce. By 2013, that number had passed 6 percent. ..... Unlike New York, which arguably has more economic, social, and employment diversity than anywhere else on earth, San Francisco’s tech-on-tech layering has created a not-so-little echo chamber. As I wrote last year, people seem to build products here that would make the rest of the country scratch their heads. ....... In San Francisco .. (I know of one successful founder who owns an old beat-up 1985 Honda that he drives to his secret private jet.) ....... When I came across a passage in the book, “The Annals of San Francisco,” about the 1840s Gold Rush, I found the answer to that question...... “Despite the amazingly high cost of living and the extraordinary opportunities for frittering away money, everyone in early San Francisco was supremely confident that he would soon be able to return home with an incalculable amount of gold,” the author writes in the book while describing the city decades ago. “Everything was conceived on a vast scale, and there was always plenty of cash available for any scheme that might be proposed, no matter how impossible or bizarre it seemed.” ..... Well would you look at that. It seems that San Francisco is the new San Francisco.
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Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Grocery Is Trickier

Amazon plans big expansion of online grocery business: sources
Wal-Mart is testing same-day and next-day delivery of online grocery and general merchandise orders in the San Francisco Bay Area and operates a grocery delivery business in Britain..... FreshDirect delivers food to homes and offices in some parts of New York City and its trying to expand its service into the Bronx. .... If online orders also include higher-margin general merchandise such as digital cameras ..... "Grocery is a frequency business. If Amazon can deliver to consumers' homes two or three times a week, they can up-sell other items" ..... Amazon offers same-day delivery in several cities including New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago, and since last year the company has been building new distribution warehouses on the outskirts of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.
Amazon Reportedly Looking To Expand Grocery Business, Roll Out AmazonFresh Beyond Seattle
Amazon has had an ongoing experiment for the past half decade called AmazonFresh, which offers grocery service and delivery of fresh produce to customers in its home base of Seattle. That program is on the verge of a significant expansion .... grocery has proven relatively impervious to attempts to turn it into an online business thus far, mostly because of immense costs of keeping inventory on hand, factors like spoilage that don’t affect other goods, and delivery complications (refrigerated trucks, for instance).
But no telling how adding intelligence does not make it a better experience.
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Monday, September 10, 2012

Geography Is Irrelevant

To me that is the whole point of the Internet. And geography is even less relevant at gigabit speeds. And welcome Kansas City.

Fred Wilson: Pollenware
Pollenware is located in Kansas City, our second investment in the midwest in less than a year. We are finding lots of interesting networks and marketplaces all around the country and all around the world. The opportunities are certainly not limited to the bay area, boston, and NYC these days.

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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Urban Centers And Tech Innovation

New York City
New York City (Photo credit: kaysha)
Facebook Opens First International Engineering Office In London
The company currently has over 901 million monthly active numbers and estimates that over 80% of those users are outside the U.S. and Canada.
What is it about big cities? Most Silicon Valley engineers prefer to live in San Francisco, the city. They commute. The number one place for tech startups in America today is San Francisco, not Silicon Valley. And I intend to differentiate between the two. The number two place is not Boston or Seattle. It is New York City. Google has a major engineering presence in NYC. Many big tech companies do.

Big cities are attractive because that is where engineers want to live. Broadband is everywhere. So other than quality of life it is about the ecosystem. And the tech ecosystem is easier to build in a big city.

Frankly I think NYC is on its way to become number one by the end of the decade.



Does Geography Matter?


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