The bipartisan Legislative Analysts’ Office has announced that California’s 2015-16 personal income tax collection has fallen from a huge surplus to a $147 million deficit. The cause appears to be plummeting Silicon Valley capital gains and weakening tech employment.
Only four counties out of California’s 58 have fully recovered from the Great Recession, in the sixth year after the official economic recovery began.
With Hillary Clinton’s polls collapsing, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s project “The Groundwork,” which was supposed to lead Silicon Valley’s effort to put Clinton into the White House, appears to be failing.
Since Obama bundler Chris Sacca led the board of directors coup to fire CEO Dick Costolo in June, Twitter has fallen from number 3 to number 7 in social media popularity, and the stock price has lost $12 billion in value.
The Obama Administration’s new Countering Violent Extremism Task Force is an effort to coerce Silicon Valley tech companies to cooperate in encryption back-door digital surveillance.
The Chinese government has just passed a security law that reportedly could require technology companies to hand over encryption keys to private data. The law is so controversial that President Obama personally raised concerns about it to President Xi Jinping.
Utah is booming as America’s top pro-business state, and its tech sector–“Silicon Slopes”–is beginning to suck in huge amounts of venture capital.
Having cycled from failed video game maker to the $2.8 billion valuation as king of corporate chat rooms, Slack Technologies now wants to get into the corporate venture capital game.
If you only read headlines about achingly politically correct tech founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Silicon Valley, for all its rapacious capitalistic instincts, is a hellhole of progressive hand-wringing.
With the rise of Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit, there’s a sinking suspicion that the traditional 9-5 job is being replaced by flexible, independent contract work. But, despite the existence of multiple billion-dollar Silicon Valley startups hiring an army of independent contract workers, economists have had difficulty finding any evidence that Americans were more likely to be self-employed.
The tech elite are teaming up to protect humanity from evil Matrix-like artificial intelligence. Elon Musk and a team of Silicon Valley elite have reportedly pledged more than a billion dollars to construct artificial intelligence that benefits mankind, rather than enslaves it.
Beacon Economics just published a report concluding that California is the best place for new business in America, despite high taxes, burdensome regulations, and high living costs. “Next 10,” founded and funded by F. Noel Perry, retained Beacon Economics to
A new Progressive Policy Institute report reveals that Silicon Valley’s domination of telecom, tech, and content industries is increasingly at risk from other tech/info clusters in America–especially Texas tech hubs.
Lack of work-life balance may be a feature—not a bug—at the world’s top companies. Glassdoor just released its annual list of “Best Places to Work,” based on its database of employee reviews.
Hillary Clinton is calling for Silicon Valley to help to thwart “the most effective recruiter in the world,” but no, she’s not talking about Donald Trump.
In the world of hyper-competitive business and San Francisco’s experimental culture a trend has emerged – microdosing psychedelic drugs to improve performance.
Mercedes-Benz research and development lab in Sunnyvale, California is racing to beat Apple, Google and Uber to dominate commercial and luxury self-driving vehicles. Google, Tesla, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Volkswagen and four other developers of autonomous vehicles already have permission from
Money that was being appropriated for use towards protecting California power plants from terror attacks is reportedly being held hostage as a consequence of a battle between the California Public Utilities Commission and state legislators over the appropriation of $5 million in legal fees stemming from a corruption investigation into the agency.
California employers added 41,200 new jobs in the month of October, as the Golden State’s employment production continues at a 50 percent higher pace than the nation as a whole.
San Francisco is a living crystal ball of what happens when a city refuses to build enough housing to accommodate the dense clustering of high-tech and service workers natural to modern industries.
The rumor mill indicates that the 155 acres that Apple quietly acquired near San Jose International Airport are enough for the R&D center for its “Project Titan” self-driving cars.
Tesla claims it will sell a half million vehicles a year when its $35,000 Model 3 is introduced in 2017, but the network of charging stations in California is already imploding with just 160,000 registered electric vehicles.
(Ferenstein Wire)—Silicon Valley is coming after unionized industries. A top investor in the Valley, Paul Graham, lit up Twitter, tweeting, “Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by startups. (I don’t mean in simply paying people less, but rather that industries afflicted by unions are sclerotic so have left lots undone.)”
Ted Cruz, who received widespread praise for his Tuesday debate performance in which he slammed the media for its biased coverage of immigration, continued his verbal broadside against pro-amnesty special interests on today’s program of the Laura Ingraham Show.
With wearable fitness devices the fastest-growing sector of consumer electronics, Fitbit, Inc. (FIT-NYSE) and Jawbone are engaged in a life-or-death marketplace and legal war.
Hewlett-Packard Inc. is officially spinning out its personal computer and printer operations into a free-standing company from its enterprise software systems and consulting business on Monday, creating two companies with market capitalizations of about $25 billion each.
Biotech sensation Theranos was supposed to be Silicon Valley’s next hot IPO. But late Thursday evening, the company told Fortune Magazine that its board of directors had shrunk from 12 members to five as it battles a perfect storm of negative publicity.
The latest brainstorm from the Chinese Communist Party is a system for monitoring the Internet activity and financial transactions of its citizens, computing a “social credit” score on the acceptability of each person’s behavior, similar to the credit ratings compiled by financial institutions.
Quotas are coming to Silicon Valley. In fact, there is growing evidence they’ve already been put in place at some of the largest tech companies in the region — and soon, “diversity” will be required for start-ups seeking funding.
Silicon Valley’s “coding bootcamps” are a cottage industry of fast-track private vocational schools for graduates looking to enter the competitive tech industry as software engineers, data scientists, and other in-demand jobs. Many coding bootcamp graduates who hold college degrees in areas notorious for slim earning potential (like English majors) and are now fully employed in the tech industry making a lot more money.
As Theranos, Inc. was preparing for one of Silicon Valley’s biggest IPO’s when its pin-prick blood test for thousands of diseases was approved by the FDA on July 15, the company was rocked on October 15 by a Wall Street Journal article citing “unnamed” former employees claiming Theranos inflated its testing effectiveness to the FDA.
Silicon Valley and other tech center start-ups raised $2.06 billion in “agtech” venture capital in the first half of 2015 to develop apps and devices to help farmers manage the four-year-old drought.
Apple Inc.’s near-billion-dollar loss Tuesday for violating a University of Wisconsin patent from 1998 that improves processor performance in all of its iPhone and iPad products will encourage more universities to sue tech companies.
The $67 billion Dell-EMC merger–a record-breaking offer in Silicon Valley–is an effort to take a Valley behemoth private in order to make the disruptive changes necessary to become a dominant force in the coming cloud computing era.
In moves that just get weirder every day, Google–now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet–has revealed that it owns abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com.
(Ferenstein Wire) – The tech industry, now one of the largest private sector lobbying forces in Washington DC, hasn’t had much to say as Republicans scramble to find a new Speaker for the House of Representatives. But now, Congress’s geekiest member, Representative Darrell Issa, is “considering” putting his hat in the ring and has turned heads in the well-heeled tech halls of D.C.
Pushing his immigration platform, which includes calls for broader reforms to the legal immigration system and “a merit-based system” that gives people a path to citizenship, Marco Rubio said “my argument is if you’re the best at what you do on this planet, I don’t want you here temporarily. I want you here permanently. I want you to become American.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has been voted in as the permanent CEO of Twitter by the social media site’s board. This follows a three-month stretch as interim CEO following the resignation of his predecessor, Dick Costolo in July. Dorsey co-founded Twitter
California Governor Jerry Brown showed his unflinching support for unlimited drone operations by vetoing three bipartisan bills protecting privacy, public safety and education.
The Tesla Model X SUV was introduced earlier this week to rave reviews for its design touches, including rear “falcon-wing” doors that open upward for seven passengers.
