Silicon Valley - Page 31

Prime Minister Narenda Modi will visit the Bay Area this weekend, becoming the first Indian PM to visit the West Coast in over 30 years.

On Monday, Ahmed Mohamed, the freshman from MacArthur High School in Texas who was arrested after bringing a clock that looked like a bomb to school, was fêted at the science fair at the Google campus in Mountain View.

The Los Angeles Public Library has created a program to teach coding to elementary and middle school children, using a grant from the Eureka leadership program.

Silicon Valley-area Democratic congressional candidate Ro Khanna received a powerful endorsement on Thursday from State Senate President Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles).

California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a controversial drone privacy bill Wednesday, declaring that it would expose hobbyists to excessive litigation.

Hipsters who cannot afford high San Francisco rent have a new option: $1,800 per month for a spot on a bunk bed with a stranger in a home with 30 other people in what is being called “co-creative” housing.

With Apple’s stock price under pressure, the company is gearing up at the San Francisco Cow Palace for the September 9 World Developer Conference.

(Ferenstein Wire)—A brand new taxi design was unveiled last week to mixed fanfare, as the tech-enabled Nissan NV 200 “Taxi of Tomorrow” runs on a decidedly 19th-century technology: fossil fuel combustion.

Rep. Mike Honda (D), who represents Silicon Valley in Washington, has hired two high-profile Washington law firms and a California-based PR team to handle his image and political future following a substantial investigation into ethical wrongdoing. Honda is accused of having mixed government and campaign business.

An estimated 200 people came out Sunday evening to a rally calling for opposition to the Iran deal currently being considered in the U.S. Congress. The event followed a midday briefing that drew over 150.

(Ferenstein Wire)—The taxi industry has launched yet another high-profile attempt to conquer their arch nemesis Uber. The upcoming Arro, like many of its predecessors, is an app for hailing and paying for a taxi, much like other ride-hailing companies out of Silicon Valley. Every similar app, so far, has either completely shut down shortly after launch or failed to slow the rise of Uber.

As much as global financial concerns are going to hit tech companies harder than other sorts of enterprise, so too will their own lack of ambition. The ugly truth is that Silicon Valley has largely given up trying to fix big problems and has retreated into photo-sharing apps and productivity tools.

Amazon views its work environments as a tough response to slack conditions elsewhere in the labor force, encouraging excellence and superior effort from its workers by setting standards it proudly describes as “unreasonably high.” Many horrified readers thought the NYT article described brutally exploitative conditions covered by corporate happy-talk about achievement.

In the immigration plan he released Sunday, Donald Trump slammed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for making the path easier for immigrants to land jobs at high-tech firms.

The New York Times caused a stir in Silicon Valley with a viral article claiming that Amazon.com brutally exploits its white collar workers with unforgiving management practices. The investigation caused such an outcry that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos personally responded with an email to employees assuring them that “callous” management practices wouldn’t be tolerated.

Uber’s low-cost service, UberX, reduces drunk driving deaths all over California and may be responsible for a drop in DUIs on NYE.

Silicon Valley often gets knocked for a lack of diversity, but historically excluded groups are making an impressive showing at the top spot of the most valuable companies. Just looking at the top ten companies based in Silicon Valley by NASDAQ market cap, 40% are run by someone who is a woman, an immigrant, or non-white. By individual demographics, 20% are women, and 30% are foreign-born.

Hillary Clinton is directly courting Silicon Valley in her $350 billion plan to overhaul higher education. Clinton will reveal the full details of her plan at an upcoming talk in New Hampshire, but she has released the major tenets to news outlets.

3D printing has been around for several decades, but expiring patents are driving costs down and major tech breakthroughs are driving up speed.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) posted a 40-day public comment period late August 3 aimed at transferring the oversight of the Internet to a not-for-profit entity.

Marketing technology is emerging as one of the hottest sectors for business tech investing, according to the PitchBook Blog. Marketing tech companies in the first six months of 2015 raised $1.62 billion in 157 venture capital deals, and 205 companies were acquired for a total of $4.3 billion.

Uber is now valued at almost $51 billion, a valuation that puts the “on-demand mobile service” (ODMS) leader at the level of Facebook in 2011. The company’s fund-raising success has spurred a vast number of “Uber for X” start-ups that are building corporate empires with legions of outsourced contract workers. But the “gig economy” seems to be operating the same money-losing business model as the “Dot-com Bubble.”

For a company that is regularly scowled at by the tech media, Microsoft’s introduction of Windows 10 over the last 48 hours has been amazingly smooth, and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. In what for Microsoft is a paradigm shift, the

Every rain cloud has a silver lining–and nowhere is that more true than in California, even though there haven’t been many rain clouds overhead in some time. California’s record four-year drought is driving a new technology boom, with several startups

Hundreds of Cal Water customers in a portion of Los Altos were at risk of being sickened by traces of the E. coli bacteria and total coliform in their water this weekend.

In its last quarter that will be impacted by innovation on Steve Jobs’ watch, Apple booked strong quarterly revenue and earnings yesterday. But the company had to admit that existing Apple customers were slow to upgrade to new iPhone releases and Apple as a status symbol in China may be coming to an end. The stock plunged by -10 percent, or about $80 billion, before recovering somewhat today. But as Breitbart News warned last month, ‘Apple Products: Without Steve Jobs, the Thrill is Gone.’

Former Florida Governor and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush arrived in San Francisco on Thursday as part of his latest fundraising binge, during which he met with members of the tech sector and reportedly fielded “tough questions” from those present.

On Friday, Lincoln Labs, a liberty-oriented technology thought leadership group, opens its second annual conference: #Reboot2015. Featuring an array of experts from across technology, politics and the ideological spectrum, attendees will discuss how technology can and should impact our politics and how we can harness innovation to improve government, society and life for all Americans.

One of the problems faced by Republican campaigns is that Silicon Valley tends to lean left, giving Democrats substantial support in a variety of forms from the big tech companies. There are plenty of great tech people out there ready to work for Republican campaigns, though. Recruiting them early and folding them into a well-organized campaign is essential. Gov. Scott Walker seems to have done just that.

Conservative talk radio host and scholar Mark Levin called in to Breitbart News Sunday and blasted “criminal politicians” on both sides of the aisle who keep praising illegal immigrants. Levin emphatically stressed that Republican voters must reject presidential candidates who will not block the left from enacting their radical goals.

Microsoft’s dumping of 7,800 employees and taking a $7.6 billion write-down related to its purchase of Nokia’s phone manufacturing operation was a cheap price to pay to vanquish the ghost of the Steve Ballmer era.

Silicon Valley Business Journal just reported that “Ellen Pao is resigning from Reddit after eight months of drama as interim CEO.” Having kept her Reddit position despite  losing America’s highest profile sexual discrimination lawsuits against what she called Silicon Valley’s “boy’s club,”

If it weren’t for the excessive spending of late ’90s Silicon Valley startups, one of TV’s most iconic shows would likely have been axed by network executives. “Silicon Valley put the West Wing on television,” the show’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, tells The Ferenstein Wire.

Given that the world is full of hunger, volatile food prices, and social unrest, a pair of recent MIT Sloan Business School graduates have launched a mobile application called Spoiler Alert to make it quick and easy for companies to sell or donate millions of tons of surplus food.

“San Francisco: It’s the New Rome.” That’s the anonymous comment overheard by Politico’s Mike Allen–or one of his sources–at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the summer gathering of the nation’s intellectual elite (and the people with enough money to be seen with them). It is an acknowledgment of the city’s new power–and its decadence.

We need a new Bond. No need to be tied to convention here; the era of middle-aged white British men is over. In the spirit of the Jenner clan, the 21st Century cries out for an androgynous Bond. Maybe Miley Cyrus? Also, the name “James” is too 20th Century. Something like “Jamey” would be more appropriate, and allow Bond to swing easily between male and female, as necessary or desired.