Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Skype has just posted an explanation of the firm’s 30-hour outage last week. I previously used Skype religiously for both Internet and landline phone calls (incoming and outgoing), but over the last six months have pretty much dropped using the service due to huge echo problems dialing many numbers (nothing worse than a business call being interrupted by “could you repeat that again?”), inability to connect to conference call lines, and some strange problem connecting into the 805-area code (particularly in Santa Barbara).

Posting has been slow here, as I’ve been traveling for the last week and haven’t had the cycles to post to the blog.

Here’s a great example of blog reach overkill: Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing — which, according to their open stats — gets more than 2.5M unique visitors a month, and 22M pageviews a month (Alexa rank: 2,311) – just posted his garage sale in Silverlake on the blog. I sure hope everyone doesn’t show up at once…

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in Southern California, which is an increasing number of stealth-mode, funded companies. Stealth mode–which is to fund and build a company without letting anyone know what you’re doing until at or very near launch–is something which has typically been a Silicon Valley phenomenon. The reasons given to me for starting in stealth mode are usually something about not letting the competition get wind of what you are working on, not letting competing venture capitalists fund similar companies, or to provide an air of “mystery” around a product. Typically stealth mode firms do not have a web site, or only have a single page with contact information and jobs; won’t talk to the press; and are not listed on VC firms portfolio pages, even if funded.

In some cases–semiconductors come to mind–stealth mode seems like it might be useful. In particular, where there are just a few possible customers, and where you don’t need exposure to a larger market audience, it might make sense to avoid cluing too many people into what you’re doing. However, I’ve seen an increasing number of consumer-focused or online web services who are staying stealthy, and won’t talk to the press–even when they have product, are open for business, and trying to attract customers– because they feel like if they let people know what they’re doing, someone will copy them.

How can you possibly expect to get any traction in a market, if no one knows you exist?

VentureNet, the local venture capital focused conference held in fall by the Technology Council of Southern California, has begun accepting applications for presenter spots. The deadline to be considered is September 14. I’m on the selection committee, but there are far better qualified venture investors who really spend a lot of time winnowing through the applications for the event to find the best presenting firms.

VentureNet is an interesting contrast to most of the Silicon Valley venture capital events I run across, not only because it’s organized by a nonprofit, but because there is a dedicated group of Southern California venture capitalists who work to make the event happen. I’ve noticed that a great number of events down here are truly community supported by VCs — perhaps because it’s only recently we’ve started to gain some attention for the great technology firms here, or because the common interest in building the technology base here — but it’s a marked contrast from what often can be a “dog eat dog” world in Silicon Valley, where you often have to spend thousands of dollars to apply, attend, or exhibit at the venture conferences. It’s a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and startups to connect with investors in both the local area and beyond.

Santa Monica’s ThisNext has just put up a new real-time activity map on their web site, which shows what people are shopping/browsing for on Google Maps. Sort of interesting to watch. (as most people who read socalTECH know, we have our own map mashup of recent venture deals on our web site–though our map mashup is not quite as mesmerizing as watching an Internet user in Norway shopping for a bikini…).

(disclaimer: Clearstone is a sponsor of this blog, and happens to be an investor in ThisNext; however sponsors don’t influence who we do or do not cover in our news, or how we cover them.)

The Los Angeles Times just announced a few minutes ago that it has appointed a Vice President of Software Engineering and Architecture — shortly after appointing a CTO from Edmunds.com and Yahoo/Overture. Now, what does this say about the massive changes facing the newspaper publishing industry, when they are laying off journalists and hiring software VPs? Are newspapers media companies, or software companies?

Tom Foremski (a Silicon Valley independent blogger/reporter) had an interesting post on this earlier this year, claiming that the center of the media world is shifting to Silicon Valley. From my own experience–although I’m probably biased, as I started out my career as a software engineer, not a journalist–our own business is as much software as it is media.

Southern California is ranked number two again in venture funding for Q2, with $933M in venture investments last quarter. Silicon Valley still had the most activity in terms of both deal amounts ($2.5B) and number of deals (290 deals), however Southern California continues to be ahead of New England in terms of dollar amounts (New England saw $862.4M in deals, 141 deals total). Interestingly enough, Southern California had a smaller deal count (105 vs. 141) than New England, which also was the same case as last quarter. It appears that funded firms here are simply raising more money in their rounds than in New England.

John Dvorak has an interesting post on his thoughts on Bubble 2.0; and, a new site has launched which makes it obvious why I haven’t got what it takes to do a tech news videoblog.