If you haven’t already heard about the Digital Family Reunion holiday party, a long list of local organizations has gathered together to put together a holiday party at the Skirball Cultural Center on December 11th. There are more details on the Digital Family Reunion web site. On Thursday, December 11th from 5:00pm to 10:00pm, the [...]
Tired of the constant stream of bad news as high tech startups have been cutting back staff as the markets and economy continue to spook investors and executives? Don’t worry–it’s No-Layoff Week! That is–unless somebody in your HR staff, executive staff, or investors are absolutely stupid–it’s extremely rare to have companies fire or conduct layoffs [...]
Jason Nazar, CEO of local Santa Monica startup Docstoc — and relentless promoter of his company–has weighed in on the “Silicon Valley versus Los Angeles” debate with a blog post last night, saying: Bay area founders are amazing technologists. They build obsessively user focused products, do a fantastic job at virally driving a ton of [...]
As the high tech industry continues to react to the overall economic slowdown I’m finding that recently — on the whole — entrepreneurs are fairly upbeat about their prospects, but venture capitalists, attorneys, and other service providers seem to have hit a “recession depression” and are taking a very negative outlook towards the prospects for [...]
In the cycle of grief over the current state of the markets (public and private), where is Southern California’s high tech community right now? Denial? Anger? Depression? I think we’re still early in the cycle–in the denial stage–where, based on many entrepreneurs I’ve talked to, people are in denial that the economy is going to [...]
Hi everyone–we’ve been doing some server upgrades for the last week or so, and we had inadvertently disabled part of our calendar pages. They’re back up, in case you’re wondering. btw, if we’re not listing any Southern California (Santa Barbara to San Diego) technology events you think ought to be listed, let us know. You [...]
Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today about how younger startups/workers are dressing down, and how NOT wearing a suit/etc. seems to be a badge of pride for startups. Of course, this has always been the case in technology/Silicon Valley (ie think golf shirt + khakis for marketing folks, T-shirt + jeans + birkenstocks [...]
The launch this morning of Oblong Industries — a venture-backed company developing gesture-based user interfaces ala The Minority Report — is the latest in what appears to be a string of 3D and virtual interaction-related companies showing up here in Southern California. Other companies in the area include Total Immersion, which develops technology which allows [...]
I chuckled at this post a few minutes ago on Mashable–talking about how a Twitter ranking site might be a phishing scam for passwords. The site — twitterrank — claimed to give out a numerical rating of how popular any particular account on twitter was. Someone pointed me at the site last week and the [...]
Greentechmedia, an online media site focused on the clean technology industry, has a good profile of a very, very stealthy Southern California venture capital firm, The Quercus Trust. Apparently, The Quercus Trust is the most active clean technology investor in the nation–more active than Khosla Ventures. Greentech reports that they have 34 clean technology firms [...]
Thoughts and commentary from Benjamin F. Kuo, publisher of socalTECH.com.
