Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

I was amused to see this post on Valleywag about Google’s Susan Wojcicki improperly taking credit for AdSense, and the fact that AdSense came from Santa Monica-based Applied Semantics.

I’m very surprised by the number of people I run into who don’t even realize that Applied Semantics (which was purchased by Google a year before its IPO) was the “brains” behind Google AdSense. In fact, Google AdSense was at one time Applied Semantics AdSense, and the reason why Google opened a Southern California office in the first place. I’ve run into quite a few venture capitalists (who absolutely love backing employees from companies that have been successful in the past) who weren’t even aware of Applied Semantics and its success — probably because the employees have hung on at Google for a long time given the huge upside they saw on their options. Even if they’re out there, they probably wouldn’t need a venture capitalist to fund their own company…

Google announced a new program Wednesday to fund developers who create gadgets for the firm’s personal desktop and home page. For those who haven’t played around with Google’s personal home pages, gadgets are little software widgets which allow you to display custom content–news, games, weather, etc.

We’ve had a Google gadget available for socalTECH since almost day one, which allows you to customize the display of news and information from the web site. For example, you might set it to show only San Diego news; or perhaps display just Los Angeles venture capital dealflow; or maybe just San Diego technology events. Or, you can put three socalTECH gadgets on your custom home page each set to a different area.

Speaking of gadgets and widgets, we also have a Google Coop profile which will highlight recent articles on socaltech relevant to any search you do in Google; a browser plug-in for Mozilla to allow you to search socalTECH from your search bar in Mozilla; and a live calendar feed you can add to Google calendar or other calendar services.