Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

I was driving around today and was pleased to see the number of drivers who were actually (surprise!) using both hands while driving, now that California has made driving while holding a cell phone while driving illegal. Now, it’s the first day of the law, so it’s likely with the publicity and attention to the subject only the very stupid would be driving around with their cell phone, but in any case, it’s a dramatic change from seeing about 8 out of 10 cars on the freeway with someone jabbering away on their mobile phones, gesturing with both hands (off the steering wheel), or otherwise not driving.

However it seems like “calling while driving” is just another symptom of today’s information overloaded world, where there are so many competing demands for our attention, we have begun to evolve into hyper-multitasking-short-attention-span creatures.  There are so many competing demands on our attention nowadays — from email, to RSS feeds, social networking services like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn; to SMS, twitter, and other instant messaging services — that I sometimes wonder how anyone can focus and pay serious attention to the task at hand.

Back when I was managing a software development group, we used to talk about how the best developers seemed to be able to shut out the world — cut out the “noise” from day to day life, email, and interruptions from other developers — in order to really focus and deliver on their code. We even set up “isolation rooms” for teams, where they could basically be locked up without interruption — by managers or others not on the team — so they could figure out the “really hard” problems involved in their projects.  The ability to really focus, and I mean 100%-of-your-brain-on-the-problem really made a huge difference to the productivity, and success, of the teams. Given that prior experience, I wonder how much the instant-communications, always-on environment is truly affecting the quality and work of companies today?

This morning’s funding news for Row 44 - a Westlake Village manufacturer of equipment for providing Wi-Fi in airplanes — is a reminder of what I’ve long regarded as one of Southern California’s biggest strengths: its diversity of people, industries, and companies. While many people might think of Southern California on mostly consumer internet and entertainment terms, the technology roots here run much, much deeper. Name almost any industry — hardware, software, Internet advertising, publishing, biomedical devices, pharmaceuticals, clean energy, advanced materials, semiconductors, communications, scientific equipment, storage, computer games and so on–and I can give you a list of a significant number of companies here who are major players in those industries.

It’s what you would call — if you were a biologist — biodiversity, namely, a wide range of types of species and variations (or in this case, companies) in the ecosystem (here, the economy). It’s a strength, because as folks in the tech industry know, there is a constant shift in the fortunes of not just companies but entire industries. It’s one of the great things about being in an area which isn’t completely dominated by technology. There are enough other industries here to constantly spawn out new companies — very often, technology companies — to fill some need for those other industries.

That diversity makes for sustainable growth, so that when you have a shift in either economic or funding patterns, activity doesn’t just dry up. A classic industry which sees boom/bust cycles is semiconductors, where you’ll have a number of years with an immense amount of investment, usually followed by some crash and years of recovery. It’s the same with any industry; however, if you’ve got (like we have) more than just Web 2.0 companies, and a diverse base, you’ll (hopefully) be able to see the economy swing from one industry to another in terms of growth.

We live in a world where people are constantly bombarded by a constant barrage of information — and always have been. However, in this day and age there seems to be an increase in the sheer amount of information fed to us through electronic means. Everyone is familiar with the idea of “information overload” — being presented with too much information and just being completely overwhelmed. Usually, “information overload” is triggered by the huge amount of daily business which is conducted through email (so much, in fact, that you are seeing large companies declare “email free” days to actually get work done). Nowadays, that information overload can often be triggered by all of the other electronic ways of getting information — SMS, RSS feeds, twitter, instant messaging, social networking sites, and more.

Sometime, more information can be good, if you can turn that information into something more useful– knowledge. In my book, information becomes knowledge if it someone contributes to something concrete — allows me to make a better decision, improves my understanding of the world, changes my perception of the market, or otherwise helps me through the day. Conversely, information can be bad, if it really is just noise. Noise is just information–for information’s sake–and whether I’ve seen that information or not really makes no impact on my life.

Unfortunately, it seems like there’s been an increase in pure information–and with it, noise–with a lot of the trendy new Web-based services in the world. Probably emblematic of this are two services — Facebook and twitter. Twitter — which, at its best, gives you a heads up on what is going on in the world and some personal perspectives — but, at its worst, can inundate you with trivial information like what your buddy ate for lunch or blow-by-blow details on their commute across town every morning. Facebook has a similar problem — on one hand, it might be useful to know someone at a company has left to a new startup, but on the other hand, knowing they’ve just taken a random trivia quiz can’t be all that useful.

As it is, with only a few hundred contacts in Facebook, there are too many updates on my network to keep track without devoting hours a day to updates. In LinkedIn, where I have thousands of connections, a single hour of updates might take me days to plow through.

The question — for users, and also for the creators of these services — is are they helping to contribute to the knowledge of their users — or are they just creating more noise that people have to wade through in this world of information overload?

Interesting quote in VentureWire this morning from David Siminoff of Venrock on their new Southern California media fund:

“L.A. is just not the place you go for cutting-edge semiconductors, but it’s the place for storytellers,” Venrock General Partner David Siminoff said. “I have a feeling deal flow will lean toward the storytellers.”

The quote shows quite a bit of the stereotypes (and unawareness) of the Los Angeles and surrounding area in terms of technology. Unfortunately, usually when people think “Los Angeles” they really are thinking “Hollywood.” So, they ignore the greater Los Angeles area — and its strong semiconductor background — and think the only opportunities in the area are Hollywood media deals. If you’re thinking West Los Angeles, maybe. But if you look at the area as a whole (and in particular, Orange County), you’re wrong.

Some examples of why:

• Broadcom (Irvine) - $3.8B, 6400 employees
• Conexant (Newport Beach) - $750M, 2400 employees
• GloNav (Newport Beach) - recently acquired for $110M by NXP Semiconductor - cutting edge GPS chipsets
• U-Nav (Irvine) - GPS chipsets and software, acquired for $54M by Atheros
• Inphi  (Westlake Village) - high speed InP/GaAs components, funded by Cadence, Dali-Hook, Flextronics, Mayfield, Tallwood, Walden
• Fulcrum Micro (Calabasas) - clockless chips, funded by Granite Global Ventures, NEA, Palomar, Worldview
• Xirrus (Westlake Village) - WiFi chipsets/systems, funding from August Capital, Canaan Partners, QuestMark, and USVP.
• Jazz Semiconductor (Newport Beach) - high speed communications chips
• Quartics (Irvine) - wireless video semiconductors, headed by AST’s Safi Qureshey, funded by Foundation Capital and Enterprise Partners
• Solarflare (Irvine) - 10GBASE-T chipsets. Funding from Oak, Sequoia Capital, Intel, etc.
• QLogic (Aliso Viejo) - storage/networking systems and semiconductors

And that’s just to name a few of the firms here…  There’s a significant amount of latent semiconductor potential (if VCs ever get back to funding it) coming out of Caltech, USC, and UCLA — schools which have all spawned very significant advances in the semiconductor world. There’s also significant number of companies providing design tools and software, electronics components, hardware, and much more much closer to the semconductor than content/Hollywood world.  So please, don’t stereotype LA as being content…

Prince Andrew, Duke of York, has been making the rounds this week at high tech companies in Southern California, as part of a tour to promote investment and trade with the United Kingdom. Prince Andrew — who serves as the United Kindom’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment, and is the third child of Queen Elizabeth, as well as fourth in line for the throne — dropped by Avery Dennison in Pasadena today, stopped at Aliso Viejo-based Quest Software, and has also been attending countless dinners and receptions across the Southland.

At a dinner held Thursday night at the Ritz Carlton Marina Del Rey, the Prince spoke about the common links between the United Kingdom and the United States, promoted investment and trade by U.S. companies in the UK, about the economy and fears of–as he termed it, the “R” word–and also spoke for some time about global warming and how technology could be used to help move towards a carbon neutral economy. I was invited by the folks at UK Trade & Investment to attend, and I had a chance to talk with many of the companies and people there — including a number of high tech firms in the region, Hollywood and entertainment executives, investment bankers, and many others.

It’s somewhat unusual for the industry to be courted by royalty, but it’s clear that there’s a concerted effort by the UK–and other countries–to get mindshare, investment, and business from Southern California’s high tech industry, which can only be considered a good thing.

For those of you that have been remiss about applying for the Technology Council of Southern California’s Technology Industry Awards, the group has recently extended their deadline for applications. It’s a great opportunity to be recognized for your company’s achievements. Applications are now due January 25th. You can go to http://www.tcosc.org/awards/index.html to apply.

The Los Angeles Times just posted a great article on the technology industry here: L.A. tech party scene heats up. Well, it’s been heating up for awhile, but it’s good to see the rest of the world starting to notice (again)… From the article:

Venture capital fuels a boom in the Southland. Entrepreneurs, bloggers and others meet at social events to find investors, discuss ideas or just have fun. In the high-tech world, Southern California is almost as cool as Silicon Valley.

The California Institute of Technology just announced today that its scientists have set a new record for sustained data transfer, showing how long distance, wide area links can be used for clustered supercomputing. The record 80+ Gbps sustained data transfer was demonstrated at the SuperComputing 2007 conference. According to Caltech:

Multigigabit/s end-to-end network performance will empower scientists to form “virtual organizations” on a planetary scale, sharing their collective computing and data resources in a flexible way. In particular, this is vital for projects on the frontiers of science and engineering, in data-intensive fields such as particle physics, astronomy, bioinformatics, global climate modeling, geosciences, fusion, and neutron science.

Essentially, this kind of technology is useful for distributing difficult computer applications across the Internet. It’s interesting to note the heavy influence of technology firms here in Southern California in contributing to the effort. According to Caltech:

The record-setting demonstration was made possible through the use of seven 10-Gbps links to SC07 provided by SCinet, CENIC, National Lambda Rail, and Internet2, together with a fully populated Cisco 6500E series switch-router, 10-gigabit Ethernet network interfaces provided by Intel and Myricom, and a fiber channel disk array provided by Data Direct Networks equipped with 4-Gbps host bus adapters from QLogic. The server equipment consisted of 36 widely available Supermicro systems using dual quad-core Intel Xeon processors, and Western Digital SATA disks.

The setup includes hardware from Arcadia-based Myricom; Chatsworth-based Data Direct Networks; Aliso Viejo-based QLogic; and Lake Forest-based Western Digital. The whole demonstration was run on the FAST TCP protocol, which is from Caltech and is the basis of Pasadena startup FastSoft.

I’ve been rather amused by the amount of coverage given recently to VMware, a Palo Alto-based company which makes system virtualization software. Their software is used by enterprise IT datacenters to consolidate the amount of hardware they are using for applications. For example, instead of buying six different PCs to run six different applications, you can instead buy one big box and run all six “virtual” PCs inside that one box.

It’s a great solution, which for many, many years has been gaining traction in the enterprise space.

All of the sudden, however — after the firm’s blockbuster IPO — everyone seems to be paying attention to everything the firm is doing. The company was actually purchased by EMC back in 2003 - EMC is still a majority shareholder — and the whole growth story is much older than the IPO. I remember attending VMworld 2004, the firm’s annual conference, as an exhibitor, and thinking how smart of a move EMC made in buying the firm. (They paid $635M for VMware in 2003; the market cap today is right around $32.5 billion). I worked very closely with people at VMware in my position (at that time, socalTECH was still just something I was running as a hobby) and it was incredible how much growth they were seeing–but how no one in the technology or business press noticed.

I actually think the recent interest is a result of an overall — but subtle — shift in interest, and some funding, away from Internet and Web 2.0 investments, towards investments in infrastructure, software, hardware, and chips.  It’s probably the nature of the cyclical cycles in the technology industry, with some counter-trend investors starting to look at the more neglected industries as valuation (and hype) gets a bit too lofty in the Internet/web areas.

In many ways, the interest in the area is a repeat of the post-bubble syndrome seen with Internet companies. Immediately after the bubble, Internet companies were shunned–everyone removed the dot com from their names, no one could get funding, much less a meeting from a VC, and you wouldn’t want to mention you worked for an Internet company at a cocktail party. But, because of that, no competitors were funded, companies who had real business models could quietly build their businesses, and–at least here in Southern California–we saw a number of huge, successful, and very profitable firms built.

I think there is the potential for that to happen in the infrastructure, software, and hardware firms of today. Left to their own devices, they have not been attacked by dozens of startups, if they’ve figured out their business model should be quietly building their business, and will be the next big winners. Time will tell.

I’ve been recently playing around with Facebook and Twitter, and — although extremely fascinating from an entertainment standpoint– I’m wondering if all this “communication” is just contributing to an already, immensely information overloaded world. It’s bad enough with the hundreds of emails I get every day (not including the spam); do I really need a minute-by-minute update on everything you are doing every day? Does knowing what forty of the people I know ate for lunch really enrich my  life?

Most of the people I know are extremely busy, and it’s difficult enough to get a slice of time to discuss worthwhile and important things — much less sit around the water cooler and trade idle chitchat.  Back when I was involved in day-to-day engineering development, you could tell the “good” developers from the “lousy” developers by their productivity — lines of good code they could churn out every day.  Generally, the top tier, elite software developers were able to shut out all of the distractions of the day — emails, phone calls, unnecessary meetings, etc. — and really execute, and make things happen. On the other hand, the folks who just weren’t up to snuff would often be seen hanging out in the hallways and other people’s cubicles, getting a cup of coffee, chit-chatting with other people — ie think of Wally from Dilbert.

It’s all well and good that we can now provide micro-updates on every move of our life on the Twitters and Facebooks of the world, but it seems like what we really need is a massive information filter to prune down what is, and isn’t important.  The fact that your biggest business partner was just acquired: let me see that. The details of what you paid for cab fare from the airport, that you just clipped your toenails, or had a bagel instead of a donut for breakfast: filter that out.