Nicira: A classic Silicon Valley story, complete with big payday
Nicira is a start-up right out of the Silicon Valley playbook with a $1.26 billion ending, in just five years.
VMware's decision, announced Monday, to buy this network virtualization company will likely be cited as a starring example of why Silicon Valley remains the world's engine of innovation.
The sale has all the classic elements of a Silicon Valley start-up. Whether Nicira can deliver on its promise is now up to VMware, which must make its new technology work with everything else it sells, say analysts. But for the Nicira's founders and investors, their big day has arrived.
Networking virtualization technology is to virtualization what server virtualization was to servers seven or more years ago. It's still new, its market size is still small, but it will grow rapidly because this technology is needed, say analysts. Nicira seemed perfectly timed for it. Read more...
Silicon Valley’s top threat is China, survey finds
A significant number of high-level technology executives appear to believe Silicon Valley's days as the world's innovation hub are numbered.
At least that's the findings of a KPMG survey of 668 technology business executives at $1 billion-plus companies, start-ups and venture capital firms around the world.
Of those surveyed by the audit, tax and advisory firm, 44% believe it's likely that the "technology innovation center of the world," now in Silicon Valley, will shift to another country in the next four years.
The most likely choice among respondents is China. Read more...
With heart and money, Silicon Valley aids undocumented students
Some big names in Silicon Valley's tech community are helping a group of talented, young students who are victims of circumstance and politics.
They are undocumented students brought to this country illegally. In many cases they came to America as young children, even as infants, with no choice in the matter and raised as Americans.
This country is their home.
But as young adults, they are in limbo. They are unable to work legally, have no clear pathway to permanent residency, and face difficulty in financing their education because of their immigration status.
"We are essentially punishing the kids for the actions of their parents; they didn't do anything wrong," said Jeffrey Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing, who is among those in Silicon Valley who are helping to fund a scholarship program directed at these students. Read more...
CA startup sees entrepreneur-ship as visa solution
You've heard of tech companies starting in a Silicon Valley garage. What about on a ship?
That's the idea being floated by a California startup that wants to dock a vessel off the coast to house foreign entrepreneurs who have dreams of creating the next Google but can't get visas to work in the United States.
Sunnyvale-based Blueseed Co. says current immigration rules can sink promising ventures and torpedo innovation and job creation.
The ship aims to provide a remedy by giving foreign entrepreneurs a place to build their companies only a short boat ride from high tech's hub.
"A lot of people say, `I'd like to go to Silicon Valley' but there is no way for them to do it," said Max Marty, Blueseed CEO and co-founder. Read more...
Apple co-founder Wozniak says he’ll miss Jobs
Steve Wozniak, who started Apple in a Silicon Valley garage with Steve Jobs in 1976, said he'll miss his fellow co-founder "as much as everyone."
"We've lost something we won't get back," he said in an interview with The Associated Press following Jobs' death on Wednesday.
"The way I see it, though, the way people love products he put so much into creating means he brought a lot of life to the world."
Wozniak, a high school friend of Jobs', last saw him about three months ago, shortly after Jobs emerged from a medical leave to unveil Apple Inc.'s iCloud content syncing service and the latest version of its iOS mobile software. At the time, Wozniak said, Jobs looked ill and sounded weak. Read more...
AT&T center to tap into Silicon Valley talent
AT&T set up shop in Silicon Valley on Wednesday with its Foundry Development Center in Palo Alto, a facility where software and hardware developers can get help bringing their inventions to the real world.
The site is AT&T's third Foundry Innovation Center, following ones opened earlier this year in Plano, Texas, and in Israel. But the carrier has high hopes for meeting promising startups in the hotbed of U.S. technology.
AT&T wants to free developers from the hassles of dealing with technology on the back end of AT&T's infrastructure, such as billing and location functions, so they can finish their applications and make them work on the network more quickly, said John Donovan, the carrier's CTO. Read more...
Memo to kid coders: Enterprise software exists
If you live or spend time in Silicon Valley, it's easy to forget that enterprise software exists, or that it still drives $245 billion in annual revenue, according to Gartner.
Google, Facebook, and a rising generation of consumer-facing startups get the media buzz, to the point that young developers have neither an interest in enterprise software nor an appreciation for the challenges it has long sought to solve – but could this be a good thing?
This generational shift hit home while having lunch with my 20-something developer colleagues this week. I mentioned BEA Systems and got blank looks all around. I persisted, "You know, the app server company???" Vacant expressions. "Java?!? You've heard of that, right!?"
"Is it like JavaScript?" Read more...
SQL survives murder attempt by mutant stepchild
Silicon Valley likes nothing more than to fetish the Next Big Technology Trend, be it cloud or NoSQL or scripting languages. The problem is that the real world moves much more slowly, and has very different considerations fueling its technology decisions. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the technology media's infatuation with NoSQL, even as the world plods along with SQL.
I was reminded of this by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady, who nicely shows that far from rendering SQL obsolete, the NoSQL crowd actually finds itself adopting SQL's query languages. As O'Grady notes: "The category might self-identify with its explicit rejection of the industry’s original query language, but the next step in NoSQL’s evolution will be driven in part by furious implementations of SQL’s children." Read more...
Sound-based system promises chipless NFC now
While NFC (near-field communication) gradually emerges to turn mobile phones into payment devices, Silicon Valley startup Naratte is introducing a system it claims can do roughly the same thing without adding a chip to the handset.
On Monday, Naratte introduced Zoosh, a technology that lets phones exchange transaction information via inaudible sound waves. As with NFC, the phone user would just put the phone near to a point-of-sale terminal to redeem a coupon or make a purchase.
Naratte's approach might allow for faster deployment, but some observers raised questions about its technical and market potential. Read more...
Suit says tech titans fixed worker pay
A former Lucasfilm software engineer is suing the movie studio along with Silicon Valley technology titans for what he portrayed as a conspiracy to curb pay for workers.
A suit filed on behalf of Siddarth Hariharan in a California state court on Wednesday contended that the accused firms and perhaps as many as 200 more illegally fixed workers pay by agreeing not to recruit talent from one another. Read more...