Autonomy founder Mike Lynch (Credit: HP) If Meg Whitman has a clue about how to restore a one-time Silicon Valley legend, she's doing a great job of keeping the plan to herself. Nine months after her appointment as Hewlett-Packard's CEO, the Whitman era began in earnest today with the announcement that HP would fire 27,000 employees. Twenty seven thousand employees. And among the casualties is one Mike Lynch, the brilliant English computer scientist who founded Autonomy, a company once described by the Financial Times as "the doyen of European software." Autonomy's software sifts through and categorizes patterns found in unstructured and semi-structured information as opposed to the data residing in columns and rows. It's propeller head stuff -- hey, Lynch is a Cambridge-educated propeller head ... Continue reading →
Members of the Class of 2012, As a former secretary of labor and current professor, I feel I owe it to you to tell you the truth about the pieces of parchment you're picking up today. You're f*cked. Well, not exactly. But you won't have it easy. First, you're going to have a hell of a hard time finding a job. The job market you're heading into is still bad. Fewer than half of the graduates from last year's class have as yet found full-time jobs. Most are still looking. That's been the pattern over the last three graduating classes: It's been taking them more than a year to land the first job. And those who still haven't found a job will be competing with ... Continue reading →
Kevin Efrusy, Bing Gordon, Reid Hoffman, Steve Jurvetson and Peter Thiel sit on a panel presented by the Churchill Club and Forbes Magazine on Tuesday night. (Credit: Donna Tam/CNET) SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Some of Silicon Valley's greatest minds used an interesting piece of hardware to vote on which trends will rule the tech world: ping pong paddles. The Churchill Club, a business and technology forum, hosted discussion here Tuesday night, along with Forbes magazine, to pick the brains of Kevin Efrusy, Bing Gordon, Reid Hoffman, Steve Jurvetson, and Peter Thiel. With a few hundred people seated in the grand ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, each investor presented his case for two ideas for what he thought would be a dominating tech trend for the ... Continue reading →
Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true. At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 800 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy. The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the ... Continue reading →
History in the making, May 18, 2012 (Credit: CNET) From darling to dud in just three days? Even on Internet time, that's pretty fast. Truly, the whine-fest accompanying Facebook's first few steps as a public company has been remarkable, what with the screeching about a botched IPO now as loud as the hype that surrounded the run-up leading to last Friday's big event. It's also fed a growing backlash that has left investors and analysts howling about the $105 billion market capitalization that Wall Street gave the company. And though this novella is far from played out, you know the rest of the story: as the share price continues to sag, the bag holders will blame "Suckerberg," the incompetents at Morgan Stanley, the Nasdaq -- ... Continue reading →
So if I've got this straight Raul Castro's daughter Mariela deserves a visa to enter the United States but not (former American citizen) Eduardo Saverin. Saverin, as you may have heard, has renounced his U.S. citizenship and will avoid paying capital gains taxes on windfall profits after Facebook goes public on Friday. As the company's co-founder, Saverin's 4% share of the company is worth around $4 billion, give or take a few shekels. That has infuriated the morality police, and now the chatter has turned to how the U.S. may - ought to? - try and prevent him from ever returning here for a visit. Little surprise, then, to learn that some in Congress couldn't resist this made-for-tabloid drama. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and Bob ... Continue reading →
Last week, I wrote about a Dell summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the moderator of the event, Mads Christensen, "entertained" the crowd of IT professionals with a barrage of sexist jokes, and exhorted them to go home and tell their wives to "shut up, bitch." This week, Dell posted an apology on its Google+ page, saying the company would be "more careful selecting speakers at Dell events." Dell's Google+ apology ... find it here, and nowhere else! The apology comes weeks after the actual event, unfortunately, after my column and tech blogger Christiane Vejlo's English-language post made it onto Reddit this past weekend. (Vejlo was the only journalist invited to the event, and live-tweeted Christensen's comments as they happened, plus posted a follow-up in Danish ... Continue reading →
SAN FRANCISCO – Closing arguments in the second phase of Oracle v. Google were presented on Tuesday morning, commencing with the plaintiff, Oracle. Court proceedings actually started approximately 45 minutes late at the U.S. District Court of Northern California as one juror was late due to car trouble on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. After she informed the court via telephone that she would not be able to make it at all on Tuesday, Judge William Alsup dismissed her from the jury altogether. That brings the total jury count to six women and five men. Attorney Michael Jacobs of Morrison and Foerster LLP spoke for Oracle, outlining Oracle’s three core arguments: Google infringed upon U.S. Patent No. RE38,104 or U.S. Patent No. 6,061,520, and Google’s ... Continue reading →
