Bay Area Jobs And The Economy

[Silicon Francisco]

In case you were confused about which part of the Bay Area is associated with Silicon Valley (I'm sure many of us are) here's a handy map:

Pink = San Francisco
Yellow = Oakland
Blue = Silicon Valley

[lochinvar]

Sta. Cruz and Stockton are part of Silicon Valley?

[bay_area]

I think this is more accurate

The Silicon Valley spreads out over 3 counties at the southern edge of San Francisco Bay. Santa Clara, San Mateo and Alameda.

Area 1,500 sq miles
Population 2.43 Million
Jobs 1.1 Million
Average Annual Wage $69,455
38% of Silicon Valley is Foreign Born

Racial Breakdown
40% White
33% Asian
23% Hispanic
3% Black
1% Other

[Silicon Francisco]

nice map, but even my map doesn't show the whole picture.

here's a classic style

[SDfan]

bump.

[Silicon Francisco]

Seven bidders step up with wireless Net plan for valley
NETWORK TO COVER 1,500 SQUARE MILES FROM SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO THROUGH SANTA CRUZ
By Jessie Seyfer
Mercury News

Seven bidders stepped up Friday with proposals for bringing affordable wireless Internet access to all 1,500 square miles of Silicon Valley -- a costly, technically challenging task.

Among the companies that met Friday's deadline for proposals were Mountain View's MetroFi, which has already built networks across other areas of the Bay Area and San Jose's Cisco Systems, which was represented in two different bids, one with the Oregon-based wireless network company VeriLAN and another with IBM and the San Francisco non-profit group SeaKay.

Other plans were submitted by the Blue Horizon Group of San Francisco, Palo Alto-based Community Wireless, Carmel-based Fire2Wire and NextWLAN of Los Gatos. EarthLink and Google, which are teaming up to build a wireless Internet network across San Francisco, did not submit proposals.

The Wireless Silicon Valley project aims to build a network of thousands of radio transceivers carrying Internet signals to and from residents from South San Francisco and Fremont all the way south through Santa Cruz.

The proposals were not made public, but some companies explained their strategies.

MetroFi outlined a network similar to those it already operates in Cupertino, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, where it offers free service with ads and a $20-per-month subscription without ads. Both have download speeds of 1 megabit per second, roughly equivalent to DSL service.

``This area is important to us,'' said Ben Zifrony, MetroFi's vice president of sales and business development.

Zifrony called the project ``an extension of what we were building anyway.''

VeriLAN, working with Cisco and other companies, hopes to build a wireless Internet network it can then lease to other Internet service providers and companies wholesale. Those ISPs would then be on the hook to provide Internet access to residents.

VeriLAN has been in talks with Google, America Online and Microsoft to resell space on their proposed network, said Clive Cook, VeriLAN's executive vice president.

Organizers of the Wireless Silicon Valley project plan to announce a winning vendor on Sept. 12. The project, which launched in April, comes at a time when an estimated 250 communities across the United States are planning similar networks or have already built them.

Supporters say the networks have the potential to bring Internet access to the masses cheaply, improve communication among public safety workers and streamline city services.

But skepticism has cropped up in many recent discussions, especially now that groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have expressed concern over how well privacy will be protected on the networks.

In addition, technical and bureaucratic problems have plagued some projects, such as Sacramento's, which fell through entirely last month after city officials changed their minds about wanting free, rather than fee-based, Internet access. And holes and weak spots in networks in other cities, such as St. Cloud, Fla., have required extensive tweaking and extra equipment.

In a Webcast discussion on municipal wireless Internet projects earlier this week, wireless expert Craig Reid said networks and communities need to make sure the business models supporting wireless Internet networks are strong enough to keep them afloat. Some networks, like MetroFi's, rely on advertising revenue, fees from subscribers and communities for installing specialized services.

``Networks will need subsidies . . . to be sustainable in the long term, or there will be a need to change business models that are being implemented right now,'' said Reid, vice president of business development of the municipal networks unit at BelAir Networks in Ottawa.

ect:

from http://www.siliconbeat.com/

Pan-Silicon Valley WiFi network is coming -- The network will stretch from South San Francisco down to Santa Cruz. Seven players have bid to build the project, including Cisco, IBM and MetroFi. Winner announced Sept 12.


Google steals another from Microsoft -- This is getting into intimidating territory. First, Google stole Microsoft's man in China, reportedly causing Microsoft chief executive to throw a chair (though that story is contested). And now Google has hired away the general manager for platform evangelism at Microsoft, Vic Gundotra -- and this comes right after the departure of VP Martin Taylor, Ballmer's protege.


Francisco Partners, a San Francisco tech-only buyout fund, has finished raising $2.3 billion -- This is the firm's second fund, and puts it in the "big" camp, but behind Menlo Park-based Silver lake Partners' $3.6 billion tech buyout fund. Full story in Buyoutsnews.com



Google Checkout: Will lose money to brutalize PayPal
Google has finally launched its own online payment service, and will stomach losing money on processing your credit cards -- in an aggressive move to go after competitor PayPal.
It is called Google Checkout, and our colleague Elise Ackerman has a good story in the Merc that talks about other benefits this will bring Google, including the ability to inspect user buying habits for the first time. That's one more step toward knocking away an advantage held by eBay in the marketplace.


Ding Dong, go the wedding bells of Hollywood and Silicon Valley
We are finally jumping into bed with each other in a furious way.
Warner Brothers said yesterday they had struck a deal with San Francisco company Guba.com, to distribute its new and vintage movies and TV shows via the online video site. It comes after Warner chose controversial San Francisco file-sharing company, BitTorrent, do help with the distribution. Then there's YouTube's announcement today that NBC will use it to promote its fall TV lineup. This adds to all he other stuff going on, including Cisco's aggressive chase after Hollywood content, signaled in May.


Io: Keep your paws off my video porn!
And here we were, thinking So. Cal was the home of porn, and northern California was above it all.
Turns out, San Francisco adult entertainment company Io Group filed a lawsuit last week against southern California's Veoh Networks, yet another of those online video-sharing services, alleging Veoh was allowing users to access Io's adult videos without permission.

Nanosolar to build world's largest solar cell factory in Bay Area (!)
Forgive the exclamation point. But this could be one of the greatest Silicon Valley stories this year.
Martin Roscheisen, the chief executive of Nanosolar, emailed us Monday to tell us he has finally done it. He has succeeded in taking far-out nanotechnology and applying it to solar cells in a way that promises to work commercially.
This is significant because all solar cells until now have been made from clunky, crystalline silicon. That's why you get these big old thick solar panels that some think are an eyesore. More importantly though, they have remained expensive, which is why you need states to subsidize solar projects. And lately, they've been in short supply, driving up costs even more. Martin's company, Nanosolar, has developed solar cells so thin you can paint them onto a piece of foil. It uses a copper alloy, called CIGS (Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide). The resulting cells are efficient as traditional silicon cells, but can be manufactured at one-fifth the cost.

[hkskyline]

Wireless Train Hits Rails in California
By RACHEL KONRAD
2 August 2006

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - The nation's first mass-transit train with wireless Internet access rolled through Silicon Valley this week, offering laptop-lugging testers access to the Web and e-mail without forcing them to peck at tiny phone or BlackBerry keyboards.

Nomad Digital Ltd. and Intel Corp. outfitted the Caltrain light-rail vehicle with WiMAX-based technology, which provided continuous high-speed Internet access between the popular Millbrae and Palo Alto stations. The train reached 79 mph while testers from the companies watched streaming video, composed e-mail and completed a large file download at broadband speeds.

The system links the train to track-side wireless base stations, with radios located every few miles along the rail. Caltrain might also use the technology to monitor train speeds and security cameras.

Randy Rudolph, Caltrain's chief information officer, said the successful debut means the company can introduce the technology along the entire line, from Gilroy north through San Jose to San Francisco. It will likely be available within two months. Caltrain does not plan to charge extra for the service.

Hexham, England-based Nomad has installed similar systems in the United Kingdom and Holland, and now is working on wireless projects in China, the Middle East and South America.

[Silicon Francisco]

So that will be wireless for San Francisco, the Silicon Valley and our trains. Now we just need wireless for the East Bay, Marin County and our automobiles, and we would be one of the first completely wireless metropolises.

[hkskyline]

Originally Posted by Silicon Francisco

So that will be wireless for San Francisco, the Silicon Valley and our trains. Now we just need wireless for the East Bay, Marin County and our automobiles, and we would be one of the first completely wireless metropolises.

Taipei already has wifi throughout the city.

Taipei's wireless net is slow to catch on
Ken Belson
The New York Times
26 June 2006

Peter Shyu, an engineer, spends most of his day out of the office, so when he needs an Internet connection he often pops into one of the many coffee shops in this city that offer free wireless access. He could use WiFly, the extensive wireless network commissioned by the city government that is the cornerstone of Taipei's ambitious plan to turn itself into an international technology hub. But that would cost him $12.50 a month.

"I'm here because it's free, and if it's free elsewhere, I'll go there, too," said Shyu, hunched over his laptop in an outlet of the Doutor coffee chain. "It's very easy to find free wireless connections."

Despite WiFly's ubiquity with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population just 40,000 of Taipei's 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year. It has lowered that target to 200,000.

That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise technology-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other U.S. cities that are building wireless networks of their own.

Like Taipei, these cities hope to use their new networks to help less affluent people get online and to make their cities more business-friendly. Yet as Taipei has found out, just building a citywide network does not guarantee that people will use it. Most people already have plenty of access to the Internet in their offices and at home, while wireless data services let them get online anywhere using phones, laptops and PDAs.

Like Q-Ware, operators in the United States, Europe and other parts of Asia are eager to build municipal networks. But they are grappling with the high expectations politicians are placing on them. On June 9, MobilePro backed out of plans to develop a wireless network in Sacramento, California, because it said the city wanted it to offer free access and recoup its investment with advertising, not subscriptions, a model that other cities are hoping to adopt. Elsewhere, incumbent carriers have challenged cities' rights to requisition new networks. And many services have had difficulty attracting customers.

"There is a lot of hype about public access," said Craig Settles, a technology consultant in Oakland, California, and author of "Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless." "What's missing from a lot of these discussions is what people are willing to pay for."

Q-Ware's relationship with Taipei has been less contentious, partly because the WiFly network is part of a far broader and highly regarded plan to incorporate the Internet into everything the government does.

The brainchild of Taipei's mayor, Ma Ying-jeou, the CyberCity project was conceived in 1998 as a way to catapult past Seoul, Hong Kong and other Asian capitals that were recasting themselves as cities of the future. Many government agencies now communicate almost exclusively online, saving millions of dollars, and citizens have been given hundreds of thousands of free e-mail accounts and computer lessons. WiFly plays a role, too, by allowing police officers to submit traffic tickets wirelessly, for instance. But making it appeal to the average citizen is another story. Q-Ware, which is part of a conglomerate that, among other things, operates 7- Eleven franchises in Taiwan, has found that consumers will pay subscription fees only if there are original offerings to pull them in. "Content is really key," said Darrell West, a professor of public policy at Brown University. "It's not enough just to have the infrastructure. You have to give people a reason to use the technology."

To that end, Q-Ware has developed P-Walker, a service that will let subscribers with Sony PSP portable game machines log on to WiFly to play online games and download songs and other material.

The company has also developed a low-priced phone service that works with both cellular antennas and WiFly hot spots to transmit calls over the Internet.

Ultimately, Q-Ware expects its network to communicate with more devices that have wireless capabilities, including MP3 players and digital cameras.

"In the beginning, you have to do something to attract people to the service," said Sheng Chang, the vice president of Q-Ware's wireless business group. "We're a wireless city, so if we can't make it here, it can't be made."

[Silicon Francisco]

That's why I said one of the first although I think Taipei is a single city rather than a metropolis.

San Francisco and the Silicon Valley together comprise an area about twice as large as Taipei, although the wireless planned for the Valley would cover an area about two to three times as much as what I would consider to be inside the region's limits, including over hills that few people occupy.

[Izmirli]

Not sure how useful it'll be
Caltrain only goes as far north as Southern SF, to go to SF people usually switch to Bart in Millbrae, thus the average ride takes quite short

[Silicon Francisco]

Wireless would be more fun for a SF to LA train.

[mr_storms]

this is lies ACE has had wifi for a while now

[Silicon Francisco]

So ACE and Capitol Corridor, and now Caltrain, why does the Bay Area need 3 or more wireless trains. Doesn't matter to me because I don't use them

[arturo]

As a Caltrain rider all I can say is :Wahooooooooooooo!!

[Silicon Francisco]

(08-18) 12:32 PDT Morgan Hill, Calif. (AP) --

Think of it as the ultimate ivory tower for academics: a castle inspired by Spain's Alhambra, lavished with sun-dappled courtyards, artisan-crafted frescoes, grottos, fountains and a patio with 12 marble lions that spit water every hour on the hour.

But instead of housing nobles atop an Iberian hill, the newest fortress will serve as a quiet retreat for mathematicians next to a golf course in suburban Silicon Valley.

The castle, which the Morgan Hill City Council approved last month, will be the new headquarters of the American Institute of Mathematics. It's expected to be complete by 2009.

The institute and castle are the brainchild of electronics retailer John Fry, who owns the nearby links and plans to donate his impressive collection of historical documents — including original math texts and writings of Nobel Prize winners such as Albert Einstein — to the institute's library.

Fry, the media-shunning co-founder and chief executive of Fry's Electronics Inc., refused requests to be interviewed about the castle he's funding. The 167,000-square-foot palace — bigger than a typical Wal-Mart — is rumored to cost more than $50 million, although people involved in the project admit no one will know the true cost until it's finished.

The retail magnate, who studied math at Santa Clara University, is taking a hands-on role in everything from the design to the selection of tile artisans and wood workers. He spent five days in the Alhambra, exploring villas, chambers and salons with Scott Stotler, a consultant who for years has been tweaking the design to Fry's specifications.

"We spent so much time there that you could pretty much stick us in a dungeon and I'd know how to get out," said Stotler, head of Stotler Design Group.

Fry's involvement in the minutia of castle construction doesn't surprise people who know him. He's shaped nearly every aspect of his family's 32-store chain, a nerdy utopia where techno-savvy shoppers can get deals on computer parts, networking equipment and appliances — if they're willing to overlook abysmal customer service, sketchy refund policies and clerks who make little more than minimum wage.

Fry opened the first store in Sunnyvale with his brothers in 1985, and Fry's Electronics now operates in nine states.

The Better Business Bureau routinely pans Fry's. Consumer advocates berate the stores for luring shoppers with deeply discounted items, then enticing them to buy higher-priced merchandise and make impulse purchases.

But Fry's, which sells everything from microchips to potato chips, has obsessive fans, particularly in Silicon Valley.

Fry, who learned about retailing from his grocer father, co-founded the mathematics institute in 1994. Roughly 800 mathematicians go to its campus in Palo Alto each year to ponder math questions.

About five years ago, academics from Princeton University and elsewhere convened at the institute to solve one piece of a conundrum known as the "perfect graph conjecture." It involved an analysis of 2,000 hours of supercomputer calculations from 1976.

Fry, who also owns the San Jose SaberCats arena football team, visited numerous castles looking for inspiration for the new headquarters. He fixated on the Alhambra both for aesthetics — it's considered the best example of Moorish art in Europe — and mathematic symbolism.

The Andalusian fortress, built primarily between 1248 and 1354, bursts with geometric patterns in every arabesque, column, garden and reflecting pool. It was built with running water and a medieval climate-control system envied throughout Europe and the Islamic world.

"The interesting geometric patterns present throughout the Alhambra's tiles, ceilings and walls — they're perfect for mathematicians," said institute Executive Director Brian Conrey, who hasn't visited Granada but hopes to go soon. "Mathematicians have a tradition of communing with nature while thinking about deep questions. It's inspiring to be in a location that lets you ponder the things mathematicians like to think about, and Morgan Hill will be just such a place."

The castle will replace The Flying Lady Ranch, a vacant restaurant on 190 acres of Fry family property south of San Jose. Demolition will begin in October.

Stotler emphasized that the math castle is going to be a homage to the Alhambra, not a replica. Although Spanish stone masons and stained-glass artisans will give the place an authentic feel, it will have unabashedly modern touches, including 30,000 square feet of underground parking and a gourmet-industrial kitchen with master chefs from a San Francisco seafood restaurant and a Napa Valley resort.

The math castle will include its own version of the Fountain of Lions, the Alhambra's alabaster basin flanked by 12 white marble lions, which signify strength and courage. In the 15th century, each lion spit a stream of water every hour — a clock far more advanced than any sundial at the time.

During the Reconquest of Spain in 1492, Christians disassembled the clock to see how it functioned. Since then, no one has been able to get it to work.

"We could cheat and do it electronically, but I'm not sure if John would allow that," Stotler said.

So there's the Winchester mansion and now this!

[metropolismayor]

Silicon Valley to get public Wi-Fi network
Ambitious project by Metro Connect will cover 38 cities

- Jessica Guynn and Verne Kopytoff, Chronicle Staff Writers

Wednesday, September 6, 2006

Looping together cities stretching from Daly City to Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley is on the verge of creating the country's largest public wireless Internet network that will serve as many as 2.4 million people in 38 cities in four counties and cover nearly 1,500 square miles.

All cities in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties are participating in the Wireless Silicon Valley Project that on Tuesday picked Silicon Valley Metro Connect, a collaboration of Azulstar Networks, Cisco Systems, IBM and Seakay, to build and operate the wireless network in the world's most wired place, said Brian Moura, assistant city manager of San Carlos and co-chairman of the project.

Users would be able to access the Internet wirelessly from their computers, cellular phones or PDAs anywhere outside, from city parks to their cars. Because the service is designed for the outdoors, customers will likely have to buy a device that costs $80 to $120 to use the wireless network indoors.

"In theory, you should be able to move around Silicon Valley and no matter what city you are in, ... flip open your laptop, turn on your wireless antenna and be on (the Internet)," Moura said.

The regional network could break ground as early as next year and may ultimately become a test for cutting-edge technologies, Moura said. Wi-Fi, as wireless Internet is called, could potentially be used for Internet telephone calls, movie downloads and monitoring traffic congestion. The agreement with Silicon Valley Metro Connect requires the companies to update their technology every three years, Moura said.

In choosing a team to build its network, Silicon Valley joins a long list of areas racing to bring residents wireless Internet connections. San Francisco is negotiating with EarthLink and Google for Wi-Fi service, and Philadelphia is working with EarthLink on a similar network.

Given the large area to be covered in Silicon Valley, the job will be formidable. The winning team expects to install at least 30,000 access points to give blanket coverage.

She said that the network will roll out in portions of Silicon Valley, starting 30 days after the installation work begins.

Boosters hope the project will become a wireless pioneer. Valley residents and businesses would gain access to different levels of outdoor wireless service, from the basic free service -- subsidized by advertising -- to services that offer higher speeds and tighter security starting at $15 a month, according to Moura. There is even a tier of service geared toward police and fire departments.

Next week, the Wireless Silicon Valley Task Force will begin negotiations with Metro Connect on a contract that will be distributed to all the cities and public agencies for approval. The first agencies to approve the agreement and permits for installation of network equipment will be the first to get the wireless coverage, Moura said.

Privacy advocates object to the industry practice of gathering information about users to sell advertising, but the team that will build the network insists that its service will protect user privacy.

[AndySocks]

That's crazy.

[*NOR CAL*]

Yay, I thought this had been cut off but it's going to happen!

Of course... I wonder if it'll be fast enough to play PSP online or not. If not, then... well it'll be ok, but not that great lol..

[sjdowntownguy]

Originally Posted by Silicon Francisco

nice map, but even my map doesn't show the whole picture.

here's a classic style

HAHA.. seems like this was written by people in SF. Silicon Valley starts at menlo park continuing south to south San Jose and over to to the East, Fremont is the starts of silicon valley.. The first map where it has blue for everything in the bay area is not correct at all..