VC Nation: Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley
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Many communities dream of becoming the next Silicon Valley. But Seattle is actually doing it.
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By Nick Perry, The Seattle Times  Sep. 17--Seattle could become the new Detroit.   A once-proud hub of innovation left to languish as brilliant people, new  ideas and dazzling products bubble up elsewhere.
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As Silicon Valley undergoes a resurgence, companies like Google, Yahoo and Apple are again looking for space to grow.
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If you're a Silicon Valley insider, expect to laugh mightily at this send up of Northern California's movers and shakers. Others might not get the joke.
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The investors are looking beyond Silicon Valley, and beyond the Internet and biotech.
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By Ashley Bach, Seattle Times  Sep. 23--The dot-com bust and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks weighed heavily on the world of commerce, and Bellevue's Meydenbauer Center was no exception.
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By Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  May 31--Attention Silicon Valley philanthropists: Here's a worthy cause for you.
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An ambitious plan to equip Silicon Valley with wireless public broadband services is proceeding with great hopes but many challenges.The Wireless Silicon Valley project was the subject of a presentation at the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday afternoon. Expected to cost $100 million to $150 million, Wireless Silicon Valley involves developing an architecture covering 1,500 square miles. It would be used by around 40 cities in Silicon Valley, each of which has contributed $2,500 to seed the effort. While there are no officially defined boundaries, Silicon Valley is generally considered to be a span of California cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose.The project's vision involves connecting anyone, anywhere, involving any device, said Seth Fearey, project lead for Wireless Silicon Valley and vice president of Joint Venture, Silicon Valley Network."We're going to move beyond the model of laptops connecting the Internet doing e-mail and the Web. We want to connect devices and things," Fearey said.The network would only function outdoors and provide capabilities ranging from citizen access to the Internet to provision of public services. Users would be able to maintain a connection if they linked up in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, and traveled to Gilroy 71 miles from San Francisco.Economic development is the top priority of Wireless Silicon Valley, with the idea being to connect small businesses, attract businesses, and make Silicon Valley an exciting place to be."People coming here for conventions would spend more money if they knew where to go," such as being able to find movie theaters via wireless access, said Fearey."We can use this network to help give them that information," he said.Benefits of the plan are to make a network that is much more useful and leverages economies of scale, one that deploys multiple technologies together, provides more revenue opportunities, and accommodates government staff.Challenges, however, include finding an owner/operator and operating on an unproven business model. Also, the network has a high cost to build and the needs of low-revenue areas must be balanced with those of high-revenue areas. The network also takes time to deploy."We're breaking new ground here," said Fearey. Investors want to see how the network will work and are struggling to determine how they will make moneyThe cities participating in the program are quite small, except for San Jose, Fearey said. "This is a big, big challenge," financially, he said.A request for proposal was issued, resulting in companies such as IBM and Cisco offering to provide equipment and Azulstar to operate the network. These vendors comprise the Metro Connect team that intends to provide the network infrastructure, own and operate it, and sell services. Azulstar, however, was not able to raise money to get the project moving. Now, additional operators are being sought.?The goal with the network is create lots of opportunities for the operator of the network to make money not just from consumer subscriptions and adverting but also from other services such as provision of point-to-point advertising.A variety of applications has been suggested, ranging from wireless reading of water meters to irrigation control and wireless parking meters that could have fluctuating prices based on the time of day.During an earlier panel session at the conference Tuesday, Joanne Hovis, president of Columbia Telecommunications, said that if Google acquires the 700-MHz frequencies to be auctioned off by the FCC, that could change the wireless market.Hovis noted there is much speculation about Google's plans. One audience member speculated Google could open up a wireless network for everybody.?"My personal opinion is I'm not sure Google is serious about bidding on that spectrum," Hovis said. It also would be a few years before Google could build its network, Hovis said.
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SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, the world's technology hub, is starting to buzz again for the first time since the dot-com bust. The Valley's infamous start-up community is coming back, thanks to start-ups like digital media firm Dabble and its contemporaries.
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For presidential candidates campaigning in Silicon Valley, the place to be is Googleâs headquarters.
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THE CAPITAL division of Intel has invested in a Seattle firm in bid to promote the WiMAX wireless standard. Speakeasy, based in Seattle, is a beneficiary from the Intel Communications Fund but it&#39;s not clear
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Welcome back to 1998 From Wall St to Silicon Valley, experienced finanical types and entrepreneurs are privately conceding the obvious: we're in a tech bubble. The only doubts are over whether we are in 1998 or 1999 again.â¦
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The financial picture is not pretty at Infinium Labs, a Sarasota, Fla., video-game company that lured former Microsoft employees to work at its main development office in Seattle.
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How investment in technology firms can help the UK recreate Silicon Valley.
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A Silicon Valley start-up is  gearing up to embed free, Web-based telephone services on a  variety of popular social networking and blogging services,  including MySpace, Friendster and Blogger.
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Silicon Valley is a collection of remarkably local clusters based on industry niches, skills, school ties, traffic patterns, ethnic groups and even weekend sports teams.
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The Seattle P-I has an interesting look at Redmond's program that has 'Softies taking home the latest in home gear in an effort to better understand how the company's digital living room products perform in actual living rooms.