Silicon Valley Shaped by Technology and Traffic
15058
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.
716723
By John Wiedenhoeft, The Wisconsin State Journal  Feb. 16--It's fitting one of the first hits of a new video era is being filmed in a city that is banking its economic future on technology.
308416
Envy may be a sin in some books, but it is a powerful driving force in Silicon Valley, especially with talk of a second dot-com boom.
523613
Netizens often like to compare the settlement of the Internet with that of the American West. The explorers charted new territory, observes product developer Chad Harrington of Zone Labs, a San Francisco-based
646401
Samer Salameh envisions a world in which you can videoconference, check and send e-mail, watch your favorite television shows, make online reservations at your favorite restaurant and pinpoint the best route around a traffic jam -- all from the comfort of your moving vehicle.
599237
Economic geographer AnnaLee Saxenian says the migration of Silicon Valley's "New Argonauts" speaks volumes about wider changes in techdom.
125087
A sparsely populated western state best known for potatoes is becoming a magnet for tech entrepreneurs. The slow pace, absence of traffic and low-rise landscape has helped lure 800 tech companies to the state.
34263
In Silicon Valley, the bandwagon is now electric-powered, as a who's who of IT stalwarts reinvent themselves as cleantech entrepreneurs. This map presents a small sampling of the companies, causes, and familiar faces behind the greening of the Valley.
402915
SUNNYVALE, Calif. Inside an unassuming one-story building halfway between Palo Alto and San Jose, Amir Mashkoori and his team are putting the finishing touches on a revolutionary technology that aims to take the silicon wafer out of Silicon Valley.
77746
Cities and towns are jumping on the Wi-Fi bandwagon. But a municipal model of connectivity may be tricky to pull off.
471176
Greenwich, Conn. has joined New York, Los Angeles and Northern Californiaâs Silicon Valley as must stops on the presidential fund-raising tour.
169262
BERKELEY, California  - Internet culture, often portrayed as the vanguard of progress, is actually a jungle peopled by intellectual yahoos and digital thieves, according to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-dissenter.
769733
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.
402100
Networks of low-res cameras and sensors could monitor urban environments for diverse data -- traffic flow, pollutants, structural integrity -- online. By the Associated Press.
450129
By Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.  Feb. 10--Google. MySpace. Facebook. YouTube. They're not just insanely popular phenomena: They also are businesses that require superpowerful computers distributing mountains of data in microseconds to eager users.
628251
Young, urban Asian consumers are among the most tech-savvy people on the planet.
240483
As Silicon Valley undergoes a resurgence, companies like Google, Yahoo and Apple are again looking for space to grow.