29
November
2007
|
06:59 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Top Flacks and Hacks Gather For Silicon Valley PRSA Gala Dinner


Wednesday evening I'm at the Computer History Museum for the first annual Silicon Valley PRSA Gala dinner, sponsored by Microsoft and Yahoo and featuring a panel of local journalists.


I'm there as a guest of MSFT sitting with Doug Free, Dan'l Lewin and Michael Celiceo. It's a well attended event and I bump into lots of people (Brian Solis, Lish Woodgate, Matthew Podboy, Lisa Croel, Mimi Harris, Tony Obregon, Elke Heiss, and many more...)


On stage Sam Whitmore is the emcee, and sporting a new and very distinguished salt and pepper beard. Ann Winblad then takes over as an excellent moderator of a panel consisting of some of our top local journalists: Jim Goldman, CNBC; Don Clark, WSJ; Victoria Murphy Barret, Forbes; Rob Hof, Businessweek; Robert Scoble, Podtech and Scobeleizer; and the ubiquitous Kara Swisher, All Things Digital.


Some highlights:



On the subject of Facebook and being reunited with old friends, Jim Goldman says:"There is usually a good reason I lost touch with friends 10, 15 years ago."


Kara Swisher likened Google to "the Pablo Escobar" of the tech world. Not sure what she meant by that. She also said she would like to drive a Hummer through the bicycle parking lot at Google. Not sure what she meant by that either, except maybe expressing a backlash to GOOG and All Things Green (as opposed to Digital:-)


Don Clark said he is very skeptical about Silicon Valley being able to save the world through its green tech efforts.


Victoria Murphy said that enterprise IT is back.


Rob Hof wondered about the effect of a consumer downturn on Silicon Valley.


Robert Scoble said that the large Silicon Valley companies are far less interesting than many startups, such as Zoho. He also said it was surprising that Amazon.com has emerged as a leading infrastructure company and that he is meeting many startups that use Amazon's services and don't own a single server.


- - -


Podtech.net will be posting a video of the event.