Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

I recently met with Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy, the second largest European software company. Autonomy has become a force in the enterprise software market with its search and discovery technology that can find related content based on its meaning.

Autonomy's technology has been licensed on an oem basis and is found in many enterprise software applications. The company acquired California based Zantaz earlier this year, which helps companies discover documents related to legal issues such as lawsuits.

Mr Lynch is also on the board of the BBC and talks about the changes and challenges in the media sector.

Video and editing by Aron Pruiett.

A few weeks back I spent a Saturday afternoon in Palo Alto crammed into a small room with a couple of hundred people listening to the stories of some of the early Facebook app developers. Believe me, it wasn't the way I wanted to spend my Saturday.

But the enthusiasm was fun to witness and it did feel as if we were all (and we still all are) at the beginning of something big. It was fun to see kids straight out of school suddenly rock stars in the nascent Facebook community, learning how to be entrepreneurs.

Whatever your personal and emotional reaction is to Facebook, (and many have told me it is a fad and worse) you have to take notice that you just might be missing out on one of the big stories of the next couple of years.

And you wouldn't want that, or would you? :-)

Take a look:

http://www.podtech.net/home/3977/how-to-succeed-in-developing-facebook-apps

Video: Tom Foremski Video Editor: Lee Cummings Feel free to use on your site or blog!

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However, Mr Hoffman's scenario doesn't preclude one host of many social graphs, which Facebook is currently well positioned to provide.

Mr Hoffman said the challenges of social apps is to find something that is sustainable and can stay ahead of "me too" type applications.

He added that the economics of the Facebook platform are not yet clear but could become clearer as the platform evolves. He points out that there will be massive competition:

-Someone will try to give away anything you charge for.

-At least 3 people will copy anything that works.

-Competition will come from companies and individuals.

-Newness is extremely important and a challenge for developers.

Silicon Valley is getting better at paying attention to its own culture and history--and noticing that there are many giants still walking among us. Recently, the Computer History Museum celebrated 4 key technologists at its 2007 Fellow Awards fund raising event.

It was a great event, I took my son Matt with me so that he could see some of our living history, the people that have helped make Silicon Valley into the world's innovation engine. We were guests of Microsoft, one of the sponsors of the event.

Morris Chang helped create the fabless chip industry. And in doing so, he created a massive innovation platform by enabling small bands of chip designers to buy production time as they needed it. Chip companies no longer needed to own and maintain hugely expensive chip fabs.

John Hennessy helped develop the RISC microprocessor, whose features are found in all modern microprocessors. As president of Stanford University, he has made huge contributions to education, and the creation of a student body that has gone on to found many of Silicon Valley's largest companies. And his work has helped generate huge licensing revenue for the university.

David Patterson made important contributions to microprocessor design and RAID data storage technologies. As head of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, he has helped educate generations of computer engineers.

Charles Thacker helped create the personal computer. His work at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center led to the Alto, the machine that inspired Apple Computer and featured a windows graphical user interface. He co-developed Ethernet and also the laser printer.

TechOne

Technorati Tags: computer history museum, TechOne

Jeremiah Owyang recently left Podtech.net to take up a new position: senior analyst at Forrester Research with a focus on Social Computing. He'll be working with the very talented Charlene Li.

Jeremiah first made his name at Hitachi Data Systems where he was Online Community Manager, launching and managing a very successful social media program. At Podtech, he was Director of Corporate Media Strategy.

I'll miss not seeing him at Podtech, where I am working as Executive Editor of TechOne. Here is a brief interview with Jeremiah from a recent conference:

Technorati Tags: TechOne

Last week I was at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus for a Halo 3 launch party. MSFT was also showing off some other products.

I met Dan Fernandez, lead product manager for Visual Studio, and he showed me Popfly, which is currently an Alpha version. It is the first application of MSFT's Silverlight technology that allows developers to mashup web services and data sources. Popfly allows consumers to do similar mashups with an easy user interface. And consumers can also share their mashups, which can then be mashed up with other Popfly mashups.

This is an interesting technology but will it be put to interesting uses?

Tags: Dan Fernandez, Popfly, Silverlight

A Selection of recent TechOne segments.

[Steve Gillmor is VP of Creative Development. Tom Foremski is Executive Editor of TechOne.
Producers and Editors: Lee Cummings, Aron Pruiett.]

ZDNet's Dan Farber recently moderated a fascinating discussion on the use of collaborative apps in the enterprise. Panelists include Scott Dietzen, Etay Gafni, Sam Lawrence, Oliver Marks, Paul Pedrazzi and Jay Simons.

A panel discussion on what types of devices are needed by mobile workers. How many devices are needed? What types of formats? The panel was moderated by Oliver Starr, analyst at, Guidewire Group; T.J. Kang, CEO, ThinkFree; Jerry Kurtze, Ecosystem Enabling Manager, Intel; Arthur Lin, chief technology officer, Nokia; and Dennis Moore, CEO OQO.

Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz

Steven Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify.net, explains how anyone who has a Website or wants to build one can have their own YouTube-like video channel almost overnight.

(Tom Foremski is Executive Editor of TechOne)

Breakfast with Jamis

Valerie Cunningham interviews Jamis McNiven, the owner of Buck's Diner, in Woodside, Calif. This is where many of Silicon Valley's most famous companies got their start: pitching their business plans in breakfast meetings with local VCs.

I popped into the recent LinuxWorld:

Linux Increasingly Mobile

Motorola is moving towards widespread deployment of its mobile Linux on its cell phones. It is moving the OS further and further up the stack towards enterprise class handsets.

I spoke with Christy Wyatt, VP of Ecosystem and Market Development at Motorola, about recruiting developers to Motorola's Linux platform.

Mobile Software Giant

Access is one of the largest software companies that nobody has heard of, is how Diedier Diaz, senior vp of product strategy at Access describes the company.

It is a leader in mobile applications, and virtually everyone with a cell phone has used one of the company's apps. This is especially true since the acquisition of PalmSource in late 2005, the developer of the Palm OS.

Enterprise Open Source Applications

Combining open source software to create powerful enterprise-class applications suites is what SpikeSource does. But how do you make sure dozens of constantly changing open source software components will work together, and not break each other?

Kim Polese is the CEO of SpikeSource and the former chief evangelist for Java. She says the secret is in the automated testing of the suites of open source software.

[Steve Gillmor is right about the iPhone please see: iPhonomics

I popped into Wired.com's anniversarry celebrations Wednesday evening. I walked out as soon as I got there because it was a dark cave of a club when it was a postcard summer evening in San Francisco. I walked out and waited for my friend Tom Abate from the Chronicle to arrive. Then we ran into Sam Whitmore and his better half, Christy ( a merger is planned in Hawaii in a couple of weeks.)

Had a great chat with Chris Anderson, Wired Mags chief editor and responsible for a remarkable turnaround at the magazine. Believe it or not, we talked about the spiritual nature of blogging.

Media is my favorite subject so I was surprised there were no iPhones amongst the aristocracy of the digerati...(except mine of course(!)).

It is surprising there were no iPhones because this device is the lynchpin, it is the delivery platform of this many-media world we now live in. And it will force the creation of an IT infrastructure that is going fuel the next boom in tech business cycles.

But I'm too self concious to bring it out because people want to touch and stroke it and it feels uncomfortable because a cell phone is more personal than a PC. Does anyone else feel the same way? Does your cell phone feel very personal?

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PS: I ran into the new editor of ValleyWag, Owen Thomas. He is a very nice man, I think we can all safely sleep in our beds at night.

My colleague Steve Gillmor at Podtech.net has released the first episode of Bad Sinatra... I bet you've never seen anything like it!

http://www.podtech.net/home/3549/bad-sinatra-i

No, it's not the Gillmor Gang, but who cares.

Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Marc Benioff, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmor

Copyright 2007 Bad Sinatra Network LLC

Tags: Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Marc Benioff, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmor

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Posted in Bad Sinatra, Social Media, PodTech, Featured, TechOne

Here is a teaser for the project I've been working on at PodTech.

If you're not disrupting, you're not innovating!

http://www.podtech.net/home/3475/introducing-techone