Articles tagged with 'CultureWatch' | Silicon Valley Watcher

Silicon Valley Watcher (CultureWatch)

2019
February
17,
2019
| 15:09 PM America/Los_Angeles
                    Diane Wilsey President and Thomas Campbell CEO of Fine Arts Museum - Photo courtesy of Chris Knight
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2018
April
27,
2018
| 16:16 PM America/Los_Angeles
Facebook and Google make money by aggregating services and advertising around a single user ID — usually your official name. But this creates a messy user experience as the algorithms try to guess your interests from a large tableau of your
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2017
October
17,
2017
| 04:34 AM America/Los_Angeles
When I was commuting to Menlo Park last year my journey would start on the San Francisco 38 Geary bus. It was always crowded and I’d be fortunate to squeeze in. I remember one particular gorgeous sunny morning and I’m on a very
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February
07,
2017
| 11:26 AM America/Los_Angeles
Chelsea Peretti (above) a comedic actress, introduced the 10th Annual Crunchies — awards celebrating startups and VCs in Silicon Valley — and managed some decent jokes poking fun at the techie audience and coming up with some great app ideas. (The
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2016
November
15,
2016
| 06:30 AM America/Los_Angeles
The winter issue of CNET Magazine is out and comedian T.J. Miller is on the cover and featured in an interview.Miller is one of the characters in HBO’s sitcom Silicon Valley. In the interview he says,I consider everybody who takes themselves
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October
12,
2016
| 10:30 AM America/Los_Angeles
 Above photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos for WIREDJoi Ito, head of the prestigious MIT Media Lab told President Obama he is concerned that the core development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is being built by a “mostly white”
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August
11,
2016
| 02:35 AM America/Los_Angeles
Photo from Catan.com Guest Post: By Janet Miller — a board game addict, habit scientist, former Silicon Valley executive and cofounder of Jen Reviews.Settlers of Catan Settlers of Catan was one of the first European games to gain popularity in the
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April
06,
2016
| 09:55 AM America/Los_Angeles
Romantic relationships, and a person's relationship with their work, would seem to be too distant and the experience too different to be comparable, yet eHarmony believes its success with the lonely can be put to use to make happier workplaces, and
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2015
March
07,
2015
| 05:35 AM America/Los_Angeles
Credit: San Jose MercuryCharles DiLisio is a prominent Silicon Valley photographer focused on preserving the region's history. He tells me there's a new photo contest: Visual San Jose Visual SJ -- a free photography hosted by Preservation Action
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January
25,
2015
| 04:05 AM America/Los_Angeles
[A Saturday Post... The future is already here — it just needs some connecting dots...]If we take our technologies of personalization and predictive business analytics to their ultimate conclusion, in the future we won't need marketing or consumers.
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January
20,
2015
| 06:14 AM America/Los_Angeles
CEO Richard Edelman (center) discusses "trust" at a Churchill Club event in 2013.Public trust in business has plunged across the world and is harming consumer acceptance of innovation, according to a survey of 27,000 people in 27 countries by
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January
07,
2015
| 07:12 AM America/Los_Angeles
The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is featuring a lot of "wearables" reports Techcrunch (above) (which all seem to be smart watches).Foremski's Take: All the fuss over Apple Watch will certainly help sell a lot of watches - regular and
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2014
November
18,
2014
| 05:12 AM America/Los_Angeles
Updated: December 1 — PRWeek named Weber Shandwick a Best Place To Work 2014 - Large Agency, for the second year in a row.I've been spending a lot of time in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, working with teams on Weber Shandwick's Mediaco
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October
01,
2014
| 03:55 AM America/Los_Angeles
Matthew Reinhold writes:I want to tell you a little about our project. It's a movement that asks for Oct. 4, to be the day for disconnect to reconnect. A gathering group of mostly Californians, feel overly accessible and need a second to catch their
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September
11,
2014
| 04:19 AM America/Los_Angeles
This week at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference, it seems that "innovation" has been lost in a discussion about disruptive companies.John Biggs reported:Investment bankers Bill Hambrecht and Clayton Christensen took to the Disrupt SF stage today to
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September
06,
2014
| 06:46 AM America/Los_Angeles
The new Friday market on mid-Market Street was a big hit with hundreds of people enjoying drinks, food trucks, and shopping eclectic stalls on a warm autumn evening. Mayor Ed Lee and several supervisors arrived, too. I managed to speak briefly with
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August
25,
2014
| 04:56 AM America/Los_Angeles
CNET's reporters have published a series of articles under the title "Vexed in the City" examining the pressures on housing and community caused by the expansion of San Francisco's population of tech workers.There are ten articles in the special
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August
07,
2014
| 05:25 AM America/Los_Angeles
There's a lot of backlash out there around Silicon Valley and I think it's largely because of the hypocrisy in techies claiming to be changing the world yet they can't change anything in the very places where they live.Silicon Valley cities and
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August
01,
2014
| 02:24 AM America/Los_Angeles
Saturday, August 2, there was a memorial service for Berkeley-born chemist Alexander Shulgin, who died recently aged 88. Mike Power, reporting for the Guardian newspaper (above) described his work as "fearless" because ... his chosen discipline --
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July
15,
2014
| 08:58 AM America/Los_Angeles
I'm adamant that San Francisco shouldn't be allowed to be made into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley's business parks. Original ideas require original experiences and companies should take advantage of that and not force their staff onto a bus
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June
10,
2014
| 06:49 AM America/Los_Angeles
The Internet Archive is housed in a wonderful San Francisco building that used to be a Christian Science church. In the pews along both sides of the large, skylight-lit auditorium, there is always a congregation: half-sized ceramic figures
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May
28,
2014
| 07:56 AM America/Los_Angeles
I'm a big fan of the Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA) and its projects, which generally try to link the art and tech worlds of San Francisco, along  with an awareness of the challenges facing urban residents of all incomes and backgrounds.
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May
24,
2014
| 04:23 AM America/Los_Angeles
I popped into the Exploratorium's recent fund raising gala and was told the event had raised $1.5 million, $300K more than it expected. Which is fabulous news because there were some job cuts last year.I'm a big fan of the Exploratorium but the
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April
25,
2014
| 02:17 AM America/Los_Angeles
This video is superb and I can't stop playing it: Shawn Riegsecker, CEO and founder of Centro, explains at a 2013 TechWeek event in Chicago, why he focused his company's culture on the happiness of its employees.It's working: Centro has become a
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April
16,
2014
| 06:06 AM America/Los_Angeles
The Psychedelic Society of San Francisco announced the sudden death of its 30 year old founder, Daniel Jabbour, a well known software engineer and political activist. There will be a memorial celebration April 19th at 11.30 AM at Hippie Hill in
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April
12,
2014
| 09:16 AM America/Los_Angeles
Sarah Slocum’s recent experience at Molotov’s, a lower Haight Street bar where an irate drinker snatched her Google Glass off her face, did a lot to boost her popularity as TV and newspapers covered the incident. But the association with someone who
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March
18,
2014
| 09:39 AM America/Los_Angeles
Inside Philanthropy magazine has a fascinating list of the top philanthropists in the tech industry (you'll be surprised at who is at the top: Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, the original founders of Cisco Systems).It also includes the six "least
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March
13,
2014
| 07:30 AM America/Los_Angeles
I’m looking forward to seeing Matt Taibbi, a scathing critic of Wall Street, at The Commonwealth Club April 10 in San Francisco. He recently left Rolling Stone and joined Pierre Omidyar’s $250m media group First Look, which I persist in calling
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January
31,
2014
| 03:20 AM America/Los_Angeles
This ad for  Autism Speaks at a San Francisco bus stop reminded me of an excerpt from an article written by Curt Woodward, senior editor at  Xconomy, about the lack of eye-contact within Google’s top echelon:During Schmidt's decade as Google CEO,
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2013
November
27,
2013
| 02:08 AM America/Los_Angeles
In the late 1990s , the Herman Miller Aeron chair (below) became the symbol of the startup boom because it seemed that every startup office had them. They weren't cheap, around $900 each, but they were, and still are, very stylish. Nobody knew at
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