This creates curious opportunities for fun. When Twilio was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As recounted by VentureBeat, when Lawson called, he heard automated voice messages asking him to press 1 for $5 million, 2 for $10 million and 3 for $15 million.

Hijinks like this say a lot about the culture that surrounds Twilio, but it’s not well known outside the developer community. Addressing that will be job one for Lynda Smith, its new chief marketing officer, who joined the company on April 23.

Smith is joining Twilio from Jive, the social enterprise software concern, where she was senior vice president of marketing until last fall. As CMO, she’ll be responsible for Twilio’s marketing strategy around the world.

“I think the Twilio brand is huge among developers because it gives that community a chance to play with something they haven’t had before,” Smith told me. “But it’s also getting a lot of traction within the telephony industry. … Voice and messaging are still a big part of the worlds that we live in, but they’ve been difficult to bring into new-world software applications because it’s still tied to some old-world things like hardware and protocols.” First priority, she says, is making sure that people outside the developer world know what Twilio is and what they can do with it.

Before Jive, Smith held a number executive slots at Genpact, Nuance, Genesys and Lockheed Martin. She’s a graduate of Simpson College, and has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. She’s also on the faculty at Stanford University, where she lectures on global entrepreneurial marketing.

Twilio is definitely on the move: It landed $17 million in that C round late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million. It also just announced its second conference in San Francisco, in October. Time to get serious about marketing.

Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller

Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng are on leave to launch Coursera, which will offer university classes for free online, in partnership with top schools.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Coursera is backed with $16 million in funding led by John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Scott Sandell at NEA. It has no immediate plans to charge for courses or to make money in other ways.

Compared to Udacity, a similar start-up from former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun that’s creating its own classes, Coursera helps support its university partners in creating their own courses, which are listed under each school’s brand.

Some might doubt that universities would want to share their prized content for free online with a start-up, but Coursera has already signed up Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania as partners, with a set of classes launching April 23.

Coursera evolved, in part, out of the hugely popular Stanford classes that Ng and Thrun taught last fall on machine learning and artificial intelligence, respectively. Ng’s course had 104,000 people enrolled, with at least 46,000 completing at least one homework assignment. Of those, 23,000 completed a “substantial” amount of the class, and 13,000 received a “statement of accomplishment,” Ng said. He’ll be offering that class again, starting next week.

Koller and Ng are particularly committed to developing pedagogy for this new medium, and have built their own course software and student forums. They describe their philosophy as similar to that of Salman Khan and the Khan Academy, where students are encouraged to take the time to master material at their own pace.

Coursera students help other students — in the fall, the median response time to a question asked on the class forum was 22 minutes — and the system will also learn from the students.

For instance, 2,000 of the 20,000 or so students in Ng’s online class had the exact same wrong solution on one problem set, he said. That’s an opportunity to recognize what’s happening, and to teach those students in that moment.

Koller and Ng have also conceived of an ambitious plan to grade humanities classes with thousands of students enrolled.

Coursera’s content is naturally heavy on computer science — where problem sets are fairly straightforward to grade — but it will also offer poetry, sociology, and medical courses. These classes will be graded crowdsourcing style, with peer assessment and review. Figuring out how to grade masses of assignments on a subjective scale is a machine learning problem, Ng said.

Another ambitious venture-backed college-level online education start-up I recently covered is the Minerva Project, which is planning to launch its own mostly virtual elite university.

As SVP of Worldwide Digital Media, Kessel oversees the company’s digital strategy, including books, music, video and the Kindle.

“After incredible success leading the Kindle team over the last several years, Steve Kessel decided to take a well-deserved and long-planned-for sabbatical,” said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener.

Herdener declined to say when Kessel would return, but said that, in the meantime, Dave Limp, who runs the Kindle device business, and Russ Grandinetti, who runs Kindle content, were overseeing the digital business.

Kessel’s absence follows the launch of the Kindle Fire tablet late last year, and comes at a time when Amazon is aggressively pushing into digital content. Just today, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos sent a letter to shareholders, emphasizing how the Kindle is disrupting the book publishing industry.

Some sources I talked to believed that Kessel, 46, was unlikely to return to Amazon and were characterizing his departure as early retirement. Another source pointed to internal documents, which listed Kessel as overseeing Donald Katz, the CEO of Audible, the company’s audiobooks group. However, Amazon’s investor page continues to list Kessel as the SVP of Worldwide digital media, and Herdener said Kessel is not retiring and is not in charge of Audible.

As one of 10 executives who report directly to Bezos, Kessel has worked closely with the visionary founder since 1999. Initially, he served as the VP of U.S. Books, Music, Video and DVD, and then was the VP of digital before landing in his current role.

According to a BusinessWeek article, it was Kessel who conspired with Bezos in 2004 to explore the radical idea of the online retailer making their own hardware.

Over the years, Kessel has been quoted occasionally in press releases, providing updates on how well the Kindle is selling. In October 2010, he said: “It’s still October and we’ve already sold more Kindle devices since launch than we did during the entire fourth quarter of last year—astonishing because the fourth quarter is the busiest time of year on Amazon.”

Amazon has never released specific sales numbers about the Kindle — a secret that has largely stayed under wraps, likely due to the company’s small management team.

Kessel received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Dartmouth College, and an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Quick as a wink, I got in my tux and hailed a cab for midtown Manhattan. That message from a friend who shall not be named was how I ended up crashing the 2012 Inner Circle Show, an annual New York ritual where members of the city’s press corps put on an impressive musical roast of the local, regional and national political elite since 1922. It’s a big black-tie affair, and an invite is not easy to get.

The highlight of the night is always the Mayor’s Rebuttal. Last year, Mayor Mike Bloomberg flew around the stage as Spider-Man, taking advantage of the infamous buzz that plagued that Broadway show back then.

As you’ve probably figured out, Mayor Mike doesn’t do anything small. Being the 20th-richest person the world — worth some $22 billion via his majority ownership of the financial data and media company that bears his name — has its perks. One of them is the ability to hire the cast of a hit Broadway show to help make you look good on stage. (Full disclosure: I worked for that company for about a year before taking this job.)

This year, Bloomberg hired what must have been the majority of the cast of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” including its current headliner, Nick Jonas, a.k.a. “the cute Jonas Brother,” and also longtime Hollywood actor Beau Bridges.

Naturally, there were a lot of references to local political chatter. In the skit, Bloomberg bans coffee at City Hall — a reference to his administration’s war on nasty food ingredients like trans fats and salt — touching off a drama among city employees. He also quizzes the presidents of Cornell and Stanford University on their knowledge of New York — a quiz Stanford fails, prompting her to walk out. It’s a reference to a real-world competition between the two to develop a technology hub on Roosevelt Island, and yes, Stanford really did walk away. And of course there were plenty of references to Lady Gaga, whom Bloomberg famously kissed on New Year’s Eve.

Below is a six-minute highlight reel of Bloomberg’s production, which ran a good 30 minutes or more. The fun lasted well into the wee hours this morning. Hilton security guards shut down a crowded after-party in a penthouse suite at about 2:30 am. (I crashed that, too, again with the help of the friend who shall not be named.) One wonders if Bloomberg can be coaxed into a reprise when he hits the stage at our D10 conference in May. We can at least hope!

Prabhakar Raghavan, the well-respected head of Yahoo’s Labs unit and also recently its head of strategy, is leaving the company to take a job at Google.

The departure comes ahead of what will be very deep cuts in his division, which is in charge of long-term research at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, said sources, and is spread all over the country. More researchers at Yahoo — which is a very well-respected group — are also expected to go too and will be the subject of fervent recruiting interest by companies such as Google and Facebook.

Yahoo confirmed the move after I made an inquiry about it this morning.

In a statement, the company said:

“Yahoo! thanks Prabhakar Raghavan for his dedication and contributions to Yahoo! for the past 7 years. We wish him well in his next endeavor. Ash Munshi, CTO, will assume leadership for Y! Labs.”

It is unclear what Raghavan’s new role at Google is.

But, as head of Yahoo Labs, Raghavan’s research arena has been extensive, encompassing everything from data mining to algorithms to search.

He is also a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University. According to his bio, Raghavan has “co-authored two textbooks, on randomized algorithms and on information retrieval.”

The Berkeley PhD had been CTO at Verity and had held a number of jobs at IBM Research.

More to the point, he was very well respected within the company, which seems to be curtailing its commitment to research as it attempts to turn itself around under the new leadership of CEO Scott Thompson.

Raghavan had been made head of strategy under former CEO Carol Bartz, who was fired.

He has been at Yahoo seven years.

Google’s very first employee, Craig Silverstein, is leaving the company to join the high-profile online learning phenom, Khan Academy.

News of the departure first appeared yesterday in a line in a newsletter on education-tech entrepreneurship EdSurge, and the search giant confirmed the departure to me.

[UPDATE: Here's a statement from a Google spokesperson -- and not CEO Larry Page (classy and appreciative of others as ever!, Larry!) -- on Silverstein's leaving: "Craig's been with Google since the early days. He was instrumental in the development of search and made numerous contributions to Google over the years. We wish him all the best at the Khan Academy and know that he will do great things to help them promote education around the world."]

Silverstein, who was actually Google’s No. 3 employee — that would be after its pair of founders, Page and Sergey Brin — has had a variety of technology jobs at the company over the years since it was founded in 1998.

But his first — helping them build the famed and lucrative search engine itself — was perhaps his most important. An experienced techie, Silverstein worked with Brin and Page on Google, from their dorm rooms as Ph.D. students at Stanford University, to their garage days, to the giant and diversified behemoth it is today, with tens of thousands of employees.

Currently, he has been working on a variety of projects, including mentoring engineers.

Having spent some time with him over the years, I can tell you that he’s a lovely and adorkable guy, whose infectious enthusiasm and joy of tech has always embodied what I always refer to as “Good Google” (as opposed to, well, you know).

Silverstein will simply be a developer at Khan Academy’s Mountain View, Calif., offices, but I have emails for more details in to all parties.

Speaking of party — IMHO, Larry and Sergey should throw him a really nice one. Really nice — it’s well-deserved.

Here is Silverstein’s cute goodbye email to staff that I obtained (natch!):

[I couldn't possibly remember everyone who I should be sending this mail to, so please feel free to spread the word to anyone I missed!]

It is with decidedly mixed feelings that I announce, after more than 13 years, that I’m leaving Google. My last day will be Feb 10. I’ll be joining the Khan Academy as a developer.

Some of you thought this day would never come (as one person once put it: “Will you die at Google?”), and it was an extremely difficult choice. I am as passionate about Google’s mission now as I’ve ever been, and as proud of the work we’re doing to achieve it. While a lot has changed at Google over the years, I think we’ve done a remarkable job of staying true to our core mission of making the world a better place by making information more accessible and useful. I am looking forward to pursuing that same mission, though in a slightly different way, at Khan.

I’m extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such smart, passionate, and interesting people — not just a few, either, but (almost :-) ) everyone I worked with. I’m grateful not just that I had so many co-workers I could respect, but even more that I had so many that I could count as friends. I will miss that most of all, and I hope you will continue to be in touch. I also accept lunch invitations!

When I write my massive 4-volume autobiography, “Craig Silverstein: the Man Behind the Legend,” I will devote an entire volume to my years at Google. I can’t emphasize enough how meaningful my time at Google has been, and how meaningful all of you have been to it. I mean it literally when I say: all the best,

craig

And here’s the video of a speech Silverstein gave at the University of North Carolina in 2008, about Google’s origins:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

In an unusual gift, Helen Gurley Brown has given Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering $30 million to create a bi-coastal Institute of Media Innovation.

Said the schools in a joint press release about the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, “it is designed to encourage and support new endeavors with the potential to inform and entertain in transformative ways. It will recognize the increasingly important connection between journalism and technology, bringing the best from the East and West Coasts.”

Each university will get $12 million, with the additional $6 million to build a “state-of-the-art, high-tech newsroom” at Columbia’s famous J-School in upper Manhattan in New York.

(Full disclosure: I went to graduate school there, but we used typewriters way back then.)

Among the advisors to the project is well-known Silicon Valley exec Bill Campbell.

The move will be interesting as a collaborative venture between the East and West coasts, although it is unclear what it might yield.

Interestingly, last week, Harvard University announced an on-campus venture fund with New Enterprise Associates to better compete with the enticements of California.

Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens,” said Gurley Brown in a statement. “It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge.”

Here’s the official press release on the Brown gift:

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL AND STANFORD SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING ANNOUNCE JOINT $30 MILLION GIFT FROM DAVID AND HELEN GURLEY BROWN

Gift Establishes First of Its Kind Bi-Coastal Institute for Media Innovation — Bringing Together the Best in West Coast Technology with East Coast Content

NEW YORK and PALO ALTO, Calif., January 30, 2012, 1:00 p.m. ET – Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering today announced a $30 million gift from longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor and author Helen Gurley Brown to establish the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

The Institute and the collaboration between the two schools is groundbreaking in that it is designed to encourage and support new endeavors with the potential to inform and entertain in transformative ways. It will recognize the increasingly important connection between journalism and technology, bringing the best from the East and West Coasts.

The Institute, the first of its kind, is inspired by the memory of Ms. Brown’s late husband, David Brown, a graduate of both Stanford University and the Columbia School of Journalism. Brown, who along with partners Richard Zanuck and Steven Spielberg created such classic American films as Driving Miss Daisy, The Verdict and Jaws, was also a former journalist, publisher and, late in his career, a stage producer whose credits included the musicals Sweet Smell of Success and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Of the total gift, each school will receive $12 million for Institute activities. The gift to Columbia’s Journalism School, the largest in its history, will endow a professorship whose holder will be the Institute’s East Coast director. The gift to Stanford’s Engineering School will similarly endow the position of the West Coast director. An additional $6 million will go to Columbia which will also pay for the construction of a highly visible signature space at the eastern end of the J-School’s landmark building, featuring a state-of-the-art high-tech newsroom.

The funding of the Institute will support graduate and postgraduate fellowships, both at Stanford and Columbia, and competitively awarded “Magic Grants,” intended to seed the most innovative and promising ideas for future development conceived of by Brown Fellows.

Commenting on the announcement, Helen Gurley Brown said, “David and I have long supported and encouraged bright young people to follow their passions and to create original content. Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens. It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge.”

The east-west collaboration of the two schools will enable students at both institutions to build upon their ideas with professors and innovators at both universities. At both locations there will be a strong emphasis on executing new ideas and demonstrating products and prototypes. The
Institute will establish ongoing links to business leaders and media companies to bring its innovations to market.

“New York City, as the major center for the television, music, print media and advertising, is profoundly affected by rapidly evolving digital technology,” said Stanford engineering professor Bernd Girod, who will serve as the Institute’s founding director until Columbia appoints his East Coast counterpart. “The Brown Institute will bring together creative innovators skilled in production and delivery of news and entertainment with the entrepreneurial researchers at Stanford working in multimedia technology.”

“This gift from David and Helen Gurley Brown is truly transformative for the school,” said Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. “As we enter our Centennial year, the Browns’ generosity will enable us to explore new and exciting realms of leadership in our field. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to collaborate with Stanford Engineering.”

“Stanford brings to this partnership its exceptional research and teaching, a history of transformative technology innovation and a tradition of multidisciplinary collaboration,” said Stanford University President John Hennessy. “We are excited about the opportunity to partner with Columbia University’s truly outstanding School of Journalism, and look forward to combining the expertise of New York and Silicon Valley at a critical point in the evolution of media.”

Stanford Engineering has a storied history of achievement and entrepreneurship. Its faculty and graduates have founded such iconic companies as Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems and Yahoo! and contributed to such groundbreaking technologies as lasers, global positioning, magnetic resonance imaging, digital sound synthesis and modern web-search algorithms.

“Under Dean Nick Lemann, Columbia Journalism School is building on its tradition of leadership by developing innovative teaching and research addressing the future of a fast-changing news media,” said Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar who has written extensively about press freedom. “We are deeply appreciative of Helen Gurley Brown’s vision in honoring her late husband by bringing together his two alma maters to develop the next generation of digital journalism. We look forward to working with Stanford in seeking new ways for technology and creativity to enhance a robust free press in our society.”

The Institute will have a distinguished board of advisors including leaders from technology, venture capital and media including, among others, Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation; Bill Campbell, Chairman of the Board at Intuit and an Apple Inc. board member; and Eve Burton, Vice President and General Counsel of Hearst Corporation.

Helen Gurley Brown, who turns 90 in February, is one of the world’s most popular and influential editors. She led Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 to 1996 and authored many books, including the 1962 bestseller, Sex and the Single Girl. Her impact on popular culture and society has reached around the globe, largely due to the three-plus decades when she put her personal stamp on Cosmopolitan in a way that has rarely been replicated. Under her reign, Cosmopolitan became the go-to magazine for women worldwide and remains the best selling young women’s magazine around the world today with 64 editions, in 35 languages and more than 80 countries.

“As both CEO of Hearst Corporation and advisor to the Brown Institute, today marks a very special day for education, journalism and technology,” said Bennack. “I’m very proud of David’s legacy and Helen, who understood the power of community, in particular, and its importance to women, long before social media had a name.”

(Photo credit: Hearst Corp.)

There are a lot of things to like about Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, who works by day as a lecturer focusing on strategic philanthropy at Stanford University, and also is the founder and chairman of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and the founder of SV2, the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund.

But my recent favorite was when — before being interviewed with her husband, well-known tech legend and now powerful VC Marc Andreessen, about her new book, “Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World,” at a big fancy dinner honoring them — she called the Netscape creator her “trophy husband.”

That was what you might call a good one.

Actually, there are a lot more weighty, serious good ones to take note of in the book, which was recently released, in which Arrillaga-Andreessen tries to find new ways to think about giving.

Interestingly, given her spouse, the answers are not all about digital solutions, and do not require being a gazillionaire geek, either.

Here’s a video interview I did with Arrillaga-Andreessen — who hails from a prominent Silicon Valley family, and was inspired by her parents to focus on philanthropy — talking about the book, and where the sector is going:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111115/laura-arrillaga-andreessen-talks-about-giving-2-0/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111016/steve-jobs-memorial-held/ http://allthingsd.com/20111016/steve-jobs-memorial-held/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 05:48:45 +0000 Jessica E. Vascellaro and Ian Sherr http://allthingsd.com/?p=132731 STANFORD, Calif. — Hundreds of Silicon Valley’s elite streamed into Stanford University’s Memorial Church on Sunday evening for a service commemorating Apple Inc.’s late co-founder Steve Jobs.

Guests, many of whom were wearing black, arrived amid intense security with guards stationed near the main gate of the university’s campus.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111016/steve-jobs-memorial-held/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111014/steve-jobs-memorial-service-to-be-held-sunday/ http://allthingsd.com/20111014/steve-jobs-memorial-service-to-be-held-sunday/#comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 23:11:59 +0000 Jessica E. Vascellaro http://allthingsd.com/?p=132651 Apple Inc. has invited some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names to a memorial service for Steve Jobs Sunday, Oct. 16, according to a copy of the invitation and several invitees.

The event will be held at Stanford University’s campus Sunday evening, according to the invitation. It follows a small private funeral held for the Apple co-founder and chief executive last week.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111014/steve-jobs-memorial-service-to-be-held-sunday/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111006/now-what-the-post-jobs-era-in-tech/ http://allthingsd.com/20111006/now-what-the-post-jobs-era-in-tech/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:17:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=129320

As Steve Jobs famously said to rival Bill Gates of Microsoft in a joint interview with Walt Mossberg and me in 2007, “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.” And perhaps what is most amazing about Jobs was his longevity.

Not in life, of course, which was cut tragically short at 56 years, with his last years focused a lot on the cancer that would ultimately defeat him.

Actually, by longevity, I mean how the iconic entrepreneur continued, until the very end, to have an enormous impact over all of technology and especially in Silicon Valley.

It is easy to see that Jobs has been the single consistent tech tastemaker and true-north icon — even in the frantically changing, what’s-new-is-best atmosphere that too often prevails in the industry.

The list of tech and media arenas he changed via innovative thinking and, more importantly, action, is long — from graphics to design to touchscreens to smartphones to tablets to animation to ease of use to apps to quality to, well, you get the idea.

The hits seemed nonstop: The Macintosh. The iPod. And iTunes. The MacBook. The iPhone. The iPad.

And it is no stretch to say that even the brightest lights in tech and media always watched what he did and were influenced by him, reacted to him, changed because he changed.

In many ways, it was because Jobs never seemed to waver.

Let’s be clear, this is not an easy thing to do, to keep sailing on your own course, often against the prevailing winds, and not be swayed.

Perhaps that is the thing that Jobs most exemplified — a stubborn unwillingness to adjust who he was, maintaining an integrity of purpose and vision when others could not.

It is certainly what has made him — and by extension, Apple — so special. Of course, it is not that he was not difficult, capricious and cutting at times. But even that he owned.

So who and what does tech look to now for that kind of inspiration?

Certainly, at this moment, there is no one leader to fill Jobs’s outsized shoes.

The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Quirky, curious, arrogant, but so, so prosaic.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg? Still forming, so awkward and not yet the leader he might become.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon? Certainly creative and bold, but utterly lacking in the moxie and style of Steve.

I could go on and not get to anyone even slightly close — there’s no one with the kind of charisma that makes it impossible to look away.

It’s called inspiration, a quality so lacking in all parts of this world, making it hard to imagine any replacement for Jobs.

And, in a way, why should we try to find one?

As Jobs himself said in his memorable “Stay hungry. Stay foolish” speech at Stanford University, right after he recovered from his first bout with cancer:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No reason at all. So, as we all wish Jobs could have done, let’s live on.

And so will Steve Jobs. As AllThingsD Web guru Adam Tow said about the innovative Siri voice control feature in the latest iPhone 4 — introduced earlier this week without Jobs being there to present — perhaps Siri stands for: Steve is right inside.

Yes, indeed. Because his DNA lives in all of Apple. And, of course, in Silicon Valley and in tech, forever and always.

But we move on, too, so here is a video I did yesterday with WSJ.com on what impact Jobs’s death may have on Apple and whether the company will remain an innovator and market leader:

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Steve Jobs Full Coverage »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111006/now-what-the-post-jobs-era-in-tech/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111004/perplexed-by-u-s-ownership-rules-alibabas-ma-yellow-lights-yahoo-buying-parade/ http://allthingsd.com/20111004/perplexed-by-u-s-ownership-rules-alibabas-ma-yellow-lights-yahoo-buying-parade/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:28:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=127909

After his unusually enthusiastic declaration at a Silicon Valley event last week that “we are very, very interested” in buying the “whole” of Yahoo, you might imagine Alibaba Group co-founder and CEO Jack Ma running out of the speech looking for a giant pile of cash to pay for it immediately.

Instead, according to sources close to the situation, what the Chinese entrepreneur got was a cold dose of CFIUS — or Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the federal interagency review process for foreign investment deals.

Translation: If you are from China and want to buy our U.S. companies, we are going to have to give you a major look-see and it is not going to be pretty.

Perhaps that’s fair, but the prospect that even a purchase such as Yahoo, a consumer business that seems to have little in the way of national security concerns, might enter the buzzsaw of U.S. politics apparently surprised Ma.

Thus, sources said, that while it remains very interested, Alibaba is now at least a little concerned about the feasibility of the deal and that Ma is “perplexed” about why the U.S. has such restrictive rules against foreign ownership of a consumer business.

That said, he has been in touch with Yahoo co-founder and board member Jerry Yang and is likely to make a more official visit soon with others involved in Yahoo’s strategic review.

In addition, sources said, rumors of an imminent Yahoo bid hook-up with DST Global and Silver Lake — which recently invested in Alibaba — are overblown. While Ma did say last week at his much-noticed speech at Stanford University that he was talking to a lot of buyers, Alibaba is not closely aligned with anyone as yet.

Of course, given that Yahoo owns a 40 percent stake in Alibaba, Ma will be a big player in any deal done.

That’s because of a 2005 agreement that stipulates that if there is a change of control, Yahoo must give Alibaba a 15-day chance to buy back its stake.

Still, after his effusive I-want-Yahoo-now speech that caught the Internet giant and its bidders off guard, dialing back the rhetoric a bit is probably no surprise given the delicate dancing now going on.

In other words, a case of wanna-be-buyer’s remorse.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111004/perplexed-by-u-s-ownership-rules-alibabas-ma-yellow-lights-yahoo-buying-parade/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111004/even-if-hes-not-at-apple-event-steve-jobs-sure-knows-how-to-put-on-a-show/ http://allthingsd.com/20111004/even-if-hes-not-at-apple-event-steve-jobs-sure-knows-how-to-put-on-a-show/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:18:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=128031

In the forefront of everyone’s mind covering the Apple event today, there is probably a fervent little wish that at some point its legendary co-founder and chairman Steve Jobs will saunter on out to take a much-deserved bow.

That seems unlikely for a variety of reasons — most especially because it would take the focus off Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook and also the new products being featured.

It certainly would be something to see, even if it would be difficult, in one stage moment, to encapsulate the profound impact of Jobs on Apple and on the tech world in general.

But it seems unlike Jobs to do that, mostly because it would be too obvious, too rote and too much of a Hollywood wrap-it-all-up cliche.

And, most of all, because it’s not different — a guiding idea that has always been at the heart of Apple and its best motto ever.

I thought a lot about that today, looking over all the frantic speculation about exactly what Apple would release this morning, and all the piles and piles of news stories, tweets and more about it all.

That has become typical around any Apple announcement, of course, and it can become more than a little wearying at times.

That said, when you take a moment to step back and think about it, all the hubbub is perhaps a good thing, given that a lot of it is about what could be done, what might be made, what people really hope for in technology.

That’s because — unlike other, more prosaic tech companies, who all make a lot of cool stuff, too — much of the crazy swirl around Apple seems to be about what’s possible and what could be.

And that is at the heart of the most important “one more thing” that Steve Jobs has given to Silicon Valley and beyond.

Which is to say, the impetus to think different.

In fact, it’s hard to say just how critical it is in this world today to zig in an opposite way from the safe norm, and to do it with a confidence that belies the difficulty of that shift.

In small tech ways, Jobs has done that again and again, dumping everything from removable batteries to Flash to internal disk drives to whatever he thought needed the heave-ho.

These are not easy decisions for a big tech company to make. But they are ones that are often muddled through by too many executives, to little effect and no definitive change, leaving a mushy pile of nothing.

As I like to say about a lot of big companies I cover — they think small, and then, well, think smaller.

For all its pros and cons, that has never been Apple under Jobs, and I hope that continues.

Jobs sounded a lot of the same arguments in his famous 2005 speech at Stanford University, in which he famously said: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

So in honor of his massive contribution: Let’s.

It reminds me of a poem by Shel Silverstein that I always read to my kids — so much so that they are more than a bit tired of hearing it, even if I never am:

Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’Ts
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me –
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be.

And while it is perhaps just another iPhone or whatever doodad Apple whips out today, the real point of it — and what Jobs has taught tech — is that it can be anything.

Enjoy:

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111004/even-if-hes-not-at-apple-event-steve-jobs-sure-knows-how-to-put-on-a-show/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111002/as-u-s-listed-china-internet-stocks-dive-renren-ceo-smacks-alibaba-on-the-way-down-and-gets-smacked-back/ http://allthingsd.com/20111002/as-u-s-listed-china-internet-stocks-dive-renren-ceo-smacks-alibaba-on-the-way-down-and-gets-smacked-back/#comments Sun, 02 Oct 2011 15:35:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=127296

While they are usually much less voluble than the chatty Web execs of Silicon Valley, the execs who run China’s fast-growing Internet companies seem to be keeping up just fine of late.

On Friday, for example, the Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma was positively effusive about wanting to buy all of Yahoo, a company which actually owns 40 percent of Alibaba. “We are very, very interested,” said Ma at an event at Stanford University.

Now, in an interview with Bloomberg, Renren CEO Joe Chen decided to take a smack at Ma over his disputed spinoff of its Alipay payments unit, which caused a high-profile ruckus with Yahoo earlier this year.

“It’s quite unfortunate,” Chen said to Bloomberg about disagreement, which has since been settled. “It caused a lot of uncertainty about Chinese Internet companies.”

Them’s fightin’ words, and a source close to Alibaba reacted with, well, reaction.

“Yeah, it shook confidence so badly that Silver Lake and DST [Global] just decided to put in billions to back Jack Ma,” referring to a recent funding deal by the large investors. “People shouldn’t try to blame their own lack of performance on others.”

Ouch!

Actually, Renren has bigger problems than Alibaba.

According to a substantive report in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, what’s really hurting Chinese Internet companies is the declining stocks caused by recent accounting scandals there, which may have attracted scrutiny from U.S. regulators.

Wrote the Journal: “A series of alleged accounting frauds this year at little-known Chinese companies listed in the U.S. has triggered a sharp shift in sentiment among investors, who are now worried about hidden business risks or financial problems.”

Hence possible investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission that will surely drag Chinese stocks on U.S. exchanges down more.

And indeed, the stock of Renren — which had its own controversial issue with accurate data reporting at the time of the IPO of the social networking site earlier this year — declined 13 percent Friday, along with other Chinese companies listed here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111002/as-u-s-listed-china-internet-stocks-dive-renren-ceo-smacks-alibaba-on-the-way-down-and-gets-smacked-back/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110930/jack-ma-at-stanford-we-are-very-interested-in-buying-yahoo/ http://allthingsd.com/20110930/jack-ma-at-stanford-we-are-very-interested-in-buying-yahoo/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 23:00:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=127071

In answer to a direct question about whether his company was going to buy Yahoo at a forum at Stanford University in Silicon Valley this afternoon, Alibaba Group Chairman and CEO Jack Ma said: “We are very interested.”

Said Ma: “We are very interested in Yahoo. Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo and Yahoo is important to us … All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.”

Finally, at least one crystal clear answer in the confusion at Yahoo. More importantly, it is the first time Ma has indicated that he wanted to be a principal player in any deal around Yahoo rather than an element of a buying group.

Later, in answer to a question I posed about how he was going to do that, Ma said he wanted the “whole” company, but that the effort was complicated and included a number of players.

Again, he said: “We are very, very interested.”

I also asked him if he had visited Yahoo in his trip to California, which Ma said he has not in 15 days here so far. He said he has mostly been sleeping and eating, as part of a longer-term visit to the U.S.

Ma’s declaration came as part of a lively closing keynote speech at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he talked about the Chinese Internet company’s growth, focusing on how China is the next great Web economy.

Talking about competitors such as eBay, which have tried to enter the huge Asian market, he joked that “eBay might be sharks in the ocean, but Alibaba is a crocodile in the Yangtze.”

Of course, given his presence in Silicon Valley, one topic of interest was whether Ma would be heading over to visit nearby Yahoo and what role he will play in the current internal debate over the company’s future in the wake of the ousting of its CEO Carol Bartz.

The disposition on Yahoo’s Asian assets, which includes 40 percent of Alibaba and a large stake in Yahoo! Japan, are critical to the current strategic review of the company, since they make up a large part of its market valuation.

In comparison, the value of its U.S. and other global assets are small.

When later asked about his experience of being involved with Yahoo, which made a very canny investment by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang in Alibaba many years ago, Ma also said that he would do it again, but not in the same way.

The same way has to do with the level of foreign ownership, which Ma has been trying to reduce in a number of ways and which Yahoo has thus far resisted.

To answer a question about the fight between Ma and Yahoo over its Alipay fight, when Ma spun it out of Alibaba, he said the situation was tense, but that today “the problem is solved and I am half-burnt.”

He was referring to a settlement, which will require a lot of growth from the still-nascent online payment business.

Ma was asked later about the biggest misunderstanding in the U.S. about China and vice versa. “Our job is not to solve the misunderstanding,” he said. “Our job is to change ourselves to solve the problem.”

In another query about his relationship with Yahoo’s Yang, Ma called him a lifelong friend and also said he appreciated how much that meant to Alibaba’s beginnings.

“But, this is business and not personal,” Ma said about the current situation. “While we appreciate yesterday, but we are looking for a better tomorrow.”

The first line, for those not mad fans of the classic movie like me, is from “The Godfather.”

The question is, though, will Ma make Yang an offer he can’t refuse?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110930/jack-ma-at-stanford-we-are-very-interested-in-buying-yahoo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110831/crowdsourcing-deficit-reduction/ http://allthingsd.com/20110831/crowdsourcing-deficit-reduction/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:59:25 +0000 Amir Efrati http://allthingsd.com/?p=116016 Can the Internet help balance the budget?

Amid the conflict in Washington over how to reduce the deficit, two heavyweight computer scientists in the Bay Area have launched a website that aims to find politically palatable solutions, in part by giving ordinary citizens a voice on the matter.

The site, called Widescope, has some support among budget experts and policy wonks. It also has plenty of skeptics who feel the project is an example of “technological utopianism,” the belief that technology can solve difficult problems caused by humans, including political ones.

The site’s creators, Stanford University professor Ashish Goel and former Google Inc. executive Narayanan Shivakumar, believe public discourse about the budget is broken.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110831/crowdsourcing-deficit-reduction/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110818/latest-in-web-tracking-stealthy-supercookies/ http://allthingsd.com/20110818/latest-in-web-tracking-stealthy-supercookies/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:01:58 +0000 Julia Angwin http://allthingsd.com/?p=111484 Major Web sites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people’s online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, new research shows.

The new techniques, which are legal, reach beyond the traditional “cookie,” a small file that Web sites routinely install on users’ computers to help track their activities online. Hulu and MSN were installing files known as “supercookies,” which are capable of re-creating users’ profiles after people deleted regular cookies, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110818/latest-in-web-tracking-stealthy-supercookies/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110502/meet-evan-reas-of-lal-and-his-proximity-based-social-graph-for-colleges/ http://allthingsd.com/20110502/meet-evan-reas-of-lal-and-his-proximity-based-social-graph-for-colleges/#comments Tue, 03 May 2011 01:20:07 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=6185 The start-up LikeALittle, or LAL, had fended off NetworkEffect’s reportorial advances for weeks. Funny, considering the site helps people flirt with one another.

But last week we were granted access to the Palo Alto “hacker house” where the recently seed-funded LAL team has set up shop to expand its early success into a larger vision. No, LAL is not turning its flirting site into a dating site, but rather becoming a way for people to interact with others who are nearby, as co-founder and CEO Evan Reas described in a video interview embedded here.

LAL, which started at Stanford University last fall and now is live at 450 different colleges, gets 250,000 page views per day for its message boards and Web chat service. Reas estimates 75 percent of Stanford students have used the site. But total user numbers are slightly hard to ascertain, he noted, because LAL allows people to post and chat anonymously.

Reas promises that LAL’s grand vision will become more apparent in the coming weeks, but for now here’s why he’s been able to bend investors’ ears:

• A dynamic social graph determined by users’ locations seems like an alternative to the static real-name-based Facebook social graph.
• Flirting provides enticing content for both participants and voyeurs.
• When it comes to virality, densely populated college campuses seem to be a match waiting to be lit.

LAL participated in the most recent class of Y Combinator and raised a seed round led by Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, as was reported by TechCrunch.

Here’s the full list of investors, provided by LAL: Marc Andreessen, Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway, Scott Cook, Charles River Ventures led by Saar Gur, Matrix Partners led by Josh Hannah, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, David King, Yuri Milner, Shervin Pishevar, Brian Pokorny, Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, David Sacks and Y Combinator.

Reas told us LikeALittle was probably the seventh or eighth idea he and his co-founders Prasanna Sankaranarayanan and Shubham Mittal prototyped under the header Hawthorne Labs. The quick viral success of LAL at Stanford indicated to the three that they might have found their elusive “billion-dollar idea,” so they stuck with it, Reas said. Prior to Hawthorne Labs, Reas had been a co-founder of ProFounder and received his MBA from Stanford.

Here’s our video chat with Reas, shot in the “hacker house” backyard.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110502/meet-evan-reas-of-lal-and-his-proximity-based-social-graph-for-colleges/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110324/video-the-pulse-boys-to-men-talk-about-huge-growth-of-visual-news-reading-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20110324/video-the-pulse-boys-to-men-talk-about-huge-growth-of-visual-news-reading-app/#comments Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:20:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42002

Today, BoomTown braved the floods and skippered All Things Digital‘s S.S. Minnow through a Noah-like rainstorm in Silicon Valley to visit the HQ of Pulse.

Last summer, you might recall, co-founders Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta of the nifty visual news-reading app got publicly picked out by Apple’s Steve Jobs in a speech about third-party innovations on the iPad.

It was a high point for the pair of Stanford University students and newbie entrepreneurs–except that the very same day, the New York Times slapped them with a cease and desist for misusing its RSS feed.

Dramatic, for sure, but they have made nice with the Times since then and have also raised more than $1 million in funding from a range of notable venture players.

Compared to a similar start-up–the social news-reading app Flipboard–that’s a very small budget for Pulse, which was making a profit on a paid app but, since it went free in November, it’s not making a profit now.

The move–while it will require a new business plan at some point–allowed Pulse usage to explode, hitting three million users today from 250,000 paid users only four months ago.

A lot of that growth has been on Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android smartphones, rather than on the iPad tablet, where Pulse began.

And, although the Android mobile operating system was the last platform to be introduced, it is the fastest growing one, with over one million users on it, Pulse said.

Pulse launched a 2.0 update for the iPhone and Android today, with “enhanced performance, new content sources and improved sharing with social feeds and news discovery features.”

That means the app is speedier, has more news offerings in more categories and a bigger dollop of social content and sharing tools with Facebook, Twitter and other social networking companies.

Pulse now has eight employees squeezed into its small offices in downtown Palo Alto, CA–complete with the required start-up garage door.

Here’s a video interview I did with Kothari and Gupta this afternoon, just as the sun came out, along with one I did with them in cloudier times last June during the Times’ dopey assault:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110324/video-the-pulse-boys-to-men-talk-about-huge-growth-of-visual-news-reading-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110227/stanford-entrepreneurship-week-little-fish-but-in-big-pond/ http://allthingsd.com/20110227/stanford-entrepreneurship-week-little-fish-but-in-big-pond/#comments Sun, 27 Feb 2011 17:00:44 +0000 Joe Ciolli http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=36673 The opening day of Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Week–E-Week, for short–concluded on Wednesday with a presentation from Idealab founder Bill Gross.

In front of a crowded auditorium and a glowing overhead screen, Gross discussed his business incubator, which has given rise to such successful companies as Picasa, Overture and Citysearch.

While such famous guest speakers and panels make up a considerable portion of the E-Week schedule, which runs through Wednesday, March 2, Gross’ lecture-style presentation isn’t necessarily par for the course.

E-Week also serves as a launching pad for student start-ups to get their ideas out into the open, at the university that has spawned some of the most important tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Heard of Google?

The week-long, campus-wide event series is ultimately designed to encourage interaction between student entrepreneurs and potential investors, and to burnish Stanford’s credentials as a hub of tech and business innovation.

And while start-up conferences are a dime a dozen in Silicon Valley, with seemingly endless companies trotted out as can’t-miss targets for investors, E-Week organizers hope their event has one key differentiator: Early access to Stanford brainpower.

The event’s organizers believe that this alone is enough to attract high-profile investors hungry for that first piece of the action.

“There’s no shortage of companies or firms here in the Valley that would love to get on the inside and make contacts with students coming out of Stanford engineering, business or any other department,” explained Matt Harvey of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the event’s main organizer. “So many students go on to make major impacts in their fields–there’s a great deal of interest in what they’re up to.”

Perhaps the most notable event has been VC3, which took place Friday, giving students three minutes to pitch an idea to venture capitalists, after which they received three minutes of feedback.

But don’t expect a handful of Stanford students to walk away from VC3 with freshly cut checks in hand. Harvey noted that the event is geared more towards critiquing the early plans of start-ups and making initial introductions to investors.

“We try to offer a more holistic approach to starting up,” added Laura Chau, president of the Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society, which sponsors the event. “Our goal for this is introductions, although a lot of times, after presentations, VC people will invite students back to their offices and have sessions.”

Chau cited one success story from last year’s event, commercial satellite company Skybox Imaging, which received funding following its presentation at VC3.

The event continues this week through Wednesday.

On Monday, for example, the Graduate School of Business Energy Club and Stanford’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies will be co-sponsoring a presentation by Dan Yates, chief executive officer of OPOWER, a clean-tech company. The following day, E-Week will switch gears entirely as the Stanford Biodesign organization hosts its Medtech Career Fair.

The STVP will also be busy throughout the week as it hosts several sessions, most notably its daily “Coaches-On-Call” event–a sort of office hours for curious students who wish to ask questions and bounce ideas off industry experts.

In addition to matching entrepreneurs with investors, E-Week also encourages collaboration between disciplines, especially since Stanford students often become insulated in their respective departments.

“Sometimes there are people involved in the same sorts of interests and passions that may not know each other,” said Harvey. “Being introduced to people with similar ideas can be a great benefit for an aspiring entrepreneur.”

And, for many students, it will be the first exposure they have to the world of private financing, and to bigger fish who live outside the Stanford pond.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110227/stanford-entrepreneurship-week-little-fish-but-in-big-pond/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/remembering-rajiv-dutta-veteran-of-ebay-and-elevation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/remembering-rajiv-dutta-veteran-of-ebay-and-elevation/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 04:11:10 +0000 Nick Wingfield http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35767 Rajiv Dutta, a veteran Silicon Valley executive and investor, died Monday morning after battling a recurrence of cancer.

Dutta, 49 years old, was eBay’s chief financial officer during its headiest growth period and later ran its PayPal and Skype divisions. He was most recently a partner at the private equity firm Elevation Partners. Dutta died at a Stanford University hospital after checking into the facility last week.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/remembering-rajiv-dutta-veteran-of-ebay-and-elevation/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110126/intel-invests-100-million-in-visual-computing-research-at-universities/ http://allthingsd.com/20110126/intel-invests-100-million-in-visual-computing-research-at-universities/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 20:12:04 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2382 A day after having a little publicity fun with Black Eyed Peas front man Will.i.am, Intel announced a $100 million investment in research at U.S. universities over the next five years, and said it will open Intel Science And Technology Centers at several universities throughout the year. The first one will be at Stanford University.

One of the priorities of the research is what Intel calls “visual computing,” which will harness Intel’s latest Core chips, which combine the traditional microprocessor and a 3-D graphics processor that until recently had generally been a separate chip. The research will be focused on applications for both consumers and professionals.

A video showing some of that research in action is below. It shows how millions of vacation photos of Rome are being used to build an incredibly realistic 3-D model of some of its most popular tourist sites.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110126/intel-invests-100-million-in-visual-computing-research-at-universities/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110120/juniper-engineering-vp-joins-stealth-networking-start-up-nicira/ http://allthingsd.com/20110120/juniper-engineering-vp-joins-stealth-networking-start-up-nicira/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:47:37 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2026 Rob Enns, vice president of engineering at Juniper Networks, has joined Nicira Networks, a networking start-up in stealth mode that’s backed by an investment from Andreessen Horowitz, which invested $9 million in the company earlier this month. It’s also backed by VMware founder Diane Greene.

Enns had spent 11 years at Juniper and oversaw the unit in charge of its Junos network operating system. Before that, he spent 10 years at Berkeley Networks, FORE Systems and IBM.

The news comes only a day after Juniper announced that it had hired Brad Brooks, a vice president of Microsoft’s Windows business unit, as its new vice president of enterprise marketing. Juniper has also been acquisitive in recent months, and bought three companies late last year.

Nicira is working on creating software that it says “virtualizes the network.” The company was founded by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. Its CTO and co-founder, Martin Casado, did his Ph.D. work on the technology that Nicira hopes to bring to market. Its other two founders are Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker, professors of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford and Berkeley, respectively. Its CEO is Steve Mullaney a veteran networking executive who’s worked at Palo Alto Networks, Shoretel and Cisco Systems, among others. AH co-founder Ben Horowitz sits on Nicira’s board of directors.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110120/juniper-engineering-vp-joins-stealth-networking-start-up-nicira/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110118/viral-video-steve-jobs-stay-hungry-stay-foolish-speech-now-more-than-ever/ http://allthingsd.com/20110118/viral-video-steve-jobs-stay-hungry-stay-foolish-speech-now-more-than-ever/#comments Tue, 18 Jan 2011 09:20:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39672

It’s definitely an oldie–from a 2005 speech that Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University, after recovering from his first bout with pancreatic cancer–but a truly good one.

BoomTown posted it last time there was a hubbub around what and what was not known about his poor health in 2009.

As everyone knows now, it appears that Jobs has suffered some sort of relapse, which is causing even more debate about his medical privacy.

As I wrote then:

“So let’s slow things down, shall we, and get some much-needed perspective this speech surely has (in other words, the inevitable finger-pointing and shareholder lawsuits can wait).”

Indeed, as you wil see below.

Here’s the video of the speech, as well as the full text:

The 2005 Jobs Stanford Commencement Address:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky–I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation–the Macintosh–a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30, I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down–that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me–I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up, so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of “The Whole Earth Catalog,” and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110118/viral-video-steve-jobs-stay-hungry-stay-foolish-speech-now-more-than-ever/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101230/who-isnt-rambus-suing-at-the-itc/ http://allthingsd.com/20101230/who-isnt-rambus-suing-at-the-itc/#comments Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:27:46 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1209 Shares in the perpetual patent litigation machine known as Rambus received a healthy boost yesterday on word that the International Trade Commission had taken up its patent complaint against a litany of technology companies.

Rambus, whose nominal specialty is designing ways for chips to pass data back and forth but which is better known for more than a decade of bitter legal battles, earlier this month filed a complaint with the ITC, saying that products from several companies contained chips that infringe on its patents.

As anyone who’s been paying attention to the numerous patent battles around smartphones knows, the ITC is generally seen as a fast track to a settlement of a patent dispute. Since federal courts are slow and litigation is expensive, companies often go to the ITC ostensibly to block the import of products found to infringe on patents. Since practically every technology product is built outside the U.S., sales of an infringing product can be subject to an exclusion order, the usual outcome when a violation is found.

What’s interesting is the wide range of companies that Rambus has named in its complaint: Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Nvidia, Broadcom, Seagate, Motorola, Garmin, Asus and Hitachi are among the better known ones. The full list contains 34 companies, including some subsidiaries.

Some of the patents involved in this complaint were the subject of a prior case that Rambus took to the ITC against Nvidia. The commission ruled the patents–known as the Barth family of patents–were valid and issued an exclusion order, prompting Nvidia to come to the table and sign a licensing agreement in August. Rambus is obviously looking for a similar outcome from Broadcom and Freescale, which it says are among those now infringing on the Barth patents.

Additionally there’s another set of patents known as the Dally family, which Rambus didn’t invent but to which it holds a license. The patents are owned by MIT and are based on the work of Bill Dally, a former MIT professor of electrical engineering who’s now at Stanford University. The patents had been licensed exclusively to a small private firm called Velio Communications, where Dally had been CTO and which was acquired by the chip maker LSI Logic in March of 2004.

In a twist that could happen only in the strange world that is patent law, Rambus acquired the exclusive license to Velio’s serial interface patents–the Dally family–in a separate deal in the waning months of 2003. The irony is that LSI is among those being sued for infringing on the Dally patents. Some M&A lawyers at LSI must be kicking themselves today.

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