ArdentNews

Naked and unaware: art voyeurism

2008-10-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

Oh yes, you know home-based voyeurism. In Silicon Valley, it’s hard to avoid. To be precise: the practice of walking or driving around beautiful places and marveling at who lives there. And feeling great if it’s you. To wit: Palo Alto’s Crescent Park or Professorville neighborhoods, the entire walled city of Atherton, and the mansions tucked into hillsides up and down the Peninsula along nausea-inducing windy roads (you know, the estates with their own vineyards / go-kart courses / private hiking trails, etc.)

But there’s something that gives me a special thrill beyond even the most breath-taking, palatial monument to Internet wealth. It’s peeking behind the walls at museums before exhibits are open to the public, or art voyeurism. It’s looking underneath the skirts of the museum. It’s naked art.

Seeing a Matisse lying around on a table, idly, without a rigid spotlight cast on it, produces goosebumps. Absent is the bored-yet-watchful guard circling visitors like a shark, waiting to see who steps too close to the artwork. Nor are there prim, proper wall texts from two common schools of art-writing thought: the “hit ‘em with abstract notions of ‘meaning’ and big, Ivy-League vocabulary until they’re awed” or the “dumb it down for a ‘modern’ audience” type of writing. In fact, there’s nothing. Just the work of art.

Sometimes not even a glass case stands between you and a Mesopotamian jar – not impressed? This thing lay in the Iraqi desert for 7,000 years! – or an Impressionist masterpiece. Gee, without the cage it’s usually in, that canvas is prettier than a postcard.

I had a chance to indulge in a little art voyeurism at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center. A new exhibit called “Durer to Picasso” is coming. How dreamy-sounding. I've visited Durer's relatively intact 15th-century house in Nuremberg, Germany and stood silently in his chambers, trying to imagine the master heralded for bringing the Italian Renaissance north at his work.

Naturally, I strove to look in at this installation-in-progress. I peered beyond a wall-like divider and saw a table with a canvas on top. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see the work itself. But there was the gallery, a little messy, with objects lying about, clearly neither prim nor proper. I was thrilled. I plan to try to get a better look next time. As I left, a grim-faced man wheeled in a cart with something swaddled in white, gauze-y looking material. Who knew what masterpieces lay below? And right near him, school-kids chatted casually, unaware of the unadorned art rolling past.

Another time, at Berlin’s Bode Museum , some exhibits remained incomplete right up to the press debut – shortly before the actual public opening. Oh, the temptation to touch the tiny sculptures, so bare, so inviting, so casually strewn about! (No, I ultimately didn’t.)

For art lovers, the temptation of art voyeurism crosses class lines. If you love art, you may not be immune to the temptation of advanced voyeurism – namely, walking into an incomplete exhibition and assuring yourself that even when you inevitably get caught, it will be worth it. Witness the immensely polite, proper and wealthy Texan, a friend of President Bush in fact, who took me on a visit to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. She grinned guiltily and suggested we just, um, slip right in here to take a peek at the exhibit under construction. Egads! She led the way and we peered at the paintings, up close, raw and without other visitors or a curator telling us how to think about it.

(Not to slight curators – they do really important work. They pour themselves into making an exhibit special and coherent for a wide range of visitors. And often their wall text is essential and helpful, despite the two less-fun categories of writing I describe above. But there’s just something magical about art, undressed.)

So we strolled through the exhibition, just beyond the roped-off area. And when caught, this Texan queen was charming to the guard. And not penitent in the slightest, I should add. "We just wanted a little peek," she said in honeyed voice.

Despite my Kimbell experience, I couldn't actually endorse entering an unfinished installation, given the risks to the art. What if you stumbled over a Picasso and fell smack down on the Demoiselles D'Avignon?! Could you ever forgive yourself? Casino magnate Steve Wynn accidentally elbowed and tore the canvas of Picasso's Le Reve (1932), interrupting a $149 million deal to sell it in 2006. Nevermind the damage to the poor masterpiece itself.

But it's worth a harmless look, a crane of the head. Try it. Go up to an installation-in-progress and peek around the dividers. Sniff about until a guard shoos you away. Getting a sense of the museum without its starched collar, white walls and disciplined aura is a great thing – a real work of art.

Images Creative Commons licensed.

Yogurt wars takes on election frenzy

2008-10-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

The owners of Fraiche -- the ultra-popular frozen yogurt store in downtown Palo Alto with legions of devotees including Facebook regulars and Steve Jobs -- have thrown their hat in the ring.

Riffing on the lawn signs popping up everywhere in town as the Nov. 4 election approaches –particularly the orange “Yes on N” libraries-bond signs -- owners made 30 signs proclaiming “Yes on Yummm!”

They’re now sprinkled on lawns and shrubs throughout downtown. Employees are wearing “Pro-biotic” pins – tongue-in-cheek election flair.

According to Fraiche co-owner Jessica Gilmartin, the signs are an effort to bring a bit of levity to a frazzled societal moment fraught with political tension.

And, she added, Fraiche wanted to remind customers how darn tasty it is, given the other frozen yogurt stores popping up in town.

Frozen yogurt, in this case, is not a synonym for “ice cream but less tasty” but rather actually meaning yogurt that is very cold. On the heels of the Los Angeles-born Pinkberry trend, such dessert purveyors have popped up left and right in Palo Alto, including Red Mango at 429 University Ave. --opened by a former Googler -- and Culture at 340 S. California Ave.

For a close-up view of the yogurt wars, check out the Yelp review thread for newly opened Culture.

Watergate Wannabes: 5 Tips

2008-10-11T22:59:00.000-07:00

Journalism pros weigh in on “making it” these days in Silicon Valley

It’s not just “journalism.” It’s the magic juice that shapes perceptions. It elects leaders, exposes scandal, brings joy and reflects our times. It gives us meaning, sometimes. People hold it dear. People are addicted to it. They swap stories they’ve heard. They forward links. And more and more, everyone wants to take part in creating it through blogs and other new media.

If the newspaper is dying – full disclosure: this reporter just cancelled her Wall Street Journal print subscription because online reading was more convenient – news is certainly not.

Still, the future of news is precarious. Bottom lines at traditional publishing houses are teetering and perhaps likely to tip in this current crisis.

So I asked a group of experts: Whither journalism? As a young professional, this wasn’t just navel-gazing reflection –my future’s at stake.

And Silicon Valley is a particularly great place to ask this question, because here is where the innovations that have been both news’ downfall and its revolution, its destroyer and liberator, have arisen. Namely, the Internet. Also, Craigslist, Digg and a host of social media to which people now turn for information. And while I’m not sure who first blew air into a bubble that grew into the blogosphere, I know many of its staunchest supporters are HQ’d in the Valley.

The people I queried included a local Pulitzer prize winner; a journalist synonymous with the Valley scene after a decade of coverage; a longtime tech correspondent who recently founded a journalism-centric startup; a refugee from the Bay Area’s gutted journalism scene who fled to New York; a newsanchor titan from the good ol' days based in the Big Apple; and a survivor at a local paper, still staggering forth despite the disappearance of many colleagues.

Why the anonymity? These folks spoke to me as friends, not as interview subjects. Only later did I realize their perceptions coalesced on several points. This seemed worth sharing, as a new breed of conventional wisdom -- the conventional wisdom of crisis and opportunity. They are:

1. Don’t go into journalism.

Things aren’t like they used to be. The pay is awful and no one’s hiring. If I had to do it again, well, I don’t know what I’d do.

2. You’ve got to love it.

Ok, so you still want to be a reporter. It has to be because any other job would feel like excruciating torture. Maybe you crave to know what’s going on, who is making deals or where the action’s at. Maybe you need the freedom. Or maybe you just like people so much you want to talk to them and write for them all day. But you’ve got to want it really badly. Or it will never work out.

3. This is a great time to be a journalist.

Everything is changing. I don’t envy you. It’s scary out there now. Geez, it’s ugly. But you’re young and creative. Create a blog, brand yourself, specialize your content, be indispensable. Don’t tie your fortunes to one paper or blog. Be your own product. Silicon Valley is a hot topic and it’s not about to cool off. You may watch the great bonfire of profits and creative-professional wages flare for another few years before something dazzling and fertile emerges from the burnt ground. It’s an exciting time. This is the great democratization of media. Try to be part of it.

4. Just work hard.

There are no shortcuts. I went to every bullsh*t panel and networking event because you never know. I try to meet three new people a month. If you can meet the right people, you can make it, because you will have access to information everyone else wants about the most exciting region on Earth—Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists in particular have their eyes on what everyone else is doing. So cultivate your network.

5. I love this job.

Not technically a tip, but a significant commonality nonetheless.

Newspaper image CC-licensed

Economic Crisis? Tell it to my Porsche

2008-10-06T23:15:00.001-07:00

This sign, spotted on the side of a stoop on Waverley Street in downtown Palo Alto, says “Porsche Street” in German. It intrigued me when I first saw it a month ago and now that the Dow is slip-sliding around, I thought of it once again. Porsche Street? Hardly. Even in Palo Alto, investment portfolios must be taking hits.

I returned to wondering –WHERE DID THIS SIGN COME FROM?

And I have decided to crowd-source the answer.

In other words, reader poll:

Is the Porschestrasse sign a

a) Kitschy souvenir brought home from the Porsche factory in Deutschland, akin to hanging a “Budweiser Boulevard” on your deck after a trip to scenic St. Louis?

b) Trinket from nostalgic German expats who moved here to work in the Bayerische Motoren Werke –more commonly known as BMW – office a few blocks away?

c) Proud plaque of a gaudy Porsche owner who wanted everyone to know that s/he not only bought a car that costs more than a pony but also has a facsimile of a German street sign to prove his/her ultimate “in-ness” vis-à-vis foreign autos?

d) Sly jab from card-carrying Prius owners at the surrounding wealthy drivers?

e) Random item a teenage boy purchased at a yard sale – its provenance possibly relating to a, b, c or d – then begged Mom and Dad to let him nail up outside, a-la a school flag?

f) Invent your own.

Help me answer this. Or, better yet , email your friend with the side business selling Porschestrasse signs and tell him I'd really like to pick his brain.

VC = Visions of Collapse?

2008-09-29T19:18:00.000-07:00

Some people use complex math models, others a method they call “common sense.” But no one has a foolproof method for predicting the financial future. Least of all the risk calculators whirring to a halt at major banking houses that will soon cease to exist, including Lehman Brothers and Wachovia.

(Of course, with a 777-point Dow Jones freefall today following House rejection of the proposed $700 billion economic-recovery bill, the market offers its own self-fulfilling prophecy. Think we’re all going to hell in a hand-basket? Then, by golly, it’s already getting hot in here.)

So perhaps that’s why it was hard to pin down a precise answer on what will happen to
venture-capital investing in the wake of the current market turmoil.

It’ll be fine, an industry representative told me.

In fact, market downturn could even spur innovation, according to Emily Mendell, the vice president of strategic affairs for the National Venture Capital Association.
Heck, laid-off tech workers could turn around and invent the Next Big Thing with newfound free time, she said.

"There's no recession of good ideas. There's always opportunity here. It could set off a whole slew of entrepreneurs who get laid off from their jobs and decide to take a risk and start their own business."

Yet blogs were less upbeat. A VentureBeat posting warns of bank-backed VC firms taking a serious head shot when they can no longer count on formerly guaranteed capital. As institutional lenders topple at a rate even faster than trendy yogurt stores opening in downtown Palo Alto, whither venture capital? Dean Takahashi asked in another posting.
“VC firms, for example, rely on large banks, endowments and pension funds for their cash. If enough of a VC firm’s so-called ‘limited investors’ default, or get scared and run, the VC firm may be forced to close,” he warns.

And Mendell admitted that VC firms may hold onto startups longer, fearful of downright murderous conditions for initial public offerings (IPOs)– meaning diminishing returns on investments as firms are forced to pump startups with more cash.

It’s cash that may be scarce elsewhere, angel investor Gadi Behar told me. Angels know the market isn’t ripe for going public and may hold back with their pots of gold and magic wands for a bit, he said.

And the whisper on the street out here is that VC is already feeling skittish – although no VCs told me so, point blank, today.
Hence the question mark at the end of the headline I eventually wrote: “Local venture capital 'insulated' from crisis?”

Of course, there will be nay-sayers who’ll say we’ll float through, no matter what.
I learned as much at the start of all this trouble.

Last year, right when the mortgage crisis hit – before it became a massive credit crunch, widespread banking failure and looming depression – I spent an afternoon calling folks to ask how local, affluent readers would be affected.
Jumbo mortgage loans will be tougher for the rich to get, realtors told me – a story the New York Times also ran the next day.

And one lawyer speculated the venture capital industry would get hurt. Money comes to Sand Hill Road from plenty of places – and some are likely to hurt from the mortgage meltdown, said Julia Wei, a real estate and mortgage lawyer in Palo Alto.
I put together the material I’d gathered and posted it online.

Boy, did our paper get heat for that posting. No, it wasn’t groundbreaking investigative journalism. It was a mix of local perspectives thrown together late on a Friday afternoon. But the suggestion that venture capital could be affected rubbed people the wrong way. Commentors called the article “horribly naïve” and told our paper to stick to covering City Council.
Well, then the chickens came home to roost and the industry has had its worst year for IPOs since 1978.

So, um, economic predictions. Sure, they’re often wrong. But when people predict that venture capital is not immune to negative market conditions, they seem to be onto something.
So here’s crossing my fingers for the economy this week. Not just for venture capitalists. For anyone needing a loan, anywhere; for bright young people –and bright older people – getting laid off in droves on Wall Street and elsewhere; for everyone who earns money and wants to keep doing so – here’s hoping things won’t be so bad.

Image of trading floor from New York Times. Money image Creative Commons licensed.

Steve Jobs: not dead. Unlike, perhaps, newspapers.

2008-09-01T23:12:00.000-07:00

Legendary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is definitely not dead. Print journalism, on the other hand, has a pretty weak pulse. The jury’s out on the newspaper’s life expectancy, as advertising and listings revenues that traditionally funded media move online – and readers follow en masse.

But the web revolution doesn’t take place without drawbacks.
Last Friday showcased the trade-offs of old and new media all too clearly. Bloomberg news service accidentally sent out Jobs’ obituary on its online wire at 4:27 p.m. Eastern.
Steve Jobs, the man who revolutionized computing and other stuff, too, is dead, the article said:

"A college dropout who co-founded Apple Inc., Jobs won ardent support by ushering 'cool' gadgets to market. He delivered the Macintosh, the first user-friendly computer, and conquered the online music industry with the iPod, making white ear buds fashionable."

Clearly unfinished, it had slots to fill in with the date and circumstance of death, as well as editors’ notes on who to contact for comment. Jobs’ friends and colleagues -- even California’s Attorney General Jerry Brown – were listed.

Someone at Bloomberg caught the error and removed the article, but not before news of the fake news spread with the superfast cyber-speed of which online marketers dream.

In the old, pre-Internet days, the Bloomberg faux pas would have merited maybe a mere mention in papers the next day, I speculate. But the Gawker posting that announced the gaffe garnered a quarter million hits in a couple hours. It now clocks in at about 358,000.

(Lucky Gawker writer. They’re paid per page view. While someone at Bloomberg is now majorly regretting the error, someone else is celebrating. One journalist’s screw-up is another’s meal ticket, it seems.)

The Jobs obituary incident showed the public what many already knew: major news sources prepare obituaries in advance of the deaths of prominent figures. They want to be ready with a well-researched roundup when famous, influential folks pass on.

As a reporter in our newsroom said, “The New York Times has whole file cabinets of these written and ready to go.” (Well, more like digital databases. But point well-taken.) And Jobs' health rumors likely triggered an update to his obit.

The incident illustrates the arguable drawbacks of instantaneous web news. To my knowledge, no one published the story before it was retracted. And they would have likely done some journalistic double-checking, anyway, before running it, especially since it was so clearly missing details such as time and place.

But what if the story ran? The instantly-known news wouldn’t have merely disoriented and upset Jobs and those close to him –argument enough that it has a clear negative effect -- it could have had other undesirable outcomes too. A sudden and needless drop in Apple stock comes to mind, but more importantly, the credibility of a major news source would have been damaged, perhaps deeply. Now, Bloomberg is just likely very embarrassed.

The faster news arrives, the more error-prone it is. Steve Jobs’ fake death reminded me of Heath Ledger’s real one. When he was found dead in a New York City apartment, our newsroom was surprised and suddenly engaged in following the story as reported by other outlets. It didn’t fall under our Palo Alto purview, so we didn’t cover it, but we did stay glued to our computer screen, Googling about for updates. As is often the case with breaking news, different sources had different chunks of information.

In the rush to get it out there, sometimes it was inaccurate.

For example, many sources reported Ledger was found dead in his apartment. But about an hour after the story broke, the New York Times reported that he was found in an apartment belonging to Mary-Kate Olsen. Hmmm....but then the Times later retracted that information, saying it was erroneously provided by police. In a show of just how much elbow grease is needed to get all the details, the ultimately final article, published in print the following day, listed 14 contributing writers.

We do the same thing at Palo Alto Online. We hurry to get news up on the site and sometimes make errors or misassumptions. More often, we post a story without key information, then go back and add to it as more comes in, in the case of major crimes, disasters or other unfolding events.

Sometimes speed has small consequences. I happened to visit the New York Times home page two minutes after they posted the story on Barack Obama being chosen as the Democratic nominee for president. The story had two errors in the first roughly 100 words. One word had an extra “s” and the word “of” was conspicuously missing from a sentence.

I mentioned the errors to a co-worker, who went to the story in her browser. She only found one. An editor or writer had already found the error and removed it. It was only a matter of time, I thought, before that second error also vanished.

The story went up perhaps sprinkled with small errors in a jubilant rush to announce what’s going on, but editors were reading it over again, performing what arguably should have been done before posting directly thereafter. The Times, like our paper, is convinced that getting the news up there twenty minutes earlier really matters.

Try it yourself. Check breaking stories on the Times or other websites, then refresh the pages and watch news mutate. Note whether or not the content actually changes. Often, particularly in breaking stories, it will.

In the pre-digital era, a news story would be vetted by an editor and copy editor before printing. Reporters often had more time to gather facts, analyze them and proofread stories. Papers had fact-checkers. This structure is still intact but it operates in a more fragmented and less thorough way in the effort to get news online. And that allows for slip-ups. Or, in the Bloomberg case, the mere existence of instant-news structures carries with it the Achilles’ heel of accidental proliferation. So much inaccuracy, spreading so quickly.

Not that there was a plodding, hum-drum pace circa 1990: plenty of dailies churned out detailed, thoughtful stories with remarkable speed. The industry itself set up awards for reporting done quickly but well. The pace of what we now refer to as “next-day news” didn’t seem so slow back then. And there was always television for a quicker, shorter scoop.

But now we can do things faster. So we do.

The assumption driving the current rush to get the news out is twofold: a) it is best to be the first news outlet to report a story because then folks know you’re working hard to keep them informed and are more likely to turn to you for news
and b) it’s best to report things quickly, so people know, and then update stories continually.

I’m not convinced speed is better. Isn’t it preferable to have in-depth pieces with more information and context in which to interpret the news, even if they go up online an hour later? I ask myself.

But it’s hard not to feel the pressure when you’re writing a story for the web. “Look,” you want to tell readers, “you can come to me. I’ve got the info. Read me.”

Just, please, cut me some slack. If the grammar is sometimes off, if the details are sloppy – hey, that’s the trade-off to get news at the speed of, well, reality.

Image Creative Commons licensed.

Silicon Valley, meet Silicon Wadi

2008-08-09T10:04:00.001-07:00

Something akin to the joy of petting a fluffy kitten or getting to the top of the iPhone waitlist came over me this week. The piece on ties between Silicon Valley and Israel -- nicknamed "Silicon Wadi" after the Arabic word for desert valley -- finally ran. Whoop-dee-doo! Check it out. Israel has more venture capital per capita than the U.S. (but not the Valley, of course) and an entire generation of whip-smart technologists emerging from the army. Dealing with threats and tactical challenges spurs innovation, Israelis say. (So, uh, does that mean the nation should thank Iran et. al.? Just kidding.)

Also, does anyone know what to make of Rackspace's not-particularly stellar IPO? The Times suggests it could be a question of Dutch auction vs. to-market sales tactics. The article declined to blame Sarbanes-Oxley. Some folks at AlwaysOn's and STVP's Summit at Stanford two weeks ago were also calling for an end to SOX-rage.

Speaking of SOX --yes, this is a free-form post; forgive me, just hopped off a red-eye this a.m. -- check out "24 Days" the tale of Wall Street Journal reporters whose coverage brought down Enron. It's a great read.

Now, off to get a real New York bagel!

The search-engine wars: Cuil takes aim at Google

2008-07-28T22:30:00.000-07:00

Former Googlers have come up with a new search engine designed to rival the reigning King of the Jungle, Google itself, the New York Times reported today.
They’ve created Cuil, pronounced “cool,” to best their master at his own game.

It's the latest in the search-engine wars, which include Ask's campaign to be seen as a viable alternative and Microsoft simply throwing money at people to use Live.
Cuil’s creators say it searches more pages than Google and provides Web surfers with more data about each link by providing images, according to the Times piece.
Cool, I thought. Let’s have a crack at it.
Full disclosure: on days when I’m annoyed with Google – which are infrequent but do occur – I use Ask in a personal measure of rebellion. No, it doesn’t work as well. Nothing does. That’s why I eventually go back to Google, as does the rest of the world.
So it was with strong curiosity and a lack of optimism that I went to Cuil.
Up popped an uncluttered black background, yin to the yang of the Google white-screen. A copycat, sure, but a neat-looking one.
There was only one question: What to test it with?
The obvious answer, of course, was my own name. Who better than me to judge the relevance of the results?

I typed in "Arden Pennell" expectantly.
And the winner is : … Google, hands down. Cuil presented only and exclusively articles I wrote for the German media company Deutsche Welle when I lived in Berlin 2006-07. Nothing from my past year in Palo Alto appeared on the main page. That means Cuil rather, ahem, coolly overlooked hundreds of article, some of which were widely linked to by news-aggregating sites (and the adoring public, natch.)
Sure, there were some pictures. But I like being able to scroll Google results quickly; the words more than the images tell me whether a site has what I’m looking for. Otherwise, I could use image search.

One of Cuil’s founders, Tom Costello, explained on the radio tonight – forgive me, it was on NPR but it may have been a BBC show, I forget – that the idea is to provide results different than Google's. Someone decamping from Google to Cuil shouldn’t find a merely second-hand version of the first set of results they didn’t want, he said.
But that begs the question – if Google already works well, why would someone want different results?
Admittedly, I was relieved to see slightly embarrassing articles that quote a flippant, too-cool-for-school teenager visiting Stanford during Admit Weekend were absent from Cuil’s first results. Google’s affection for the word “Stanford” – the alma mater of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page – pushes those old, stale articles to the top of its heap. (Don’t everyone rush to go read them at once, now.)
But my chagrin at being haunted by using the word “retarded” as an adjective at age 17 immortalized forever on the Web – and now on this blog, clearly – notwithstanding, Cuil just didn’t provide very good results. One could only extrapolate I was journalist living in Germany who was mysteriously kidnapped last summer, the latest date of those first couple pages of links.
In contrast, Google tells the whole story upfront – from my childhood church to Stanford snafus to Berlin and Palo Alto. What’s not to love?

Google image licensed to Creative Commons.

A cheap date in Silicon Valley

2008-07-20T23:10:00.000-07:00

"A cheap date in Silicon Valley." It’s not quite like saying “a good bagel in the Midwest” or “skiing in Florida,” but it’s close, right? Cheap? Here? Never.
Well, yes, sometimes. And without leaving the swank environs of high culture, either.

Now that filling my gas tank costs $58 – and I drive a sedan – pinching pennies is on my mind. And I want to share my plan for an ideal date, which just happens to cost $10. Let me repeat: TEN DOLLARS.

(Nevermind that for months, headlines have been exploring our economic gloom while that media-favored phrase “pain at the pump” floats about. It took until my latest fill-up yesterday for the sticker shock to hit, and hit hard. Later in the day, I almost cried at the farmer’s market when trying to buy peppers. But, of course, the alternative was driving to a grocery store.)

So, fellas and fellettes, here’s the run-down for an inexpensive, classy date:

Start with an afternoon at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Admission to treasures collected during the Stanfords’ world-wide traipsing and by successive generations of generous alumnae is free. Gloriously free.
The jewel in the crown may be the world-class collection of Auguste Rodin bronzes. All that sinuous metal, glimmering in the California sun, fronts the interior rotunda where “The Thinker” reigns canonically supreme.

Note: The museum is closed Monday and Tuesday. If you’re already unemployed in these harsh times and tend to forget what day we’re on, keep this in mind.

Note Number Two: The café attached to the museum is very, very tasty. It offers fresh, delicious fare by local, celebrity-like chef Jesse Ziff Cool. And you pay for it. So why not demonstrate how artsy, resourceful and sensitive you are by packing a delicious meal to take along on your date?
If you’re doing sandwiches rather than crackers, however, eschew that soft, mushy bread that comes in rectangles for a loaf of the real stuff.

When you’re finished soaking in visual splendor, head to the Stanford Theatre on University Avenue. (It’s within biking distance from the museum, if you’re feeling eco-conscious. Or bite the bullet and drive five minutes.)

David Packard – yes, that David Packard – spent about $6 million restoring this Roaring Twenties-era movie house to its former cinematic glory in 1989. Elaborate murals, baroque chandeliers, a tiled fountain and richly-detailed ceilings make moviegoers feel special. But because the theater – excuse me, theatre – is run by the nonprofit Packard Foundation, the prices are reasonable. Tickets are $7. A small drink and popcorn comes out to $3. That’s still less than a full-price adult ticket at a megaplex.

There’s a catch, of course. The theatre only shows historic films, a personal Packard passion. There are no screenings of “Batman Will Never Die is Not Enough.” But if you can stomach a little Bette Davis or maybe root for Humphrey Bogart – and your date isn’t a die-hard Tarantino loyalist – you should stand a chance here.

If the film ends and you need a bit more time with your sweet thang, take a stroll down University Avenue to Border’s. This is a clever ploy for more free entertainment disguised as cultural savvy. Because when you get to the building housing Border’s, with its airy, Mission-style courtyard and high, vaulted ceilings, you will explain it, too, was once a movie theater. In fact, the competition to the Stanford Theatre.
Yet six decades later, there was no computer-magnate-turned-film-angel to swoop in and save the former Varsity Theatre from eventual conversion to a chain department store.
Which is all the more lucky for you, since it allows you to linger over the bestsellers or browse magazines with your date without spending another cent. Don’t worry; this won’t feel lame. On weekend nights, Border’s is packed to the gills with other couples doing the same thing. It's open until midnight.
And who knows? Maybe you’ll discover a shared passion for David Sedaris or gardening magazines. That’ll be a perfect segue into winding down the date, right?

The total cost of this Epicurean excursion, from art to movies to literature, is $10. In comparison, a “small plate” salad of walnuts, blue cheese and herb vinaigrette at nearby Zibibbo Restaurant runs $12.95. Not that there’s anything wrong with a night of fine dining.

But when the cost of gas, food and perhaps other commodities is climbing with the summer mercury, it’s comforting to know culture comes cheap.

Here kitty, kitty, kitty

2008-07-15T22:42:00.000-07:00

Unsubstantiated. That’s how the state Department of Fish and Game concluded their investigation of a reported mountain lion attack in Palo Alto’s Foothills Park last weekend.

Of course, that was only announced after I spent hours Monday out in the woods, looking for a big, scary kitty.
But the incident made me wonder – how likely is a mountain lion attack, really? With so many recreational hikers in the Bay Area, is it just luck that more folks aren’t targeted by wild cougars as a walking snack?

To backtrack briefly: the man who reported the attack said he was hiking the Los Trancos trail Saturday when he felt a shove from behind and tumbled down a hillside, according to police Agent Dan Ryan.
He slammed into a tree trunk and stopped falling, but saw a lion continue to scramble down the slope, across the creek, and into the woods, Ryan recounted.
Into those very same woods Ryan and I ventured Monday.

We weren’t hunting for the cat, exactly. Rather, Ryan was gracious enough to show me and our trusty photographer, Darlene Bouchard, the section of trail where the man crossed a residential neighborhood to enter the park.
We were also attempting to cross paths with the Fish and Game wardens and professional animal tracker brought in to locate the feline.
Perhaps foolishly, I secretly hoped to catch a glimpse of the animal itself. The policeman, Darlene and I formed a nice trio of human catnip, I figured. Maybe the king of the jungle would venture out from between the madrone and bay laurel. After all, a lion was spotted prowling Palo Alto streets a few years back. And when I was a student at Stanford, a lion was seen prowling around outside dorms.

No such luck. After a hot but pleasant time in the semi-wilderness – does it count as true nature when it’s surrounded by the gorgeous homes just outside Portola Valley town limits? – Darlene and I headed back to the office.
I was just wrapping up the story with a description of Fish and Game’s plan to shoot the lion with a rifle, courtesy warden Patrick Foy’s explanation, when the phone rang.
It’s over, Ryan said. Fish and Game are calling the report unsubstantiated.
No traces of the cat in the woods nor in a forensic analysis of the hiker’s shirt were found, Foy added.

So how likely is a kitty attack?
It happens, Foy said. Even though this report couldn’t be confirmed, Foothills Park is full of deer, prime target for mountain cats with the munchies, he pointed out.
And endangered they ain't -- there are 4,000 to 6,000 cougars prowling the the Golden State, the Fish and Game site says.
Yet Ryan said this attack would have been the first in recorded Palo Alto history.
And there have only been 16 substantiated attacks since 1890 in California, according to Foy -- and only six were fatal, according to a Fish and Game chart from 2007.
So perhaps we can conclude the cats are a bit like Web 2.0 startups. They're everywhere, but we just don't see them all -- until they successfully prey on us.
Or maybe I should just scrap the forced metaphors and stick to what I know best, which at this moment is watching YouTube videos about mountain lions. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty...

Update on Wednesday: the man could face fines of $10,000 or more if it turns out he made the whole thing up. Me-owch.

Lion image licensed to Creative Commons.

iScream, uScream, we-all-Scream for iPhone

2008-07-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

What really struck me about the line outside Palo Alto’s Apple store on University Avenue today wasn’t how long it was. It wasn’t, in fact, long – only a handful of people waited to become proud owners of the new iPhone 3G.

Rather, the surprise came from how everyone expected the line to be long – and saw potential in the predicted media attention.

Anticipating that fans stretching around the block as in times past would cause reporters and cameras to circle like flies, businesses used the Apple iPhone release as free advertising.

The few people waiting – including a die-hard Mac user since 1984 and two teens who’d earlier been “banned for life” from Apple for downloading third-party apps onto an in-store phone – reaped the benefits.

According to the teens, Danny Fukuba and Eric Vicenti, a truck pulled up and plied them with Smartwater, the designer H2O. Product-design firm MindTribe handed out free t-shirts.
Design firm Speck – like MindTribe, based nearby in downtown Palo Alto – gave out a bright blue iPhone case, a color they said was limited to only 300 worldwide, according to a third teen in line.

Well, those companies were right. The Weekly did send me out and I did interview line-sitters, few though they were. And here their products are, getting air time on my blog – and on our video.

Check out the video for a look at what happens when someone tries to come between an Apple-enthusiast and his iPhone.

The Other Silicon Valley

2008-07-02T10:19:00.000-07:00

There’s two of them. In addition to the Silicon Valley in, well, Silicon Valley, a mammoth entrepreneurial machine is also grinding away in Israel.

Or so I witnessed recently at a summit on early-stage investing in Tel Aviv. Organized by Los Altos-based Silicom Ventures, the conference’s speakers included Israelis such as Meir Brand, who runs Google Israel, and a hefty contingent of Valley denizens.

Palo Alto locals were present, of course. Eric Benhamou, CEO of Cowper Street’s Benhamou Global Ventures, and Amos Barzilay, a venture consultant at Lytton Avenue’s Walden International, gave talks on management and finding funding, respectively.
For Barzilay’s talk, so many Israeli entrepreneurs crammed into the beige conference room that it became standing-room only.

Admittedly, everyone from social scientists to civic boosters has been anointing new “Silicon” spaces since the 1980s.

But Israel – a country so small that driving the coastal plain takes as long as a trip between San Francisco and Gilroy – really does have a thriving culture of entrepreneurship.

Israeli high-tech firms netted about $1.75 billion in capital investments in 2007 – down from a 2000 high of just over $3 billion, according to the Israel Venture Capital Research Center. This year, the first quarter’s $617 million in raised capital is a seven-year high, according to the research company.

As in the Valley, money and talent cluster together. Herzliya Pituach, a city 15 minutes north of Tel Aviv, is packed with tech firms such as Microsoft and funders like Israel’s homegrown Carmel Ventures.

Menlo Park-based Daniel Cohen of Gemini Israel Funds was even moved to write an entertaining blog post comparing Sand Hill Road with Herzliya Pitauch’s Hamenofim Street.
His verdict: Sand Hill lacks bars, atmosphere and enough food options. (I guess The Sundeck doesn’t cut it.) But the silence is nice, sometimes, he conceded.

At the conference in Tel Aviv earlier this week, politicos were optimistic about the growth of Israel’s entrepreneurial culture – and collaboration with the U.S.

Outgoing U.S. ambassador to Israel Richard Jones partially credited the spirit of the Israeli people for the sector’s growth. Before 1993, there’d been one venture capital firm in Israel, he explained. Now, the average size of Israeli VCs is $250 million.

"If the creativity of the Israeli people can continue to be unleashed … the sky is literally not the limit," he asserted.

Peace is also important for growth, he said – a perhaps ironic statement given the roots of Israeli’s high-tech world: the military.

As former defense minister Moshe Arens explained at the conference, it was in defending itself that Israel’s cultivation of intellectual capital took root.

It makes sense. For young, brilliant minds, even a sizable check from a firm like Draper Fisher Jurvetson to scale and monetize a Web 2.0 firm is a pale motivator in comparison to a blank check from the Israeli military to … do whatever nationalistic, futuristic projects they do in those secret bunkers.

Adrienne Sanders wrote a great exploration of those military roots – and the Israeli influence on the Valley -- last October for the San Francisco Business Times. (PDF here).

Now if only all the Israelis coming to the Valley could bring some good hummus with them. And shakshuka. And falafel. Ok, I better stop here. Stay tuned for an upcoming post about Israeli ties to Palo Alto.

(Note: despite high spirits in the Holy Land, I can only imagine the mood is a bit glummer outside the espresso-fueled optimism of self-promoting conferences. The venture capital scene stateside is in the doldrums just now, The New York Times reported Saturday. No venture-backed firms went public in the second quarter this year, a bleak stat not seen since 1978.

Oh, and luxury-caffeine peddlers Starbuck’s are closing 600 stores. Maybe everybody started taking the Latte Factor money-saving method pretty seriously.)

Chart graphic from the New York Times Web site. Flag photo courtesy Creative Commons user Johnk85. Silicom Ventures conference graphic from Silicom Ventures’ Web site.

When "where" = money, money, money

2008-06-22T22:41:00.001-07:00

It's not just for gadget-lovers anymore -- GPS technology has invaded common tools such as cell phones. Millions of us are walking around leaving traces of data on where we're going and where we've been. And where there's scale, there's entrepreneurs scurrying after profits.

A Columbia professor and businessman have created Macrosense, a massive statistical-analysis engine for geo-data, the New York Times reported today.

Knowing where and when consumers move could be crucial for businesses seeking to expand or improve services, according to Tony Jebara and Gregory Skibiski, founders of Sense Networks. They have already tested their enormous engine with major finance and consumer firms, reporter Michael Fitzgerald writes.

Unfortunately, founders wouldn't tell Fitzgerald how they got all the geo-data. (Cue creepy music...)

But they have released a Joe-Shmo version for local Blackberry owners -- sorry, Jitterbug devotees -- called Citysense. The service will tell users where traffic is worst in San Francisco and where everyone else is going out, according to its Web site.

In other words, if you were holding out hope that the corner of Broadway and Columbus was traffic free, now you can be told definitively, every time, that it's awful. Joking aside, the service could be neat -- I haven't tried it yet. But I do know that the attempt to cash in on the cache of geo-data out there is going strong in Palo Alto, too.

Local entrepreneur Shailendra Jain's geo-tracking Web site Abaqus went live earlier this month. Abaqus enables anyone to track him or herself using geo-enabled devices, either with embedded software or software downloadable from the site.

Users then upload their tracks to the site, adding photos and notes to the maps if they wish –Look! I’m at the drug store! Look - now I’m on vacation in LA! –- to create geo-diaries.
I borrowed a GPS recorder from Jain and tracked myself hiking around Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park.
(You can see my “track” if you visit Abaqus; I made it public. It’s called, creatively, Hetch Hetchy.)

Diaries are the tip of the iceberg, Jain said. Like the Sense Networks founders, Jain sees dollar signs in geo-data. In the future, it could help business services such as online shopping sites, he said.

For now, he’s working on synching the site with other online services such as Flickr. And there are also personal uses such as tracking fitness or gas mileage.

Nowhere else can users simply store the data and fiddle with it later, he added.
"There's no [other] service that says 'Independent of what you want to use it for, just record it here,'" he explained earlier this month.

He was sitting in his downtown Palo Alto home office in front of an enormous world map, continents and oceans unfolding behind him. Alongside him were two computer screens covered in maps. This is a man who’s done a lot of thinking about location, I thought.

While some software costs about $10 to download now, depending on the device you want to upload to Abaqus with, Jain’s plan is to offer it all for free by the end of the year. He’ll make money through the partnerships with other Web services, he said. Read more about Abaqus in the Weekly article I wrote.
Or drop everything and go straight to the site to get the software yourself. You don’t want to be the last one without some sort of geo-tracking program running on your phone, do you? I thought not.

My Cup of Tea

2008-06-17T21:47:00.000-07:00

This gorgeous waterfall is my cup of tea.

Also yours, and the cups of 2.4 million other Bay Area residents.

The fall flows into the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, an enormous pool of water in Yosemite National Park. Water from the reservoir travels 160 miles via gravity – ancient Roman aqueducts, anyone? – to the Bay Area to water our plants and wash our hair.

I visited Hetch Hetchy last weekend and was awed.

The reservoir was created by damming the Tuolomne River following a congressional act of 1913 allowing Yosemite lands to be developed for water supply. The construction of O’Shaughnessy Dam flooded the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a land that -- according to early-20th-century naturalist John Muir -- once rivaled Yosemite Valley in grandeur, with majestic granite cliffs presiding over idyllic
meadows.

There are still people calling upon the government to “Restore Hetch Hetchy” to its earlier beauty. It’s high time to remove the dam, they say. They claim something has been lost.

They may be right.

But Hetch Hetchy is still incredibly gorgeous now, with its hulking rock formations rising above a deeply blue lake that stretches into distant crevices. It is eight miles long and can hold up to 117 billion gallons of water, according to a brochure created by San Francisco and the park service.

Waterfalls tumble down hillsides and pines overlook the artificial sea. It is awesome – both awe-inspiring, and totally radical, dude.

Hiking to Wapama Falls, pictured above, puts a new perspective on where water comes from. I got home and turned on the tap and tried to square the tinny-tasting stuff coming out – a product of my old, old pipes – with the icy shower that rained down from Wapama. No such luck. But I did get Palo Alto's 2007 Water Quality Report in the mail the day before, which informed me that 87 percent of the city's water comes from Hetch Hetchy. Nestled in the pristine high Sierras, that water is so clean it needn't even be filtered, according to the booklet.

Despite the serene surroundings of our drinking water, all is not well in Paradise. The pipelines that bring Hetch Hetchy’s sparkling sea to our faucets cross three fault lines. Officials worry an earthquake could have disastrous consequences.

To read more about possible water doom and efforts to head it off, check out Sue Dremann’s excellent piece for the Palo Alto Weekly from November. (It just won first place for “analysis” in the 2007 Peninsula Press Club awards, held this June.)

Or visit Hetch Hetchy. It’ll get you thinking about water, guaranteed.

A numbers note: Just how many Bay Area residents drink Hetch Hetchy water is a bit unclear to me. The figure 2.4 million is commonly cited, including in a brochure produced by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, city and county of San Francisco and the National Park Service called “Hetch Hetchy and Tuolomne River Watershed.” Yet the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency states 1.7 million.

Brand Stanford

2008-06-16T22:12:00.001-07:00

Stanford University debuted its own YouTube channel today. I like it a lot.

Watching a video of Oprah Winfrey’s commencement speech from Sunday, then a talk on sticking with good-but-failing-to-generate-ROI ideas by Google’s Marissa Mayer, I was struck by three things.

The first was a shockingly precise memory of watching Sesame Street as a kid. At the start of each video, a few soothing guitar chords sound and a woman warmly intones, “This program is brought to you by Stanford university. Please visit us at Stanford-dot-e-d-u.” It’s a ringer for the PBS funding mantra that ends with “viewers like you” that capped every Sesame Street episode I ever watched. How nice, I thought. I will visit Stanford-dot-e-d-u.

The second was an appreciation for the diversity of content – although that depends on your definition of diversity, I’ll concede. Various shades of famous, inspirational or otherwise brilliant speakers might not strike some as diverse. (Where’s the footage of freshmen taking Jell-o shots or wily pranksters floating sofas in Lake Lag?)

And the third was the unmistakable branding going on. STANFORD right at the start of the video. And STANFORD again at the end, in case you missed it.

It makes sense. Stanford generates an immense amount of content – more than a million Web pages, according to Scott Stocker, director of web communications. Fewer videos of course, but I bet still quite a bit of action what with all the bold-font-worthy folks coming to speak. Why not try to grab the bull by the horns and brand it? After all, Stanford went to the trouble of inviting those noteworthy people to speak. And they pay those clever minds to work there. They deserve the recognition.

Stoker acknowledged the branding aspect. People often forward videos of Stanford events to their friends, he said, and explained, “We don't want that connection to get lost that this content is coming from Stanford, that this talk that they're listening to is coming from Stanford University.”

Since its 2005 debut on iTunes, the school has used the short, five-second branding intro, he said.

But the most important aim is to further the school’s educational mission by spreading Stanford content, he said. How nice for all the rest of us. (No sarcasm there, honest.)

While we’re on the topic, the entrepreneurship resource page run by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program has a wealth of video clips, many fascinating and all better than watching the Celtics lose to the Lakers.

The next big Stanford web project is a redesigned home page and a redesigned admissions page. It’ll be unveiled sometime this summer, according to Stocker.

Then we'll see the main page that silky-voiced, PBS-reminiscent woman is recommending we visit. Some small part of me is hoping Stanford's Web designers decide to greet the world and lure prospective students with something like: "Stanford University is made possible by Web browsers like you."

We'll just have to wait and see.

Face-bloc blacklash & Valley joie de vivre

2008-06-05T21:13:00.000-07:00

Maybe the backlash against Facebook will calm down now. Rumors are the cushy $600-a-month subsidy for employees who live within a mile of downtown offices has been cancelled.
So perhaps the blame heaped on the heaps of young Facebookers in downtown Palo Alto will let up.

The social-networking company’s presence has become ubiquitous in the last couple years. Up from its single office in 2004, the firm now rents five spaces and employs 600 people as of this spring -- and counting. Its logo-emblazoned track jackets, hooded sweaters, messenger bags and other collegiate apparel are sported by young people at every crosswalk.

All those people are pushing rents higher and crowding locals out of cafes, a summer 2007 Valleywag post groused. And as the company’s expansion continued unabated, so did the rumor mill, blaming Facebookers for exacerbating the already astronomical rent inflation of downtown.
I decided to write an article for the Palo Alto Weekly examining the Facebook influence on downtown. I found out commercial rents have indeed risen 20 to 25 percent in the last year, according to a local realtor. A residential realtor said subsidies such as Facebook’s are commonplace among tech firms, implying it’s not just the upstart firm inflating prices.
All those clothing logos actually help one employee spot her co-workers, who she otherwise wouldn’t recognize, the company is growing so fast. Read the whole article for more.
But if Facebook’s subsidy-cancellation causes employees to flee downtown, will University Avenue’s bustling vibe take a nosedive?

Currently, the company builds on an already-resurgent feel in downtown.
When I arrived at Stanford in 2002, directly after the tech blow-up, University Avenue seemed so cruelly named. Palo Alto was no college town. Sure, there were plenty of collared shirts eating lunch on the main drag and shoppers in the drugstores in the afternoon. But that was replaced by a weak trickle of pedestrians by the evening. We eyeballed each other curiously, like animals come to drink at a little-visited stream.

Of course, the whole area felt a bit deflated. Then, you could spot empty office parks from the freeway and see through their windows clear to the sky on the other side. It was a bit ghastly, and not just a little reminiscent of abandoned Gold-Rush era towns elsewhere in the West.

Fast forward six years.
It’s a scene from the film, “How Palo Alto got her groove back.” Despite some warning that the subprime crisis will – and has – already affected the area, there’s a genuine bounce-back feel. The restaurants are packed in downtown and several bars now charge cover, a formerly rare practice.

So will Facebook’s end-of-an-era crackdown on employee benefits put a damper on the hoo-rah feel? I don’t think so. Employees will likely continue to fill the street on work days and perhaps go out for drinks after work. (If they’re not busy playing beer pong in the office, that is.)
Since the firm provides free meals a-la Google, the eateries of Palo Alto will probably be minimally affected. Residentially, if some employees move away in search of cheaper pastures, other equally or more affluent renters will pop up to claim those checkbook-squeezing apartments. They will have an equal need for deodorant and coffee from downtown stores.

The bigger question is whether downtown will feel any different when the entire company moves. Rep Brandee Barker said Facebook rents rather than owns office space. And it has intentions to grow, grow, grow, according to reports on founder Mark Zuckerberg. If the company ever wants a campus, it’ll have to decamp to an office park elsewhere. Maybe it’ll make its new home in one of the last of the vacant complexes, still sitting empty out by the freeway…

But who will help the geeks?

2008-06-04T23:18:00.000-07:00

Entrepreneurs, take note: your chances at success just hitched up a notch. Versatile businessman Saeed Amidi has opened another Plug and Play Tech Center for promising start-up companies in Palo Alto.

Plug and Play centers are an alternative to traditional start-up incubators in venture capital firms, according to Amidi, the Plug and Play CEO. Instead of tying their fortunes to any one funder, young companies are housed in a sort of entrepreneurial ecosystem until they are ready to spread their wings -- and let the money come rolling in. Amidi is quick to point out that Google sparked a bidding war while housed at one of his properties years ago.

The centers' model is to cluster start-ups in a sort of beehive of brilliance. As they draw on each others' energy and creativity, they are also given access to a formidable line-up of connections.

There are regularly scheduled visits from angel investors and venture capital firms such as Draper Fisher Jurvetson. There are monthly Web 2.0 events.

There are even semiannual expos, whereby a feeding frenzy of media and funders descend to hear an exhausting roster of business pitches. And Amidi’s own fund, Amidzad, may choose to kick in some dough for the best ideas.

Lucky entrepreneurs, indeed.

Amidi’s latest Plug and Play Center is on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. It opened in early May. With space for about 15 companies to work side by side, it may not reach the fevered pitch of the Sunnyvale site, which has 129 start-ups, he said. But it’s got the nearby businesses of downtown, including Accel and Norwest Venture Partners, he said.

To read more about the Plug and Play concept and hear Tim Draper's thoughts on it, check out the article I wrote for today’s Palo Alto Weekly.

Meanwhile, reporting on Plug and Play got me wondering – what about the geeks?

To rent space in a Plug and Play center, start-ups must demonstrate their potential, according to to Shobeir Shobeiri, a Plug and Play business manager. Applicants are screened not only for the strength of their ideas but also for the quality of their team, he said. That could mean an upper hand for communicative folks skilled at the sort of networking Plug and Play arranges. It could mean an advantage for the Stanford computer-science-majors-turned-start-up-founders I’m working with for an article series now (more on that later). Far from the stereotype of shy computer nerd, they seem immensely aware of how to meet-and-greet and pitch ideas. Their handshakes are firmer than most adults'.

So are the introvert genius-geeks just left in the dust? In the era of the elevator pitch, what about the nerds mumbling at their shoes? Think of the cliché of nerdy, adolescent Bill Gates. Or any stereotype about engineers or programmers, for that matter. Are the terminally shy worker bees still starting companies, and if so, how much does charisma matter?

A lot, apparently. Just visit Stanford’s School of Engineering, home to many of its entrepreneur-grooming programs, and you’ll see fliers for overcoming fear of public speaking plastered in the halls. Social know-how is not quite the reigning jewel of innovation -- yet.

Or maybe it is. Maybe those fliers are targetted at the small, stuttering minority. Perhaps the brilliant introvert truly has gotten a bit more savvy about wooing venture capital, now that such practices are Valley mainstays.

The rise of the Cool Geek to replace the Awkward Nerd was recently chronicled in a New York Times Op-Ed piece by David Brooks. And in fact, he credited some of Silicon Valley’s biggest legends with the transition:

“The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls — Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and so on.”

The jury is out, however, on whether this transformation has happened to nerds or just alongside them. Does society like nerds more, or are they genuinely more likeable? If only someone could build a Facebook application capable of riddling me that.

Local writing. Really local writing.

2008-06-01T15:18:00.000-07:00

Hi. I’m Arden Pennell, a journalist based in Palo Alto, California.
Welcome to my new blog, ArdentNews. Obvious pun aside, the name connotes passion. Silicon Valley is packed with passionate people. In this blog, I’ll write for and about those people – and anyone else with an interest in the Valley.

ArdentNews’ focus will be on questions I hear people ask and trends we residents observe. For example, in one post I'll ask what effect Facebook really has on downtown Palo Alto, hype aside. Other posts will address Stanford’s amazing start-up-company machine, female power brokers in the Valley (or lack thereof), and how to go on a cheap –but classy! – date in our pricey hometown.

I promise readers to avoid gimmick-based posts and snide commentary. Such writing usually isn’t informative, despite tantalizing headlines and a know-it-all tone.

I work as a reporter for the Palo Alto Weekly, so many posts will refer to articles I’ve written. There’s a difference between a blog post and a newspaper article. The former allows – heck, welcomes – opinion and having fun with the writing. The latter put the highest premium on facts. The reporter’s personality is frankly less important, or not important at all. (Or that’s how it goes at the Weekly, anyway. As most literate folks know, some papers have a more, er, flexible sense of journalistic ethics.)

ArdentNews will draw on both sorts of writing, personal and professional, to look at life in the Valley and Palo Alto in particular.
Questions are welcome. In fact, they’re requested. I’d like to hear what people want to know and then try to find out the answer.
If something interesting or crazy in that only-in-Silicon-Valley kind-of way is going on –I haven’t heard the phrase “Web 4.0 ” yet, but hey, it could happen – tell me about it.

Feel free to comment, correct, disagree, digg it, and so on. That’s all good stuff. The more dialog on ArdentNews, the better.
Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy. Below, some info about me.

About me:
I have a knack for original paragraph headings, as you see above.
I grew up in New York City and went to Stanford University for a taste of something new.

I later lived in Berlin and wrote the blog New Yorker in Berlin about the city’s post-Cold War culture. It’s hard not to become fascinated by a city where former Communist secret police are awarded higher pensions than their victims. Or where the main advocate for a Holocaust memorial stole a corpse’s tooth from a concentration camp to bury inside the memorial.

Now I live and work in Palo Alto. Silicon Valley is a magnet for creative, passionate – there’s that word again – people who ardently believe they are capable of transforming society. It’s fascinating to be surrounded by such people, even if their predictions are sometimes off (“tech bubble,” anyone?). Besides New York, the Valley is the only place where I won’t grouse too loudly about rents or $4 coffee. It’s worth it to be here.