This panel session was moderated by Elizabeth Tinkham, Global Lead Consultant at Accenture with the topic being:
The panelists were:
Mount Shasta, taken from the StartupTrek bus June 31 2009
StartupTrek is on the road interviewing tech startup entrepreneurs in the largest cities (and tech startup innovation clusters) in the Pacific Northwest: Portland Oregon; Seattle and Spokane Washington; and Boise Idaho.
We’ll be back in the Portland and Seattle Metro areas interviewing tech startups and growth companies next week – July 23-25. We interview startups, investors, city officials, scientists, etc across all tech sectors. Including web 2.0, mobile, semiconductors, routing and switching, enterprise software and networks, telecommunications, gaming, medical devices, and biotechnology / genetics startups.
Just before departing Silicon Valley in late June we interviewed two very early-stage startups in silicon valley:
Both firms are seeking early-stage Angel capital investments; we’ll have videos of those interviews online shortly.
450 Angel investors, VC’s, entrepreneurs, and business people attended today’s fourth annual “Launch Silicon Valley” in the conference center on Microsoft’s Mountain View, CA campus. As was the case last year, 30 tech startup companies were selected from almost 500 that applied to present.
Here is a 29-photo gallery from the event, along with a bit of commentary:
In this Networld+Interop trade show interview I visit with Ryan Woodings, founder and ‘Chief Geek’ at MetaGeek of Boise, Idaho. MetaGeek is an impressively bootstrapped wireless instrumentation startup founded by former Cypress Semiconductor employees in Boise Idaho. They have created a product line of innovative, impressive, low-cost, portable “micro spectrum analyzers” for use on the Wi-Fi and cellular ISM (Instrumentation, Scientific, and Medical) bands at 900MHz, 2.5 and 5GHz unlicensed Microwave spectrum.
Fusion IO, of Salt Lake City has raised $48M in venture financing to develop next generation, Flash memory based “solid state server drive” io subsystems.
As a Fusion IO co-founder explains in this interview on the opening day of N+I Las Vegas (in Startup City), hard disk drive technology has not kept up with “Moore’s Law” which has defined the pace of innovation in semiconductors, especially memory, dsp, and processors for 40 years. Today it takes roughly 500 hard disk drives to keep up with a state of the art “quad quad” (16) core Pentium-based server. But fusion-io’s flash (semiconductor) based memory systems can keep up with the same server processor array, because it has no moving parts.
In this spectacular demo, a single FusionIO memory array delivers 1,000 HD video streams (about 4Mbps each) onto a “video wall”. The wall consists of sixteen 40″ LCD’s, each displaying 1000/16 = 62 separate HD video streams. With this setup, you could watch ALL of the Comcast channels (and then some) — at the same time!
It was my opportunity on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 to present a cutting-edge collegiate, socially-enabled web 2.0 application to students in the Orfalea School of Business at California Polytechnic (“Cal Poly”) in San Luis Obispo. Professor Jeffrey Danes of the Orfalea School of Business invited me into his entrepreneurial marketing class, the third in a four-course sequence. I described the business and technology strategy of a web startup that I’ve been helping out over the past year, to the 45 business school seniors enrolled in the “Entrepreneurship” program.
Reporting Live From Web 2.0 Expo
The Web 2.0 Expo made its way to San Francisco, CA March 31st through April 3rd. There was a lot of talk about the design of mobile applications, twitter vs google vs facebook vs linkedin, and much more.
K4 Bootcamp
I attended the Keiretsu Forum’s “Entrepreneurship Bootcamp” training in downtown San Francisco today. This is offered once per month at a reasonable rate, and let me tell you, if you’re starting a company you want to attend this all-day interactive seminar put on by business consulting, finance, valuation, and valuation professionals.
SMX West turned out to be an outstanding conference. There was a strong presence from the big search engines including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, ASK, as well as many SEO optimization industry experts and gurus.
If you want a lot of bang for your buck for your educational dollars, SMX West is a solid choice of conference to attend. They are held at different locations around the country every few months.
Steve was interviewed by Lisa Amin, Reporter for ABC News this evening on the breaking news about Steve Jobs leave of absence from Apple Computer:
We’d like to wish Steve and his family the best.