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I Declare War upon AWS, Azure, Silicon Valley and every single Government on Earth

I've been furious for the larger parts of a decade - Partially due to how our governments and the industrialised war machine of the "United Slaves of America" has treated Assange, Snowden and Manning, arguably spearheaded by Silicon Valley - But also due to the fact of that the internet I grew up with no longer exists. However, I am ready, bring on the storm!

In the 90s when I started hanging out in USENET forums, the internet was a machine for good. Its atmosphere was a feeling of that everything was possible, and together we could create better democratic tools, resulting in a better world, by simply coming together, and together do our part. If everybody pulled a little bit more than their own weight, we could all enter "paradise on Earth".

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AI Provides Insights on CPG Trends

We had the opportunity to meet with Andy Pandharikar, CEO/Co-founder of Commerce.ai during the IT Press Tour at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Silicon Valley. Andy’s vision for his new company is providing self-driving commerce for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies by training AI to understand every consumer product in the market and to gain insights on what makes a product successful, as well as identify market trends.

This is a joint project in conjunction with Walmart and the client list includes Chanel, Unilever, Coca Cola, SC Johnson, Rakuten, and many more. 90% of the content they monitor is unstructured feedback and 10% is structured data. Text, images, voice, videos have exploded online since 2014. 85% of consumer products fail in the first two years. SKU level data drives intelligence platform for CPG

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Techno-Optimism Is Techno-Stupidity

Is the glass half-empty, or half-full?


I recently read an article in the New York Times entitled "The Church of Techno-Optimism", which argues that the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley is techno-optimism, that technology will magically solve the world's problems, and that the state, the bureaucracy, the taxes are nothing more than obstacles to progress. The article is intended to be quite positive about this ideological movement, and I will try to defend the opposing thesis.

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Company Overview: Qumulo

I appreciate the opportunity to meet with Molly Presley, Global Product Marketing Director and Jason Sturgeon, Senior Product Manager of Qumulo, the eighth company on IT Press Tour #31 at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers' offices on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. Kleiner Perkins is an investor in Qumulo.

Qumulo was founded in 2012. According to Molly, cloud-based file storage is growing faster than on-premises with architectures and strategies falling into three groups: native, overlay, and hybrid – with hybrid being the dominant use case.

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Forget Silicon Valley: Top 7 Reasons to Move to Raleigh, NC, for Your Next Tech Job

Downtown Raleigh, NC, at sunset
Photo credit by Flickr/James Willamor

Well, it’s official: Silicon Valley isn’t going anywhere, at least any time soon. That’s according to jobs site Indeed.com, which recently published a report outlining where the majority of US tech jobs are calling home these days.

It’s certainly no surprise that San Jose, CA, saw the largest increase in per capita tech positions, or that postings of so-called “hot tech titles” – such as cloud engineer and data scientist – were seven percent higher here than the national average.  

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Why The Flow Of Ideas Is Vital For An Innovation Ecosystem

Such has been the success of Silicon Valley in supporting technology startups, they have spawned countless imitators around the world, each of whom try to tap into that magic sauce. It's fair to say that few of these efforts have come close to matching the success of Silicon Valley, and a recent study from Wharton sets out to explore why that is.

The researchers focused their attention on the impact trade secrecy plays, and how the best bits of innovation are protected from prying eyes. The researchers believe this kind of activity happens even before legal protection is sought via patents. They believe that patents tend to be the focus of academic attention because they're so visible, whereas strategies for protecting trade secrets tend not to be.