Biotech sensation Theranos was supposed to be Silicon Valley’s next hot IPO. But late Thursday evening, the company told Fortune Magazine that its board of directors had shrunk from 12 members to five as it battles a perfect storm of negative publicity.
The latest brainstorm from the Chinese Communist Party is a system for monitoring the Internet activity and financial transactions of its citizens, computing a “social credit” score on the acceptability of each person’s behavior, similar to the credit ratings compiled by financial institutions.
Quotas are coming to Silicon Valley. In fact, there is growing evidence they’ve already been put in place at some of the largest tech companies in the region — and soon, “diversity” will be required for start-ups seeking funding.
Silicon Valley’s “coding bootcamps” are a cottage industry of fast-track private vocational schools for graduates looking to enter the competitive tech industry as software engineers, data scientists, and other in-demand jobs. Many coding bootcamp graduates who hold college degrees in areas notorious for slim earning potential (like English majors) and are now fully employed in the tech industry making a lot more money.
As Theranos, Inc. was preparing for one of Silicon Valley’s biggest IPO’s when its pin-prick blood test for thousands of diseases was approved by the FDA on July 15, the company was rocked on October 15 by a Wall Street Journal article citing “unnamed” former employees claiming Theranos inflated its testing effectiveness to the FDA.
Silicon Valley and other tech center start-ups raised $2.06 billion in “agtech” venture capital in the first half of 2015 to develop apps and devices to help farmers manage the four-year-old drought.
Apple Inc.’s near-billion-dollar loss Tuesday for violating a University of Wisconsin patent from 1998 that improves processor performance in all of its iPhone and iPad products will encourage more universities to sue tech companies.
The $67 billion Dell-EMC merger–a record-breaking offer in Silicon Valley–is an effort to take a Valley behemoth private in order to make the disruptive changes necessary to become a dominant force in the coming cloud computing era.
In moves that just get weirder every day, Google–now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet–has revealed that it owns abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com.
(Ferenstein Wire) – The tech industry, now one of the largest private sector lobbying forces in Washington DC, hasn’t had much to say as Republicans scramble to find a new Speaker for the House of Representatives. But now, Congress’s geekiest member, Representative Darrell Issa, is “considering” putting his hat in the ring and has turned heads in the well-heeled tech halls of D.C.
Pushing his immigration platform, which includes calls for broader reforms to the legal immigration system and “a merit-based system” that gives people a path to citizenship, Marco Rubio said “my argument is if you’re the best at what you do on this planet, I don’t want you here temporarily. I want you here permanently. I want you to become American.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has been voted in as the permanent CEO of Twitter by the social media site’s board. This follows a three-month stretch as interim CEO following the resignation of his predecessor, Dick Costolo in July. Dorsey co-founded Twitter
California Governor Jerry Brown showed his unflinching support for unlimited drone operations by vetoing three bipartisan bills protecting privacy, public safety and education.
The Tesla Model X SUV was introduced earlier this week to rave reviews for its design touches, including rear “falcon-wing” doors that open upward for seven passengers.
The newly-introduced Samsung Pay is about to crush Apple Pay, because all newer generation Galaxy mobile phones already work with 85 percent of “swipe-style” credit card machines.
Prime Minister Narenda Modi will visit the Bay Area this weekend, becoming the first Indian PM to visit the West Coast in over 30 years.
Silicon Valley’s elites congregated this week to pay obeisance to a controversial world leader. No, not His Holiness: I’m talking about Chinese Premier Xi Jinping. With the unanticipated gusto of a portly buffet patron when a new tray of crab’s legs is brought
On Monday, Ahmed Mohamed, the freshman from MacArthur High School in Texas who was arrested after bringing a clock that looked like a bomb to school, was fêted at the science fair at the Google campus in Mountain View.
The Los Angeles Public Library has created a program to teach coding to elementary and middle school children, using a grant from the Eureka leadership program.
Silicon Valley-area Democratic congressional candidate Ro Khanna received a powerful endorsement on Thursday from State Senate President Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles).
Later this week, Republican presidential candidates will gather in Simi Valley, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, for the second GOP debate of the campaign season.
California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a controversial drone privacy bill Wednesday, declaring that it would expose hobbyists to excessive litigation.
Hipsters who cannot afford high San Francisco rent have a new option: $1,800 per month for a spot on a bunk bed with a stranger in a home with 30 other people in what is being called “co-creative” housing.
With Apple’s stock price under pressure, the company is gearing up at the San Francisco Cow Palace for the September 9 World Developer Conference.
At around 10PM on Labor Day Sunday, I posted a coding problem to the popular software developer forum, Stack Exchange.
(Ferenstein Wire)—A brand new taxi design was unveiled last week to mixed fanfare, as the tech-enabled Nissan NV 200 “Taxi of Tomorrow” runs on a decidedly 19th-century technology: fossil fuel combustion.
Rep. Mike Honda (D), who represents Silicon Valley in Washington, has hired two high-profile Washington law firms and a California-based PR team to handle his image and political future following a substantial investigation into ethical wrongdoing. Honda is accused of having mixed government and campaign business.
An estimated 200 people came out Sunday evening to a rally calling for opposition to the Iran deal currently being considered in the U.S. Congress. The event followed a midday briefing that drew over 150.
(Ferenstein Wire)—The taxi industry has launched yet another high-profile attempt to conquer their arch nemesis Uber. The upcoming Arro, like many of its predecessors, is an app for hailing and paying for a taxi, much like other ride-hailing companies out of Silicon Valley. Every similar app, so far, has either completely shut down shortly after launch or failed to slow the rise of Uber.
As much as global financial concerns are going to hit tech companies harder than other sorts of enterprise, so too will their own lack of ambition. The ugly truth is that Silicon Valley has largely given up trying to fix big problems and has retreated into photo-sharing apps and productivity tools.
Amazon views its work environments as a tough response to slack conditions elsewhere in the labor force, encouraging excellence and superior effort from its workers by setting standards it proudly describes as “unreasonably high.” Many horrified readers thought the NYT article described brutally exploitative conditions covered by corporate happy-talk about achievement.
In the immigration plan he released Sunday, Donald Trump slammed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for making the path easier for immigrants to land jobs at high-tech firms.
The New York Times caused a stir in Silicon Valley with a viral article claiming that Amazon.com brutally exploits its white collar workers with unforgiving management practices. The investigation caused such an outcry that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos personally responded with an email to employees assuring them that “callous” management practices wouldn’t be tolerated.
Uber’s low-cost service, UberX, reduces drunk driving deaths all over California and may be responsible for a drop in DUIs on NYE.
Silicon Valley often gets knocked for a lack of diversity, but historically excluded groups are making an impressive showing at the top spot of the most valuable companies. Just looking at the top ten companies based in Silicon Valley by NASDAQ market cap, 40% are run by someone who is a woman, an immigrant, or non-white. By individual demographics, 20% are women, and 30% are foreign-born.
Hillary Clinton is directly courting Silicon Valley in her $350 billion plan to overhaul higher education. Clinton will reveal the full details of her plan at an upcoming talk in New Hampshire, but she has released the major tenets to news outlets.
3D printing has been around for several decades, but expiring patents are driving costs down and major tech breakthroughs are driving up speed.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) posted a 40-day public comment period late August 3 aimed at transferring the oversight of the Internet to a not-for-profit entity.
Marketing technology is emerging as one of the hottest sectors for business tech investing, according to the PitchBook Blog. Marketing tech companies in the first six months of 2015 raised $1.62 billion in 157 venture capital deals, and 205 companies were acquired for a total of $4.3 billion.
Uber is now valued at almost $51 billion, a valuation that puts the “on-demand mobile service” (ODMS) leader at the level of Facebook in 2011. The company’s fund-raising success has spurred a vast number of “Uber for X” start-ups that are building corporate empires with legions of outsourced contract workers. But the “gig economy” seems to be operating the same money-losing business model as the “Dot-com Bubble.”
