New Year, New Blog

2007 seems like a good year to start a blog on Silicon Valley and technology. After all, I live in Cupertino, CA, home of Apple Computer, and, arguably, the center of the creative universe that is Silicon Valley. These are exciting times, what with Steve Jobs promising that 2007 would be the best year yet for Apple. The year started off with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) which ran from Jan 8th till 11th in Las Vegas, NV, but was quickly upstaged by Steve Jobs and the iPhone announcement at Macworld in San Francisco which ran concurrent to CES. I made the hour plus plane ride to Vegas for CES, but may have found more excitement closer to home in San Francisco. Of course, Vegas is always fun and I met several old friends and made some new ones, but it made it clear to me that there was much to write about in Silicon Valley.

So, I decided to start this blog on Silicon Valley, technology, people and places. I have lived here since 1994, seen one tech boom and a bust, a few small earthquakes and met some of the most interesting people anywhere in the world. Living at the leading edge of technology is very exciting to me and so I thought I would share these exciting times with others.

I won't write much about CES or Macworld, for they have been amply covered elsewhere. However, I attended two very interesting events this week which I will write about. The first was the Wireless Communication Alliance's (WCA) "What's Hot, What's not" VC panel held in conjunction with the WCA International's 13th annual symposium and expo at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. This very interesting annual panel sheds some light on what some of the VC community in Silicon Valley view as the opportunities (or not) in the near future for various wireless technologies such as WiMAX, 3G, handset technology, infrastructure, Metro WiFi.

The second was the CSPA's "VC Outlook 2007: Looking Down the Money Trail" held at the Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati offices in Palo Alto, CA. CSPA stands for the Chinese Software Professionals Association, a nonprofit organization, which very generously tolerates people like me who are neither Chinese or software professionals at their meetings. This is a panel of a different set of VCs with a focus on a broader portfolio such as biotech, software, search, Web 2.0, semiconductors, alternative energy among others. I will give you my observations on both of these events in a couple of days, once I have had the time to collect my thoughts and notes together.

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