A Tale of Two H1-Bs

A friend for many years who happens to be chief financial officer for a Silicon Valley startup has this story to tell about his immigration problems at work:

This is the immigration battle that I fight day-in and day-out.  How do we attract the best and brightest to our shores (H1-B visas) so the jobs stay in America instead of transferring overseas?  The technologists that we work with could work anywhere.  We have to make it easy for them to come here and to contribute here and to have bright babies here and to have those babies set higher standards here.  I see very, very few Smiths or Joneses or Johnsons who contribute […]

By |March 31st, 2010|2010|195 Comments
Read More

Collaborize, Rinse, Repeat

I’d been putting-off going to startups.cringely.com to finally read all 286 entries so far in this summer’s Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour.  But when I finally went to the site, I couldn’t get in.  The page timed-out.  This was not good.  Or maybe it was very good in that the site was so busy.  But even that’s not good because I don’t like turning readers away.  So which was it — good or not good?

Not good.

Twelve hours later, when I still couldn’t get in I called the CTO at the company that hosts that site — Democrasoft.  You haven’t heard about them, believe me, and I’ll […]

By |March 23rd, 2010|2010, Business, Entrepreneurship|69 Comments
Read More

Is There a Google News Blacklist?

My relationship with Google News has always run hot and cold. No make that cold and tepid. From the very beginning of Google News as an experiment back in 2001, they refused to index my work, which they said was my fault, not theirs (“they” being an algorithm attached to an e-mail box, of course). But new evidence has recently come to light suggesting to me that Google News has an actual blacklist.

For those not familiar with the expression, “blacklist” usually refers to Hollywood screen and television writers from the 1950’s McCarthy era who were thought to be communist sympathizers and were banned from working openly in the entertainment industry as a […]

By |March 16th, 2010|Uncategorized|121 Comments
Read More

What He Said: Cisco Steps Up Its Router Game

Last week Cisco Systems made a big product announcement that the networking giant said would change the Internet forever. What could it be? Well it was a big router, a really big router that would allow more bits than ever to flow over the world’s fiber backbones. And the market yawned, because bits are a commodity and it is hard to tell a million bushels of wheat in a pile from two million bushels of wheat. And Cisco’s enterprise customers — its biggest business customers — have plenty of bandwidth already, thanks.

Well that’s the entire point: corporations, where T1‘s still dominate, use less bandwidth per person than we do at our house, […]

By |March 15th, 2010|2010, Business, Companies|55 Comments
Read More

Is Yahoo Mail Broken?

This just in from an old friend who only gets pissed-off when it is justified.  He says Yahoo Mail has been going downhill for awhile and has lately become unusable. Is this an isolated incident or does it affect all 200+ million Yahoo Mail customers?  What’s your experience?

Here is his:

This is unacceptable.

We can log into Yahoo Mail.
We can read our email.
We can move or delete our email.
WE CANNOT SEND EMAIL.

When we try to send email, we are asked to enter a Captcha code.  We then receive a Yahoo error message stating the message was not sent. Due to spam problem sending has been disabled on our account.

The message goes on to say […]

By |March 15th, 2010|2010|216 Comments
Read More

The 94 Percent Solution

Newspapers are folding, magazines are fading, ad pages are down and angst is up in the serial publishing business as it struggles through a global technological transition and may not survive.  But what will be our next New York Times, our new Field & Stream, our improved Playboy?  That’s what the big guns of publishing are fighting about with their Kindles and iPads.  But I think they may have it all wrong and my friend Anina, the fashion model/girl geek may have it all right.

Anina has reinvented the magazine for your mobile phone.

Isn’t that what Apple is doing with the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch?

Not even close.

Anina, whom you may remember from […]

By |March 11th, 2010|2010, Business, Newspapers|106 Comments
Read More

Some Rules of the Road: 200 Nominations in the First Week!

Just a week into nominations for the Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour we have 200 companies signed up to vie for the 24 positions. My hope to reach 600 in eight weeks, then, is very possible if I keep up the pressure and perhaps define the rules a little better. That’s what this column is for.

Non-U. S. companies are out. We’ve had a few Canadian companies enquire and one even claimed to be from Vancouver, WA instead of Vancouver, BC. No, that won’t do. This is a U. S. competition, but that doesn’t mean the next season won’t be international. In fact I can almost guarantee it will be.

Remember this […]

By |March 9th, 2010|2010, Business, Entrepreneurship, Startups|41 Comments
Read More

100 Startups and Growing Fast!

It has been just over a day since we opened nominations for the Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour and already there are more than 100 companies in the system, all six categories are covered, and the level of competition is very high. At this point I am confident we’ll get 500-600 companies in the eight week period, which is what I had hoped.

While all six categories are represented, more than half are IT companies, which isn’t surprising given the orientation of this blog. But the Kauffman Foundation just sent out a press release about the Tour to 11,000 reporters and editors, so I’m guessing the technology base will […]

By |March 5th, 2010|2010, Business, Startups|51 Comments
Read More

The Smell of Entrepreneurism in the Morning

Today is a great day for I, Cringely and for me. It is the day we launch the special web site for Cringely’s (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour. I wrote a column last month announcing the Tour, which you can read here, but today marks the actual start of this summer’s adventure, because it opens nominations.

Visit the new web site here, but please remember to come back and finish reading this column.

This new web site is strictly for readers to nominate startup companies, discuss them, vote for favorites, then see the results as we come up with the top 24 companies in six different categories.

You have to […]

By |March 2nd, 2010|2010, Business, Entrepreneurship, Startups, Uncategorized|120 Comments
Read More
  • Copyright 2013 I, Cringely | All Rights Reserved