Wrap Up

This trip was an amazing experience! I got to see  the interworking's of some of the most progressive technology companies around, and was also given privy a much broader understanding of the Valley as a whole. The whole feel of the Valley is very different than from back East. Anyone who lives in Boston knows how competitive we Bostonians can be. (Just try taking my parking spot...really I dare you!) The atmosphere always felt more co-operative and I was surprised how much people were willing to share, but I guess I shouldn't be. All the ideas an explanations wouldn't get you any closer to the actual product than a bottle rocket would get you to the moon. It took a tremendous amount of work and resources to get these companies off the ground, and even more to keep them gaining altitude. The Valley is very organic thing, but it's also one that completely dependent on the capitalizations of its residents. The Valley may not be reproducible elsewhere, but why would you want to? The concept of reproducing a Valley like economy somewhere else is completely asinine. The Valley in itself is about breakthrough, invention and re-invention. It was never about mere reproduction, so why should we be.   

Last day

 

 

 On our last day, we headed out to San Francisco for a Q&A and tour of TuneIn and a Target office.
At TunIn we met Andrew Bock, the Sr. Manager. He first took us on tour of the facilities, seen below, and explained some different aspects of the company. TuneIn streams radio stations from all over the world via a phone app or through the browser on your computer. Andrew told us an important thing to note is that schedule information has to be put in manually. Meaning that when you use the site and see a program schedule, much in the way you'd see on your guide on t.v., all that information was put in by hand. It stuck me as one of the few things that I had seen that wasn't completely automated by some kind of algorithm or code running on a machine. I realize the reason for this after speaking with Andrew, the terrestrial analog transmissions being broadcast from the radio stations carry very little meta data. Meta data is kind of a description of the content you might be viewing or listening to. It is often referred to as information about information, but it is basically just a description of content. A really cool side note was that Andrew started his radio career as an intern for the Howard Stern show, when Howard was still at K-Rock.

Our last and final destination of our week long trip was a Target office in San Francisco. Sean Edge was our connection for this trip. He is a Curry alumni who graduated in 2003 and is the Sr. QA lead for mobile development. Our tour of the target office wasn't what I expected. It was much more layed back and had a warmer home feel than I expected. After a tour of the office, were we saw some Targets nested technology development, we were given a brief presentation and then had a Q&A session with Sean. Some of the key points I enjoyed most from our experience at target was hearing about the developments with nested technologies. nested technologies are devices that feature some kind of intelligence, like a refrigerator that knows when your out of milk. It's something Target is keeping a tight lip on, but I'm theorizing that there trying to interface with devices in order to automate the ordering process with their stores or a custom UI which would be device independent and add some other functionality. The oculus technology was really cool too. we were only able to watch a video, but they were using VR to simulate an in store shopping experience with an oculus rift head set. Lastly the app development sounded very interesting. Target is working on (and already has) a number of apps, like cart wheel. These apps stream line the whole shopping experience, with ways to get discounts, find product and ask for in-store assistance right from your phone. They are also working on some kind of augmented reality game using smart phones, which should be interesting to see when they come out.

Per the usual, I will leave you with some pics.

 

What A Day!

Had an exceptional day today and a busy one at that. We started off  on a tour of Apple. Enough said? not even close! Unfortunately, I had to keep my photographic trigger finger at bay. We weren't allowed to take many pictures inside of Apple, but it was still one of the best tours we've had so far.
Apple was extremely accommodating and Dominic Rapini, the national accounts manager of Apple, did us a great service by putting together an amazing tour. We were able to speak with many of Apples employees and got to tour the Apple Headquarters here in Palo Alto.

The people we spoke with at Apple where primarily in sales, but their job descriptions and backgrounds varied tremendously. Jim, who headed a team at Apple, was primarily tasked to help businesses come up with solutions to problems that might be preventing them from adapting certain technologies, such as using iPads or iPhones for Inventory systems. The problems he and his team would be solving could be something like network or integration issues. His background included everything from Elementary school band teacher to systems analysis for the Norwood education system. Jim explained that he has always been lucky with getting to do the things that he enjoyed. Thomas, one of Jims' team members, was a software engineer who had a similar job as Jim surprisingly. Thomas was originally born in Venezuela, but lived the first part of his life in France.

The last customer he helped, witch I find interesting, was non other than Disney. Thomas, like Jim, has a specialty and his specialty is writing or adapting software to help his customers.  Every member of Jims' team had a very different background which could aid a customer in a unique way.

Another person we spoke with was Anne, whom was a marketing specialist with Apple. Her job was to make sure that which ever product she was assigned was being marketed to it's customer base properly. She had a very interesting background, having worked with the first women to become secretary of state, madeleine Albright. Anne gave us a unique perspective of how Apple works cross departmentally. She described a very collaborative relationship when she of her job.

We also spoke with many more people at lunch who were sales and operations representatives and were very open with their own personal stories, and by the way Apple has the absolute best lattes. 

Our second stop was Facebook. It was the most dynamic and energetic campus we had been to. The pictures below may help give a better feeling for our experience. Our tour guide was Vicki whom had been at Facebook for about two and a half years. The one thing that really struck me about their campus was the amount of art all around the campus. There where posters and painting and installations everywhere. Honestly, there's not much I can say about the campus that the pictures don't show. It's a very hip and lively place, in my opinion.

The last experience we had this day was a casual meeting with Priyanka Sharma. She is the co-founder of Wakatime. Wakatime is an automated analytics solution for developers, and what this basically means is that it is a service that provides analytical feed back for programmers via a text editor plug in. A text editor is simply a piece of software that programmers use to write their code, much in the way an Author may use Microsoft word to write their stories. Priyankas' start-up is very new on the scene, so we were able to hear how she very recently received funding. She is entering the seed stage with her company, were she will be looking for investors, but she has also raised some funds already through a family-and-friends round of funding.