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.   

 

Day Three

Our day started off with a little rain. The above picture is of the court yard in front of our hotel room. I still can't get over how nice our accommodations are.

Our first tour of the day was meant to be Google, but sadly the tour we had planed fell threw last minute. We did however get to view some of the campus. The Google campus is a highly secure area. I haven't seen this level of security at any of our other destinations minus Stanford.  There were security guards everywhere and every door was either locked or guarded. The campus still had a very mellow feel regardless of the security.

 

 



 

 

 

After Google we headed over to a startup called Boxfish, where we met with co-founders Eyon and Kevin. Boxfish is doing something pretty amazing. The company specializes in a practice known as advertising re-targeting. What the company basically does is figure out what kind of media ads, such as television programs, are relative to individual users on social media sites such as twitter. This is a pretty big deal for a couple reasons. For one thing, the amount of data they are collecting and processing is tremendous. Boxfish not only has to collect and decipher everyone's tweets on twitter, but they also have to collect and interpret a ton of data being broadcast by television and online sources in order to figure out what the content actually is. They then essentially cross-reference these two sources of data, in order to determine what ads they should present to you while your on your social media site. This same principle could eventually be used to even make more actuate media recommendations for you while your searching the web or watching television. Our conversations with Eyon and Keven were very informative.

 

The founders of Boxfish also irritated the process they went through when founding their company. It was very interesting to listen to. It seems that Silicon valley really has the template down for the legal and funding process of creating a start up. Eyon explained that lawyers who work with startups in Silicon Valley often work on the basses of only getting paid when the startup receives funding. Lawyers and banks alike, also have many of the processes simplified and streamlined because they deal with these kinds of propositions so frequently.

 



 

 

After our visit to Boxfish, I split of from the group and headed downtown where I found this peculiar object pictured below. From a it merely appeared like some kind of metal egg.

 

 

But as I approached, I realized what it was made of and more importantly what it was titled. It was called "Digital DNA" by Adriana Varella and Nilton Maltz. Silicon Valley is starting to make a little more sense lately. You really do have to consider it an organism, and like this egg it is more than the sum of it's parts. 

The last stop of our day was an informational session at Cretio, where we met a Curry Alum Amber Rice. Amber Graduated from Curry College in 2003 and has been living in the area for about eight years. She is now the Executive assistant of Cretio, and has worked at companies such as Yahoo and Ebay. Having a conversation with someone who is actually familiar with where your coming from offered a nice change of pace. I immediately felt more comfortable speaking with her than I had with anyone thus far. Her demeanor was very welcoming. Amber reminisced with us about her college experiences, and noted how much positive change she's seen happening on our campus since she graduated. She also gave us plenty of useful advice in regards of how to approach this kind of an industry and she described what her personal experience was like when she decided to move to California.

At Cretio we also met with Denise Domingo, the Director of technical solutions, and Dmitry Pavlov, the Vise President of Research and Development. Denise elaborated on what Amber had told us about how Cretios' software works. What Cretio does is similar but also very different from what Boxfish does. Cretio is in the business of advertising re-targating. One thing that works very differently, is that Cretio is targeting mobile devices for their ad re-targeting and they are using the banner ads you often see on websites. They are also using a past browsing histories in order to target their ads to users. As Denise explained to us, the problem with mobile devices is in how they work differently from desktop type devices. In a normal browser session on your desktop, a cookie is placed in a cache on your devices by the website you visit This cookie can contain information such as past product searches or a history that tracks where you went on a given website. With mobile devices this does not occur, and Cretio specializes in dealing with this problem along with re-targeting ads on desktops.
Dmitry gave us advise about finding a company we fit with. He also explained what some of the qualities are that he looks for in an employee and coworkers. During this part of the conversation, he stressed the importance of being able to work with others even over individual skill. He gave a great example of someone working on a project and being able to get results faster with a team of less experienced individuals, than someone working on the same project by themselves.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second Day

Our second day was a pretty big day. It was a day full of surprises. We started off on a tour of Stanford University.

Stanford gives free hour long tours regularly throughout the day. We were part of a very large group, which was divided in to three smaller groups that were divvied up between the three tour guides. The tour guides were all current Stanford students, Our guides' name was Collin. He was a sophomore at Stanford, whom hadn't yet declared a major. He was very knowledgeable about the campus and spoke of it's history, culture and campus life. Collin imparted a real sense of enthusiasm, humility and pride for his campus when he spoke.

His best story by far came from when he explained the application process, and what got him excepted to Stanford University. Unlike most peoples expectations of what a Stanford students application may look like, Collin explained that he hadn't done anything particularly impressive. he never won any prizes of particular note. He wasn't exceptionally talented in any singular regard. What his application did describe, was a high school student who was motivated to go the extra mile with extra curricula activities and one who would always try to do something original.

 

The second place we went was the Computer History Museum. Below are some of my favorite exhibits in the Museum. The chess set is an example of a more artistic approach to using electronic parts, and below that is the PDP-1. The PDP-1 was an 18 bit system developed by the Digital Equipment Corporation. It was also the hardware used to play one of the worlds first video games, "Space Wars".

The last two places we visited were the Hackers Dojo and Concastic.

The Hackers Dojo was, what is referred to as, an incubator. An incubator is basically and inexpensive place for developers to meet up and work on their start-up ideas. There is a membership fee for people who use the space, but it is a much cheaper option than renting an office or building.

Contastic is a startup company which developed a Customer Relations Management (CRM) system. The CRM generates emails with personalized content in order to increase customer relations and raise sales. The Co-founder of Contastic, Cy Khormaee, spoke very openly with us about his life story and how he became a founder. I didn't take any pictures, but this was my favorite part of today. We got a ton of great information on how the process of creating a start up works in Silicon Valley, and how they actually receive funding. We were able to gain a lot of insight from speaking with Cy. He explained just about every aspect of his career with us, and we were all quite surprised by his admissions of failures.  He explained that part of being an entrepreneur is that not every idea is going to work out, especially in the beginning. I guess I never really realized how much of a career entrepreneurship is. It really is a job that people have to learn how to do, just like every other job out there.

First Exposures

Today we toured the VMware and NetApp campuses. Jeff Goodall, our guide at VMware, explained that companies in Silicon Valley like VMware prefer using the term campus to describe their properties. I have to say, after seeing some of these campuses for myself, calling them a campus is a very suiting descriptor. I don't think there's any other term that could describe these properties better.

The VMware campus (seen above) is sprawled out over 125 acres of land. The land itself is actually owned by Stanford University, which VMware in turn leases to build on. This peace of information has a greater effect on the culture of the campus, since the land is protected and carries a sense of being somewhat removed from the rest of Palo Alto. VMware had a very resort like feel to its layout and design. It reminded me somewhat of a larger version of Curry's campus, with its integration of natural and structural elements and that feeling of being somewhat isolated, without actually being in the middle of nowhere. NetApp on the other hand would be more akin to UMass Boston's campus, with its taller buildings and a more city like vibe. NetApp felt very much "right in the middle of things", much in the same way some Boston schools do. In either case, we were clearly dealing with massive companies with a lot of buildings, land and employees.

There honestly was so much to take in today, that I couldn't possibly fit it all in one blog entry. This was only an attempt at expressing what left the biggest and most general impression on me today.

First Impressions

One thing I noticed right away, when we arrived in Palo Alto, was a lot of banks who advertised themselves as some type of technology investor. This was something that the book "A History of Silicon Valley" referred to in chapter 14. In this chapter, the author describes how the supporting elements of Silicon Valley function, and by supporting elements he means the lawyers, investment bankers and such. I just thought it was interesting to see such a clear and obvious parallel to what I had read about.

Leaving From Logan

Off to Logan! Our trip started with an amazing sunrise over Logan airport.

 

I've flown Internationally many times, but this was the first domestic flight that I've ever taken. I was pleasantly surprised at how much less of a hassle it was. I also got to enjoy the scenery a lot more. Flying over the Atlantic, as I normally do, leaves a lot of ocean to cover and not much of  anything to see out the window. I always love the view a plane affords me. Most of these pictures below were taken somewhere around Colorado.