Davemichels

Vjeran Pavic

Okay, ’fess up. How many of you have a bunch of old electronics stashed in the back of your closet or garage because you don’t know what to do with them?

(Raises hand.)

Yes, I’m just as guilty of it as you are, but there’s no reason why that old CRT TV should be hogging up precious storage space when there are easy ways to dispose of it.

Previously, I wrote about some options for selling your old devices online for money. But maybe you have some gadgets that aren’t accepted by resellers. Or maybe they’re in non-working condition, so you can’t donate them to a school or charity. If that’s the case, you should recycle them.

Many retailers and electronics companies now offer programs that provide multiple ways to recycle your old electronics, batteries and used printer cartridges. You can drop them off at store locations, ship them to facilities for recycling, or schedule a pick-up at your home. In some cases, there is a fee involved (usually with larger electronics and appliances), but some companies will also reward you with credit to use for future purchases.

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Yes, it requires a little work on your part. But it’s better than hoarding unused gadgets in your house, and you definitely don’t want to throw them in the trash, for several reasons.

For one, devices like laptops and desktop computers contain a lot of personal information that can be recovered if you haven’t erased the hard drive. Second, it’s terrible for the environment. The electronics that end up in landfills or are incinerated can release hazardous chemicals and toxins like lead, mercury and cadmium into our air and water sources.

So, with that said, here are the details about the recycling programs offered by a several major manufacturers and retailers. The Environmental Protection Agency and Electronics TakeBack Coalition are also good resources, and be sure to check out my colleague Katie Boehret’s previous story on recycling products, as it contains still-relevant details about other companies.

Though many of these companies offer services to erase hard drives and delete personal data, I would also recommend backing up any data and wiping your devices yourself, if possible. You can find instructions on how to do that in my article, here.

Apple

Starting this past Earth Day, Apple started a new program where you can bring back any product the company has ever made to an Apple retail store for recycling. This includes batteries, laptops, iPods, peripherals and more, and there is no cost to you. In addition, you can bring your old iPhone or iPad into the store to get credit (up to $270) toward the purchase of your next iPhone or iPad. But you must buy the new model that day, and the first-generation iPhone and iPad, iPhone 5s, iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display are excluded from this offer.

Customers can also still receive a 10 percent discount toward the purchase of their next iPod when they bring their old one back to the store (the iPod shuffle is excluded from this).

For those who don’t want to deal with going into the store, Apple has online options. You can also mail in your old iPod, or any mobile phone, regardless of manufacturer, for recycling. Just head over to Apple’s website, fill out the appropriate form and print out a prepaid shipping label.

For other devices, specifically the iPad, iPhone, Mac or PC desktops and laptops, Apple contracts with a company called PowerOn to reuse or recycle those products. PowerOn pays for shipping, and once the company has received your device, it will check to see if it has any monetary value. If so, you will receive the amount via an Apple Gift Card, which can be used in stores and online. If not, PowerOn will wipe all your data and recycle your equipment for free.

Microsoft

Microsoft accepts cellphones, computers and rechargeable phone batteries from any company for recycling at select Microsoft retail stores. There is no cost or obligation to purchase something. In addition to the devices mentioned, the company will accept digital audio players and videogame consoles and games for trade-in.

At the store, you can bring your item to the Answer Desk, and they’ll check to see if the device has any trade-in value, which is determined based on condition and current market value. If it does, you’ll receive a credit that can be used at a Microsoft retail store (not online).

The company offers services to wipe personal data from products before recycling, but there may be a fee, depending on whether you’re trading in, upgrading or just recycling. Xbox owners can also receive a prepaid mailing label to send in their console and accessories for recycling.

Samsung

You can drop off Samsung products — including TVs, notebooks, digital cameras and camcorders, cellphones and home-theater equipment — at one of the company’’s approximately 600 Recycling Direct locations nationwide. There is a map on Samsung’s website to locate the one nearest you.

If that isn’t an option, Samsung offers a mail-back program that allows you to ship any company-branded product, including TVs weighing up to 50 pounds, to its recycling partner. Samsung pays for shipping, but you will be responsible for packing it up and shipping it off. You can also send your mobile phones and toner cartridges by mail for recycling.

Best Buy, Staples and Office Depot

If you own a device from a company that’s not listed above, many retailers, including Best Buy, Staples and Office Depot, recycle various electronics regardless of brand.

In all of its U.S. stores, Best Buy offers recycling kiosks where you can drop off ink and toner cartridges, rechargeable batteries, cables, and even plastic bags and gift cards.

In addition to the kiosks, you can bring your old electronics to the customer-service counter. Best Buy accepts most electronics, but it’s best to check on the company’s website before heading to the store. Also, customers can give Best Buy their computer hard drives to erase and destroy before recycling.

For larger items like TVs and home appliances, the company will pick them up at your home for free if you’ve bought a replacement from Best Buy. Otherwise, there is a $100 pick-up fee, which covers the cost of two TVs or two large appliances.

Staples accepts various devices like desktop computers, laptops, cellphones and Blu-ray players for free recycling at all of its retail stores (Staples Copy & Print shops excluded). It does not accept TVs, appliances, large speakers and several other types of electronics for recycling. You can find the full list on the company’s website .

You can also recycle your ink and toner cartridges in stores or online, and if you’ve spent at least $30 in ink/toner purchases from Staples in the last 180 days, you can receive $2 back in Staples Rewards for each recycled cartridge.

Lastly, you can go into an Office Depot store and purchase one of three boxes (small for $5, medium for $10 and large for $15), and fill them up with all of your old products. The company accepts most consumer electronics like laptops, phones, MP3 players, printers and small TVs.

After you’ve filled the box, you can bring it back to the store, where a store associate will inspect it and then send it off for recycling. The cost of shipping and handling is included in the price of the box.

Companies make it easy to recycle electronics these days with just a little effort on your part, so there’s no excuse for holding onto old, unused products. Take back your space and do your part to help the environment.

Google is working with Wi-Fi equipment maker Ruckus Wireless to build a large-scale Wi-Fi network in the cloud off of which any business could hang its wireless routers, according to a source familiar with the project who asked not to be named.

Google’s plans to supply Wi-Fi services to small and medium-sized businesses was first reported by The Information on Wednesday. But I have gotten more details on what its network would look like and how it would be rolled out. Google has been working closely with Ruckus, trialing a new software-based wireless controller that virtualizes the management functions of the Wi-Fi network in the cloud, according to my source. The end result would be a nationwide — or even global — network that any business could join and any Google customer could access.

Both Google and Ruckus declined to comment.

In any large-scale Wi-Fi network, such as one rolled out in a corporate headquarters, or in an airport, a Wi-Fi controller manages access to hundreds of different Wi-Fi access points, allowing devices to connect to the network as a whole not just individual routers. By putting the controller in the cloud, Ruckus removes it from the physical network and can hook tens or even hundreds of thousands of individual access points scattered throughout the world onto the same virtual network.

For Google that means it won’t have to manage thousands of individual local business wireless networks when it starts offering up Wi-Fi services. As retail businesses attach their access points into the cloud they all become part of the same centrally managed service. Google could serve up en masse cloud-based applications such as advertising and point-of-sale payment services, which would feed them to all devices connected to Ruckus’s access points.

From the end-consumer’s point of view, the whole thing looks like one big home network: once you’re logged in securely at your dentist’s office, you’re logged in when you step into the bakery down the street or a restaurant two states over. From Google’s point of view, this could become a key component in any plan to offer an alternate wireless data service that circumvents the traditional mobile carrier industry.

The source told me that he couldn’t provide a timeline on when Google would launch its business Wi-Fi services – The Information said it could be as soon as this summer – but was able to confirm Google for now isn’t working with any other Wi-Fi equipment vendors besides Ruckus on the project. That could change by launch, but while big companies like Cisco System and Ericsson and small outfits like Aerohive and Cloud4Wi are working on similar technologies, none of their equipment is interoperable. If Google wants to create a single unified network, it may well have to go with a single Wi-Fi equipment maker.

Our source also confirmed most of the details of The Information’s earlier report:

• Google will offer the service to businesses for free as long as they agree to join its public network, though businesses will have to supply their own broadband connections.

• Hotspot 2.0 will have a big role to play in the network, connecting smartphones and tablets automatically and securely to any Google-powered access point, much like they would connect to their mobile carrier’s 3G of 4G network.

• Google will be able to provide analytics to businesses about consumers that use networks, separating out location-specific information from the data collected by the virtual network as a whole.

Google, however, will not sell Wi-Fi equipment directly to businesses as The Information suggested. Instead businesses will be responsible for supplying their own Wi-Fi access points, the source said. That means many businesses will have to replace their existing Wi-Fi gear; today Ruckus’s virtual controller only works with Ruckus access points.

This post was updated at 4:15 OM PT to add Google’s response

 

 

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Seriously? Microsoft expects to find buyers for its entry-level Surface Pro 3 and others that will be willing to pay $1,949 for its top-of-the-line model. I don't think so.

Game over. Google is now the master of the consumer cloud. The knockout punch was the successful deployment of Google Drive. Barely two years old, Google Drive has revolutionized the consumer and small-business cloud beyond recognition.

The Dropbox cloud

Dropbox was the first reigning champion of the consumer cloud. Launched in 2008, Dropbox was an incredible leap forward. Just this past November, Dropbox announced that it hit 200 million users. There will always be a need to store data files in the cloud, and Dropbox has a proven track record.

But Dropbox never took the consumer cloud to the next level. They never became a Software as a Service (SaaS); they remained a virtual drop box for most people, no matter what features they’ve recently added.

When I used Dropbox in my last job, I thought it was an advantage being able to use Microsoft Word in a shared environment, until two of us opened the same file at the same time and things got tricky. Even if Dropbox fixed this issue, it allowed tens of millions of people to check out Google Drive and see how things worked on the other side.

The move to Google Drive

When I moved to Google Drive last summer, it was a bit of shock. I hadn’t used any word processor besides Word since WordPerfect in the 1980s. The Google Docs editor gets right to the point. It doesn’t pretend to be capable of servicing law firms and advertising agencies. To paraphrase the old Miller Lite commercial, Google Docs is everything you always wanted in an editor. And less.

My spreadsheet needs are even more basic than my document-editing needs, and Google Docs does it fine. I just don’t need 99 percent of Microsoft Excel’s features. Microsoft Office costs $69.99 to $99.99 for personal and family editions. With Google, $99 gets you 10 terabytes, and their SaaS software is free.

Gmail, the gateway drug

Every Gmail user is a potential Google consumer cloud user. Unless you live in a cave, you probably have a Gmail account. Gmail and every Google service are all gateway drugs for the Google consumer cloud. In ancient times, every road led to Rome; in modern times, every online road leads to the Google cloud. Google offers too many free services to count, and they are all ways to hop onboard.

Eventually, Gmail might just woo you into other Google apps. I myself made the move from Dropbox to Google Drive. Sure, Dropbox uploads might be a little bit faster. But the appeal of having everything in the same ecosystem won out.

The GB threshold for cloud moves

The more gigabytes of data you upload to the Google cloud, the higher your threshold for moving to another consumer cloud. That’s why Google recently raised the free limit from 5GB to 15GB. It’s one thing to re-upload 4GB of data to a competing cloud, and another to re-upload 15GB.

Think of the 20-minute form you fill out on a new social network. When you’re done, you can spend an evening uploading photos and filling out endless text boxes. When I read about “the next big social network,” I think of the time it will take me to migrate my life info to it, and I usually pass.

The Google marketing team knows exactly what they’re doing by giving away free cloud space. Expect them to raise it every so often. Like the Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Game, set, match: Google

There will always be competitors to the Google consumer cloud, but it will be nearly impossible to beat it. An investor with a few hundred million dollars will have an easier time building a fleet of cruise ships to compete with Carnival and Royal Caribbean. If you thought it was dangerous for Google to control our Internet search habits, today Google owns our online lives. And they will for the foreseeable future.

Kenny Sahr is marketing director at BYOD solution Nubo. Reach him @kennysahr.

FBI Director James Comey is starting to think the law enforcement agency's zero tolerance policy on marijuana might be, like, a total bummer.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Comey discussed how the bureau's pot prohibition was making it harder to find tech savvy recruits when he spoke to the annual White Collar Crime Institute conference Monday.

"I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview," Comey said.

As a result of this, Comey said the FBI is "grappling with the question right now" of whether or not to change its marijuana policy. Currently, the agency will not accept job applicants who have smoked pot at any point within the past three years.

In fact, Comey indicated the bureau is already relaxing its restrictions on marijuana. When one attendee at the conference said one of their friends was discouraged from trying to work at the FBI due to the pot policy, Comey said they "should go ahead and apply" in spite of their marijuana smoking. 

Watch out criminals. You've seen the FBI, but have you ever seen the FBI on weed?  

Join the conversation about this story »

Ian Paul / PC World:
70-plus XMPP messaging services now securing chats with TLS encryption  —  Many users of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol—formerly Jabber) chat services are going to be more secure starting this week.  The XMPP Standards Foundation announced that a large number of services using …

US search engine Google has overtaken rival technology titan Apple as the world's top brand in terms of value, global market research agency Millward Brown said Wednesday.

Google's brand value shot up 40 percent in a year to $158.84 billion (115 billion euros), Millward Brown said in its 2014 100 Top BrandZ report.

"Google has been extremely innovative this year with Google Glass, investments in artificial intelligence and a range of partnerships," said Benoit Tranzer, the head of Millward Brown France.

Google Glass is Internet-linked eyewear for which the firm has joined hands with Luxottica, a frame giant behind Ray-Ban and other high-end brands, to sell the new product in the United States.

"All these activities send a very strong signal to consumers about the essence of Google," Tranzer said.

Apple, which dominated the top position for three straight years, saw its brand value fall by 20 percent to $147.88 billion.

The top 10 of the 100 slots were dominated by US firms. IBM was in third place at $107.54 billion, a fall of 4 percent, followed by Microsoft at $90.19 billion -- a 29 percent rise.

Fast food chain McDonald's ranked next at $85.71 billion, followed by Coca Cola ($80.68 billion), it said.

China led in the insurance sector with Ping An valued at $12.4 billion and China Life ($12 billion).

French luxury goods manufacturer Louis Vuitton ranked 30th overall but was the top luxury brand with a value of more than $25 billion.

Brand value is calculated on the basis of the firms' financial performance and their standing among consumers.

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Dell is working with partners to make packaging for its devices out of more sustainable materials like bamboo, wheat straw and even mushrooms, said Michael Dell at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference on Tuesday. To prove his point, he and Fortune Managing Editor Andy Serwer ate small pieces of edible packaging made from mushrooms (see around minute 13) — of course, dipping them in soy sauce first. Michael Dell said he is enjoying the fact that the company is now private because it allows the company to be more bold, and think more long term. Looks like it!

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Cisco tapped Dimension Data for help on laying the building blocks for the hybrid cloud infrastructure and reaching emerging markets.

Android might be more BYOD-friendly soon thanks to a new acquisition at Google this week.

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Team Black Sheep, an R/C hobbyist group noted for various drone-related stunts (we especially like the video of their tearing up the skies of New York City), has released its latest video.

This time they're flying around Dubai, and the obvious highlight is the team's buzzing of Burj Khalifa, presently the tallest building in the world, around 2,722 feet tall.

Some stills from the video are below, and the full video is below that.

Here's the airframe they used — a TBS Discovery Pro.

Now it's airborne. Here's a rather stately looking resort in Dubai.

Here's one of Dubai's two Palm Islands, man-made islands in the shape of palm trees. 

Here's the full video of their airborne adventure. You can skip to the 1-minute mark to see them fly over the top of Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.

SEE ALSO: Now there's a drone you can control using Oculus Rift

Join the conversation about this story »

IBM CEO Virginia Rometty has spoken frankly about IBM's business woes, but insists that change will lift the company from stagnation.

Amazon and Microsoft are definitely partners — users can run a bunch of Microsoft software on Amazon Web Services – but the companies are increasingly at odds now that Microsoft Azure has AWS-like Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities. That’s probably why Microsoft added Amazon to the list of the dis-invited for its annual Worldwide Partners Conference where Amazon joins Google, VMware, Salesforce.com.

Shutting out competitors from vendor trade shows is nothing new — here’s the VARguy’s story on last year’s WPC no-gos. And earlier this year, VMware refused to let partners Nutanix and Veeam into its partner event. But the supreme example of a spectacular snub came a few years back when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison famously cancelled a keynote by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff scheduled for Oracle OpenWorld. The issue? Salesforce.com is a huge Oracle partner and customer, but also a die-hard competitor in enterprise applications.

So all this invite/disinvite stuff is part of the game. Still these sorts of corporate edicts bear watching because they tell you what the host company sees as its biggest threats.

Per the Microsoft WPC web site:

The following companies and their employees and representatives are excluded from pre-purchasing passes for attending and / or participating in WPC 2014 and affiliated events:

• Amazon
• Google
• Salesforce.com
• VMware

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will speak at the show which Microsoft traditionally uses to fire up thousands of VARs, ISV and systems integration partners about its latest efforts which this year will of course focus on its cloud-and-mobile message.

 

Whither Rackspace?

News last week that Rackspace hired Morgan Stanley to explore its options really isn’t surprising given the white-hot price competition roiling the public cloud market and how crowded the private cloud arena is getting. Rackspace which has a market cap of $5.13 billion, is dwarfed by rivals. Market caps for Amazon, Google and Microsoft are ( in order) $137 billion, $351 billion and $329 billion. And all those companies have trailing twelve-month revenue that eclipses Rackspace’s (see chart below.) You see the problem.

RAX Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts

Immediate speculation was that Cisco, Oracle, or AT&T might buy Rackspace to enhance/expand their cloud businesses. Last year, Big Blue kicked the tires on Rackspace but ended up buying SoftLayer instead for $2 billion.

Rackspace president Taylor Rhodes will be on hand at Structure next month in San Francisco so we’ll ask for an update on the company’s progress.

Heroku CEO Tod Nielsen talks PaaS

On this week’s Structure Show Tod Nielsen laid out his case as to why companies need Heroku and Force.com PaaSes and Salesforce.com to build and deploy internal and customer facing applications. If you’re strapped for time, his segment starts about 15 minutes into the podcast.

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Asa Mathat

Warning of an erosion of confidence in the products of the U.S. technology industry, John Chambers, the CEO of networking giant Cisco Systems, has asked President Obama to intervene to curtail the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency.

In a letter dated May 15 (obtained by Re/code and reprinted in full below), Chambers asked Obama to create “new standards of conduct” regarding how the NSA carries out its spying operations around the world. The letter was first reported by The Financial Times.

The letter follows new revelations, including photos, published in a book based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden alleging that the NSA intercepted equipment from Cisco and other manufacturers and loaded them with surveillance software. The photos, which have not been independently verified, appear to show NSA technicians working with Cisco equipment. Cisco is not said to have cooperated in the NSA’s efforts.

Addressing the allegations of NSA interference with the delivery of his company’s products, Chambers wrote: “We ship our products globally from inside as well as outside the United States, and if these allegations are true, these actions will undermine confidence in our industry and in the ability of technology companies to deliver products globally.”

“We simply cannot operate this way; our customers trust us to be able to deliver to their doorsteps products that meet the highest standards of integrity and security,” Chambers wrote. “We understand the real and significant threats that exist in this world, but we must also respect the industry’s relationship of trust with our customers.”

Failure to restore and repair that trust, Chambers said, could threaten the evolution of the Internet itself and lead to its fragmentation.

The letter follows a May 13 blog post by Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler saying the NSA had “overreached.” Chandler said that Cisco does not cooperate with any government, including the U.S. government, to “weaken our products.”

Concern about the aggressive tactics of the NSA have hit Cisco’s results, especially in emerging markets like Russia, Brazil and China. When the company reported quarterly earnings last week, it said that orders from emerging countries fell seven percent, and that Brazil, Russia, India, China and Mexico combined for a 13 percent drop. Individually, orders in Brazil fell 27 percent and in Russia, 28 percent.

Cisco Chambers to POTUS 2014_05_15.pdf

A battery that lasts longer, is safer, charges faster and is less expensive than a standard lithium ion battery: That’s the powerful idea behind a new type of battery under development by a young Japanese startup called Power Japan Plus, or PJP, which came out of stealth on Tuesday. The year-old company uses carbon for both the anode and the cathode portion of the battery and hopes to start producing it later this year.

A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. In a lithium ion battery, lithium ions travel from the anode to the cathode through the electrolyte, creating a chemical reaction that allows electrons to be harvested along the way.

While lithium ion batteries are the dominant batteries these days for laptops, cell phones and early electric cars, they have some shortfalls. For example, the batteries degrade pretty quickly over time (which explains why your laptop battery dies every couple of years), and they can catch on fire under extreme impact. They’re also relatively expensive if you need a bunch of them to power an electric car, which is why Tesla’s cars are only really attainable by the wealthy right now.

An all-carbon battery

A battery that uses carbon for both the anode and the cathode could be safer than a lithium ion battery because it removes the highly flammable lithium oxide. While battery fires have been rare for electric car companies, Tesla, GM and others have all seen a handful of cars with punctured batteries catch on fire, and have faced PR hiccups as a result. Thermal runaway — intense, long-lasting fires caused by lithium oxide catching on fire — has long been the Achilles’ heel of lithium ion batteries.

A carbon battery also doesn’t degrade as quickly as a lithium ion battery over time. While a standard lithium ion battery with a two-year lifetime could have around 500 cycles of charging and discharging, Power Japan Plus’ dual-carbon battery could last for 3,000 cycles, the company’s executives told me in a phone call. They also say that because of the carbon chemistry, their battery can charge 20 times faster than a standard lithium ion battery.

Because the battery only uses carbon for its main active material, it could cost less than standard lithium ion batteries, though executives declined to name its price. Lithium ion batteries have continued to drop in price and Tesla says it’s reducing the cost by 30 percent with its planned battery factory.

Finally, an all-carbon battery could be more easily recycled at the end of life than a lithium ion battery because it doesn’t contain rare earth materials and metals. Activated carbon can come from a variety of low cost, easily-available sources.

The idea for a dual carbon battery has been under development by Japanese researchers since the 1970s. Around six or seven years ago, scientists at Kyushu University started working on nanotechnology and material breakthroughs — in the laboratory of applied chemistry professor Tatsumi Ishihara — that could raise the capacity (how much electric charge can be delivered at a certain voltage) of those early dual carbon batteries.

Now Power Japan Plus — co-founded by Japanese tech entrepreneurs Dou Kani (the CEO and president) and Hiroaki Nishina (the COO) — is looking to commercialize the research done at Kyushu. While neither Kani or Nishina has a long background with battery chemistry (they hail from the telecom and software sectors), they’ve brought on Japanese battery cathode expert Kaname Takeya, who developed the cathode tech used today in the Toyota Prius and the Tesla Model S.

Takeya splits his time between San Francisco and Japan and is the company’s CTO and CEO of its U.S. operations. He just finished a project for Argonne National Labs, and previously also worked on some battery startups including Quallion and EnerDel.

Other companies are looking at ways to engineer carbon to make batteries better. EnerG2 is one of those startups, and the company has developed carbon materials for a variety of battery applications. Because Power Japan Plus’ innovation is in the development of the carbon material, the company is also looking into a side business of selling its carbon to third parties.

Early stage

While the tech has been under development for several years, the founders incorporated just a year ago, and now employ only eight people. To date they’ve been bootstrapping the company, but are hoping to raise funding to help them begin moving into early production later this year.

Funding, particularly in Silicon Valley, could prove to be difficult for an early stage battery manufacturer, given all of the battery startups that have struggled over the years. It’s a difficult market because scaling up battery production can take a long time and, potentially, a lot of money. But big corporations that are interested in ultimately owning or licensing advanced battery tech might still be interested in providing early funding.

Power Japan Plus says it is less capital-intensive than other battery companies because its battery can be manufactured on existing battery production lines. Because the batteries don’t use rare materials and have only one active material, execs say the supply chain is extremely simple, which also reduces costs. Additionally, executives told me that while they want to do some early pilot line production themselves, they know they need a large manufacturing partner if they want to scale up production to offer batteries to electric cars.

Power Japan Plus intends to first launch batteries for the medical device and satellite industries, which are hyper-focused on safety. Later down the road, they could try to tackle electric cars. An electric car with a battery pack of dual-carbon batteries could charge much faster and last much longer on the road, giving it a higher resale value. Currently the team is supplying batteries for a Go-Cart in a transportation proof-of-concept partnership.

In the immediate future, electric cars — at least from dominant players Tesla and Nissan — are betting on lithium ion chemistry for batteries. But farther down the line, other types of chemistries will need to be investigated to provide power for the next generation of electric cars.

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Anyone who has ever seen footage of a hurricane’s aftermath is probably now familiar with the COW, or Cell on Wheels. These temporary cell sites stand in for towers and base stations knocked out by storms (and boost mobile capacity at the Super Bowl), but what happens if a severe storm, earthquake or terrorist attack takes down a far bigger chunk of the communications network?

This week AT&T’s National Disaster Recovery team gave me a sneak peek of an exercise in Chicago to prepare for the most severe outage scenario in its network short of its Global Network Operations Center in New Jersey going offline. The drill was designed to explore how AT&T would deal with a disaster that took out an entire metro central office.

A central office may sound like an admin building, but in telco-speak it’s the term used for those huge windowless buildings packed to the gills with core infrastructure – the terminus for a carrier’s metro fiber lines and way station for all phone conversations. Knocking out a major CO like AT&T’s 27-story concrete monolith on Chicago’s Canal Street could leave much of the Windy City without a dial-tone or internet connection.

So what does AT&T do in case of such a disaster? It brings in a fleet of trucks hauling what amounts to a complete core network in tow. That means fiber trailers to reconnect a city’s downed optical lines, IP recovery trailers that house massive banks of routers, and power trucks and racks upon racks of generators to feed it all.

 

And because an event significant to take out a central office is probably going to do a lot of collateral damage to the network, that means mobile base stations: plenty of COWs, COLTS (cells on light trucks) and satellite uplinks to get emergency responders and the general populace back on the grid immediately. The teams that put all this together are regular AT&T employees, but they’ve all been trained for these disaster recovery scenarios, said AT&T Senior Network Specialist Kelly Morrison, who ran the Chicago exercise.

A major core outage doesn’t happen that often, but it has happened. After 9/11, AT&T’s downtown Manhattan network office suffered a complete failure. The National Disaster Recovery team had to recreate it across the Hudson River in Jersey City, attaching to the same fiber ring that served lower Manhattan.

Nobody is hoping for another disaster of such scale, Morrison said, but AT&T is prepared for outages of even bigger magnitude. The disaster recovery team has $600 million worth of emergency network equipment at its disposal – enough to build a nationwide communications grid in a small country – all of it distributed across the lower 48 states where it can be deployed quickly by truck or plane. Fully equipped, Morrison said, the team can assemble a temporary core network capable of handling 15 terabits per second of capacity.

 

 

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In a major breakthrough in the bitter and long-running war between Apple and Google over smartphone patents, the two companies announced on Friday that they will dismiss all current lawsuits against each other.

In a joint statement, the companies also said they will try to work together to reform the patent system:

Apple and Google have agreed to dismiss all the current lawsuits that exist directly between the two companies. Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform. The agreement does not include a cross license.

A person familiar with the litigation said the truce will end about 20 lawsuits in the United States and Germany, including proceedings before the U.S. International Trade Commission. The person confirmed the statement’s reference to “directly between the companies” meant that the agreement would not immediately affect related patent litigation between Apple and Samsung, or lawsuits involving the Apple-backed patent troll Rockstar.

The person described the process as Apple and Google “putting down their guns.”

Apple and Google also filed a court notice (embedded below) this week in a closely-watched patent appeals case, concerning Google-owned Motorola Mobility, that stated they were dismissing the case.

The bitter patent fight has its roots in Apple’s late CEO, Steve Jobs, declaring in early 2010 that he would start “thermonuclear war” in retaliation for Google’s launch of the Android operating system. Since then, the two companies have sued each other directly, and through proxies, in courtrooms around the world.

The patent fights, which regularly made front-page headlines, have resulted in hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars in legal cost to each side, but have failed to make a material difference in the smartphone market.

The legal brouhaha has, however, led to renewed debates over the role of patents in promoting innovation and led to doubts over the efficacy of the U.S. patent system in the first place, with one famous judge declaring the patent system “dysfunctional.”

Meanwhile, the cascade of patent litigation has also called attention to the problem of so-called patent trolls, which amass old patents in order to arm shell companies that demand licenses from a wide variety of small and large companies — a practice many have likened to extortion.

The arrangement between Apple and Google will also allow the parties to better work together to promote patent reform litigation currently before Congress, the source familiar with the matter said. A bill called the Innovation Act, which would curtain patent trolling, sailed through the House of Representatives in December with the support of President Obama, but is currently being stalled by Democrats in the Senate.

Here’s the filing, first spotted by Reuters.

Apple Moto Dismiss

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Investors may be wary about the shares of companies peddling software that runs in the cloud, but you wouldn’t know it from today’s IPO debut of Zendesk.

Shares of the cloud-based customer support company priced at $9 a share Wednesday and promptly rose by nearly 44 percent to $13 by the early afternoon. Its IPO filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission first became public last month.

The IPO price valued Zendesk at about $632 million, but after the pricing pop, its market cap rose to north of $910 million. It raised about $100 million in the offering. It debuted on the New York Stock Exchange with the trading symbol ZEN.

Zendesk’s biggest shareholder is venture capital firm Charles River Ventures, which holds a 24.5 percent stake. The firm led Zendesk’s 2009 Series A funding. Benchmark Capital is the No. 2 shareholder, with a stake amounting to nearly 19 percent. Benchmark’s Peter Fenton led a $6 million B round and sits on Zendesk’s board. Matrix Partners owns nearly nine percent. CEO Mikkel Svane and Chief Product Officer Alexander Aghassipour each control a little more than seven percent of the company’s shares.

Zendesk has more than 40,000 corporate customers that use its service as the backbone of their customer support efforts. Those customers include startups like Airbnb and Dropbox but also more established companies like Adobe.

Lately the shares of cloud software companies have fallen from recent highs over investor worries about their high valuation metrics and overall lack of profitability.

In a brief interview this morning, I asked Svane whether he thought there’s a bubble mentality around cloud stocks. He diplomatically dodged the question. “It’s hard for me to answer that,” he said. “But I know we are very prepared and ready to be a public company now. We feel good about the decision and think it was the right thing for us to do.”

For its part, Zendesk ran a net loss of $22.6 million on revenue of $72 million in 2013, according to its regulatory filings.

Svane also appeared on CNBC from the NYSE.

The White House's newest report on climate change has a clear message: The globe is getting warmer; it's our fault; and the typhoons, floods, and superstorms we've experienced in recent years will only continue to get worse. NASA agrees.

The aeronautics and space agency has an interactive feature, Images of Change, that shows the dramatic effects of global change, urbanization, extreme storms, and more over time. In the images, giant glaciers melt in the span of weeks, entire rivers dry up in just a few years, and floods devastate crops all around. All the images show the planet in a state of flux.

McCall Glacier Melt, Alaska 

Left: July 1958. Right: Aug. 14, 2003.

Pine Island Glacier Calving, Antarctica 

Left: Oct. 28, 2013. Right: Nov. 13, 2013.

Lake Change, New Mexico 

Left: June 2, 1994. Right: July 8, 2013.

Flood, Cambodia 

Left: May 17, 2013. Right: Oct. 24, 2013.

Reservoir Growth, Mali 

Left: Jan. 21, 1978. Right: Jan. 31, 2004.

Drought, North/South Dakota 

Left: May 18, 2000. Right: April 4, 2004.

Lake Shrinkage, Africa 

Left: Dec. 8, 1972. Center: Dec. 14, 1987. Right: Dec. 18, 2002.

Dam Impact, Paraguay 

Left: May 25, 1985. Right: June 7, 2010.

Flood, Iowa 

Left: Sept. 24, 2010. Right: Aug. 2, 2011.

Petermann Glacier Melt, Greenland 

Left: June 26, 2010. Right: Aug. 13, 2010.

Dam Impact, Pakistan

Left: Aug. 2, 1999. Right: June 8, 2011.

Tornado, Maryland 

Left: May 21, 2001. Right: May 3, 2002.

Correction, 12:30pm PST: An earlier version of this story stated an incorrect date for the "before" picture of Lake change, New Mexico. The correct date is June 2, 1994. 

Correction, 10:00am PST: An earlier version of this story stated an incorrect date for the "before" picture of Dam impact, Pakistan. The correct date is Aug. 2, 1999. 

Images courtesy of Getty and NASA Images of Change

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Depending on where you are in terms of stage, timing, and all the rest, you may or may not particularly care what is happening with the public markets.  I know at EchoSign, once we hit cash-flow positive, I cared a bit less — after all, what did it matter what valuations were, when I didn’t need any capital?  And I know that after the painful Lehman Brothers days, for a long time I stopped even looking at the public markets, because I didn’t want to know.

But it is worth thinking about the state of the public SaaS markets today, for several reasons.

Here’s what we know (on a day, when the leader in SaaS, Salesforce.com — fell -7.01% for very few identifiable reasons):

First, we hit a local maximum in the public markets around late February:

Way back in February, nothing could go wrong.  Valuations, which had grown 2-4x over the past 24 months, seemed to have reached a New Normal.  In the private (i.e., start-up) markets, everyone was leaning forward.

Second, fear has clearly reached the public markets.  It makes no sense for Salesforce to go down -7.01% in a single day without any bad news.  Salesforce’s business fundamentals are not only incredibly strong — they are just as strong as they were 3-6 months ago.  Salesforce is well on its way to $10 billion in ARR, its competitive advantages are increasing, and there are no new material headwinds to justify any sell-off.

But what should multiples and valuations be?  There’s no perfect answer.  That’s up to the public markets to decide.  And they’ve decided almost all high-growth internet companies, and SaaS included (even with its recurring revenue), are overvalued from a valuation perspective.

When you view the data from the above chart, but instead just over the past few months, you start to see it:

 

Third, in the long run, this doesn’t really matter.  We’re still just in the second inning of the migration of all business process to SaaS.  It’s just getting good.  Even if valuations fall 50% … as long as you grow 10x in a few years … you’ll still be up 5x by then.  For SaaS start-ups, falling valuations, at least on paper, really only mean it will take a little longer to grow into your next target valuation.  It doesn’t effect most of us operationally, that much.

>> But, today, the public markets are clearly saying valuations have gotten ahead of themselves.  And at Monday partner meetings at VC firms across the Valley and elsewhere, it’s a large topic of conversation.

Here’s what I see happening, starting now, and for a while at least:

• The frenzy to close hot SaaS deals is going to die down.  Because, people are going to get more comfortable just letting deals go.   Some amazing deals have gotten done, with little diligence and on hyper-competitive terms, over the past 12 months.  And plenty more are in the process of closing.  But there may well be a slow down here, a substantial one, as we come into summer.

• Valuations will probably fall by 50%.  The private/start-up SaaS valuations haven’t — yet — fallen in lock-step with the public markets.  But they are starting to now for later-stage deals.  There’s still a sense in earlier-stage, but post-Traction, SaaS deals that the opportunities are so large that they justify larger valuations (which I agree with).  But maybe in a few months, this will be played out.  And once it is, early stage valuations will have to fall 50% or more.  There’s just too much of a disconnect today between SaaS start-up valuations from the past 12-18 months and the public market valuations today.

• More stress on high-burn models.  I’m all in favor of the Box super-burn, super-growth model.  But it’s quite possible it will go quickly go out of fashion for anyone but the very top players quickly.

• M&A (acquisitions) will slow down, for a while.  It seems like everyone is turning down M&A offers these days.  That’s great.  I’m proud of you.  Just don’t expect the same level of frequency a few months from now, unless multiples rebound.  M&A is most common at the top of the market, for the exact same reasons venture financings are.

• Over time, The Enterprise will get less hot.  It was fun when enterprise all of a sudden became hot.  When TechCrunch didn’t make fun of us anymore — “these incredibly dull companies” was the view circa December 2011.  That may have reached a local maximum as well.  But that’s OK.

This doesn’t mean we’re in any sort of SaaS bubble, or that the bubble is popping.  SaaS is stronger that ever, the leaders are growing faster than ever.  It’s just that valuations may have gotten ahead of the market’s comfort level.  So the public market buyers are selling right now, not buying.  And that means valuations may return to where we were in ’10/’11 or so.  Not the peak of late ’13 and early ’14.  That’s not a bubble popping.  It’s just what happens once you pass a local maximum.

And the bottom line is, at a minimum, we’re well past a local maximum in the public markets.  So if you’re running a SaaS start-up, and you can raise money now, or sell, at an attractive valuation … maybe take it now.  At least, take it now if you were going to anyway over the next 6-9 months. 

Because while it’s just getting good in SaaS — it also doesn’t seem like we’ll be back to a local maximum for quite some time.

(Cross-posted @ saastr)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

The Evernote-LinkedIn approach to business cards doesn't quite eliminate paper, but it could make knowledge retention for future reference much simpler.

Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:
Tech Stocks Crumble As The Market Demands What They Can't Deliver  —  It's a nasty day for technology companies in the public markets, as aging giants like AOL are falling right alongside upstarts with larger market caps like Twitter and Groupon that are popping negative.  —  Forget your IPO window.

Dirk Ercken / Shutterstock

In the wake of Hewlett-Packard’s big cloud-computing announcement today, one competitor was quick to hammer HP for its plan to offer two tiers of the OpenStack cloud computing operating system.

In what amounts to a denominational spat between two adherents of the open-source religion, Dell, the privately held computing giant founded by Michael Dell, issued a statement ahead of HP’s Web conference, chiding HP’s plan to offer a commercial version of OpenStack in addition to the free Community version.

Remember that last year, Dell and Red Hat, the company known for helping companies deploy and manage the open source Linux operating system, teamed up to develop an enterprise-grade version of OpenStack.

Anyone choosing HP’s commercial version runs the risk of having a hard time switching to another vendor if they later decide to make a change. In this context the word “proprietary” is sort of an epithet.

“At Dell, our cloud solutions are based on open architectures with no proprietary lock in. Customers get choice, flexibility and the maximum benefit from their investment,” said Michael Dell in the statement.

In a separate blog post, Dell Enterprise VP Sam Greenblatt (who happens to be a former HP employee) singled out the commercial version, and hearkened back to the days when companies had to choose among hundreds of different versions of Linux:

“Today, Hewlett-Packard announced Helion, which is made up of two components … the open source community edition, which we applaud, and a proprietary edition which includes closed software targeted toward enterprises. With this approach, HP chooses how much proprietary software they want to include into a distribution, which runs counter to the principles of open source distributions. … [and] burdens organizations to have the OpenStack expertise and resources in house to sort through and decide which distribution is right for them, and how to deploy and maintain it.”

I asked analyst Pat Moorhead, head of the boutique research firm Moor Insights and Strategy, to tease out some of the nuance here. It comes down to the degree of openness that each company is practicing and how much that matters to the customer. Different paths to enlightenment, if you will.

“In a pure, open-source model you get the pure, open bits and then add other open bits to make it usable in a business,” he said. “This is what Dell and Red Hat are doing. They are giving the customer the option to use different bits to make the software work.”

What HP is doing with its commercial version, he said, is adding some of those extra bits of software to make OpenStack useful in a business setting, and then selling that as a package. “If you adopt the HP model, you get a turnkey product where a lot of the decisions have been made for you.” The result is something that works but which is arguably harder to move away from if you decide to do so. But the end result is still essentially the same: You get a useful version of OpenStack.

Under the terms of the arrangement between Dell and Red Hat, Dell is selling hardware with Red Hat’s OpenStack installed, amounting to what’s typically known as an OEM arrangement. But the relationship goes further in that Dell has been handling service and support efforts for Red Hat’s OpenStack product, essentially playing the role of consultant, even in instances where the customer is not using Dell hardware. It’s not exactly charity. Dell uses the relationship as a way to build up a channel to sell its hardware and other software products.

In fact, the whole arrangement is a replay of an alliance the two struck around Linux more than a decade ago. With Dell’s considerable sales muscle in its corner, Red Hat’s implementation of Linux went on to become the de facto standard for enterprise computing environments. They’re looking for a repeat.

Observers will simply note that Google’s overall strategy has been to drive both device and Internet access prices lower, ensuring that virtually everybody uses Internet access, all the time, as that drives Google’s ad-supported application revenue model.

And Google Fiber is expanding its footprint.

Following its Chromebooks aimed at the education market, Lenovo added a pair of Chrome OS laptops for consumers on Tuesday. The new devices are very similar to the Chromebooks meant for classrooms and are called the N20 and N20p. The N20 arrives for sale in July for $279, while the N20p launches the following month for $329.

Both share the same Intel Celeron chip that is now becoming fairly standard in Chromebooks, save for a few models from Samsung and HP that use the same type of processor found in smartphones and tablets. The pair also comes with an 11.6-inch display with 1366 x 768 resolution, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, up to 16 GB of internal storage and 100 GB of Google Drive capacity.

The extra $50 for the N20p adds a touchscreen display, capable of 10 simultaneous touch points. That screen also folds back up to 300 degrees, allowing the N20p to be used in a standing mode. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Lenovo’s Yoga 11e Chromebook does the same thing. In fact, the N20p is essentially a consumer model of that computer, while the N20 is similar but lacks the folding display feature.

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The PC is dying, long live the PC! These headlines have been thrown around for years, as sales of laptops and desktops have continually dwindled downward. The tablet has long been pinned as the murderer of the traditional computers and it certainly looked like it was going to be the one to do away with them (perhaps in a few years), with the focus of many companies such as Apple and Microsoft shifting towards a tablet-first world. It’s obvious from the steadily declining shipments of traditional computers and companies exiting the PC market, that it’s not looking good for PCs, with tablets regularly...

This story continues at The Next Web

I hit the streets of San Francisco on an all-too-warm afternoon with camera and notebook in tow, scouting for people wearing what I thought of as the “tech uniform”—the studiedly casual California look associated with startup culture.

You know the look—company T-shirt, jeans, and the omnipresent hoodie. You’ve seen this fresh-from-the-dorm look in films like The Social Network and now in HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” the series that cunningly stereotypes the Bay Area's tech scene. Does reality reflect the Hollywood stereotype?

I grew up in the Bay Area, so I already had an idea in my head, shaped both by pop-culture images and my own lived reality. Documenting the style, I hoped, might make me question my assumptions, as well as understand the genesis of this tech style—if indeed there was a singular style to be found.

In my head, the tech uniform looked a lot like this:

The Tech Uniform: Programmer Drag? 

As noted fashion thinker and ReadWrite muse RuPaul once noted, we are born naked. The rest is drag.

So even as a software developer grabs whatever's clean in his dresser, the choices he makes reflect the culture he lives and works in. Perhaps it’s not drag as much as code—an algorithm designed around efficiency. Whatever you call it, it's a social construction, not something you’re born with or issued when your plane lands at SFO.

The hints are all there: the branded tees and hoodies, the two-wheeled transportation, the stubbly face in transition from a goatee to a beard. Yes, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made hoodies and Adidas flip-flops famous—or infamous. But this image isn't based on any single person’s reality. It's an amalgamation of many converging ideas of what startup culture looks like. 

The idea of a tech uniform, we should note, is also stereotypically male—not so much gendered as male by default, created with the presumption of a male-dominated tech community.  It’s the intersection of many depictions of the “tech guy”, bred both within the culture and outside of it. As author and early Facebook employee Kate Losse wrote, the myth of the "brogrammer” is more a creation of the media than a reflection of reality. Now startup employees are emulating the stereotype, wherein lies its danger.

What's wrong with T-shirts and jeans, you might ask? On the surface, nothing. But the idea of a uniform, whether prescribed by authority or by social pressures, raises questions about who’s wearing it, and hence in the group, and who's outside. Without a uniform, there can’t be an other to exclude.

Clearly I need a company-logo hoodie. I appear to have violated the dress code. #OpenAir #San FranciscoStyle

— Tekla Perry (@TeklaPerry) April 24, 2014

Perhaps it’s the trickle-up effect within the tech community: Young startup entrepreneurs straight out of university carry their casual academic dress into the workplace, from whiteboard sessions to board meetings. In a culture that worships young founders, the startup boss in the graphic tee and cargo shorts sets the tone for the rest of the company.

Suddenly, coworkers and investors are dressing to match the man—and so often it's a man—at the top. Newer employees follow suit. Next thing you know, the whole company looks like it would fit in a lecture hall. 

There’s also a trickle-down effect, as external representations in film and TV weigh on people's fashion choices.

Think about Mark Zuckerberg. Now think about Jessie Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Then think about Andy Samberg parodying Jessie Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg in the The Social Network. Suddenly, the image of the “guy who works in tech” is not only cemented in the minds of the tech community themselves, through three layers of representation and imitation.

Madame Tussauds recently revealed a waxen, shoeless Mark Zuckerberg, with a T-shirt, hoodie, jeans, and brandless MacBook. (Apple’s always so fussy about its appearance.) Along with being barefoot—not a look he’s styled for almost a decade—he's also sitting in a chair cross-legged, which is pushing the chill factor pretty hard. This is the image that will greet tourists from all over the world, an image that will affirm and reify their idea of Silicon Valley. 

It doesn't matter that the Zuckerberg figure doesn’t look much like the nearly 30-year-old man who took the stage recently at a Facebook developer conference.  The tech guy turns into a costume, and programmer drag comes into existence.

The Brogrammer Myth Becomes Reality

If brogrammers did not exist, the producers of “Silicon Valley" would have to invent them. As Losse, the early Facebook employee, noted in her essay on the myth of the brogrammer,  the term, a portmanteau of “bro” and “programmer,” gained traction in the media in recent years despite starting as an inside joke, a mocking of overcompensatory masculinity among programmers who recognized that their profession was not particularly butch. A developer who rejected "typical" programmer personality traits like nerdiness and introversion in favor of the sporty gregariousness of a college jock or fraternity pledge would not have fit in well at Facebook or anywhere.

Yet as startups and technology became a sexy, mainstream phenomenon, and programming widens in its appeal, the “brogrammer” myth, picked up by the media, turns into an ideal. You can have it all, kids—startup riches and bro-sanctioned masculinity! Thus the uneasy marriage of the hoodie and the Under Armour compression T-shirt, the hipster bike pants and the designer jeans in today's Silicon Valley.

If watching HBO's “Silicon Valley,” which paints brogrammers as code-typing, conniving bullies in tight T-shirts with the wrong kind of Valley accent, hurts a little, it's because it cuts too close to the truth. 

Take a stroll around San Francisco’s South of Market district, though, and you’ll see fewer fist bumps and spandex tees and more men who look like the show’s main character, Richard, in his button-up shirt and slacks.

And that’s where “Silicon Valley” inches closer to the real deal. The parody approaches parity with reality.

The Street Styles Of SoMa 

I wasn't going to find the answers watching TV shows or reading essays on the Web, so I decided to set out and document San Francisco’s real styles.

Setting forth from ReadWrite’s San Francisco headquarters—at Third and Townsend, a block away from Caltrain and in the heart of SoMa, I began my search for the real tech uniform. 

Scouting people for photos in such an enclosed tech bubble is not an easy feat. Everyone has somewhere to go, lunch to get, people to meet. 

Marcus Ubungen, a film director who works out of downtown San Francisco at Goodby Silverstein, stopped to pose before hopping into an Uber—reminding us that the apps on one's phone are as much a part of the uniform as the T-shirt on one's body. 

The trend seemed to be stylishly casual from the start. San Francisco favors comfort over fussy and complicated outfits.

Kanyi Maqubela, a venture partner at Collaborative Fund, says most of his colleagues wear limited-edition sneakers to work—an option that combines a studied ease with deliberate self-expression. 

I caught up with Vijay Karunamurthy of Avos in line at Philz Coffee. Karunamurthy, who helped create Avos’s Mixbit video app, doesn't think Silicon Valley techies pay too much attention to what other people wear. That leads individuals to feel more free to be who they are. He calls it "casual with a purpose."

A Flock Of Coders

HBO’s "Silicon Valley" paints groups of programmers as a stereotyped flock of five—"a tall skinny white guy, short skinny Asian guy, fat guy with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair, and then an East Indian guy. It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group." 

This stereotype defied discovery—I couldn't find a group like this if I tried. But I did catch this trio emerging from GitHub's San Francisco headquarters. 

These three GitHubbers took a different stance towards tech culture's widespread dress-for-comfort attitude. 

GitHub's David Newman describes that attitude as "intentionally casual."

He explained that often in a tech company, newer employees will want to wear clothes marked with the company logo in order to represent the brand. 

After the initial phase of decking themselves out in head-to-toe company merch, employees then go through a period of distancing from the brand.

The science of a tech company shirt is really complex. Wearing newer shirts could signify a newbie—a new hire. Non-company shirts may be worn by a longtime staffer comfortable in his role. Or these longstanding employees might also wear older company T-shirts, with outdated logos, to indicate all the years they've put in. 

At this point in the conversation I felt as though I was being taught the etiquette of a 17th-century French court.

This idea that specific T-shirt customs within a tech company can follow certain rules and imply meaning, power, and hierarchy is a fascinating one.

It’s an example of how the everyday fashion choices of bosses and coworkers influences others in the company. Employees may not judge one another for their brand of plaid for the day, but a 2008-era GitHub shirt? That alone speaks volumes.

Logowear also makes statements about class and attitude towards wealth.

Jake Boxer, a developer at GitHub, points out that most people in tech just wear what they can get for free. That conveys a certain attitude towards material possessions that’s common in the tech culture.

Yet there remains a yearning for more: Dressed in GitHub’s signature Octocat-branded hoodie alongside his sweater-clad colleagues, Boxer tells me he regularly looks towards his more fashion-forward coworkers for style inspiration, because as he puts it, using video-game-inspired slang, “We could all level up a little bit." Not that one has much to aspire to. It’s hard to level up when the average level is so low. Fabian Perez, a designer at GitHub who comes from the northeastern U.S., finds fashion in San Francisco's tech culture uninspired compared to what he's used to.

A Moving Target

I caught Lumen Sivitz, CEO of Mighty Spring, next to his bike. Besides leaving a smaller carbon footprint, this choice of transportation plays a huge part in one's work attire. (Try biking to work in a three-piece suit.)

Sivitz says that his outfit depends on the context of his day. He'll wear a button-up for business meetings, for example. He says none of his colleagues appear to invest too much in what he's wearing—again, a theme that in tech, you dress for yourself.

MyProject engineer Dan Wiesenthal agrees that the tech bubble is a relatively judgement-free zone in terms of fashion, where comfort and individuality take precedent over getting in the good style graces of a colleague. 

What I appreciated most was the idea that all that mattered in getting ready in the morning was their happiness for the day. Sivitz and Wiesenthal explained that "… it's all about the right T-shirt," paired with some brown boots or sneakers. So much meaning in such simple garb.

So maybe TV does get it right sometimes. I saw bits and pieces of my stereotypical tech-guy avatar at various points in my photo journey; a fixie bike here, some Warby Parker glasses there, and company T-shirts everywhere.

Like so many other styles of clothing, the tech uniform is a mishmash of street style and mainstream influences. Through it all, there’s a fundamental idea: Dressing not for success, but for happiness. It's a dream we can all aspire to—if only putting on the uniform was all we had to do to live the fantasy of today's Silicon Valley.

Photos by Madeleine Weiss for ReadWrite, Illustration by Nigel Sussman and Madeleine Weiss for ReadWrite 

Vjeran Pavic

I didn’t want to wear Google Glass at all, ever. But, after so many reports of late of people hating on the face computer in San Francisco, right in the area it was born, my editor assigned me to do it.

One guy had his Glass ripped off his face and stomped, someone else was reportedly attacked at a local dive bar and the city is rife with stories of rejection of and disdain for so-called “Glassholes.”

It’s increasingly clear that some in San Francisco have had uncomfortable reactions to Google Glass since the mobile devices started rolling out to select “Explorers” last April.

But how could such a harmless-looking device cause so much consternation? Is it because it represents the dystopian future to come, where humans can only engage via products glued to their heads? Or that it might be recording, tagging and cataloging everyone within sight, with or without their permission, to become part of the greater and ever-growing ocean of information for the search Charybdis?

Or is it because they are just ugly, meaning no people will ever procreate again — or, as the meme goes, is it a chastity belt for the face?

I thought I’d make the best of it and spend a night on the town flirting while wearing the famous face computer to see if the story could change at all.

The plan: I would write a piece on all the ways I could chat someone up with a five-megapixel camera and 12 gigabytes of memory attached to my forehead. I’d text a prospect my number while we talked. I’d videotape our first drink together. If things went well, I’d Google their favorite movie scene, and we’d watch it together right there in the bar.

The two stories I mentioned above have become legendary. One woman, Sarah Slocum, claimed to have been attacked by a crowd at Molotov’s bar, although her story has since been called into question. More recently, Kyle Russell, a reporter for Business Insider, had his Glass torn off his face and smashed on the sidewalk into little bits.

But I figured, with the device roving the city for a whole year, surely we were ready to start having at least some fun with it.

Wrong, as you can see from the many texts I sent to my editor as I stepped out for the night:

So, maybe we weren’t ready to discover the joys of flirting via a computer that rests on the ears and has a jutting screen that floats just over the right eye.

Maybe the story was actually about getting kicked out of iconic bars across San Francisco — it seemed like I was on a good path toward that. So, on another recent night, I started out in the Marina neighborhood, at the Balboa Cafe, a historic cougar bar where as a teenager I’d used my mom’s ID to get in (and no one would question it, which tells you everything).

But I had no problem getting into the Balboa as a grown woman. A grown woman wearing Glass. I sat down. A table of 30-something revelers in paper party hats stared at me. The bartender asked what I wanted, and then paused.

“Hey, so what’s wrong with you?” asked Brian Seifert, who has been tending bar at the Balboa for 15 years.

I queried if I should leave of my own accord or be kicked out in a dramatic fashion. Too dramatic, it seems. He cocked his head and told me I could stay, but he had a few things he wanted to say to me first.

“It’s insidious enough to have iPhones everywhere,” Seifert began. “A bar is a place to be as free as you want to be, to do what you want to do. It’s a safe space.”

The other bartender, Adam, walked over. It was almost midnight on a rainy Tuesday night, so there wasn’t much action.

“There’s nothing inherently bad about them, unless we catch you videotaping in the men’s bathroom or something, but they’re weird as shit,” Adam opined about Glass. “That you’d need this on your face, to me, is just inherently idiotic. I’m not a doomsday prepper, but I do think it’s vastly unimportant, all this antisocial tech. It’s dull.”

Moving on.

Across town at the Tempest, a bike-messenger bar, the bartender sighed when I came in wearing Glass. Neither he nor the burly leather-clad men on the wooden stools cared about my presence, and I was completely ignored.

At Bourbon and Branch, a speakeasy in the Tenderloin district, I was standing at the bar taking a break and thinking about ordering something, when a tall Argentine fellow sidled up next to me and said he’d like to buy me a drink — as long as he could try on my Glass.

It was finally happening: Glass flirting!

Rodrigo, who works as an analyst for McKinsey and was at the bar with an American friend from business school, gently removed my face computer and tried it on. Unfortunately, he then spun around and started chatting up another girl, Nicole. He tipped the Glass over his nose so he could peer over them and wink at her. He pretended to take a picture with it. He pretended that it was a laser and everyone was naked, which Nicole thought was hilarious. He helped her try them on. He was rocking it. This was Glass flirting. Just not with me.

Rodrigo’s friend Brian, a mobile and Wi-Fi product manager at Facebook who lives in the neighborhood, leaned over.

“Dude, what are you doing? Glass is fucking revolting,” Brian said, who asked that his last name not be used because his friend is one of the Glass product managers. “It’s like something about it just makes me mad.”

Rodrigo smiled: “You just don’t appreciate it here anymore. You’re jaded.”

Finally — and with a significant amount of back and forth — I reclaimed my Glass from Rodrigo and Nicole and made the pilgrimage to one last place, the site of the first Glass drama: Molotov’s.

While the earliest Explorers reported amused, curious responses from strangers, local San Franciscans seem to have been less enthusiastic. The little device has become a negative symbol, much like the company’s much-maligned shuttle system.

But it goes beyond the shuttles, which drive people crazy here. Glass seems actually dangerous to some in the City by the Bay. When I wore the device in New York or L.A., for example, people stared; some smiled. The dry cleaner was a little worried, but kids on the subway wanted to try it on.

In San Francisco, the response was different: Everyone knows exactly what it is, and they don’t like it. Maybe the more we’re around Glass, the less we like it.

Maybe Glass is something that doesn’t grow on people.

Yes. The Molotov bouncer put his hands out in front of him to stop me as I started to walk in.

“No, not allowed. No computers on the face,” he said, before asking me to please go on the other side of the street. The other side of the street. As in, across the street.

A young man named Eric was smoking outside, and started backing away from me.

“Whoa, too soon, man. Too soon.”

Or maybe, just maybe, too late.

Here’s How to Come Home Alone With Glass

I eventually wrangled a colleague into joining me (and my Glass) for a beer, and I came up with some flirty face-computer tricks for the occasion. For those who don’t live in Glass-phobic San Francisco and might actually stand a chance with this effort, these could be helpful. And Google offers its own “exploring” ideas.

As will be typical of your own Glass-flirting encounters, the person I met was initially surprised that I was recording and Googling them, but I didn’t let that stop me. Who’s to say which first drink will be the first with your soul mate? And Googling someone as you’re talking to them is the best way to make sure you know what school they went to.

Some good entry questions:

Can I Facebook friend you?

Can I Google you?

Want to know the score?

Want to watch a video of my cat?

Can I tape our first drink, since it’s a special moment and ours will be a lasting love?

Want to try on my Glass? (This one might actually work.)

Teri Virbickis/Shutterstock

It’s hard to miss a pattern that has emerged in the current crop of tech startups either going public, being acquired or getting funded in recent months: While the majority have been based in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, a fair number have also come from Colorado.

It has been about a year since Boulder-based Rally Software, a company that supplies software development tools in the cloud, raised $84 million in an IPO. More Colorado companies are likely headed down the IPO pipeline: Denver-based Ping Identity, which supplies software to help companies manage the login credentials of their employees, raised $44 million in a Series F last year in anticipation of an IPO that could happen this year. And just last week, Twitter acquired Boulder-based Gnip, a supplier of Twitter’s data stream, after it had raised about $7 million in two funding rounds.

While it’s no Silicon Valley, Colorado’s venture capital community is gaining momentum. Today the state’s leading venture capital organization will announce a new conference called the Colorado Venture Summit to be held on June 19 that’s intended to promote new business in the Rocky Mountain state, where VCs have invested roughly $3.5 billion since 2008.

There are practical advantages to starting up in Colorado. The cost of living is lower, so salaries tend to be a bit lower than in San Francisco or New York. Robert Half, a staffing firm, pegs the average starting salary of a software developer in Boulder at about $85,000 a year versus about $101,000 a year in San Francisco.

The same is true of real estate. The average lease on San Francisco office space has been creeping up to $60 and $70 a square foot in some cases. The average in Denver hit a record last year of $32 a square foot.

Those factors can make a difference, said Jim Franklin, CEO of SendGrid, a company that provides cloud-based email marketing services. “It’s not as cheap to operate here as it is in Iowa or Kansas City, but it’s not as expensive as New York or Boston or San Francisco either,” he said.

Colorado has seen its share of business cycles – booms and busts, for sure, but also a long series of successful exits, said David Gold, the chairman of the conference and a managing director at Access Venture Partners, a VC firm based in Westminster, Colo. “One of the great things that has happened in Colorado over the last 15-20 years is that we’ve had a lot of new companies get started from the second layer of executives. That kind of talent base takes a long time to build and we’ve been doing it here for decades.”