Last week, Recode's veteran tech reporter Kara Swisher visibly held an aggressive interview with Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey , who has been on something of a meandering press tour over the last few months, which has led to more questions than it's seemingly answered , as h…
Silicon Valley has been the leader in many things for decades, but rarely has the region's first place position been for something as undesirable as air quality. Following the record-setting disaster that has wiped out my one-time hometown of Paradise , Bay Area residents are cho…
Let's talk about the Camp Fire for a second. My family moved to Paradise in 1991, as I was starting 8th grade. I lived there through high school, until heading to college. The family stayed until all kids had graduated high school - the last in 2004. (This story is adapted from a…
My plea to Jack on Twitter . Web content has typically divided into three camps - those who create, those who react, and those who just watch. The lurkers, if you will. From the very earliest days of blogging, those first posts awaited the inevitable comments, and, given a clear …
My first two years in Silicon Valley were spent in Burlingame at a dotcom that hoped to revolutionize telecommunicatons online - with Web meetings, conference calls and even faxing from the Web. They had great services, but not enough customers, and eventually ran out of funding …
Editor’s Note: Part 12 in an irregular series of stories from my many years in Silicon Valley. Part 11 talked about the time I got called into HR's office to meet with lawyers over industrial espionage . This time, a story involving gray hat search engine marketing in the early d…
This looks like an ad. But it's just a few recent Chromebooks. In 2011, on my first day at Google , I was asked to pick out a laptop. The choices were slim - a thin Apple MacBook Air or the larger MacBook Pro, a forgettable Windows equivalent, or a Linux device more suitable for …
People are constantly on their phones. All day. There's a flurry of debate over whether smartphones and their apps have become too addicting . While there is no complete agreement over how often smartphone users access their phones each day, estimates put the number at anywhere f…
The World Wide Web was designed to primarily do three things - inform, discover and connect. A globally connected series of documents could instantly bring you to the thoughts and experiences of someone across the world. In the earliest designs of the Web, it was through hyperlin…
Career Paths Are Often Circuitous Routes My career in Silicon Valley started before I'd even graduated from college. Rather than plug away at Berkeley and try to get top grades, I split my time my senior year between going to classes and commuting across the Bay Bridge to Burling…
The 2018 Social Media Flow is Driven by Content Silos In the ten-plus years since I started this blog, one of the clearest trends on the Web has been for destination sites to want to control the user session and experience. In parallel, sites focused on aggregating content from e…
Some time last year, we installed five Google Home units in our house. One was placed in the master bedroom. One each went in both our kids' rooms, as well as one in the office, and one downstairs in the kitchen. Knowing that asking Google any question was just a simple request a…
This nice home would probably go for $2 million in some Bay Area cities. That Silicon Valley housing is very expensive is no surprise to anyone who is paying attention. Fueled by a bullish tech market for the better part of a decade, with inventory dramatically constrained, each …
At the beginning of last year, as the Trump presidency sickeningly took hold, I worried his mere presence and daily volleys against what most of us thought to be good and proper, right and just, would dominate our every thought and conversation . His long shadow of darkness const…
The Web always promised to bring people together. But just as simply, it can drive people apart, as geographical barriers or partial or full anonymity empowers people to say things or behave in ways they wouldn't in a direct setting. Accelerated by the new reality of realtime str…
Each year, American businesses are confronted with estimates that upwards of $2 to $4 billion in worker productivity is lost thanks to employee office pools around March Madness, the month-long college basketball championship tournament. Conventional wisdom has it that the tens o…
Editor’s Note: Part 11 in an irregular series of stories from my many years in Silicon Valley. Part 10 talked about the time I left my job for a competitor and rescinded the offer. This time, a story involving industrial espionage, the SVP of HR and way too many lawyers. If I cou…
It has been years since I wore a watch regularly. Considering I’m rarely more than an arm’s length away from any smart device, I’d weaned myself away long ago — relying instead on my phone, laptop or tablet to give the time. And in the past few years, with many different smartwat…
Once again, the tech web is aflutter about a proposed change in Twitter’s timeline — as they have finally made a choice to offer more than a simply chronological feed of updates displayed in the order they were posted. While a chronological order of tweets can be considered a hal…
It’s no secret the stock market has been more than a little bit rough this year. After years of growth and optimistic enthusiasm about Internet giants, promising biotech pioneers who aimed to change the world, and starry eyed hope for unprofitable unicorns, 2016 has seen record s…