Russia Takes a Big Step Into Technology

Russia Takes a Big Step Into Technology
A group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who bet on companies like Skype and Facebook are taking a look at another long-shot proposition — that Russia can diversify its economy away from oil.

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Forbes® Greatest Technology Stories: Inspiring Tales of the Entrepreneurs and Inventors Who Revolutionized Modern Business

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You’ll never look at your laptop the same way again Backed by Forbes’ excellence in reporting, this book follows on the success of the blockbuster Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time to bring readers another series of remarkable stories–this time, focusing on business technology. Forbes Greatest Technology Stories goes behind the great technology empires and introduces readers to the visionaries who made them. This book profiles fascinating characters such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andy Grove and other high-tech entrepreneurs. Here are the little-known inventors and even the failures that helped lead the way to striking changes in our business landscape and in the very way we live our lives. * From the first computers to the Internet, intriguing stories of how business seized on the new technologies and forever changed our lives * In the tradition of Forbes’ tremendously successful Greatest Business Stories of All Time Jeffrey Young (Silicon Valley, CA) is a Forbes contributing editor and writes business technology stories for Forbes, Forbes ASAP, and Forbes Digital Tool. He is also the author of Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward.

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Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley

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Silicon Valley, a small place with few identifiable geologic or geographic features, has achieved a mythical reputation in a very short time. The modern material culture of the Valley may be driven by technology, but it also encompasses architecture, transportation, food, clothing, entertainment, intercultural exchanges, and rituals. Combining a reporter’s instinct for a good interview with traditional archaeological training, Christine Finn brings the perspectives of the past and the future to the story of Silicon Valley’s present material culture. She traveled the area in 2000, a period when people’s fortunes could change overnight. She describes a computer’s rapid trajectory from useful tool to machine to be junked to collector’s item. She explores the sense that whatever one has is instantly superseded by the next new thing–and the effect this has on economic and social values. She tells stories from a place where fruit-pickers now recycle silicon chips and where more money can be made babysitting for post-IPO couples than working in a factory. The ways that people are working and adapting, are becoming wealthy or barely getting by, are visible in the cultural landscape of the fifteen cities that make up the area called “Silicon Valley.”Amazon.com Review
Observing the dot-com boom and bust was like watching time-lapse photography; it seemed unreal, unsettling, yet deeply compelling. How can we try to understand the cultural changes wreaked by the last “new economy” of the 20th century? Oxford scholar Christine A. Finn spent 2000 in San Jose and its surrounding valley, exploring the personal and material culture of the area. Her outsider’s report, Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley, is a great start for students of the accelerating rate of social change.

Though she’s no techie herself, she has an uncanny knack for meeting the right people at the right time to get the information she needs to drive her story onward. Talking with successes and failures, pre-IPO orchard workers turned uncertain service industry workers, and unashamed old-tech geeks, she finds a wealth of passion and confusion as social upheaval threatens to make the area’s daily earthquakes nothing more than a convenient bundle of metaphors.

Finn is blessed with the ability and willingness to admit her own bafflement–when the goings-on get too weird for her to explain, she just shrugs her shoulders and moves on, leaving explanations to later theorists. Written just as the bust was recognized as more than a temporary setback, Artifacts could have been an epitaph or a morality play; instead, Finn guides the reader to a broader understanding of human motivation and behavior amidst trying times. –Rob Lightner

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Regional Innovation And Global

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Among the interesting developments of the 20th century has been the economic rise of such nations as Japan and Taiwan and the relative decline of Latin American countries, of the UK, and so on. In order to understand this ebb and flow, economists have begun to appreciate the evolutionary nature of socio-economic change, the important role that technological and research capabilities play in this dynamic, and the apparently paradoxical observation that globalization typically relies on local behaviour. An analytic lens has been developed by Lundvall, Freeman, Nelson and others, called “the national system of innovation.” This approach recognizes both the highly creative nature of economic growth and economic adjustment in a turbulent world and the highly uneven or lumpy distribution of growth. This approach leads to an understanding that economic growth is not a “national” phenomenon, but a highly specific reaction to change: hence the rise of Silicon Valley. What is missing in the national systems approach isa mechanism through which to understand innovation when the realistic unit of analysis is no longer the nation state. In this volume, some of the leading scholars in the field set out to broaden the systems of innovation approach conceptually and empirically, to include both subnational and transnational systems of innovation.

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Hive45 Episode #9 1/3 – Facebook, Pixel mindfcuk

Facebook is kicking ass for this week ending the 28/03/10: Facebook virtual currency trademark and the potential for a global Internet currency, turning point in history as Facebook overtakes Google in traffic numbers, new Photoshop playing the game of magic AI with their “content-aware fill” feature, epic display technology on its way to consumers and the implications of touchscreen everything, and some freedom of speech topics thrown in for good measure. Please visit the website to see the full show notes and links: hive45.com Stories covered this week: Facebook Virtual Currency On Its Way, Facebook Overtakes Google Web Traffic, Wikipedia: Mark Zuckerberg, Zynga Facebook Games, Facebook Releasing ‘Like’ Button Platform Across Internet, Digg.com, Wikipedia: Kevin Rose, Google Buzz, Reddit IAMA: Facebook Employee On Likes, 22 Megapixel Touchscreen Wall Video, 3D Projection on Buildings Video, UrbanScreen Light Graffiti, 3D Moving Blocks Projection Video, Displax Nanowire Polymer Multitouch Interface, Photoshop CS5 Content-Aware Fill Video Demo, Photoshop CS5 Content-Aware Fill Spoof Video, Wikileaks.org, Wikileaks Releases Sensitive Video “Collateral Murder”, Wikileaks Leaked Australian Site Blacklist, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Google Censors Encyclopedia Dramatica Article on Aboriginals, Business Insider, Silicon Valley Insider, Techcrunch: Twision Twitter TV Show, Twision on Veo7, SMBC Santa Comic

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