The SF Bay Area is a great place to start a tech company. There is literally no other place on earth that combines the people with the technology knowledge and “far-out” ideas with the more practical people like the hands-on managers, lawyers, accountants, and other support people. Throw in a tremendous amount of money people who are willing to take risks for a high return on their investment, and you get the “Greatest Tech Show on Earth” called Silicon Valley.

This concentration of brain power (or maybe a combo of brain power with a dash of nonreality) may explain the latest fixation by Silicon Valley residents. Costco, a large chain of warehouse stores, is reporting a run on rice and flour in the SF Bay Area. For those of you who have been busy watching the price of gasoline rise, you missed that the cost of rice has doubled in the last few months. There have even been riots overseas such as those in Haiti as the cost of food climbs beyond what the normal person can afford.

Costco has stated that there is no reason to worry about running out of rice; they have plenty. Someone needs to explain to the geniuses hoarding rice that the US is the world’s 4th largest exporter of rice. California is one of the biggest producers of rice in the US.

But maybe these people are simply timing the rice market. Maybe they believe that a big hurricane will hit Louisiana, another large producer of rice, and send the price soaring. Then they will break out their stored Costco rice and sell it on eBay. They could make a killing.

As rice becomes more rare than Internet startups with good business plans, we may be reduced from eating sushi to only being able to afford sashimi. Oh the horror!

Technorati tags: Costco, rice, food riots, Silicon Valley

Attended the NewTech meeting last night.  Came late and left early because I have so many other things to do.  It is really terrible because it is a great meeting to network.

Of the presentation, the two best were neighboroo.com and thinkfree.com.  Neighboroo was one that had popped onto my radar earlier, but I did not have a chance to research them.  They are essentially a mashup between statistical data and local market locations.  For example, they mash Google maps with the U.S. census data to show in visual format the percentage of people between the ages of, say, 20-30 year old that live in a certain zip code.  They can also how areas are divided based on numbers of Democrats and Republicans or Muslims, Jews, and Christians or by level of income.  Basically, if someone has polled for this data and they can get their hands on it, Neighboroo can show it.  It is a great use for people moving to new areas and for retailers interested in opening new stores in other locations.

Thinkfree is essentially Office-on-the-web.  You can work on and create your own doc, xls, and ppt files in your free account at their web site.  This company has been working on creating the software from scratch since around 1999.  It is based on Java and should be pretty solid.  This service would be great for people who want to collaborate over long distances or who are traveling and want to use Office products from anywhere in the world without having to drag all the files with them.  Basically, it would be great for any world travelers to work as they travel. The best feature is that it is supposed to work almost seamlessly with Microsoft products.  So you can open a basic Office file in Thinkfree (they support 85% of Microsoft features), work on it on the web, and then save it back to your hard drive in the future as a completely compliant Office doc. The one feature that they seem to be missing is the ability to trace changes at the line level for groups of people working on a single file.  This feature will probably be added in the future.

Technorati tags: NewTech, Neighboroo, Thinkfree, networking, Silicon Valley, travel, travel tools

Yesterday I expanded my network by attending the very excellent SVC Wireless Networking Dinner.  If you are not familiar with SVC Wireless, they are the Silicon Valley-China Wireless Tech Association.  They are a great organization that has a ton of events with all sorts of relevant speakers and networking events.  I usually am hard pressed to get time for all their events, but I always try to attend their annual meetings.  They take about half of a Saturday and include speakers from the top mobile companies.  For me this is a short cut to actually going to Asia.  I have been told that Asia is about a couple of years ahead of the US in cell phone usage, although the US is catching up.  If something works in Asia, then there is a good chance it will work here. 

The dinner was a wonderful networking opportunity.  Everyone was interested in talking about their business and searching for possible collaborations.  It was a very energetic environment.

I was so interested in talking with other attendees that person in charge had to politely tell us to come to dinner three times. Ken Liew, VP Networking, and Allie Xiong, Director Networking, were great organizers and made a point of introducing everyone.

 The choice of restaurant was also inspired.  The great Singaporean food at Prima Taste USA was inspired.  I would kill for the recipe for the baby squid appetizer and the ladyfingers. 

You can join SVC Wireless for free to get the newsletters and emails.  For only $50 you can become a full member and get in free to their events.  In Silicon Valley, this is a great deal and explains how they have 3800 members.

Technorati tags: Silicon Valley, SVC Wireless, wireless, networking, Prime Taste USA, Singapore food