Silicon Valley

SAN FRANCISCO--For the record, although "Game of Thrones" is said to have perhaps the largest cast in television history, Craig Newmark is not on the hit HBO show.

Which raises the question: Why was the founder of Craigslist making his way down the red carpet rope line at the "Game of Thrones" season three premiere here last night?

In contrast to the real premiere, held a night earlier in Los Angeles, the event here was filled to brimming with the best and brightest in the world of technology. Twitter employees were abundant, some sporting shirts with … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas -- SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk wowed a capacity SXSW crowd here today with the first public showing of a video of a rocket capable of blasting off and then returning safely and gently to the ground. And he later added he hopes to one day travel (perhaps one-way) to Mars.

The video of the company's Grasshopper rocket, filmed just about a day-and-a-half ago, demonstrates one of SpaceX's key propositions: That it can develop reusable rockets at a fraction of the cost of a traditional NASA mission, and that it can bring them back down … Read more

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who last year purchased his own Hawaiian island, bought a small airline that services the island chain.

Island Air announced the acquisition in a press release today that noted there would be no staff or operational changes as a result of its sale to Ellison. Financial terms of the transaction were not revealed.

"We are excited Mr. Ellison has acquired Island Air. He has the vision and resources to literally take Island Air to new heights," Island Air President Les Murashige said in a statement published by the Associated Press. The airline announced last … Read more

The one thing everyone wants to know about Christian Gheorghe's life is the one thing he won't talk about.

In Silicon Valley, where the top talent at the hottest companies -- the Zuckerbergs, the Brins, the Cooks, and so forth -- are household names and paparazzi bait, Gheorghe's name isn't in play. Though he is a Silicon Valley CEO, his company, Tidemark, makes enterprise-focused performance and financial management applications, certainly not the sexiest of products.

But to a category of people who matter a lot in Valley -- the VCs -- Gheorghe is a bona-fide hero, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In an era of "Entourage" and a well-publicized fleet of planes personally owned by Google's top execs, the private jet has never before seemed as accessible to so many.

The truth is, of course, that just a tiny fraction of the population will ever set foot on any plane other than a commercial airliner, but traveling by Gulfstream has become romanticized in popular culture, and as that's happened, there's been a rise in the number of companies aiming to provide a more efficient, and more affordable way to fly private.

Into that new environment … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--I'm standing behind Leo Villareal, watching the well-known artist calibrate settings in the software running on his screen. Each time he moves a slider, one of the world's largest art installations -- mounted on one of the world's most-famous landmarks -- changes in an instant.

It's a gorgeous evening on the Embarcadero, San Francisco's eastern waterfront, with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge dominating the landscape in front of us, and a near-full moon doing its best to overcome the typical evening fog cover. Lights from the city, and from Oakland on the other side of the bay reflect brilliantly in the water. And with just the most subtle adjustments in his custom-designed software, Villareal makes thousands of LEDs strung out over the 1.8 mile-long western span of the bridge almost instantaneously change what they're doing, and how they're interacting with each other. … Read more

Fame is an insidious little thing.

It seems like the only current currency. Get it and you're made. Keep it and you can get a maid, and a butler.

That appears to have been part of the thinking of Shirley Hornstein, who not so long ago made much of Silicon Valley believe she was an It Woman.

Sometime later, it transpired she was full of It.

Should the tale not be tattooed on your cranium, Hornstein was a dab hand at Photoshop. She dabbed her face into pictures of famous stars like Justin Timberlake, and Silicon Valley, known for … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Maynard Webb is a fixer.

When Webb was asked to take control of eBay's failing IT operations in 1999, the company was in full-scale crisis. The then-young, fast-growing site had become the poster child for dot-com instability as it suffered through a series of outages. CNN crews, as Webb remembers, were parked outside eBay's offices, waiting for the next headline-grabbing crash.

Nearly 14 years later, eBay is a mature company (at least by dot-com standards) and Webb is considered one of the elder statesmen of Silicon Valley. He left eBay several years ago and is now … Read more

Somehow "Mad Men" just sounds cooler than "Sili Men." Still, there's no telling what sort of martini and microchip soaked show some wild-eyed TV exec might concoct after seeing PBS' upcoming "American Experience" documentary on the origins of Silicon Valley.

Take a peek at the photo above. Just look at that chrome-y Fairchild Semiconductor logo in that oh-so-midcentury interior. Check out those natty suits and spectacles. And (sigh) look at that dreamy, tieless rebel in the foreground -- he makes Don Draper look like a wuss.… Read more