Google announced today that it is getting a new Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Ruth Porat is headed to California to become Google’s CFO. She was CFO at Morgan Stanley. Porat grew up in Cambridge, MA and Silicon Valley. She studied at Stanford before heading out to study in London and Wharton. She joined Morgan Stanley in… Continue Reading
San Francisco bay area has a rich history of filmmaking. The tradition goes all the way to the early 20thc when Niles Canyon near Fremont was home to the Silent Film Industry. Many silent films were produced in the studios of Niles Canyon. Fast forward to the late 1960s when Francis Ford Coppolo and George… Continue Reading
Louis Lumiere and Auguste Lumiere, the French inventors showed their first motion picture in Paris on March 22, 1895. They made the film using Cinematographe, which in turn was inspired by Thomas Edison’s invention Kinetascope. “Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory,” is less than a minute long and to use that hackneyed phrase the rest is history.… Continue Reading
Today is World Water day and naturally there are lots of stories, photo essays and interviews about water and how millions of people around the world have no access to water. The hashtag #worldwaterday is trending on social media and is helping create awareness about water right from paucity of water to how to solve the problem… Continue Reading
San Francisco bay area has a rich history of filmmaking going back to the late 19th when Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the moving picture of a horse to Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University. In the early 20th the bay area was home to the Silent Film industry and Niles Canyon near Fremont was home to Essanay… Continue Reading
Facebook unveiled a new feature today that lets you send and receive money through Facebook messenger.”It is easy and free,” is how the the Menlo Park-based company described this new feature that will be available to users in the US in the coming months. Facebook introduced Messenger in 2011 that is used by millions of… Continue Reading
San Francisco-based Pinterest, a visual bookmarking company has raised $367 million at a valuation of $11 billion according to the Wall Street Journal. This is Series G round reports the Financial Times on the company’s latest round of funding. In 2004 Pinterest raised $200 million at a valuation of $5 billion per NYT DealBook. The company is not done… Continue Reading
American fruits and nuts in Bangalore you ask? Yes, you can find California pistachios, Washington apples and Oregon pears from big grocery stores to the corner mom and pop shops. According to one report California almonds rank fifth in the list of American exports to India.
Apple Watch was not the only thing that CEO Tim Cook and his team announced yesterday at their much anticipated March Spring Forward event in San Francisco. They announced a clutch of new products and services like an all-new MacBook, MacBook Pro, ResearchKit and HBO NOW on Apple TV. In case you missed here are… Continue Reading
Really sorry to see Gigaom shut down. If someone knew how to do things in style it was Om Malik, the founder of the influential technology website based in San Francisco. Earlier this evening this is what Om wrote: “There will be time for postmortems, but not today. Today, I want to thank all the people… Continue Reading
“Make It Happen” is the theme for this year’s International Women’s Day. Everyday millions of women make it happen for themselves, their family and the society around the world. Over the years I have interviewed many women from different walks of life and have been lucky to talk to them about their lives and how… Continue Reading
Former Googler Punit Soni has left Silicon Valley to join Bangalore-based e-commerce company Flipkart as its Chief Product Officer according to The Business Insider. This is an interesting development since Soni has left a high-profile job at Google to join Flipkart, another high-profile company, whose valuation is over $10 billion. Flipkart raised $700 million in… Continue Reading
What is behind the symbolism of India-US relationship? President Obama became the first American President to visit India twice. What are the business opportunities for American business in India beyond IT and technology? What are the business opportunities for California and the states on the west coast? We sat down to speak with Ambassador Venkatesan… Continue Reading
Dalrymple examines the transformation of East India company and points out it that should serve as a lesson for the present. He argues that “the East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model for many of today’s joint-stock corporations.” He underscores… Continue Reading
Diversity. Diversity appears to be on everyone’s mind in Silicon Valley and San Francisco-based tech companies. What is the make-up of the workforce in tech companies? What is the percentage of minorities? What is the percentage of women in the work force? These, and other diversity related questions is part of this conversation on diversity in… Continue Reading
LISTEN: Academy Award Winner Resul Pookutty “I don’t remember getting up from my seat and getting the award from Will Smith…I had a blackout,” confesses Academy Award winner Resul Pokutty, who won an Oscar in 2009 for “Slumdog Millionaire.” “ I never imagined I’d win an Oscar…I was shocked. I never thought that we, the Indian talent… Continue Reading
LISTEN: Sukhi Singh On Building Sukhis, Gourmet Indian Food Meet Sukhi Singh, a tenacious and battle hardened entrepreneur, who went from selling home-made curry pastes at Berkeley Bowl and farmer’s market to founding a multi-million dollar food company in San Francisco bay area. ”We bring Indian food to the mainstream table,” is how she describes her… Continue Reading
In a few weeks time we will get to see the second season of HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” When the show debuted last year I was a bit skeptical and unsure if I wanted to watch it. But, this was a Mike Judge show and I thoroughly enjoyed his film “Office Space.” I tuned into the… Continue Reading
This interview was recorded in 2009, when Padmasree Warrior was Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Her role has expanded since then and she is currently a Chief Technology & Strategy Officer at Cisco. She joined Cisco in 2007 after having spent over 20 years at Motorola in Chicago. At Motorola she was an Executive Vice President and Chief… Continue Reading
Before CK-12 Neeru’s attention revolved around her on her family, children and their education. During this time she got busy volunteering for her children’s school. She also went back to school and got a second master’s degree in education from Stanford University. Inspired to do something in the area of education Neeru’s husband Vinod Khosla suggested looking into textbooks… Continue Reading
President Barrack Obama became the first American President to visit India twice, and the first to attend India’s Republic Day parade. He spent 3 days in New Delhi meeting with politicians, entrepreneurs and other policy makers. There was lot of talk about the “bromance” between Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. It is… Continue Reading
President Obama just wrapped up a 3-day visit to India. While the President’s visit to India may not have received extensive coverage in the US, the Indian media scrutinized every move and gesture of the President. This is President Obama’s second visit to India. At a symbolic level President Obama’s meeting had a couple of… Continue Reading
In 2006 I did a series of interviews with technologists and entrepreneurs in India to understand the booming telecom (mobile) boom in India. One of the people I spoke to was the late Atul Chitnis, who described himself as a disruptive technologist. He is the person to talk in Bangalore was a common refrain I… Continue Reading
We continue our series on the Indian Telecom boom. This interview was recorded in 2006. In Part-II of our conversation with the late Atul Chitnis talks about the two competing technologies in India: CDMA and GSM, and how they are duking it out and finding their own levels in the Indian market. It was only four years… Continue Reading
When Gurcharan Das took an early retirement from his corporate job he decided to pursue a “full-time career as a writer.” And that change in direction from a corporate life to a scholarly pursuit was greeted with a fair amount of surprise. How could this be? He was a “box-wallah“ or a corporate executive. Mr.Das was the CEO of Proctor and… Continue Reading
This interview was recorded in late 2008 at LinkedIn’s Mountain View office. Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in his living room in Silicon Valley in 2002. The company went IPO in 2011. This was the first time an American social network company is going public to raise money. Hoffman owned about 20 percent of LinkedIn shares before it… Continue Reading
This interview was recorded in 2008 at LinkedIn’s office in Mountain View. LinkedIn was co-founded by Reid Hoffman in 2002 and was officially launced in 2003. Hoffman is often described as the most connected person in Silicon Valley. He is the executive chairman of LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. In… Continue Reading
New Enterprise Associate’s Managing Partner Kittu Kolluri is an engineer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-investor. In 2006 I met with Kolluri at NEA’s Sand Hill Road office in Menlo Park, to find out how he made this transition from being an engineer to an investor. In Part-1 of our conversation Kittu describes his transition from an engineer to an entrepreneur to an… Continue Reading
In 2006 I met with Kittu Kolluri at NEA’s Sand Hill Road Office in Menlo Park. He had just joined the VC firm and I wanted to find out how he made this transition from being an engineer to an investor. Around the time of the interview one of Kolluri’s portfolio company Teracent was acquired by Google… Continue Reading
2014 was an interesting year, where we got to meet and interview guests from the world of technology, films, culture and politics in Silicon Valley. You can watch all the interviews on our YouTube channel and subscribe to it. Every Thursday and Saturday mornings, you will find new videos on our YouTube channel. 2014 was also the year… Continue Reading
The Kamla Show 