Is Seattle-based Amazon opening a store in Silicon Valley? It seems that just be the case according to this article in Silicon Valley Business Journal. While Amazon has not confirmed this news, the paper reports that there is a new building coming up in Sunnyvale and that Amazon could be one of its “likely tenant.” … Continue Reading
Medallia, a Palo Alto-based company raised $150 million yesterday and became the latest member of the Unicorn club. Unicorns are companies whose valuation is over $1 billion. Medallia’s valuation was over a $1 billion according to Borge Hold, CEO of the company. The latest round of funding was led by Sequoia Capital, which participated in previous… Continue Reading
Abhay Parasnis is the new Chief Technology Officer of Adobe Systems. The San Jose-based company announced today it has appointed Parasnis as their new CTO and senior vice president of platform technology and services. Kevin Lynch was Adobe’s previous CTO, who left the post 2 years ago to join Apple as Fortune reported. Lynch helped… Continue Reading
Meet Zia Syed, founder and CEO of ClipMine, a Mountain View startup. Syed is an ex-Googler, who spent 10 years at Google and then decided to peel off and do his own thing. Videos are what interests Syed and the focus of his startup is to index YouTube videos. “We want to personalize the video… Continue Reading
Reddit, Reddit, Reddit – that is what dominated my social network timeline last week. Reddit – The Front Page of the Internet was now suddently the front page of social media networks and cable/TV news around the world. It all started when Victorial Taylor one of the editors was let go from Reddit, a San Francisco-based… Continue Reading
Meet Catlin Powers, who is passionate about harnessing the sun as clean fuel for millions of energy deficient communities around the world. Imagine if you had to walk for miles every morning to collect fuel for your basic cooking needs. I know my grandmother did that in the Indian Himalayas where she lived. But that… Continue Reading
For those of you who thought my show – The Kamla Show – is available only online I have news for you. It is actually a weekly TV show that airs in many markets in the San Francisco bay area, and in a couple of places on the East Coast. And if everything goes well… Continue Reading
Finally, it is here – the first full length trailer of Steve Jobs by director Danny Boyle. Michael Fassbinder essays the role of Jobs, and he is practically unrecognizible. Seth Rogen plays Steve Wozniak, co-founder and the tech wizard of Apple. The film is based on Walter Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs. The book was blessed by… Continue Reading
Kiran Malhotra is Director of Venture Capital Relationships at Fenwick & West, a well-known Silicon Valley law firm. Facebook, Uber, Lending Club and GoPro are some of the companies that Fenwick & West has worked with. In this interview we talk with Malhotra on how she went from working as a social worker in a… Continue Reading
Ever wondered about the tower of Babel of programming languages? What programming languages do Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and Google use? I have. Am often on the lookout for articles that explain how companies like Twitter and Facebok scale and morph and add new features so quickly. Remember how we stuck around Twitter when the famous… Continue Reading
Craig Dalton is the CEO and co-founder of DODOcase. In this interview we talk to Dalton about his entrepreneurship journey of manufacturing products locally in San Francisco. How did the idea for a locally manufactured product using traditional book binding craftsmanship take shape at DODOcase? How did they go from making iPad and iWatch… Continue Reading
Finally, the world got to see the first Oculus consumer virtual-reality (VR) headset last week. On June 11, 2015 Brendan Iribe unveiled and showed the first Oculus Rift. Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014 for a little over $2 billion. You can read more about Oculus VR headset here and here.
I stumbled upon New York-based Solar Punch’s version of a popular Bollywood song from the film “Swades.” Solar Punch is an unusual band. Once you read about this eco-rock band’s mission statement, it became instantly clear why they chose to sing this Bollywood song. It fits with the band’s mission and the connection between Bollywood… Continue Reading
BiteSV was a 3-day conference held at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. Food was center stage at the conference, and more imporantaly our relationship with food and the challenge to feed billions of people in a healthy way. Chefs, technologists, and others from the food industry came together to talk about feeding 9 billion people, which… Continue Reading
A South Korean team won $2 million dollars at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA Robotics Challenge held over the weekend (June 5-6, 2015) in Pomona, CA. The challenge was launched in response to the 2011 Fukushima crisis. In a disaster situation, where toxins are involved the ability to rescue human life becomes a… Continue Reading
The first BiteSV food and technology conference brings together chefs, winemakers and technologists under one roof from June 4-7, 2015 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. Chef José Andrés, Josh Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek Food, Chef Michael Chiarello, and Dr. Robert Fraley, executive vice president of Monsanto are some of the speakers at the event. Roi Choi, Charlie Ayers, Mei Lin, Michale… Continue Reading
Billionaire investor Chris Sacca’s long and thoughtful post on “What Twitter Can Be,” created a small tsunami of sorts in the tech world like this exchange between Sacca and Fred Wilson, a New York-based venture capitalist. Both Sacca and Wilson own quite a lot of Twitter stoks. And Sacca spoke to CNBC about his post and… Continue Reading
Cisco’s Padmashree Warrior, Chief Technology Officer is reportedly moving on according to a report on Re/code.Her last day at Cisco is reportedly July 25, 2015. Warrior joined Cisco after a long stint at Motorola. It is unclear where she is headed next. Re/code reports that Warrior recently interviewed for at least for one job. And then… Continue Reading
Ross Ulbricht (31) was sentenced to a life in prison for for his role in creating and operating Silk Road, an underground marketplace. The sentencing comes without a possibility of a parole for Ulbricht. US District Judge Katherine Forrest “gave Ulbricht the most severe sentence possible, beyond what even the prosecution had explicitly requested. The minimum Ulbricht could have served… Continue Reading
Google made quite a few announcments this morning at its annual Google I/O conference currently underway in San Francisco. Sundar Pichai delivered the keynote address that was punctuated with demos of new features and products the Mountain View-based company is rolling out. Google has 1 billion Android users, and that user base keeps growing every month… Continue Reading
Photos and videos. We have gigabytes of images stored across various devices and they remain largely unorganized. Google now has a solution – Google Photo that allows for free, unlimited storage of photos and videos for Android, IOS and desktop devices. It is available on Google Play and Apple store starting today. Google made the… Continue Reading
Robots are coming. You have probably heard about the coming of robots with increasing frequencey in the past few month and how they may steal our jobs and hearts. You probably watched the new film “Ex Machina” an easily accessible film that takes you into the world of humans and sentient robots. Now, meet a robot… Continue Reading
Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends for 2015 is here. She unveiled the report at the Code Conference this morning. Naturally, there is a lot of buzz, instant analysis and debates about where we are headed in this market. Meeker is a well-known Wall Street analyst, who came out west and joined the storied venture capitalist firm Kleiner… Continue Reading
Filmmaker Alex Winter’s new film “Deep Web:The Untold Story of Bitcoin And The Silk Road,” highlights the story of Ross Ulbricht the founder of Silk Road, the underground marketplace, his arrest, the charges brought against him, his trail, bitcoin, and the intersection of technology, privacy and law. A final veridct on Ulbricht’s case is expected from… Continue Reading
Here is our first look at Danny Boyle’s new film on “Steve Jobs.” Written by Aaron Sorkin, the film stars Micahel Fassbender, Seth Rogen, Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels and others. Earlier this year Boyle and his crew spent a couple of months in various parts of San Francisco bay area shooting their film. The film is… Continue Reading
Austrian Chocolate Burrito? Vietnames Apple Kebab? Like me, you probably have not heard of these dishes. You are probably thinking there is an error and it should really be Mexican burrito or Turkish kebabs. But, what happens when you introduce big data into the kitchen and let IBM’s Watson do all the data crunching, analysis,… Continue Reading
The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) is a non-profit organization founded in Silicon Valley over 22 years ago. The goal of the organization is to connect, mentor and educate entrepreneurs from the valley and around the world. The organization has local chapters located in various parts of the world. One of the central events of TiE is… Continue Reading
Unicorns. Until about 2 years ago if you mentioned ‘unicorn,” I suspect most people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere would have instantly thought of that mythical creature. But, that is not the case anymore. Ever since Aileen Lee wrote an article about “unicorns” and startups, we now instantly think of startups whose valuation is north of $1… Continue Reading
Meet Cisco’s new CEO Chuck Robbins, who will succeed John Chambers, who spent 20 years at the helm of the world’s largest networking company. This “unexpected” announcement of a new CEO came as a surprise to many. Robbins will take over Chambers on July 26, 2015. He will also join Cisco’s board. Chambers will continue as Chairman of… Continue Reading
Alex Winter’s new documentary “Deep Web: The Untold Story of BitCoin & The Silk Road,” screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, which is where we caught up with him to talk about the film. The film is about Ross Ulbicht, Silk Road, an underground market place, the war on drugs and privacy. Ulbricht… Continue Reading
The Kamla Show 