Skip to main content

Silicon Valley and Everywhere else

It has been an interesting month with a lot of exciting work with a lot of smart people taking up my time. I've had my head down and been doing some serious graft and hadn't really noticed the minor details like the fact that I'd bounced between three continents, changed my time zone 8 times and taken eating out with all meals accompanied by technical debate and napkin sketching to be the normal way to consume sustenance.

Then last week I had a reality check when I suddenly realized I was in fact doing for a living something I dreamed of as a kid.
So, what prompted this moment of clarity?

Well, I looked up and found myself hurtling down the 101 between Burlingame and Palo Alto in Silicon Valley in the back of a rented mini-van, MacBook balanced on my knee, hacking some last bits of code together for a product demo I was about to deliver at Stanford University!
Now I may have been doing the relatively easy job from the technical point of view of getting the Rails code of superstar hacker Dave and front end of ex-Hollywood SFX guy George to talk to each other - but that is beside the point! To a young computer obsessed kid growing up in 70s/80s small town Derbyshire, UK, these were almost mythical places and the thought of 'doing computers' for a living tantamount to joining Kirk's crew.

The irony of my working with distance shrinking communications technology and still feeling the gravitational pull of a specific geographical location (and I'm not talking about 'The Mystery Spot') is not lost on me. This is I guess partly to do with my own childhood fascination and partly to do with the fact that despite great work going on elsewhere in the world (and there is lots of it), nowhere else has quite the confluence of smart people, facilities and investment money in such scale.

Over the years of course there have been many examples of attempts to replicate Silicon valley elsewhere, and numerous ongoing debates about why this hasn't or couldn't or shouldn't work and I'm not going to get into that now. Suffice to say that as a tech entrepreneur and innovation consultant the cultural differences between the 'go for it' attitude that prevails in the Valley (and to be fair the US in general) and the risk averse over-caution I meet most often in Europe (there are always exceptions) are extremely vivid.

In Carbon, one of our passions is helping to cultivate a culture of encouragement for innovative thinking and doing, an attitude where a single failure is not perceived as a millstone that must be worn around the neck for public display for the rest of a career and an environment where start-ups, large enterprises, investment and education can all come together with an air of optimism, enthusiasm and excitement and really start to achieve something.
It is heartening that on this quest we are discovering more and more like minded people.

Who knows where these combined efforts could lead, but it would be nice to think that one day, some fresh faced kid from Mountain View CA, might grow up to blog about his adventures hurtling down the M62 in a rented hovercar, while hacking a 3D Holographic interface to a quantum computer driven back-end on their way to demo their product at The University of Huddersfield.

Comments

Anonymous said…
We're not just gonna imagine it - we're gonna make it happen :)

OpenCoffee, BarCamp, dotnorth, GeekUp, b.TWEEN, Old Broadcasting House - this is the Summer where we'll cross the tipping point

Popular posts from this blog

Winter Wonderland

The first snow of the season fell here yesterday afternoon. So, I know I'm a 'grown up', but I can't help but get excited by such things. My Dad always said that people loose the wonder and excitement of snow fall once they have to start commuting to work. I'm lucky, if I look at the window and the roads are impassable, I don't have to bother heading off to the office. Thanks to the technology of my trade home working is habitual anyway. Is technology responsible for allowing me to keep a sense of wonder, and enjoy the vagaries of mother nature for what she is, rather than seeing her meteorological mood swings only in terms the effect of my daily grind. Maybe, or maybe I'm just an entry level weather geek! Whatever, come lunchtime I'm off to take Monty the dog out to play in the snow!

Digital Will

A conversation with a bunch of colleagues yesterday got me to thinking. We were in our usual free form Socratic Dialogue mode and were discussing the drive to digitisation of personal media and what concept, if any, the general public had of the longevity or persistence of their data. With the human weakness in our inability to empathise with our future selves and the short term focus that a fast moving society engenders, have we really thought things through sufficiently. When I upload my photos to Flickr , I’m just assuming they are going to be there forever or more accurately I don’t perceive of any time at which they won’t be there. If I think about it a little longer I suppose I assume that the Flickr system will ensure a roll with the times and that my pictures will be retrievable and trans-codable into whatever system makes sense as the years go by. The Urban myth would have us believe that the data which ran the ‘69 Moon landing is no longer readable and we’ve forgotten the for...

Browser Mute

So, how often have you been in your own little world, headphones clamped around your head pumping out some fine tunes via iTunes WHY and surfed onto some web page with some god awful sound effects loop or worse a page with content you actually want to read but some multimedia ad keeps asserting itself with some annoying chirp? It happens to me all the time and leads me to this one question. Where is the 'mute' button on my browser?