The latest Silicon Valley tech action:
MySpace uses Simply Hired for its jobs board; starts to look like portal -- Simply Hired, the Silicon Valley start-up for job classifieds, has been selected by the fast-growing social network MySpace to offer job listings via MySpace Careers. This comes just two months after Fox Interactive, which like MySpace is owned by News Corp, invested in the start-up.
MySpace is now looking like a full-fledged portal (click below to enlarge). All MySpace needs to add to the search bar are tabs for a few things like "news" search and "maps" and -- voila -- it will be competiting with Google, Yahoo and MSN -- and may even be more fun!
AOL's Netscape.com to be revived as Digg-like site -- paidContent.org says that Jason Calacanis, who joined AOL after it acquired his blog network, WebLogs, will take over Netscape.(UPDATE: Turns out this is an old link)..
Did Google Earth almost take down a fire agency on SF peninsula? -- Here's a note by someone who talks about the problem of Web-based software of the type that Google is offering via Google Spreadsheets. In this case of Google Earth and the fire agency, a "designer who wrote the program decided to store the map cache in the users profile. While it's great for home users, corporate users who have roaming profiles suddenly had a profile that was 20GB to download. The bandwidth consumed by users logging on choked the network. Again, only tech support via e-mail, even after calling Google directly and pleading for live assistance for a public safety organization."
HP is the new Big Blue -- Notable factoid by BusinessWeek, about how HP has become the largest technology company. The Palo Alto personal computer and printer company moved ahead of IBM in sales last quarter.
What's up at Ultrawideband chip company Tzero? -- The Sunnyvale company has a write-up in the WSJ article today which says it will start selling its chips in July. Not mentioned, though, is that this three year old company has been going through a lot of CEOs lately -- it is on its third already over the past several months, and the latest, Mike Gulett, is apparently only interim. We tried going to the Web site, to contact the company, but the site -- or at least the site listed for Tzero by Google and other sources -- has been down all morning.
TZero earlier raised around $15.5 million in venture capital August Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and VentureTech Alliance, and was recently searching to raise $25 million more.
UltrawideBand can transmit up to a whopping 500 megabits of data a second -- roughly 10 times today's Wi-Fi speeds, but companies like Palo Alto's Airgo Networks say their technology can do just as well as Tzero's effective 100 megabits of data per second.
How to improve Silicon Valley? -- Paul Graham continues his insightful screeds about entrepreneurism:
To start with, Silicon Valley is too far from San Francisco. Palo Alto, the original ground zero, is about thirty miles away, and the present center more like forty. So people who come to work in Silicon Valley face an unpleasant choice: either live in the boring sprawl of the valley proper, or live in San Francisco and endure an hour commute each way. The best thing would be if the silicon valley were not merely closer to the interesting city, but interesting itself. And there is a lot of room for improvement here. Palo Alto is not so bad, but everything built since is the worst sort of strip development. You can measure how demoralizing it is by the number of people who will sacrifice two hours a day commuting rather than live there.
(Via Slashdot)
Intel is in crisis -- If you are interested in Intel and the chip industry, Dean Takahashi, the Merc's expert on chips, has a piece about how Intel is "in a crisis."
Oracle keeps buying, but is it making a difference? Oracle has bought more than 20 companies in the past few years, and our colleague Therese Poletti writes in the Merc about how it has yet to pay off. Other Silicon Valley giants are hungry too. San Jose networking company, Cisco, has just acquired two more companies, for a total of 12 already in the past year.