Valley Still the Center of Tech Innovation

Via The Mercury News, Valley still the center of tech innovation

Social Sqeeze

“Silicon Valley is rapidly becoming to technology what Manhattan is to banking, finance, publishing and advertising: a head office, employing only the highest-paid professionals. Production and back-office administration are done elsewhere. [...] Manhattan’s population is either very rich or very poor, with a middle class that commutes into the city. [...] Silicon Valley is in the middle of a similar squeeze.”

The Emergence of the Creative Class

“The new jobs instead come from start-ups, a few at a time. Because it’s so expensive to do business here, the start-ups only put the chief executive, researchers and top marketing executive in Silicon Valley. Everyone else is hired in Sacramento, Tel Aviv or Shenzen.”

“Despite the economic problems the San Francisco and Bay Area region has suffered in recent times, it has more than held its own as a leading knowledge economy when compared with its counterparts.”

What this means to me, at the risk of sounding harsh: Outsourcing is a good thing. If software can be written more cost-effectively in Hyderabad, then software-writing jobs should move there.

The vacant cubicles in Silicon Valley will soon be filled by workers performing tasks that are more important — and more economically valuable — than what came before.

Related: The 2003 Siliicon Valley 150

Moblog test

This is a moblog test

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This post was made with a trial version of BlogPlanet, a photo blog client for mobile phones. For more information visit www.blogplanet.net.

Highly Skilled Swiss Citizens Who Live Abroad

A list of networking and jobs sites for highly skilled swiss professionals living abroad:

SHARE Swiss House for Advances Research and Education in Boston
http://www.creativeswitzerland.com/

Swissnex (Californian version of the Swiss House) in San Francisco
http://www.swissnex.org

SwissTalents: Network of highly skilled professionals living abroad, who are Swiss or have strong ties to Switzerland.
http://www.swisstalents.ch/

Swissbrains: Swiss-based information and service tool for highly skilled Swiss citizens who live abroad and intend to return back home
http://www.swissbrains.ch/

Telejob: Academic job exchange board
http://www.telejob.ethz.ch/

The Swiss-List: informal group of young scientists and businesses professional living in the US with close ties to Switzerland
http://www.swiss-list.com/

Bruce Sterling Rant-A-Thon

A few quotes I liked from Bruce Sterling Rant-A-Thon:

I’m not into the military and I’m not an anti-war guy. I’m more into infosec.

It’s alarming to have Brazil as the world’s most politically innovative country. Even Brazilians like to say that Brazil is country of the future and always will be. They’ve got a lot of things wrong.

If you could get every scam artist, phisher, and 419 scammer and surround this building, we’d see them as a terrifying army, but they have carte blanche to go anywhere in the world and terrorize people less sophisticated than ourselves.

In Spain they’re tired of bullshit. They followed the PM to the poll and booed him: Put down that ballot, you lying son of a bitch. They were sick of the deceit. It wasn’t the war, it was the policy of spin and feeding lies. It’s the dismal business.

Waiting for the Post-Oil peak Era

I am eager to live the post-oil peak era with its abandonned SUVs on the border of the roads. Bruce Sterling explains why in its Rant-A-Thon:

Creative class people — the people at this event — will never prosper in an oil society. An oil society sinks a well and surrounds it with bayonets and waits for the civil society to decline around it. Why bother, so long as there’s money coming out of the ground?

Un Système de Localisation par Triangulation pour les Activités Coopératives

Premier article écrit avec Nicolas Nova, Patrick Jermann et Pierre Dillenbourg:
Un système de localisation par triangulation pour les activités coopératives

Résumé: Cet article décrit un système de localisation de personnes en environnement construit sur assistant personnel et Pc tablette utilisant un réseau sans fil et la triangulation par rapport à la position des antennes de ce même réseau. Un tel système vise à être employé dans deux contextes. Le premier concerne l’étude de la coordination spatiale d’un groupe dans le cadre d’une tâche semi-écologique. Le second vise à étudier la topologie des espaces d’interactions sociales.

Analysis of User Mobility on the Wireless EPFL Campus Network

A few notes from the presentation of the analysis done by Guillermo Fernandez Castellanos (Professor Matthias Grossglauser) of the User Mobility on the EPFL wireless network. He built an analysis tool (BEGO) of WiFi access points’ logs in order to understand the roaming patterns and propose new roaming models. Data where collected only from the INF building.

2 types of WiFi networks:
- clients build an ad-hoc network
- infrastructure with access points

3 types of mobile users:
- Static user (connects always from the same place)
- Pseudo-mobile user (connects from different places, but disconnects while moving)
- Mobile users (moves while connected)

There where virtually no mobile users detected. The “mobile” population splits more or less in two halves between static and pseudo-mobile users. The heaviest wireless use are at the cafeteria and in the computer room. The average highest simultaneous use of access points is by 4 users. Over 9 monthes, 50% of people connected to 4 APs and 75% connected to only 5 APs. 25% of the people used the wireless network for 1 day over 9 monthes and 66% only 5 days.

The EPFL wireless network is formed by wireless islands.

It is difficult to analyse roaming from AP logs because it seems like they are either badly installed and/or have a bad implementation of the roaming algorithm. In most cases, roaming does not mean mobility.

A factor for mobility could be: (number of access points)/(number of sessions). The higher the more mobile.

The Rise of the Creative Class to the European context

A study by Richard Florida of the creative class in Europe is out: “Europe in the Creative Age [PDF]“. Too bad it does not take into account non-EU members like Switzerland (and Norway). Indexes for the EU members and the US are calculated based on the 3Ts (Talent, Technology and Tolerance) and put all together to create a Creativity Index, Creativy Trend Index (evolution from the past to the future) and a Creativity Matrix (How a country scores on the creativity index and its recent performance or trend).

This study confirms that the epicenter of competitiveness in Europe is shifting from the traditional powers, especially France, Germany and the United Kingdom, to a cluster of Scandinavian, Nordic and northern European counties. The ability to attract the best and the brightest won’t probably be at the United States advange in the future since number of countries in Europe and elsewhere (notably Canada and Australia) have liberalized their immigration policies and increased their efforts to attract and retain talent. But it also lies in the fact that the climate for creative talent in the United States has chilled somewhat both as a result of direct policies which restrict scientific information and make it harder for people to get into and out of the country and also because of a widening perception of the U.S. as unilaterally aggressive and less friendly toward foreign-born people.
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Brainstorm at CRAFT

Friday morning brainstorm on spatial positionning with Pierre and Nicolas. Hard to determine the joint activity on the first picture. The second could be the landing area of the UFOs already witnessed in Geneva this week.

Devant Fabien Barthez et les Beatles sur Google

J’arrive devant Fabien Barthez sur Google en tapant “fabien”. (16ème sur 621,000) et devant les Beatles (The Fab 4) en tapant “fab” (40ème sur 1,590,000). Yeah!