Podcasts about mountain view california

Colin James (RPTA '09), Recreation Manager at City of Mountain View (CA), talks with Dr. Brian Greenwood (Cal Poly Experience Industry Management) about his life and career to date.

Imagine if, within 9 years of starting a company, you could grow to have 34 million people a month interacting on your platform. And that is the story you will hear today from Adrián Ridner.   Driven by a mission to provide life-changing and accessible education, Study.com is one of the largest online learning platforms for K-12 through college and beyond. With learners and educators representing more than 11,000 schools, Study.com is focused on supporting students, teachers, and the teacher pipeline. The platform also seeks to make college-level education accessible and friendly for the non-traditional student and help professionals prep for and ace licensing exams.   Here are the highlights of our conversation:   - The Personal Why: Hailing from Argentina, having lived in four countries, and learning three languages (Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, and the US), Adrián's experience of assimilating into the education systems has influenced his passion point around it. Adrián also highlighted the personal aspect of his journey, as he is the first in his family to graduate from college and has a brother with special needs who has been able to go farther than doctor's projections.   - Global Impact:  Adrián revealed that he co-founded a company in October 2015, which has since grown to support 30+ million learners and educators a month. He is particularly proud of the university-level courses that span a variety of topics and can transfer to listed colleges. They project that these courses have saved students almost $475 million in tuition costs over the last five years.   - Accessible Education and Social Impact:  Study.com is proud of its investment in social impact programs, including "Keys to the Classroom," which aims to increase the diversity in the teacher workforce and help aspiring educators become teachers. The program's success was attributed to the collaboration of all stakeholders involved.   - Study.com: Adrián's Journey and Success: Adrián and his co-founder built two other companies before study.com.  He emphasized the importance of understanding the market,  thinking strategically, and learning from your failures.  Study.com was a 'bootstrap' venture that has paid off, as the business has enjoyed sustainable growth and profitability from the first year.   - Keeping Balanced as a CEO: Adrián spoke about his family, particularly his twins, and his passion for soccer. He also shared his interest in AI and its potential for personalized learning. He expressed his excitement about the opportunities AI presents while also acknowledging the potential risks it poses. He shared his recent readings on AI, including "Co-intelligence" and "The Coming Wave."   About the guest: Adrián Ridner is co-founder and CEO of Study.com, an education platform supporting more than 34 million learners and educators a month across K12 curriculum, college courses and test preparation. As a Latino EdTech founder and first-generation college graduate, Adrián has spent the past two decades focused on making education accessible for under-supported learners.   Adrián has been committed to advancing personalized and engaging learning at scale for students of varying needs in the U.S. and across the world. Study.com's short video lessons and online courses help students achieve their educational goals and degrees needed to unlock economic opportunities.     Connect with Adrián: Website: https://study.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianridner/   Connect with Allison: Feedspot has named Disruptive CEO Nation as one of the Top 25 CEO Podcasts on the web, and it is ranked the number 6 CEO podcast to listen to in 2025! https://podcasts.feedspot.com/ceo_podcasts/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonsummerschicago/ Website: https://www.disruptiveceonation.com/ Twitter: @DisruptiveCEO    #CEO #brand #startup #startupstory #founder #business #businesspodcast #podcast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The College Football Experience (@TCEonSGPN) on the Sports Gambling Podcast Network continues its 134 college football team preview series with the San Jose State Spartans 2024 Season Preview. Pick Dundee aka (@TheColbyD) & CJ Sullivan (@CJSullivan_) break down the upcoming San Jose State Spartans season from the offense, defense and special teams to every game on the schedule and the coaching hire of Ken Niumatalolo. How will year one of the Niumatalolo era look and what should we expect from the Spartans offense with Craig Stutzmann.Will Emmett Brown get the start for the Spartans after coming over from Washington State? Is the Spartans running back room with Jabari Bates and Lamar Radcliffe looking to play a big factor in 2024? Will the wideout room be in decent shape with the return of Nick Nash, Malikhi Miller and Justin Lockhart and the additions of Treyshun Hurry and Sawyer Deerman? How will the offensive line look with only one returning starter in Marist Talavou?Was retaining longtime defensive coordinator Derrick Odum a great thing for San Jose State Spartan fans? Will the defensive line be the biggest question mark on the defensive line with just one starter returning in Soane Toia? Is the Spartans linebacker room the heart of the defense with the return of Jordan Pollard, Taniela Latu and Jordan Cobbs? Will the secondary be in decent shape with the return of Michael Dansby and DJ Harvey? Is the San Jose State Spartans schedule favorable in 2024? What would be a great first season with Ken Niumatalolo in San Jose, California? We talk it all and more on this San Jose State Spartans edition of The College Football Experience. JOIN the SGPN community #DegensOnlyExclusive Merch, Contests and Bonus Episodes ONLY on Patreon - https://sg.pn/patreonDiscuss with fellow degens on Discord - https://sg.pn/discordDownload The Free SGPN App - https://sgpn.appCheck out the Sports Gambling Podcast on YouTube - https://sg.pn/YouTubeCheck out our website - http://sportsgamblingpodcast.comSUPPORT us by supporting our partnersCirca Sports - 16 MILLION in guaranteed prizes w/ Circa Survivor & Circa Millions - https://www.circasports.com/circa-sports-millionFootball Contest Proxy - Use promo code SGP to save $50 at - https://www.footballcontestproxy.com/Rithmm - Player Props and Picks - Free 7 day trial! http://sportsgamblingpodcast.com/rithmmUnderdog Fantasy code SGPN - Up to $250 in BONUS CASH - https://play.underdogfantasy.com/p-sgpnGametime code SGPN - Download the Gametime app, create an account, and use code SGPN for $20 off your first purchase - https://gametime.co/ADVERTISE with SGPNInterested in advertising? Contact sales@sgpn.io Follow The College Experience & SGPN On Social MediaTwitter - https://twitter.com/TCEonSGPNInstagram - http://www.instagram.com/TCEonSGPNTikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@TCEonSGPNYoutube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheCollegeExperienceFollow The Hosts On Social MediaColby Dant - http://www.twitter.com/thecolbydPatty C - https://twitter.com/PattyC831NC Nick - https://twitter.com/NC__NicK

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series. This week's episode is hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson, CISO, Rivian. Joining us is our guest, TC Niedzialkowski, CISO, Nextdoor. In this episode: Has the line between work and personal devices blurred? Why are we seeing signs that that line no longer exists for employees? What is the path of cybersecurity to keep company data secured when its continually commingling with personal devices? Thanks to our podcast sponsors, Eclypsium and Normalyze Eclypsium is helping enterprises and government agencies mitigate risks to their infrastructure from complex technology supply chains. Our cloud-based and on-premises platform provides digital supply chain security for software, firmware and hardware in enterprise infrastructure. Get started today at eclypsium.com/spark Where is my data? Is it sensitive? Who has access to the data? What are the risks? What is the cost of exposure? Am I compliant now? Enter Normalyze. Normalyze's agentless, machine-learning scanning platform continuously discovers sensitive data, resources, and access paths in all cloud environments. Learn more.

At the start of 2023, Yuval Bachar told us about his latest project - to build off-grid, hydrogen-powered data centers. As 2023 came to an end, he was back to tell us he'd done it. He's got 1MW of capacity fed by hydrogen in Mountain View California, and he's telling potential customers he can build the same thing anywhere you can get hydrogen shipped by pipe or tanker.  He's keen on the benefits. No long waits for power distribution, no struggles getting permits for diesel. And the building is quick and cheap too. He can make them with a 3D concrete printer - which incidentally is environmentally better than tilt-up building, he says.  He picked up the Environmental Impact prize at this year's DCD Awards, and joined the podcast to give us some more details on what he has done.... and what's coming next 

www.theotheeros.com LinkedIn | Instagram | X   Eros Marcello a software engineer/ developer and architect specializing in human interfacing artificial intelligence, with a special focus on conversational AI systems, voice assistance, chat bots and ambient computing.   Eros has been doing this since 2015 and even though today for the rest of us laymen in the industry we're hearing about AI everywhere, for Eros this has been something he's been passionately working in for quite a few years.    Super excited to have him here to talk to us about artificial intelligence and help demystify some of the terminology that you all may be hearing out there.    I'm so excited to welcome Eros Marcello to this conversation to learn a little bit more about AI. He is so fully well versed in it and has been working in AI at since 2015, when it was just not even a glimmer in my eyes so I'm so glad that to have somebody here who's an expert in that space.   Eros glad to have you here I would love to just jump into the conversation with you. For many of us this this buzz that we're hearing everywhere sounds new, as if it's just suddenly come to fruition. But that is clearly not the case, as it's been around for a long time, and you've been involved in it for a long time.     Can you take us to as a creative, as an artist, as an architect, as an engineer take us through your genesis and how did you get involved and how did you get started. Let's just start at the beginning.   Eros:  The beginning could be charted back sequentially working in large format facilities, as surprise surprise the music industry, which you know was the initial interest and was on the decline. You'd have this kind of alternate audio projects, sound design projects that would come into these the last remaining, especially on the East and West, Northeast and So-cal areas, the last era of large format analog-based facilities with large recording consoles and hardware and tape machines.  I got to experience that, which was a great primer for AI for many reasons, we'll get more into that later. So what happened was that you'd have voiceover coming in for telephony systems, and they would record these sterile, high-fidelity captures of voice that would become the UI sound banks, or used for speech synthesis engines for call centers. That was the exposure to what was to come with voice tech folks in that space, the call center world, that really started shifting my gears into what AI machine learning was and how I may fit into it. Fast forward, I got into digital signal processing and analog emulation, so making high caliber tools for Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase , Mac and PC for sound production and music production. specifically analog circuitry emulation and magnetic tape emulation “in the box” as it's called that gave me my design and engineering acumen. Come 2015/2016, Samsung came along and said you've done voice-over,  know NLP, machine learning, and AI, because I studied it and acquired the theoretical knowledge and had an understanding of the fundamentals.  I didn't know where I fit yet, and then they're like so you know about, plus you're into voice, plus you have design background with the software that you worked on.  I worked on the first touchscreen recording console called the Raven MTX for a company called Slate Digital. So I accidentally created the trifecta that was required to create what they wanted to do which was Bigxby which was Samsung's iteration of the series for the Galaxy S8 and they wanted me to design the persona… and that as they say is history. Samsung Research America, became my playground they moved me up from LA to the Bay Area and that was it.  It hasn't really stopped since it's been a meteoric ascension upward. They didn't even know what to call it back then, they called it a UX writing position, but UX writers don't generate large textual datasets and annotate data and then batch and live test neural networks. Because that's what I was doing, so I was essentially doing computational linguistics on the fly. And on top of it in my free time I ingratiated myself with a gentleman by the name of Gus who was head of deep learning research there and because I just happened to know all of these areas that fascinated me in the machine learning space, and because I was a native English speaker, I found a niche where they allowed me to not only join the meetings, but help them prepare formalized research and presentations which only expanded my knowledge base.  I mean we're looking into really cutting-edge stuff at the time, AutoML, Hyperparameter tuning and Param ILS and things in the realms of generative adversarial neural networks which turned me on to the work of Ian Goodfellow, who was until I got there was an Apple employee and now it's gone back to Google Deep Mind. He's the father of Generative Adversarial Neural Networks, he's called the GANfather and that's really it the rest is history. I got into Forbes when I was at Samsung and my Hyperloop team got picked to compete at SpaceX, so it was a lot that happened in a space of maybe 90 days.  Katty You were at the right place at the right time, but you were certainly there at a time where opportunities that exist today didn't exist then and you were able to forge that.  I also can see that there are jobs that will be coming up in AI that don't exist today. It's just such an exciting time to be in this space and really forge forward and craft a path based on passion and yours clearly was there.  So you've used a lot of words that are regular nomenclature for you, but I think for some of the audience may not be can you take us through…adversarial I don't even know what you said adversarial … Yes Generative Adversarial Neural Networks. Eros A neural network is the foundational machine learning technique, where you provide curated samples of data, be it images or text, to a machine learning algorithm neural network which is trained, as it's called, on these samples so that when it's deployed in the real world it can do things like image recognition, facial recognition, natural language processing, and understanding. It does it by showing it, it's called supervised learning, so it's explicitly hand-labeled data, you know, this picture is of a dog versus this is a picture of a cat, and then when you deploy that system in production or in a real-world environment it does its best to assign confidence scores or domain accuracy to you know whether it's a cat or a dog.  You take generative adversarial neural networks and that is the precipice of what we see today is the core of MidJourney and Stable Diffusion and image-to-image generation when we're seeing prompts to image tools. Suffice it to say generative adversarial networks are what is creating a lot of these images or, still image to 3D tools, you have one sample of data and then you have this sort of discriminator and there's a waiting process that occurs and that's how a new image is produced. because the pixel density and tis diffused, it's dispersed by you know by brightness and contrasts across the image and that can actually generate new images. Katty So for example if an artist is just dabbling with Dall-E, let's say, and they put in the prompt so they need to put in to create something, that's really where it's coming from, it's all the data that is already been fed into the system. Eros  Right, like Transformers which again are the type of neural network that's used in ChatGPT or Claude, there are really advanced recurrent neural networks. And current neural networks were used a lot for you know NLP and language understanding systems and language generation and text generation systems. Prior, they had a very hard ceiling and floor, and Transformers are the next step. But yeah more or less prompt to image. Again tons of training that assigns, that parses the semantics and assigns that to certain images and then to create that image there's sequence to sequence processes going on. Everyone's using something different, there's different techniques and approaches but more or less you have Transformers. Your key buzzwords are Transformers, Large Language models, Generative AI, and Generative neural networks. It's in that microcosm of topics that we're seeing a lot of this explode and yes they have existed for a while. Katty Where should somebody start? Let's say you have a traditional digital designer who doesn't really come from an engineering or math background like you didn't and they can see that this is impacting or creating opportunities within their space-- where should they start? Eros First and foremost leveling up what they can do. Again, that fundamental understanding, that initial due diligence, I think sets the tone and stage for success or failure, in any regard, but especially with this. Because you're dealing with double exponential growth and democratization to the tune where like we're not even it's not even the SotA state-of-the-art models, large language models that are the most astounding. If you see in the news Open AI is and looking at certain economic realities of maintaining. What is really eclipsing everything is and what's unique to this boom over like the.com bubble or even the initial AI bubble is the amount of Open Source effort being apportioned and that is you know genie out of the bottle for sure when it comes to something of this where you can now automate automation just certain degrees. So we're going to be seeing very aggressive advancement and that's why people are actually overwhelmed by everything. I mean there's a new thing that comes out not even by the day but seemingly by the minute. I'm exploring for black AI hallucinations, which for the uninitiated hallucinations are the industry term they decided to go with for erroneous or left field output from these large language models.  I'm exploring different approaches to actually leverage that as an ideation feature, so the sky is the limit when it comes to what you can do with these things and the different ways people are going to use it. Just because it's existed it's not like it's necessarily old news as much as it's fermented into this highly productized, commoditized thing now which is innovation in it and of itself.   So where they would start is really leveling up, and identifying what these things can do. And not trying to do with them on their own battlefield. So low hanging fruit you have to leverage these tools to handle that and quadruple down on your high caliber skill set on your on what makes you unique, on your specific brand, even though that word makes me cringe a little bit sometimes, but on your on your strengths, on what a machine can't do and what's not conducive to make a machine do and it's does boil down to common sense.  Especially if you're a subject matter expert in your domain, a digital designer will know OK well Dall-E obviously struggles here and there, you know it can make a logo but can it make you know this 3D scene to the exact specifications that I can? I mean there's still a lot of headroom that is so hyper-specific it would never be economically, or financially conducive to get that specific with this kind of tools that handle generalized tasks. What we're vying for artificial general intelligence so we're going to kind of see a reversal where it's that narrow skill set that is going to be, I think, ultimately important.  Where you start is what are you already good at and make sure you level up your skills by tenfold. People who are just getting by, who dabble or who are just so so, they're going to be displaced. I would say they start by embracing the challenge, not looking at it as a threat, but as an opportunity, and again hyper-focusing on what they can do that's technical, that's complex, quadrupling on that hyper-focusing on it, highlighting and marketing on that point and then automating a lot of that lower tier work that comes with it, with these tools where and when appropriate. Katty I would imagine just from a thinking standpoint and a strategy standpoint and the creative process that one needs to go through, that's going to be even more important than before, because in order to be able to give the prompts to AI, you have to really have to strategize where you want to take it, what you want to do with it,  otherwise it's information in and you're going to get garbage out.   Eros Right absolutely. And it depends on the tool, it depends on the approach of the company and manufacturer, creators of the tool. You know Midjourney, their story is really interesting. The gentleman who found that originally founded Leap Motion, which was in the 2010s that gesture-based platform that had minor success.  He ended up finding Midjourney and denying Apple two acquisition attempts, and like we're using Discord as a means for deployment and many other things simultaneously and to great effect. So it's the Wild West right now but it's an exciting time to be involved because it's kind of like when Auto-tune got re-popularized. For example it all kind of comes back to that music audio background because Autotune was originally a hardware box. That's what Cher used on her song and then you have folks that you know in the 2010s T-Pain and Little Wayne and everybody came along it became a plug-in, a software plug-in, and all of a sudden it was on everything and now it's had its day, it had 15 minutes again, and then it kind of dialed back to where it's used for vocal correction. It's used as a utility now rather than a kind of a buzzy effect. Katty Another thing to demystify.. Deep fake—what is that? Yes deep fake, can be voice cloning, which is neural speech synthesis and then you have deep fakes that are visual, so you have you know face swapping, as it's called.   You have very convincing deep fakes speeches, and you have voice clones that that more or less if you're not paying attention can sound and they're getting better again by the day. Katty What are the IP implications of that even with the content that's created on some of these other sources? Eros The IP implications in Japan passed that the data used that's you know regenerated, it kind of goes back I mean it's not if you alter something enough, a patent or intellectual property laws don't cover it because it's altered, and to prove it becomes an arbitrary task for it has an arbitrary result that's subjective. Katty You are the founder and chief product architect of BlackDream.ai. Tell us a little bit more about that what the core focus? Eros: So initially again it was conceived to research computer vision systems, adversarial machine intelligence. There's adversarial prompt injection, where you can make a prompt to go haywire if you kind of understand the idiosyncrasies of the specific model dealing with, or if you in construction of the model, found a way to cause perturbations in the data set, like basically dilute or compromise the data that it's being trained on with malice. To really kind of study those effects, how to create playbooks against them, how to make you know you know zero trust fault tolerant playbooks, and methodologies to that was the ultimate idea.  There's a couple moving parts to it, it's part consultancy to establish market fit so on the point now where again, Sandhill Road has been calling, but I've bootstrapped and consulted as a means of revenue first to establish market fit. So I've worked for companies and with companies, consulted for defense initiatives, for SAIC and partnering with some others. I have some other strategic partnerships that are currently in play. We have two offices, a main office at NASA/Ames, our headquarters is that is a live work situation, at NASA Ames / Moffett field in Mountain View CA so we are in the heart of Silicon Valley and then a satellite office at NASA Kennedy Space Center ,at the in the astronauts memorial building, the longevity of that which you know it's just a nice to have at this point because we are Silicon Valley-based for many reasons, but it's good to be present on both coasts. So there's an offensive cyber security element that's being explored, but predominantly what we're working on and it's myself as the sole proprietor with some third party resources, more or less friends from my SpaceX /Hyperloop team and some folks that I've brokered relationships with along the way at companies I've contracted with or consulted for. I've made sure to kind of be vigilant for anyone who's, without an agenda, just to make sure that I maintain relationships with high performers and radically awesome and talented people which I think is I've been successful in doing.  So I have a small crew of nonpareil, second to none talent, in the realm of deep learning, GPU acceleration, offensive cyber security, and even social robotics, human interfacing AI as I like to call it. So that's where Blackdream.ai is focusing on: adversarial machine intelligence research and development for the federal government and defense and militaristic sort of applications Katty This image of an iceberg comes to mind that we only see in the tip of it over the water you know with the fun everybody's having with the Dall-Es and the ChatGPT's but just the implication of it, what is happening with the depth of it ….fascinating!! Thank you you for being with us and just allowing us to kind of just maybe dip our toe a little bit under the water and to just see a little bit of what's going on there. I don't know if I'm clearer about it or if it was just a lot more research needs to be now done on my part to even learn further about it. But I really want to thank you for coming here. I know you're very active in the space and you speak constantly on about AI and you're coming up soon on “Voice and AI”. And where can people find you if they wanted to reach out and talk to you some more about this or have some interest in learning more about Blackdream.ai? The websites about to be launched Blackdream.AI. On Linkedin I think only Eros Marcello around and www.theotheeros.com,  the website was sort of a portfolio.  Don't judge me I'm not a web designer but I did my best. It came out OK and then you have LinkedIn, Instagram its Eros Marcello on Twitter/X its ErosX Marcello. I try to make sure that I'm always up to something cool so I'm not an influencer by any stretch or a thought-leader, but I certainly am always getting into some interesting stuff, be it offices at NASA Kennedy Space Center, or stranded in Puerto Rico…. you never know. It's all a little bit of reality television sprinkled into the tech. Katty: Before I let you go what's the last message you want to leave the audience with? Eros:  Basically like you know I was I grew up playing in hardcore punk bands and you know.  Pharma and Defense, AI for government and Apple AI engineer, none of that was necessarily in the cards for me, I didn't assume. So my whole premise is, I know I may be speaking about some on higher levels things or in dealing more in the technicalities than the seemingly, the whole premise is that you have to identify as a creative that this is a technical space and the technical is ultimately going to inform the design. And I didn't come out of the womb or hail from you know parents who are AI engineers. This isn't like a talent, this is an obsession.  So if I can learn this type of knowledge and apply it, especially in this rather succinct amount of time I have, that means anyone can. I mean it's not some secret sauce or method to it, it's watch YouTube videos or read papers, you know tutorials, tutorials, tutorials. Anyone can get this type of knowledge, and I think it's requisite that they do to bolster and support and scale their creative efforts. So this is gonna be a unique situation in space and time where that you know the more technical you can get, or understand or at least grasp the better output creatively the right it will directly enrich and benefit your creative output and I think that's a very kind of rare symmetry that isn't really inherent in a lot of other things but if I can do it anyone. I love it thank you for this peek into what's going on the defense component of it, the cyber security component of it, the IP component of it… there just so many implications that are things we need to talk about and think about, so thank you for starting that conversation. Absolutely pleasure I appreciate you having me on hopefully we do this again soon.    

We continue this week with the second set form the band's performance at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View CA. on August 25, 1993.  This is a fine setlist - highlighted by some outstanding work by Garcia especially during the transitions between songs. A Scarlet>Fire opens things up and Jerry gives us some remarkable work during the transition and in the opening solo of Fire.  'Estimated Prophet' begins a nice long stretch of music highlighted by a 'Terrapin Station' and a sweet jam out of Terrapin into Drums and Space.  'All Along the Watchtower' grows out of Space and the post-drums highlight for me is 'Attics of My Life', although there is a bit of static here and there..  A fun 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds', is the encore this night sending folks home with a smile.   Grateful Dead Shoreline Amphitheatre Mountain View, CA 8/25/1993 - Wednesday Two     Scarlet Begonias > Fire On The Mountain Estimated Prophet > Terrapin Station > Drums > Space > All Along The Watchtower > Attics Of My Life > Sugar Magnolia Encore     Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds   You can listen to this week's Deadpod here:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/deadshow/deadpod090123.mp3  Have a safe and fun Labor Day weekend! 

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Sandy S is from Mountain View California, she opens this meeting by sharing her story for about 20 min, after Sandy we have Amy for the last 40 min, Amy is from Hollister California. They are speaking at a meeting called Friday Night Fever held sometime in 1992 at an unknown location. Email: sobercast@gmail.com Support Sober Cast: https://sobercast.com/donate AA Event List: https://scast.us/events If you have an AA roundup, retreat, convention or workshop coming up, we would be happy to give you a shout out here on the podcast and list the event on the Sober Cast website. Visit the link above and look for "Submit Your Event" in the blue box. Sober Cast has 2200+ episodes available, visit SoberCast.com to access all the episodes where you can easily find topics or specific speakers using tags or search. https://sobercast.com

The Google IO Conference kicks off at the top of the hour, we're live in Mountain View CA for the headlines. Evercore ISI putting out a tactical bull and a tactical bear call ahead of earnings. We dig into both names with analyst Greg Melich. Plus, Kindbody is #43 on the Disruptor 50 list this year. The company's founder joins Kelly to discuss the big business of babies. 

Howard Cespedes worked at seven Tower Records locations during his 19-year career. He's best known for his three stints at the Mountain View CA store and his five year tenure at the 4th & Broadway location in Manhattan.Born on Guam and growing up in Northern California, Howard was a life-long jazz fan, starting with his father's Duke Ellington recordings he discovered. His first time shopping at Tower Watt Avenue, he was taken by the jazz section size and got lost in it.Starting as temporary inventory help, Howard was called back for an interview to work in the Classical Department atMountain View. This was when Mike Lowther was General Manager. His first weeks at Tower involved an exclusive in-store promotion for consumers to win a car and he shares his memories of those first days with us.Working with A Teams was a big part of Howard's Tower career. Helping to open Washington DC, London Piccadilly, Torrance, Boston, Carle Place, Nashville, Atlanta and a whole host of other stores was critical to his development. Howard walks us through his time working at Picadilly Circus as an A Team member and then as Receiving Department Manager. This was so much more labor intensive than the US position. London is also the only store where Howard was late to a Tower Meeting because of Princess Diana.Following London, in NYC Howard was the Assistant Manager of #125 at 4th & Broadway. One special in-storeperformance in 1991 was with a new Seattle band called Nirvana. Another legendary night was with Keith Richards in-store just steps from Keith's condo. Howard discusses the perks and headaches of running the busiest US store in the chain at the time.In 1993 Howard moved back to the Bay Area and didn't enjoy his last years with the company due to Tower's diversification into non-music products. In addition, he wanted to return to live musical performances.Join us for an informative look on Howard Cespedes' journey at Tower Records. 

"Overcoming Toxic Shame" Join Dr. Jill Levitt and me  at our fabulous new workshop Sunday, February 5th, 2023 8:30am - 4:30pm PST - 7 CE units Click here for information and registration In today's podcast, David and Jill describe their new workshop on Overcoming Toxic Shame. This workshop will feature video snippets from a fantastic session with a beloved colleague named Melanie who struggled with intense feelings of anxiety and shame for more than 8 years. You will see her transformation from utter despair to joy in a single therapy session lasting roughly two hours, and you will get the chance to learn and practice the techniques that were so transformative for her. Most mental health professionals also struggle with feelings of shame because of their belief that they aren't "good enough" and from fears of being found out. You will have the chance to heal yourself while you master cool new techniques to transform the lives of your patients! In today's podcast, David and Jill do a live demonstration of a couple of the many techniques they will illustrate on February, which will include the Paradoxical Double Standardl Technique, Externalization of Voices, and the Feared Fantasy. You will not only witness a remarkable change in Melanie, as well as a sudden, severe and unexpected relapse half way through the session. David ang Jill will ask, "If you were the therapist, what would you do right now?" What follows is AMAZING! Jill practices and serves as the Director of Training at the Feeling Good Institute in Mountain View California. She is also co-leader of my Tuesday evening weekly training group at Stanford (now entirely virtual). This group is totally free and is available to mental health professional in the Bay Area and around the world. You can reach Dr. Burns at david@feelinggood.com.

In this episode I had a chance to talk to Lisa Jones-Huff about the importance of data visualization and how it can help both security AND the business. Lisa is the Senior Director of Global Security Specialists for Elastic.Talking Points:Some basic steps for understanding how to interpret your data:What is the very first thing you should do on your data visualization journey?What type of data do you have?What is the value of that data?What types of use cases provide the most 'Combined Value'?How can Graph can help tell the story in a detail that a 'regular' person can understand?Episode Sponsor:This episode is sponsored by Elastic. Elastic is a multi-faceted business and security solutions company based out of Mountain View California.  Part of the sponsor ship fee will be going to raise money for the Autism Alliance of Michigan.

In this month we're going to be touching up on some of Pearl Jam's past festival dates, starting with the first touring festival that helped make the band at Lollapalooza in 1992. Two shows at the Shoreline Amphitheater kicked off this tour, and we're gonna cover the second night because it's the only one that has a bootleg attached. We'll share a clip from our Horizon Profile episode with Amy Wynn, who was at the first night of the two-day kick-off. We'll also get to talk about an entertaining interview that exists on the internet featuring Stone and Jeff on MTV's 120 Minutes. They discuss how they met, how they felt about touring at the time, and a word that you can say on TV that absolutely caught the attention of Stone. That's probably the big moment to tune in for! Visit the Concertpedia - http://liveon4legs.com Donate - http://patreon.com/liveon4legs

Hello again Racing Ears, In this episode Trent, Rick, and Jeff were fortunate to have a first conversation with Mr. Jerry Woods.  Jerry Woods is the owner at Jerry Woods Enterprises which is a Porsche related specialist service shop that specializes in preparing Porsches either for the enthusiast driver collector or for the enthusiast collector racing driver.  Mr. Woods is known as the crew chief for the world famous Dick Barbour Racing Garretson Enterprises Porsche 935 that is highlighted in the documentary on the Porsche 935 "Moby and the Warhorse Gang", which is the story of how volunteer mechanics from Mountain View California had success in the late 70's and early 80's in sports car racing events which include the 24 Hours Of Le Mans in Europe and the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring in the United States. It was truly an honor to be able to chat with Jerry Woods for this episode.  Thank you for listening to The Racing Ear Podcast.  #theracingearpodcast#rickknoopracing#jeffoldham#jerrywoodsenterprises

EP289 - ShipBob Co-Founder Dhruv Saxena  Dhruv Saxena is the co-founder and CEO of ShipBob, Inc. ShipBob is a tech-enabled third-party logistics provider (3PL) that fulfills e-commerce orders for direct-to-consumer brands. We discuss ShipBob's origin story, how the e-commerce fulfillment industry has evolved, as well as the challenges and implications of Amazon and Shopify's various fulfillment initiatives. Episode 289 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Friday March 18, 2022. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 289 being recorded on Friday March 18 20 22 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:37] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason as you know we did a Amazon Fulfillment deep dive a couple weeks ago and that was quite a popular Topic in episode and we've been getting a lot of questions from listeners about what's going on in the world of and we are now living in a world where products used to be if you get it in a week that was amazing and now anything that's longer than 2 days feels like a lifetime so we thought it would be good to bring on one of the top startups in the Fulfillment area the shipbob and we have with us the CEO and co-founder of shipbob dhruv saxena dhruv welcome to the show. Dhruv: [1:20] Thank you so much Scott and Jason for having me excited for our conversation. Jason: [1:24] We are looking forward to it as well I'm getting tons of complaints on the feet already that people were expecting Bob to be on the show today so you'll have to tell us how it became dhruv started shipbob. Dhruv: [1:36] Yeah for sure I'll give you a quick back story on me if that's the opening question and tell you how did we come up with the name shipbob. Jason: [1:46] That would be perfect yes I asked it very awkward we Scott is laughing at me on the back Channel. Dhruv: [1:51] Yeah so. Quick back story on us you know I grew up in Delhi India came to the u.s. in 2007 to pursue engineering my co-founder on shabaab device is also from India we've known each other all our lives. And so we after we both did an engineering in the midwest here I went to Purdue we came back to Chicago and started. I'll booking in a full-time jobs at software programmers and on nights and weekends as most Engineers do. We were trying and experimenting with a bunch of thought of ideas and one of the start-up ideas was in e-commerce. And be Engineers we were able to automate effectively everything in that e-commerce business except the part around shipping and Logistics. And so every time you would have a bunch of folders we would have to run to the post office here in Willis Tower Chicago in the basement, they have a post office and we would have to stand in line and basically ship out those orders out and that became the most manual and painful part of our e-commerce business. And we wanted to find ways of automating that. [2:58] And we would call up a bunch of these existing companies 3pls who helped companies with the shipping and Logistics take all three pills third party Logistics providers. And none of them wanted our business because we were too small for them, and so that got us thinking as to hey how do others small to mid-sized e-commerce businesses figure out their shipping and Logistics we realize that there really isn't a good alternative for businesses like ours who are you know ramping up e-commerce businesses and that caught us into, thinking what should pop can be. And how did the name come about you know so when we started thinking about building a company for helping businesses with their shipping and Logistics needs. We were going for like like people want fast shipping so we should have ship and a fast you know like an animal name or something like a ship park or a ship Cheeto something on those lines so that it conveys. That heylia company which helps you with fast shipping and all of these that domain names were taken, stop after a while godaddy's recommendation engine you know started recommending you no other alternative domain names and one of them was shipbob for 299 or something, and so we say you know we don't have money but this seems like a cool name and so if you just turned shipbob.com for 299 and that's the story of her name and so now we have a good messaging around hey, Bob Means bending over backwards for your shipping or Bob can be a plumber Bob can be you know any use for gyves but as Bob kennels to be a shipment so that's like the marketing angle on shipbob. Scot: [4:24] Very cool so it's interesting because this kind of parallels a lot of a lot of companies in e-commerce they start with people building e-commerce stores and then they're like, this part of it stinks I'm just going to focus on solving this so what is your original e-commerce store do. Dhruv: [4:42] So we started were doing a lot of like printed photographs and so you know this is like 2013 2012, bear Instagram had just been acquired by Facebook for like a billion dollars and so we thought oh wow that's photo-sharing seems to be like a heart, market right now and Instagram is all about digital photo sharing so what if we brought back the Retro way of sharing pictures which is people would print and mail pictures to each other so our e-commerce business was that you would send us a photo. Honor text bot we would print that photo we would frame it we would write a message at the back of the for any personal message you wanted and mail it to your friends and family all across the world. And so that was sort of you know our big idea then like physical photo sharing. Scot: [5:28] Cool car like frame bridge I think does some of that now cool yeah so then you you did you wind that down as you kind of pivot it over to the Fulfillment center. Dhruv: [5:39] Yeah it won't down on its own to be honest because once we started focusing on on shipbob E that business wasn't really taking off with shipbob first was was so we started spending a lot more energy on shipbob. Scot: [5:52] And then so that was 2015 earlier kind of also 2014 yet. Dhruv: [5:58] Now 2014 2015 we got into this incubator called y combinator Scott so. That allowed us to you know quit our full-time jobs because y combinator gives you like a hundred and twenty thousand dollars so that was enough money for us to like put in you know our notices on a full-time jobs and go all in on shipbob. Scot: [6:20] Brickell so you got no Y combinator and then that usually requires you to go out to Silicon Valley for a period of time did you guys do that or are they at some point they introduced remote but I think that was later. Dhruv: [6:32] Much later yeah no that's a good question so. This is another great sort of Peace around you know building startups and Chicago so when we go into YC. We were one of the very few companies you know. Who did not relocate to California so it was it wasn't mandated or Partners there were very comfortable we okay with us traveling back and forth. So every week on Tuesday they have these partner meetings but you go and tell them the progress you've made. And so we would fly every Tuesday morning to our Mountain View California do our pitch and you know and learn and then come back and because, we had to fly and I was you know what a red eye flight Etc it was a lot of effort so we would always try to make sure that we have enough progress that we've made in a given week to make that trip worthwhile otherwise we would go there and we will just come out looking like we didn't really do much and that would be a waste of our time so that pressure of making that trip by productive I think in the early days for stars to work way harder, that may be a lot of other companies simply because you know we were putting a lot of effort and these so and capital in making those trips and but we headquarter the business in Chicago. I'll see you know which turned out to be you know pretty good decision I guess in hindsight. Scot: [7:49] Yeah and then you know what's really interesting and I kind of live this every day so I'm curious how you path you took here as software people you know we love to solve things with software and at some point shipping is not a software problem right you can you can build the world's best shipping but at some point some human has to and maybe a robot but you know some something has to move a package from point A to point B sometimes Point c d and e and then someone has to you have this middle Mile and this last mile when did you guys realize that you're going to have to actually have like fulfillment centers. Dhruv: [8:26] Um right from the prions yeah pretty much. Because you know coming out of the running your own e-commerce business and then also a couple of other startups before then. Like. Be being Engineers yes we were very accustomed to writing a lot of code and then just hoping that users will show up and none of the startups are for shipbob for us worked out, and one of the realizations that would be in the way had is that just because you build it doesn't mean that people will come, and so you would have to spend a lot of your time and energy in making sure that you actually spend you know time on sales marketing and distribution and so when so we were very. Early before even adding code we were talking to our customers and these customers you know who would eventually become users or loyal users. Told us very clearly that we don't really care about great software what we care about is a great product or a great service which helps us in packaging and shipping so that influence the decision-making right. We can't be a pure software company these Merchants are paying us because they need great fulfillment service so having our own fulfillment centers probably requirement for us before we can start scaling. Scot: [9:36] Got it okay cool so you go do y combinator and then women did you like build your first like when did you have your first fulfillment center. Dhruv: [9:48] So right at the you know when you started the company like our office and my apartment became sort of a file template. Fulfillment center very Loosely here so you won't really be able to. Call the Department of proper fulfillment center but you know it did the did the work so there was enough room in our apartment and enough first office. Which is like I think thousand square feet for us to have some room for people to send us their product and we would store their inventory. And then have couple of hours basically pick pack and ship you know those boxes out so my apartment was on the 31st floor so every evening we would get a big. Little trolley and put all the packages and that's all a and then use the freight elevator to bring those packages to the ground level where Michael ejector words you know use the car and we'll take it to the post office. Scot: [10:41] If you're in Jason's building he would have reported you as like a probably a drug dealer some suspicious Behavior going on up on the 31st floor. Dhruv: [10:50] Yeah no. Jason: [10:51] I'm just grateful the city planners that do the zoning didn't hear this story. Dhruv: [10:56] Yeah you know it. Scot: [11:00] It's not illegal if you don't get caught. Dhruv: [11:02] You know we did get in trouble in the early days with the local post office so what would happen is again you know because we had been. We didn't have a lot of successful startups before shipbob Beaver like way paranoid about finding customers. And we none of us came from the sales and marketing background so we tried to run for this position where you can we find customers in the most cheapest and fastest way possible and the obvious answer to us was let's go outside the post office because there's always a line, people don't always seem very happy or to go to a post office and so if he. Can find a few e-commerce merchants in those lines we can pitch them that idea while they are still in the line and convince them to give us their package and not go to the Post Office the second webinar. And so we spend the first three during by see it is like a first three to six months of our shipbob basically standing in lines outside different post offices in Chicago to convince people walking in that shabaab is a better alternative than you going inside the post office. So the post office Forks very nice people thought that we were trying to take business away from them. [12:10] So they were sent they would call up these post office apparently post office has its own police do something so they would send out these post office cops, who would comment she was away and so we would just go from one post office to the other like based on you know which one had last called the cops on us and so, I think some post office might still have a picture of Jessica and the way to make sure that they don't show up again. Scot: [12:33] Hello. Jason: [12:35] Those cops are federal agents by the way they're not messing around. Dhruv: [12:38] Oh man I hope they did especially because we were immigrant Founders so we can't get in trouble with the the federal police. Scot: [12:49] The federal jails and I hear pretty nice though so good they have tennis and stuff. Jason: [12:54] What we're going to have a separate episode about how Scott knows that. Scot: [13:00] Okay cool so you did your wife see then you came back to Chicago and then maybe kind of update us like the bullet points to where we are today. Dhruv: [13:10] Yeah so once we you know got back to Chicago post why see we were fortunate enough to raise a seed round of a million dollars and so that allowed us to, you know take that top pill and hire a couple more engineers and hire a few more sales people and then expand the business so we opened up a warehouse in Chicago. Where we were headquartered and then we quickly expanded to New York as well so we added a location in Brooklyn New York. [13:38] And based on the progress that we had made you know in Chicago and New York and remember let's also limited so it requires Capital because you're opening up these fulfillment centers at the very beginning and you're also writing a lot of software which powers. The inside operations of the Fulfillment center and so we have to raise Capital simply by the nature of the business we are in also fulfillment I'm sure like, all your list has no it's not like a software business it's not an 80% gross margin business we have very tight margins, and so you are you require a lot of captains in this business to scale and so every couple of years we've had to raise Capital simply for us too, add investment dollars into building, either the software which powers are fulfillment centers or to open up our own fulfillment centers and so The quick summary of f Bob is today is that over the last five years or so, we raised you know close to 400 million dollars or so of venture capital, we've added you know be as close to 1,000 employees now a lot of it on the product and Engineering teams and sales and marketing team for us too. Add many emotions to our network but also write a lot of great stuff in which power is the back end of almost we know back-end systems of all of the e-commerce businesses using a platform. And the business strategically also has you know evolved where we don't now need to. [15:02] Operate our own fulfillment centers because we have four of our own social incentives each one in Chicago New York Texas and California so we kind of know how to run fulfillment centers we now partner with existing. 3pl Zone fulfillment centers who have empty capacity we bring in our software our know how our physical infrastructure into those locations, we bring them up to the shipbob standard and then we are able to Route our Merchants into those locations and so the business now requires a lot less capital in scaling the infrastructure side of things but not all of that Capital goes towards you know basically growing out the product capabilities and adding new Merchants into our Network. And we have fulfillment centers in the u.s. in Canada in UK Europe in Australia. And we of course added a lot of capabilities on a network all the parts on this wall so truly today now shipbob is a global. Omni-channel fulfillment solution for a Merchants where we can we are probably you know on power if you were starting an e-commerce business and you wanted to compete very effectively with Amazon and Walmart supply chain we are a great alternative. Scot: [16:13] Pickle the way I explain it let me see if this pencils for you so if someone asked me how this you know how this kind of what I would call your one of these next-generation fulfillment companies my pitch is you had these 3pls but they were really designed for you're kind of almost like a real estate thing where you go in and say Hey I want a corner of this fulfillment center and I'm going to lease it and do X Y & Z and then Amazon's Innovation was FBA where it was you know what much more aligned with the the e-commerce model of yes I want you to hold my goods but they're going to turn over quickly and I want to pay more of a per transaction kind of a thing, and I also want a lot of flexibility about how fast I can get products to Consumers so 3pls were in this kind of old world where they weren't really built that way so then part of what you guys did as you built your own fulfillment centers with this new model and then you can kind of take that model and put it into Old 3pls bring them up to kind of like the FBA level of above standard is that a fair summary of how you explain shipbob to other folks. Dhruv: [17:20] Yes that is very real articulated Scott I might actually use that going forward and and the only piece I would add to it is, of course you hit on the fast piece of it which is very relevant for a merchant, the second big element of wine Merchants choose us and our network is our ability to customize the unboxing experience which is unique for that particular brand so you know when you order something on Amazon it shows up in Amazon branded box for a merchant they want that unboxing experience to represent their brands you know. Ethos and the brand value so whether that's a custom box you know whether it could be eco-friendly material it could be custom gift notes accustomed shipping labels Etc the ability to customize that you know that. Transaction is very relevant for them it's almost on par alongside speed and and so that's the piece the second element of. Of customization I guess that should Bob's been able to unlock that I think FB it doesn't offer. Jason: [18:18] Got it and just to sort of clarify for listeners like so the goal then is it feels like it got shipped by the vendor right so it has whatever packaging the the manufacturer would want to use and a bill of lading that has their logo and those things on it as opposed to I ordered something from cuts and then I got an invoice from shipbob or something like that. Dhruv: [18:41] Yep exactly right we want to be. In the background you know where the Shopper is building a direct relationship with the brand and and the Shopper is agnostic to whether shipbob ships or whether the brand shifted. Jason: [18:58] Yep so and just to kind of frame this like back in that time frame the the idea of B2 C3 PLS was not common today it's a it's a pretty crowded Market space there's a lot of a lot of options but they're back then is got kind of pointed out like there was a thing called 3pls but they were more of like a B2B service really right. Dhruv: [19:22] That's right yep and so, the reason why even we were able to even build a business here is because majority of the 3pls out there were focused on the palette and Palette outside our transaction because most of their customers, but the bands who was selling predominantly in retail stores like Macy's no storm or Target Etc and so the concept of this High Velocity two to three units per order was very foreign to them, and all of the infrastructure was designed to store large number of palettes worth says having inventory in each has or in single units stored in bins and shelves. And so far from that perspective, the reason you know if you are doing pallets and pallid out like getting into e-commerce and then getting working with small and mid-sized e-commerce businesses where you don't make a lot of money for customer Justin. Pencil for these for these B2 B3 Tails because they were used to having. A small number of very large customers and then designing their entire operation inside the building's only for that few number of merchants because they would be able to make a you know the entire earnings ones from that limited set of merchants, word says it shipbob you know we we have a whole large number of merchants none of our Merchants you know are these are all birds or these massive Brands but these are growing emerging bands and. [20:50] Productized what is very much like been away service-oriented business. Jason: [20:55] Yep and so the profile of the typical shipbob customer is a start-up that's intending to sell direct to Consumer mostly through their own website is that a fair characterization. Dhruv: [21:08] That's how we got started his and so you know today that is definitely evolved as a capabilities have grown as well so, I would say like if you have to break down the merchants that we serve are so, on one end of the spectrum we have these Merchants you know they could be ought to pronounce what just getting started and they're doing anywhere from you know less than a hundred thousand dollars of annual revenue on the website all the way up to maybe a million dollars or so. So that's one and then we have Merchants who are from 1 to 15 million dollars of gmv, and they are predominantly selling on their own website but they're also selling on marketplaces like Amazon eBay Walmart. And then we have a mid-market segment of merchant these are relatively established Brands they are doing anywhere from 10 to 150 million dollars of gmv across all the different channels that they're selling on, and for them you know they are in e-commerce which is direct-to-consumer they're also in marketplaces but they're also in retailgeek, and so they and they also are thought getting to be Global and so for them, they use shipbob because under one umbrella they are they get not only great technology but the Fulfillment solution is able to carry it across all the different channels that they're selling on, and it allows them to manage inventory Under One Roof so in the. I guess the value proposition over the last six years for shipbob has definitely evolved as a capabilities have grown I've grown. Jason: [22:33] Makes total sense and I'm assuming so in my day job one of the the new categories of business that I see you like getting into direct fulfillment more are traditional products that used to exclusively sell through wholesale and in some cases these could be quite large companies that are used to sending pallets to Target and Walmart and now they're starting to sell some of their own goods from their own website and just like those those startups from 2014 they've got to figure out how to do the each's Fulfillment and I think they turn to folks like you as well now. Dhruv: [23:06] Yeah absolutely and so you know that's the exciting piece of direct-to-consumer is that. The technology and the infrastructure needed for you to start your own e-commerce business and be able to reach your consumers is has massively evolved so these traditional. You know Brands who are predominant retail now they are able to participate in e-commerce in the pretty meaningful way as well and they have access to Great infrastructure and. I think you know the. They've also realized that the infrastructure that they need it for their retail shipping doesn't look anywhere close to what they need for the direct to Consumer so on the record consumer side maybe you choose Chopper 5 for your front end platform. Are you choose to do a lot of your advertising and marketing on through Facebook Instagram Snapchat social media is the predominant digital marketing channel effectively. And then you choose shipbob for your fulfillment and and running your supply chain and maybe use a form or you know or care enough for your buy now pay later like those credit financing options and so this technology stack that you need to run your direct-to-consumer e-commerce business you know now exists, and is completely different from what you might have used for running a full wholesale retail operation. Jason: [24:27] Yep and I do want to just double-click on one other thing before we turn to two marketplaces and the Frenemy situation there but the so a couple of your advantages why you develop this software to make the Fulfillment center much more efficient than traditional ones were and obviously efficiency is a huge differentiator and in the Fulfillment you you enable all this customization and personalization which is a better match for The Branding that all of these clients want to do one of the other things that I think of is. 3pls from that era that was sort of problematic and that kind of Amazon disrupted is like they used to make you manage your own inventory so if they had to. Fulfillment centers you as the merchant had to decide how much good you are sending to the West Coast and how much good you are sending to the east coast and and you sort of had to do all those things and. Amazon through their fulfillment by Amazon kind of took that that that Inventory management burden away from some of their their merchants and sort of did all that for them and did the load balancing and all those sorts of things so do you do that like you now it sounds like you've got four of your own fulfillment centers and a bunch of virtual fulfillment Centers do you do all of that sort of AI based inventory allocation for your customers as well. Dhruv: [25:56] Yep absolutely so and that's sort of I guess we can break that inventory allocation into two parts so one is choosing where in the network, to send your products from your manufacturer. [26:08] And so that's based on you know we provide all of that information upfront to a merchant base where you know based on historical purchase data that we captured from all the different sales channels that you connect into Shabbat we can be have a model that, Delta to fairly well as to how much inventory to store in which parts of the network, and so that's and so you can but we don't necessarily mandate that because for these brands you know they want to be one them to have the ability to make those decisions for themselves we provide them with all of the information and if they choose to they can have shipbob distribute that inventory for themselves for them or they can do it directly from the manufacturer my following our data you know that we give out to them so that's on the first half of like sending like the right amount of inventory to the right location so that's a little bit of a optionality for these bands. And then the second part of it where we do a lot of the work ourselves is once we start getting these orders into our platform once you buy something from our, from a branch choosing which fulfillment center that particular order gets routed to and what shipping carrier is used for that particular transaction that is something that we that we definitely do you know in the house and so that is a pretty important element of it because as a brand you might off be offering two day shipping on your checkout page. [27:32] But you actually don't want you know to be using Ups 2 day or FedEx overnight to do that today transaction because that will be very expensive, and sociable because we've captured a lot of far, carriers performance data over time we have a pretty built out model which tells us hey if we even if you use this local Regional carrier for this particular order we have a very high likelihood it will get delivered in 2 days or less and we don't have to pay for a UPS guarantee today service and so we are able to bring down the cost of two days significantly down at this almost the same price point as a USB as ground shipping which is a total which is the cheapest form of shipping simply by placing inventory in better you know better placement of inventory and a fulfillment centers but also choosing where which fulfillment center ships that particular order and what shipping carrier we use for the transaction, for that was a little long answer but I think that is sort of the secret, Elemental why brands of any size are able to offer a two-day next a sort of a shipping experience on the checkout page. Scot: [28:37] Yeah if that's helpful at when I've talked to some people about this kind of stuff they're always like how hard could this be like this comes up in the Shopify so a lot of Shopify Wall Street folks you know they'll say well why is this so hard and you know one of my favorite things about e-commerce is going to tour warehouses because once you get inside of warehoused you realize that this pretty complicated and the way I explain it is once you've committed to a. [29:09] Yo an asset like a warehouse and all the people in everything then it becomes an optimization problem in optimizing warehouses is pretty complicated right so let's let's take you guys have X number of customers in a fulfillment center let's just keep it one of the ones you own and operate to make it even simpler and you know there's a there's a bazillion questions like how do you if you take customer 1 through 100 do you intermix there things how do you do the packaging you talked about how do you how tall are the shelves do you use conveyor belts do you do two floors or one floor and your fulfillment center so what's fun about that is an engineer there's a lot of fun problems to solve their and it's a lot, you know your explanation of the shipping is interesting because that's like yet another one so a lot of people feel like this is too easy is really easy and then they kind of run up against the the the hardness of it and they kind of have to step back and redo it do you have a point of view of. You know what Shopify kind of did it seem like they tried to do a software-only kind of a solution and it kind of didn't work and now they're trying to get more involved in it and you have a point of view on that. Dhruv: [30:18] Yeah for sure but you framed it really well Scott which is. Once you you know once you go inside the Fulfillment center the number of problems of that that you can potentially solve or almost endless, and the reason it's important to attack these optimization problems is fundamentally you know fulfillment is not a software only problem. And it doesn't come with 80% gross margins and so it's in your best interest to optimize once you get to certain scale because every cent and dollar you share from those operating costs is a dollar that flows to your bottom line alternatively is a dollar that you can then reduce you know your cause to your brand which then allows them to reduce their fulfillment costs and that way allows them to offer free shipping which then drives, you know more sales on the website which then drives you no more orders into your platform which allows you to get to scale faster. And so optimization is you know is key for you to be operating at the lowest cost possible because there are advantages of doing so. And so there are a lot of different ways to get to Optimum to try to optimize but if you don't own and operate your fulfillment centers at least the onset you simply don't know what problems to solve, and so at shipbob you know what I believe worked really well in our favor is because we operated our own fulfillment centers we saw firsthand. [31:45] What are the consequences of the choices that we are making. And that involves you know the physical infrastructure do we mix products of different merchants in the same aisle where in the, we're in the Fulfillment Centers do we place the fast-moving skus do we take the loaf slowest moving skills and put them at the back of the Fulfillment centers away from the rest of the merchants inventory or do we place them high up in the, under racking system how do we think about Labor planning is Mondays. [32:15] 20% higher than Friday so do we need to staff up in the morning shift Etc and they are all and material handling and and Idol walking is such a big. Cost of the Fulfillment centers operations how do we try to minimize that and at what scale there are hundreds of these optimization decisions that we've had to make over the last seven years, which then have been productized in our software in our warehouse management system which then now is being deployed across these Partners sites, and so I think if we were to to you know jump ahead and just do our partners sites that we don't own and operate we don't own or operate on a day-to-day basis we would have missed out on all of these optimization decisions that we made over the last seven years which then allows us to operate, at a much lower operating costs than any of the competition so I think Shopify I don't know, you know the products are actually there but I think they might have tried to short-circuit their way into running virtual fulfillment centers to early without having learned the lessons of our without having experienced the lessons of running your own building which I think they might be course-correcting now. Scot: [33:25] Yeah it gives you the ability to go to a 3pl and say hey here's your you know 3pls are kind of V1 and you guys are like V10 so you can go in there and say take this section do it this way here's how you know here's the barcode reader you need to use yours there's like all this stuff that has to come together seamlessly with the software to kind of execute and you guys have figured all that out and you can just kind of plop it right into the 3pl I imagined. Dhruv: [33:50] That's right yeah exactly out pitch to these existing 3pls is that you have this unused capacity. This is like a warehouse in a box that we are providing you and if you follow you know the product or the our operating protocol then you will be able to make X dollars and order or Y dollars a square foot, Which is higher than what you are achieving now and by the way you don't have to spend any money on sales and marketing and servicing because shabab you know these are shipbob merchants and so you should be able to make. You know. You should be able to generate a return on that on that space in a relatively short amount of time which makes it a pretty interesting proposition for these existing 3pls who want to participate in e-commerce but they necessarily don't have the infrastructure. All the capital to do so as yet. Scot: [34:44] Interesting cool so give us an idea of your scale so I saw on crunch basis it says you've raised over 300 million so congrats on that the I've been raising capital in this kind of more asset heavy World in it's not not easy so so kudos to you for being able to fund us at the scale you have maybe like how many packages a day are you guys processing or anything you can tell us around scale would be kind of interesting. Dhruv: [35:10] For sure I won't be able to get to the. Exact are approximate taxes but here he is maybe a good proxy you know we have close to. 30 or so fulfillment centers in our Network today we are adding one fulfillment center a month that's the relative scale and majority of the reason why we're adding these fulfillment centers that are rapid clip. Is because we are you know reaching. Pasty in these fulfillment centers fairly quickly and the amount of space that we take inside of a fulfillment center is anywhere from. 30 to 40,000 square feet on the lower end as much as 90 200,000 square feet on the higher end so that's the sort of every sight every node in the network represents at least you know maybe call it average 50,000 square feet and we have close to 30 of them. Scot: [36:04] Furcal and then it wouldn't be a Jason and Scot show if we didn't at least throw you an Amazon question. So so it's easy to kind of you know again for someone to kind of look at this and say hey you're competing with FBA and I I get that you know. Amazon's talked about doing you know a you know just non-market play Style Style fulfillment. And then but then and then they've also talked about yeah you can use your own packaging and but you know my understanding is they're not really doing that at scale do you do you guys feel like you compete against them or do you see them the other thing that also blows people's minds a lot of time is software and sinners like you guys operate frequently will ship stuff using Amazon's API so that it can be prime eligible which is also kind of a so-so the 3pl the shipping partner can be Merchant fulfilled Prime which thus means their products are prime eligible so maybe talk a little bit about how you feel about Amazon. Dhruv: [37:03] Yeah for sure and yes you're right so we do ship inventory sometimes into Amazon Fulfillment centers as well for, for the fpaa. [37:15] And some of our some of our Merchants do also you know use the what you call the seller fulfilled Prime option but more on your question on the do we compete with FPA I think it is servicing a slightly. Different segments of the market and so if you talk to most of our brands, you know they were they won't really say that we trust Amazon with all of our data. And so for these brands that we serve as passing that customer information or who their buyers are, to Amazon seems like a big business dress because Amazon competes with them, you know on the Amazon to the Amazon Basics line or you know placing the product slightly differently on the the listing speed and sector so they want to build a supply chain, and demand you know sort of website which allows them to control their own destiny without having to rely on. On Amazon which could potentially be problematic for them down the road. And so in that context they want to stay away from Amazon as much as possible of course they also do sometimes have Amazon listings because Amazon is such a great. Aggregator of demand that maybe it has a lower cost of acquisition than having to do it yourself on your website but you don't want to rely on Amazon for. [38:40] Majority of your sales and so in you know under that, through contacts then we don't necessarily compete with Amazon FBA because for these Brands using FPA is not even an option and so and two because then we are there under this ethos of like if I have. Slightly Superior brand and my brand is represented through all aspects of my branding website supply chain I can I can be a better business, then you know shipbob stability to provide us a plethora of customization options, is a real value sell because and I know our ability to match you know this two-day Prime life experience. I think it's a real value add and the third aspect of it if I may add is as these Brands grow larger being able to have inventory globally is. Something which I don't think is possible with FB and fourth is if you're also getting into retail, you know doing being able to ship Ballads of inventory to these retail distribution centers again is not an option with fpso if a brand is thinking about their supply chain as a whole I think shipbob FB is probably not a solution. Jason: [39:51] Yeah so that really makes sense I'm kind of curious how this is going to continue to evolve I mean it seems like there's some risk that some of these big retailers like or marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart might eventually start selling their fulfillment as as a third party service that could potentially compete in the 3pl area and I think the the FedEx is and UPS is of the world are leaning more into it as well is. Is the future going to be kind of all of these different Services kind of colliding and meaning in the middle or how do you see the future of this industry playing out. Dhruv: [40:26] Yeah that's a hard question to answer, because yes you know e-commerce is growing so quickly that there are so many Greenfield opportunities for different companies. To play a part in so but I think each one probably you know like this industry benefits from scale. And so and of course this is a hard business because you're dealing with physical products and physical inventory and physical assets. And so I don't know if the industry would sort of all of us will start doing each other's work simply because it's by doing our core businesses by itself pretty hard and getting to scale in our Core Business is very relevant so. [41:07] I think UPS and FedEx might I think might have dabbled an e-commerce fulfillment but I think majority of the business still very much remains around transportation and and same for shipbob I think majority of our business is around fulfillment we are looking at ways of adding value to a merchant Base by taking parts of the transportation and seeing if we have enough density on certain routes, that can be that can allow us to reduce the overall fulfillment calls for a Merchants but again I think there's so much you know there's so much to be done in this space that if you. Lose focus you can lose the advantage that you have right now so you know I and and businesses are able to grow, simply by focusing in the core business area so for us at least you know it's mostly fulfillment and maybe pieces of Transportation sprinkled in. Jason: [41:58] Well that seems like a toy reasonable perspective and it certainly is going to be fun to watch but I think that's going to be where we have to leave it today because as per usual we have used up all of our allotted time as always if this is episode was helpful to you we sure would appreciate that five-star review but we really appreciate your time today and sharing a little bit more about shipbob with us. Dhruv: [42:21] Now thank you so much Jason and Scott for having me this was a good conversation. Scot: [42:25] Dexter even if folks want to follow you online do you pontificate or should they just follow the shipbob socials. Dhruv: [42:32] The shipbob Socialist would be a great great dad. Scot: [42:35] I know I would advocate for you doing more would love to read anything you write about the industry as it's been a good discussion and you know at least Jason I would read it so we can guarantee that. Dhruv: [42:47] It's great to read as I got I got it. Scot: [42:49] Boom and Jason's mom she always follows Oliver stuff stuff. Dhruv: [42:54] I can convince my mom as well. Jason: [42:59] The audience is growing by the minute well thanks very much everyone and until next time happy commercing.  

Hello to you listening in Mountain View, California!Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is 60 Seconds for Thoughts on Thursday.  I may as well face it: I can behave like an over-stretched, over-committed, dutiful, responsible, driven, obligated mother's daughter.Begin Anew 2022 is getting me caught up in doing it all wrong by trying to do it all right. It's the cost of having grown up in my generation, in my family, in my family's religion. Those spaces forged me as if I was metal to be hammered by a blacksmith.I have all these notions about what I am supposed to do, have, create, earn, market, calendar, write, publish, reconfigure, reorganize, schedule, envision, network, and  connect. I can't do it all and I can't do it perfectly. Do you feel some of this, too?  Practical Tip: Let's just stop. Let's ask ourselves: How would it feel if we stopped “shoulding” on ourselves? Let's invite peace, space, the power of the pause. Did you just breathe a deep sigh of relief? Perhaps drop your shoulders? Maybe even smile at your silly human self? Me, too. 60 Seconds is your daily dose of hope, imagination, wisdom, stories, practical tips, and general riffing on this and that. This is the place to thrive together. Come for the stories - stay for the magic. Speaking of magic, I hope you'll subscribe, follow, share a nice shout out on your social media or podcast channel of choice, including Android, and join us next time! You're invited to stop by the website and subscribe to stay current with Diane, her journeys, her guests, as well as creativity, imagination, walking, stories, camaraderie, and so much more: Quarter Moon Story ArtsStories From Women Who Walk Production TeamPodcaster: Diane F Wyzga & Quarter Moon Story ArtsMusic: Mer's Waltz from Crossing the Waters by Steve Schuch & Night Heron MusicAll content and image © 2019 to Present: for credit & attribution Quarter Moon Story Arts

Hello again Fellow Racing Ears, Martin Raffauf is an auto racing mechanic that spends his time being a highly published auto racing Porsche racing historian.  He has written several articles that are currently posted on www.porscheroadandrace.com.   In this episode, Martin Raffauf joins The Racing Ear Podcast to share how he started in auto racing working as a volunteer mechanic on a certain historic Porsche 935 for Dick Barbour Racing at Garretson Enterprises in Mountain View California back in 1978, while working for a certain well known world renowned computer company.  His experience is highlighted and documented in the Porsche 935 auto racing documentary "Moby and the Warhorse Gang".  Originally from Philadelphia Pennsylvania, Martin spent many years working alongside IMSA legendary mechanics, race drivers, and team owners.  He competed against Rick Knoop and Jeff Oldham during those years and it was great to capture things that they all remember when IMSA was in its beginning.  Many names and many stories during the days with IMSA took him to the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona, the Mobil 1 12 Hours of Sebring, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.Many thanks to Martin Raffauf, Jeff Oldham and Rick Knoop for making this episode possible.  Thank you for listening to The Racing Ear Podcast.  #theracingearpodcast#rickknoopracing#jeffoldham#martinraffauf#mobyandthewarhorsegang

If you're looking for a habit-building coach in Mountain View, California, get in touch with Tiny Habits Coach in San Francisco. Learn more by visiting https://www.adajoe.com/tinyhabits5day (https://www.adajoe.com/tinyhabits5day)

If you were to take a guess as to what venue Pearl Jam has frequented the most over the last 30 years, would you think Shoreline Amphitheater is the correct answer? If not, then you're wrong. 17 of the performances in the San Francisco area amphitheater came from the Bridge School benefits, but this episode will happen to cover a show played there in 2003. As of most nights from this era, there are some politically motivated moments seeped into this evening. From a pro-activism speech during Porch to a few references to some of the bay area war protests that happened that February, it's not difficult to see what's on the band's mind. However, it being the second leg of this US run following the Nassau Coliseum incident, things are a lot more composed. As long as people didn't fuck with The (Dixie) Chicks, Ed was in good spirits. Tune into this episode to check out great versions of Long Road, You Are, Daughter, Thumbing My Way, Present Tense, Love Boat Captain and an out of this world Crazy Mary. Potentially the best of all-time? One host's opinion may reflect that. Thanks to our Patron Ryan Morden for joining us and selecting this show for us to cover! Visit the Concertpedia: http://liveon4legs.com Donate to the show: http://patreon.com/liveon4legs

Sales managers in Mountain View, California should check out the leadership training course offered by Sandler Training SF Bay Area (1-408-314-7395). Learn more by visiting https://sandlersfbay.funnelpages.com/ (https://sandlersfbay.funnelpages.com/)

Google invertirá en empresas emergentes lideradas por latinos Google anunció una inversión de 15 millones de dólares en empresas emergentes que estén lideradas por latinos y en formación digital para estudiantes y personas que estén buscando trabajo dentro de esta comunidad. La firma presentó la iniciativa como una manera de ayudar a los hispanos a tener "acceso equitativo" a financiación y educación para las necesidades del mercado laboral actual. Casi la mitad de esta inversión (7 millones) se destinará a empresas emergentes, "startups", para que puedan aumentar sus operaciones, y a organizaciones que trabajen en la creación de un ecosistema "robusto" de firmas latinas. A través del Fondo para Fundadores Latinos, Google donará hasta 100.000 dólares a emprendedores particulares para que retengan la propiedad de la empresa que fundaron sin necesidad de endeudarse. Además, los emprendedores que reciban estos fondos también podrán optar a apoyo informático de la compañía y a asesoramiento de expertos en negocios y tecnología. La apuesta de Google con la comunidad latina es similar a la que ya llevó a cabo con la comunidad negra mediante la creación del Fondo para Fundadores Negros. En la parte relativa a la formación, la firma de Mountain View (California) colaborará con la Asociación de Colegios y Universidades Hispana (HACU, por sus siglas en inglés) con el objetivo de formar en habilidades digitales a 200.000 estudiantes universitarios latinos para 2025. Para aquellos que ya estén buscado trabajo, la empresa donará un millón de dólares a la Federación Hispana para que formen a más de 6.000 hispanos en capacidades digitales durante el próximo año. Pese a ser el grupo demográfico que más crece en el sector de los pequeños negocios, los hispanos a menudo encuentran más dificultades que la media de la población para lograr financiación, como apunta el hecho de que desde 2015 sólo un 2,4 % del capital en inversiones de riesgo ha ido a parar a manos de emprendedores latinos y negros.

Looking for ways to strengthen and restore your skeletal system? OsteoStrong offers a unique, medication-free approach to improving bone density and reducing joint pain! Go to https://osteostronglosgatos.com (https://osteostronglosgatos.com) for more information.

Uncle tests out Hello Kitty Sake. Another dollar store drink review. Topics include: poverty, live-streaming video, Robin in Canada, Uncle t-shirts, Uncle stickers, street team, garbage, Ochelli Effect 2000th episode, California Flex Time, Mountain View California, sushi, rose petal taste, marketing alcohol to children, TikTok, hand me down phones, swords, travel

Hey My Stupid Podcast friends! We're back with a live commentary episode! We listen through the entire iTunes only release: As/Is Vol 2. Mountain View, CA. This was recorded as part of a 5-part series of iTunes-only live albums from the Heavier Things Tour in 2004. Sony would eventually make a compilation of the best-of from these albums and release As/Is as a digital and physical release. We also read your emails and talk about Sob Rock, John's upcoming release, and everything we know about it thus far. If you think the show has value, please leave us a positive review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, follow us on Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts! Email the show: mystupidpodcastshow@gmail.com Instagram: instagram.com/mystupidpodcast Twitter: twitter.com/mystupidcast Facebook: facebook.com/mystupidcast

This week is Google I/O, where Google regularly takes the opportunity to release what's new and coming "soon" in the Google ecosystem. Mark and Allen take the opportunity to review what new features have recently come out for developers of Alexa skills and actions for the Google Assistant. What new features of these platforms have you been building for?

Episode Six - Welcome to Mountain View, California   My name is Gautam Iyer, and I'm the host of Rest Assured, a podcast generally about the San Francisco Bay Area's housing crisis.   After promising that this podcast would focus on Mountain View for 5 episodes, we're finally in Mountain View. Mountain View is my hometown, and on this episode, I explain why it's such a unique place for housing in the Bay Area. I discuss the structure of government as it pertains to housing, starting with the federal government and working down to local government. With a lot of help from some knowledgeable folks, I also talk about rent control, demographics, and development in Mountain View. Enjoy and thanks for listening!   Thank you to Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics for giving me the opportunity to pursue this project.    Thank you to Liam Dillon of the LA Times, Alex Nuñez, Emily Ramos, Lenny Siegel, and Pardis Beikzadeh for their help and contributions. Additional thanks to Alex Brown, Lucas Ramirez, Sandra Esparza, Malia Pires, Elizabeth Weiss, Joan Brodovsky, Kevin Forestieri, Bruce England, and many more for their help, time, and work. Credit and additional thanks to: KTVU Fox 2 for the news clips in the intro. The California Apartment Association for their advertisement, via youtube. Fatcat beats (yes, Fatcat beats) on Youtube for the intro and outro music.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLWKQpphd7k Kevin MacLeod for several pieces of music that were used on this episode and that will be used on future episodes.Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License  Source/artist: https://incompetech.com/ Acid Trumpet by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3340-acid-trumpet License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Freesound.org for the several sound effects that you heard. And the many others who made this possible.

Episode Six - Welcome to Mountain View, California My name is Gautam Iyer, and I’m the host of Rest Assured, a podcast generally about the San Francisco Bay Area’s housing crisis. After promising that this podcast would focus on Mountain View for 5 episodes, we’re finally in Mountain View. Mountain View is my hometown, and on this episode, I explain why it’s such a unique place for housing in the Bay Area. I discuss the structure of government as it pertains to housing, starting with the federal government and working down to local government. With a lot of help from some knowledgeable folks, I also talk about rent control, demographics, and development in Mountain View. Enjoy and thanks for listening! Thank you to Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics for giving me the opportunity to pursue this project.  Thank you to Liam Dillon of the LA Times, Alex Nuñez, Emily Ramos, Lenny Siegel, and Pardis Beikzadeh for their help and contributions. Additional thanks to Alex Brown, Lucas Ramirez, Sandra Esparza, Malia Pires, Elizabeth Weiss, Joan Brodovsky, Kevin Forestieri, Bruce England, and many more for their help, time, and work.Credit and additional thanks to:KTVU Fox 2 for the news clips in the intro.The California Apartment Association for their advertisement, via youtube.Fatcat beats (yes, Fatcat beats) on Youtube for the intro and outro music.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLWKQpphd7kKevin MacLeod for several pieces of music that were used on this episode and that will be used on future episodes.Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License Source/artist: https://incompetech.com/Acid Trumpet by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3340-acid-trumpetLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Freesound.org for the several sound effects that you heard.And the many others who made this possible.

Happy Saturday! On our fourth and final installment of our Listener Appreciation Minisodes, Jasmin tells Maggie the story of a 1930's high-society murder from Mountain View, California. *As always, you can find a complete source list at thegoodolddayspod.com. ***This episode is brought to you by Libro.fm. Use promo code OLDDAYS to get two audiobooks for the price of one. libro.fm/redeem/olddaysSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/darknostalgiaworks)

In this episode I talk with Gustavo Camolinga! Gus is the owner of McDermaid Painting in Mountain View California. When he was 16 years old he immigrated to the United States and began a new life of work away from family and friends back in Mexico. In this conversation we talk about Gus' path to the US, paying a coyote to lead him across the Mexico-United States border, the work he pursued as he learned English, the connections he made along the way that helped him establish himself, and his desire to build his own company. Likewise we talk about important of hard work, the attention that needs to be placed on how you spend your time, and the real, underlying reason for all the work we go through in life. Stay tuned to the end to hear what it is! I loved this conversation with Gus and I know you will too. Enjoy!-----Podcast IG: https://www.instagram.com/seekingauthenticitypodcast/Podcast Website: https://seekingauthenticity.buzzsprout.com/©Flint Mitchell

In this episode I speak with Jared Phipps on the timely topic of ransomware. Jared is the Vice President of Worldwide Sales Engineering for SentinelOne and had some great insights on what is happening with these types of attacks.Some of the talking points included:Why the sudden surge of ransomware attacks?What is really happening behind the scenes?What is the impact to cyber liability insurance companies?How can you reduce your chances of getting hit?What does the future hold for cyber insurance?The sponsor for this episode is SentinelOne. SentinelOne is a autonomous AI endpoint security solution based out of Mountain View California. As always, a majority of the sponsorship goes towards helping At Risk students here in West Michigan.

We are in strange and uncertain times. The technology industry has always managed to respond to strange and uncertain times with incredible innovations that lead to the next round of growth. Growth that often comes with much higher rewards and leaves the world in a state almost unimaginable in previous iterations. The last major inflection point for the Internet, and computing in general, was when the dot come bubble burst.  The companies that survived that time in the history of computing and stayed true to their course sparked the Web 2.0 revolution. And their shareholders were rewarded by going from exits and valuations in the millions in the dot com era, they went into the billions in the Web 2.0 era. None as iconic as Google. They finally solved how to make money at scale on the Internet and in the process validated that search was a place to do so. Today we can think of Google, or the resulting parent Alphabet, as a multi-headed hydra. The biggest of those heads includes Search, which includes AdWords and AdSense. But Google has long since stopped being a one-trick pony. They also include Google Apps, Google Cloud, Gmail, YouTube, Google Nest, Verily, self-driving cars, mobile operating systems, and one of the more ambitious, Google Fiber. But how did two kids going to Stanford manage to become the third US company to be valued at a trillion dollars? Let's go back to 1998. The Big Lebowski, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, There's Something About Mary, The Truman Show, and Saving Private Ryan were in the theaters. Puff Daddy hadn't transmogrified into P Diddy. And Usher had three songs in the Top 40. Boyz II Men, Backstreet Boys, Shania Twain, and Third Eye Blind couldn't be avoided on the airwaves. They're now pretty much relegated to 90s disco nights. But technology offered a bright spot. We got the first MP3 player, the Apple Newton, the Intel Celeron and Xeon, the Apple iMac, MySQL, v.90 Modems, StarCraft, and two Stanford students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin took a research project they started in 1996 with Scott Hassan, and started a company called Google (although Hassan would leave Google before it became a company).  There were search engines before Page and Brin. But most produced search results that just weren't that great. In fact, most were focused on becoming portals. They took their queue from AOL and other ISPs who had springboarded people onto the web from services that had been walled gardens. As they became interconnected into a truly open Internet, the amount of diverse content began to explode and people just getting online found it hard to actually find things they were interested in. Going from ISPs who had portals to getting on the Internet, many began using a starting page like Archie, LYCOS, Jughead, Veronica, Infoseek, and of course Yahoo! Yahoo! Had grown fast out of Stanford, having been founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo. By 1998, the Yahoo! Page was full of text. Stock tickers, links to shopping, and even horoscopes. It took a lot of the features from the community builders at AOL. The model to take money was banner ads and that meant keeping people on their pages. Because it wasn't yet monetized and in fact acted against the banner loading business model, searching for what you really wanted to find on the Internet didn't get a lot of love. The search engines or portals of the day had pretty crappy search engines compared to what Page and Brin were building.  They initially called the search engine BackRub back in 1996. As academics (and the children of academics) they knew that the more papers that sited another paper, the more valuable the paper was. Applying that same logic allowed them to rank websites based on how many other sites linked into it. This became the foundation of the original PageRank algorithm, which continues to evolve today. The name BackRub came from the concept of weighting based on back links. That concept had come from a tool called RankDex, which was developed by Robin Li who went on to found Baidu.  Keep in mind, it started as a research project. The transition from research project meant finding a good name. Being math nerds they landed on "Google" a play on "googol", or a 1 followed by a hundred zeros. And within a year they were still running off University of Stanford computers. As their crawlers searched the web they needed more and more computing time. So they went out looking for funding and in 1998 got $100,000 from Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim. Jeff Bezos from Amazon, David Cheriton, Ram Shriram and others kicked in some money as well and they got a million dollar round of angel investment. And their algorithm kept getting more and more mature as they were able to catalog more and more sites. By 1999 they went out and raised $25 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, insisting the two invest equally, which hadn't been done.  They were frugal with their money, which allowed them to weather the coming storm when the dot com bubble burst. They build computers to process data using off the shelf hardware they got at Fry's and other computer stores, they brought in some of the best talent in the area as other companies were going bankrupt.  They also used that money to move into offices in Palo Alto and in 2000 started selling ads through a service they called AdWords. It was a simple site and ads were text instead of the banners popular at the time. It was an instant success and I remember being drawn to it after years of looking at that increasingly complicated Yahoo! Landing page. And they successfully inked a deal with Yahoo! to provide organic and paid search, betting the company that they could make lots of money. And they were right. The world was ready for simple interfaces that provided relevant results. And the results were relevant for advertisers who could move to a pay-per-click model and bid on how much they wanted to pay for each click. They could serve ads for nearly any company and with little human interaction because they spent the time and money to build great AI to power the system. You put in a credit card number and they got accurate projections on how successful an ad would be. In fact, ads that were relevant often charged less for clicks than those that weren't. And it quickly became apparent that they were just printing money on the back of the new ad system. They brought in Eric Schmidt to run the company, per the agreement they made when they raised the $25 million and by 2002 they were booking $400M in revenue. And they operated at a 60% margin. These are crazy numbers and enabled them to continue aggressively making investments. The dot com bubble may have burst, but Google was a clear beacon of light that the Internet wasn't done for. In 2003 Google moved into a space now referred to as the Googleplex, in Mountain View California. In a sign of the times, that was land formerly owned by Silicon Graphics. They saw how the ad model could improved beyond paid placement and banners and acquired  is when they launched AdSense. They could afford to with $1.5 billion in revenue.  Google went public in 2004, with revenues of $3.2 billion. Underwritten by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, who took half the standard fees for leading the IPO, Google sold nearly 20 million shares. By then they were basically printing money. By then the company had a market cap of $23 billion, just below that of Yahoo. That's the year they acquired Where 2 Technologies to convert their mapping technology into Google Maps, which was launched in 2005. They also bought Keyhole in 2004, which the CIA had invested in, and that was released as Google Earth in 2005. That technology then became critical for turn by turn directions and the directions were enriched using another 2004 acquisition, ZipDash, to get real-time traffic information. At this point, Google wasn't just responding to queries about content on the web, but were able to respond to queries about the world at large. They also released Gmail and Google Books in 2004. By the end of 2005 they were up to $6.1 billion in revenue and they continued to invest money back into the company aggressively, looking not only to point users to pages but get into content. That's when they bought Android in 2005, allowing them to answer queries using their own mobile operating system rather than just on the web. On the back of $10.6 billion in revenue they bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in Google stock. This is also when they brought Gmail into Google Apps for Your Domain, now simply known as G Suite - and when they acquired Upstartle to get what we now call Google Docs.  At $16.6 billion in revenues, they bought DoubleClick in 2007 for $3.1 billion to get the relationships DoubleClick had with the ad agencies.  They also acquired Tonic Systems in 2007, which would become Google Slides. Thus completing a suite of apps that could compete with Microsoft Office. By then they were at $16.6 billion in revenues. The first Android release came in 2008 on the back of $21.8 billion revenue. They also released Chrome that year, a project that came out of hiring a number of Mozilla Firefox developers, even after Eric Schmidt had stonewalled doing so for six years. The project had been managed by up and coming Sundar Pichai. That year they also released Google App Engine, to compete with Amazon's EC2.  They bought On2, reCAPTCHA, AdMob, VOIP company Gizmo5, Teracent, and AppJet in 2009 on $23.7 Billion in revenue and Aardvark, reMail, Picnic, DocVerse, Episodic, Plink, Agnilux, LabPixies, BumpTop, Global IP Solutions, Simplify Media, Ruba.com, Invite Media, Metaweb, Zetawire, Instantiations, Slide.com, Jambool, Like.com, Angstro, SocialDeck, QuickSee, Plannr, BlindType, Phonetic Arts, and Widevine Technologies in 2010 on 29.3 billion in revenue. In 2011, Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion to get access to patents for mobile phones, along with another almost two dozen companies. This was on the back of nearly $38 billion in revenue.  The battle with Apple intensified when Apple removed Google Maps from iOS 6 in 2012. But on $50 billion in revenue, Google wasn't worried. They released the Chromebook in 2012 as well as announcing Google Fiber to be rolled out in Kansas City.  They launched Google Drive They bought Waze for just shy of a billion dollars in 2013 to get crowdsourced data that could help bolster what Google Maps was doing. That was on 55 and a half billion in revenue.  In 2014, at $65 billion in revenue, they bought Nest, getting thermostats and cameras in the portfolio.  Pichai, who had worked in product on Drive, Gmail, Maps, and Chromebook took over Android and by 2015 was named the next CEO of Google when Google restructured with Alphabet being created as the parent of the various companies that made up the portfolio. By then they were up to 74 and a half billion in revenue. And they needed a new structure, given the size and scale of what they were doing.  In 2016 they launched Google Home, which has now brought AI into 52 million homes. They also bought nearly 20 other companies that year, including Apigee, to get an API management platform. By then they were up to nearly $90 billion in revenue. 2017 saw revenues rise to $110 billion and 2018 saw them reach $136 billion.  In 2019, Pichai became the CEO of Alphabet, now presiding over a company with over $160 billion in revenues. One that has bought over 200 companies and employs over 123,000 humans. Google's mission is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” and it's easy to connect most of the acquisitions with that goal. I have a lot of friends in and out of IT that think Google is evil. Despite their desire not to do evil, any organization that grows at such a mind-boggling pace is bound to rub people wrong here and there. I've always gladly using their free services even knowing that when you aren't paying for a product, you are the product. We have a lot to be thankful of Google for on this birthday. As Netscape was the symbol of the dot com era, they were the symbol of Web 2.0. They took the mantle for free mail from Hotmail after Microsoft screwed the pooch with that.  They applied math to everything, revolutionizing marketing and helping people connect with information they were most interested in. They cobbled together a mapping solution and changed the way we navigate through cities. They made Google Apps and evolved the way we use documents, making us more collaborative and forcing the competition, namely Microsoft Office to adapt as well. They dominated the mobility market, capturing over 90% of devices. They innovated cloud stacks. And here's the crazy thing, from the beginning, they didn't make up a lot. They borrowed the foundational principals of that original algorithm from RankDex, Gmail was a new and innovative approach to Hotmail, Google Maps was a better Encarta, their cloud offerings were structured similar to those of Amazon. And the list of acquisitions that helped them get patents or talent or ideas to launch innovative services is just astounding.  Chances are that today you do something that touches on Google. Whether it's the original search, controlling the lights in your house with Nest, using a web service hosted in their cloud, sending or receiving email through Gmail or one of the other hundreds of services. The team at Google has left an impact on each of the types of services they enable. They have innovated business and reaped the rewards. And on their 22nd birthday, we all owe them a certain level of thanks for everything they've given us. So until next time, think about all the services you interact with. And think about how you can improve on them. And thank you, for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. 

Stai ascoltando un estratto gratuito di Ninja PRO, la selezione quotidiana di notizie per i professionisti del digital business. Con Ninja PRO puoi avere ogni giorno marketing insight, social media update, tech news, business events e una selezione di articoli di approfondimento dagli esperti della Redazione Ninja. Vai su www.ninja.it/ninjapro per abbonarti al servizio.Google propone un nuovo campus presentato come "quartiere" con case, negozi e parchi. Il piano comprende fino a 1.850 unità residenziali nella città natale del gigante del web, Mountain View - California. Continuano i ban di app cinesi in India. Dopo Tik Tok e WeChat prosegue il contrasto tra le due potenze asiatiche, questa volta il ban riguarda 118 applicazioni tra cui Alipay e Baidu, considerate dal governo indiano pericolose per la sicurezza nazionale. “Tenet” permetterà di capire se c'è un futuro per il grande schermo. Per l'ultimo sforzo cinematografico di Cristopher Nolan gli operatori aspettano i risultati del botteghino con trepidazione. Attualmente il trend delle compagnie è quello di lanciare le pellicole direttamente via streaming a causa del Covid, come Disney con Mulan.

Jake Wichman is a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He is the lead singer of the acoustic-pop band JWB, who released their debut album “Start Today” in 2019. In addition, he is the host of the weekly Open Mic at Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View California, which takes place every Monday starting at 7PM. We will be discussing his debut album, “Start Today.”   https://www.facebook.com/JWBMusic/

On Monday I was invited to attend the 5th annual Silicon Valley Reinvents the Wheel at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, courtesy of Charlie Vogelheim (The Flying Car) and Scott Fosgard (FosgardPR). I'll share some of the highlights from the all-day presentation, as well as four exclusive interviews from members of Velodyne, Nvidia, Ridecell, and Wavyn. ALSO: My full 19-minute Tesla Model 3 review is live; watch it here and be sure to subscribe to my channel! Read, listen, and discuss this episode at MarcHoag.com Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/AutonomousHoag Follow us on Instagram at instagram.com/autonomoushoag Like us on Facebook: fb.com/autonomoushoag Subscribe to my new YouTube channel at youtube.com/channel/UCzDAWTzwkA_MgmqoOKhHYzQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/autonomous-cars-with-marc-hoag/message

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on former Social Networking pioneer, Friendster. Today when you go to friendster.com you get a page that the social network is taking a break. The post was put up in 2018. How long did Rip Van Winkle Sleep? But what led to the rise of the first big social network and well, what happened? The story begins in 1973. Talkomatic was a chat room and was a hit in the PLATO or Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations community at the University of Illinois, an educational learning system that had been running since 1960. Dave Woolley and Douglas Brows at the University of Illinois brought chat and then the staff built TERM-Talk the same year, adding screen sharing and PLATO Notes would be added where you could add notes to your profile. This was the inspiration for the name of Lotus Notes. Then in the 80s came Bulletin Board Systems, 84 brought FidoNet, 88 brought IRC, 96 brought ICQ, and in 96 we got Bolt.com, the first social networking and video website with SixDegrees coming in 1997 as the first real social media website. AOL Instant Messenger showed up the same year and AOL bought ICQ in 99. It was pretty sweet that I didn't have to remember all those ICQ numbers any more! 1999 - Yahoo! And Microsoft got in the game launching tools called Messenger at about the same time and LiveJournal came along, as well as Habbo, a social networking site for games. By 2001 Six Degrees shut down and Messenger was shipped with XP. But 2002. That was the year the Euro hit the street. Before England dissed it. That was the year Israeli and Palestinian conflicts escalated. Actually, that's a lot of years, regrettably. I remember scandals at Enron and Worldcom well that year, ultimate resulting in Sarbanes Oxley to counter the more than 5 trillion dollars in corporate scandals that sent the economy into a tailspin. My Georgia Bulldogs football team beat Arkansas to win the SEC title and then beat Florida State in the Sugar Bowl. Nelly released Hot In Here and Eminem released Lose Yourself and Without Me. If film, Harry Potter was searching for the Chamber of Secrets and Frodo was on a great trek to the Two Towers. Eminem was in the theaters as well with 8 Mile. And Friendster was launched by Jonathan Abrams in Mountain View California. They wanted to get people making new friends and meeting in person. It was an immediate hit and people flocked to the site. They grew to three million users in just a few months, catching the attention of investors. As a young consultant, I loved keeping track of my friends who I never got to see in person using Friendster. Napster was popular at the time and the name Friendster came from a mashup of friends and Napster. With this early success, Friendster took $12 million dollars in funding from VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital the next year. That was the year a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerburg launched FaceMash with his roommate Eduardo Saverin for Harvard students in a kinda' “Hot or Not” game. They would later buy Instagram as a form of euphoric recall, looking back on those days. Google has long wanted a social media footprint and tried to buy Friendster in 2003, but when rejected launched Orkut in 2004 - which just ran in Brazil, tried Google Friend Connect in 2008, which lasted until 2012, Google Buzz, which launched in 2010 and only lasted a year, Google Wave, which launched in 2009 and also only lasted a year, and of course, Google + which ran from 2011 to 2019. Google is back at it again with a new social network called Shoelace out of their Area 120 incubator. The $30 million dollars in Google stock would be worth a billion dollars today. MySpace was also launched in 2003 by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, growing to have more traffic than Google over time. But Facebook launched in 2004 and after having problems keeping the servers up and running, Friendster's board replaced Abrams as CEO and moved him to chairmen of the board. He was replaced by Scott Sassa. And then in 2005 Sassa was replaced by Taek Kwn and then he was replaced by Kent Lindstrom who was replaced by Richard Kimber. Such rapid churn in the top spot means problems. A rudderless ship. In 2006 they added widgets to keep up with MySpace. They didn't. They also opened up a developer program and opened up APIs. They still had 52 million unique visitors worldwide in June 2008. But by then, MySpace had grown to 7 times their size. MOL Global, an online payments processor from Malaysia bought the company in 2009 and relaunched the site. All user data was erased and Friendster provided an export tool to move data to other popular sites at the time, such as Flickr. In 2009 Friendster had 3 Million unique visitors per day. They relaunched But that dropped to less than a quarter million by the end of 2010. People abandoned the network. What happened? Facebook eclipsed the Friendster traffic in 2009. Friendster became something more used in Asia than the US. Really, though, I remember early technical problems. I remember not being able to log in, so moving over to MySpace. I remember slow loading times. And I remember more and more people spending time on MySpace, customizing their MySpace page. Facebook did something different. Sure, you couldn't customize the page, but the simple layout loaded fast and was always online. This reminds me of the scene in the show Silicon Valley, when they have to grab the fire extinguisher because they set the house on fire from having too much traffic! In 2010, Facebook acquired Friendster's portfolio of social networking patents for $40 million dollars. In 2011, Newscorp sold MySpace for $35 million dollars after it had been valued at it peak in 2008. After continuing its decline, Friendster was sold to a social gaming site in 2015, trying to capitalize on the success that Facebook had doing online gaming. But after an immediate burst of users, it too was not successful. In 2018 the site finally closed its doors. Today Friendster is the 651,465th ranked site in the world. There are a few thing to think about when you look at the Friendster story: 1. The Internet would not be what it is today without sites like Friendster to help people want to be on it. 2. The first company on a new thing isn't always the one that really breaks through 3. You have to, and I mean, have to keep your servers up. This is a critical aspect of maintaining you're momentum. I was involved with one of the first 5 facebook apps. And we had no idea 2 million people would use that app in the weekend it was launched. We moved mountains to get more servers and clusters brought online and refactored sql queries on the fly, working over 70 hours in a weekend. And within a week we hit 10 million users. That app paid for dozens of other projects and was online for years. 4. When investors move in, the founder usually gets fired at the first sign of trouble. Many organizations simply can't find their equilibrium after that and flounder. 5. Last but not least: Don't refactor every year, but if you can't keep your servers up, you might just have too much technical debt. I'm sure everyone involved with Friendster wishes they could go back and do many things differently. But hindsight is always 20/20. They played their part in the advent of the Internet. Without early pioneers like Friendster we wouldn't be where we are at today. As Heinlein said, “yet another crew of Rip Van Winkle's” But Buck Rogers eventually did actually wake back up, and maybe Friendster will as well. Thank you for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're lucky to have you. Have a great day!

IHRSA speaker Ashley Selman is the owner of Evolution Trainers in Mountain View CA and also an expert in helping small business owners maximize profits and efficiency. This is a great episode if you are looking for tips on employee retention.

Evolve! Nurturing the New in Consciousness, the Arts, and Culture hosted by : Robin White Turtle Lysne, M.A., M.F.A., Ph.D. Evolve! brings you people and ideas on the cutting edge of change opening the shells of the past to move our culture into the now. We are all in great need of sustainable ideas for change. The arts and evolving consciousness are how we are bringing that change to the culture at large. This show will bring you the wise, the foolish and the heart-based to help us meet the challenges of the times we are in. This weeks guest is Scout Bartlett creator of Life Insights, a clarisentient, and medium with many years experience supporting clients in releasing blocks and transforming trauma and stuck energy. Scout is a longtime intuitive and healer throughout the Bay Area. He works at East West Bookshop in Mountain View California offering readings along with the host of this show. Check out East West website for more information. www.eastwestbooks.org or Scouts website: www.lifeinsights.net or notscott.com

At TechEmergence, we often talk about the software capabilities of AI and the tangible return on investment (ROI) of recommendation engines, fraud detection, and different kinds of AI applications. We rarely talk about the hardware side of the equation, and that will be our focus today. For hardware companies like Nvidia, stock prices have soared thanks to the popularity of new kinds of AI hardware being needed not only in academia but also among the technology giants. Increasingly, AI hardware is about more than just graphics processing units (GPUs). Today we interview Mike Henry, CEO of Mythic AI. Mike speaks about the different kinds of AI-specific hardware, where they are used, and how they differ depending on their function. More specifically, Mike talks about the business value of AI hardware. Can specific hardware save money on energy, time, and resources? Where can it drive value? Where is AI hardware necessary to open new capabilities for AI systems that may not have been possible with older hardware? What is the right business approach to AI hardware? This interview was brought to us by Kisaco Research, which partnered with TechEmergence to help promote their AI hardware summit on September 18 and 19 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. See the full interview article here: www.techemergence.com/financial-roi-ai-hardware-top-line-bottom-line-impact

Jonathan Olivo is a Filmmaker from Mountain View CA. Chase talks about the recent social media outcry from the Parkland mass shooting gun control debate. Jonathan returns to the studio and discusses the latest Cloverfield film released, working on his Star Wars fan film, and casting Jorge in his short film regarding hotdogs.

Rozanne Gewaar is a Musician currently based in Mountain View CA. Jorge rambles about receiving a small grant. Rozanne is joined with collaborator Joshua Johnson and chats about growing up in South Africa, flexing her musical talent in Ohio, and she performs an original song with Joshua in the studio, Army of Muses. Song in the intro - "When We Were Water" by Rozanne Gewaar

Margaret Abe-Koga--Mountain View, CA councilmember--shares a fascinating insight: citizens notice whether their representatives speak up during council meetings. She talks about how she went from being "too nice" to her confrontation with Google at 1:15 a.m. City Council Chronicles provides reviews of city council meetings from across the world. Named a "Top 100 Local Government Influencer" in 2016 and 2017 by ELGL.org. Link: https://councilchronicles.com/ Follow on Twitter: @michaelkarlik. Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/citycouncilchronicles/. Graphic by Ben Wasserman: @benwassetweets. Music credits: News Theme by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Artist: http://incompetech.com   Dance of Deception by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100271 Artist: http://incompetech.com/ Home Base Groove by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100563 Artist: http://incompetech.com/ Clowning Around by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Artist: http://audionautix.com/ Happy Strummin by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Artist: http://audionautix.com/

There are many things that will surprise you from a Steve Jobs biography. We all feel that we know the man well. We have read the stories of success, heard the tales of peculiar behavior and used the products that the man left behind. But what you will find when you start researching Steve Jobs, is a man who I don't think anyone will truly understand. A man with so many layers of personality, and distinct characteristics, that we all had the potential to see the type of person that Steve Jobs wanted us to see. So where do we start on the Join Up Dots take, on the Steve Jobs Biography? Well we can clearly see on the Join Up Dots timeline, that Steve Jobs was from the moment he was born looking for identity. Steven Paul Jobs was brought into the world on the 24th February 1955 in San Francisco California, by two students of the University of Wisconsin, who for whatever reason felt that this new born boy, who would grow up to become the king of techonology, was not theirs to keep. Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, played such an amazing part in bringing this child to the world, but would also play such a small part too, and gave the young Steve Jobs up for adoption shortly after birth. And this was one of the dots in the Steve Jobs biography that Steve spoke so candidly about in 2005, when he addressed the graduating students on Stanford in a commencement address that has become a firm favourite to the world. Not least becoming the basis of what became the theme behind the show “Join Up Dots with David Ralph” The Steve Jobs Biography is a fascinating tale of clearly defined dots that shape what he was going to become right from the start, which would make it fascinating if we could ever go back in time and show the young Steve Jobs the steps that he should take. Would he follow them, or would this young child with such a fascination for technology, and understanding of the components that made early electronic devices work, listen? Well probably not, but you can see in the Steve Jobs biography those dots were clearly working in his favour right from the start. His adopted parents lived in Mountain View California, which would fortuitously become what is known as silicon valley in later years, planting the budding entrepreneur in the centre of where he would later go on to rule. His father, Paul Jobs who worked as a Coast Guard veteran and machinist, also had an interest in electronics and would show his young son from the confines of the family garage (the birthplace of Apple) how to take electronic devices a part, and then have the confidence to put them all back together. Paul Jobs could have had fishing as a hobby, but once again the Steve Jobs biography shows that the skills that he would later utilize to such astonishing success were laid before him. Yes of course, he needed the interest and persistence to make these skills work, but Steve Jobs was nothing but tenacious when that interest was in evidence. A completely different Steve Jobs, to the one we would see throughout his career when he was bored, or things didn't quite go his way! And those opposing, and not so dynamic and conscientious personality traits, were more than evident to everyone during his schooling. Steve Jobs was an innovative thinker. He could see things long before most people had started to even consider there was even something to be seen. Which meant that during school, he struggled with the confines of formal schooling, and the structure of his lessons which as we all know, more often than not are anything but innovative. The young Steve Jobs, would attempt to keep himself entertained by playing pranks and creating mischief, even once being bribed by his fourth grade teacher to get his head down and study. But there was no getting away from the fact that being born to two University graduates had provided him with the genes of intelligence. And school tests, even from a boy who had little interest in the work were a breeze. He would sail through the testing with such apparent ease that the school administrators were keen to push him ahead to High School, which his parents were reluctant to sanction. So already at school age, the Steve Jobs biography shows that we have a child who is living smack bang in the middle of the soon to be formed Silicon Valley, had an interest in electronics, possessed an innovative and questioning mind, and was born in 1955. And this last fact is probably one of the most interesting of all, as Malcom Gladwell attested to in his bestselling book the Outliers” in the chapter “Timing Is Everything” Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was born in 1953, Apple founder Steve Jobs in 1955, Sun Microsystems founders Bill Joy and Scott McNealy in 1954, Bill Gates in 1955. Which made them the prime age when the first do it yourself home computers came to market in 1975. Old enough to see the potential, and risk their futures by working on what someone already established in a career in computers would consider too much a risk to take on. But not old enough to be already settled down with children and responsibilities, frightened to take the leap of faith and risk what they had already gained in life. All of them fascinated with what was in front of them, and on their own paths to becoming household names in computing, making them richer than anyone could hope to be. So we are building quite a list of dots on the Join Up Dots timeline, and of course the Steve Jobs biography. We can now add perfect timing of his birth, to the perfect location, an interest in electronics, questioning mind, and a passion to go against the norm. We can almost see already, the Steve Jobs that we would see a few years later, in the young man huddled over a box of wires and fuses. But no matter how inspired and intellectual a person is, they will need the support of others. And Steve Jobs found this when he was introduced to Steve Wozniak, who became his future business partner. The two hit it off straight away, and as Wozniak spoke about in a 2007 interview, it was obvious from the start that the two had similar outlooks and passions. Passions that back in the early years of the 1970's very few people had. As he says “We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips. And very few people, especially back then, had any idea what chips were, how they worked and what they could do. I had designed many computers, so I was way ahead of him in electronics and computer design, but we still had common interests. We both had pretty much sort of an independent attitude about things in the world.” And that was how Steve Jobs life was throughout High School. Limited interest in what was happening within the education system, but along with Wozniack fascinated and consumed by the potential outside its walls. And now in the Steve Jobs biography we arrive at that definitive time in his life. The definitive time in everyone's life. They are now ready to go out into the world as young adults and create their own paths. Would Steve Jobs follow the course that so many people follow and play it safe, getting a job just because it's money in the bank, following in the footsteps of his father, or would he strive boldly into a new future, and create his legacy. Well surprisingly Steve Jobs did neither, and even against a background off disinterest in studying and education, Steve Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland Oregon. This appears a decision that was not well thought out, as Steve Jobs quickly realised that he wasn't suited for further education and made the decision to drop out of college and do his own thing. And that thing was to start attending classes that he thought would be interesting. He would choose classes to attend, just because he was intrigued by their content, not because how they would look on his resume. One of those classes, as Steve Jobs recounted once again in the Stanford Commencement address changed his life. The course was in calligraphy, and developed the love of typography that he brought to the world in such a dramatic and successful way with his first foray into the home computer market. As he said to the students hanging on his every word on that day “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.” In 1974, the Steve Jobs biography shows, what you would think was a great starting point to his career as a computer genius, and the young Jobs accepted a position with the promising and innovative games company Atari, as a video game designer. Atari would go onto to dominate the home games console market in the late seventies and early eighties, with children across the world clambering for one of these wooden boxes that they could plug into their television sets. The demand was astonishing. But Steve Jobs would not play a big part of the success of the company, as just six months later he quit, to go and find himself by traveling the huge continent of India, high on drugs most of the time. When he did return to the United States of America it was now 1976, Steve Jobs was twenty years old and about get serious about what he saw the future of home computing to be. Alongside his friend Steve Wozniak, still spending hours and hours inside the Jobs family garage, they would create what would grow to become the most valuable company on Earth. The two friends set to work experimenting with the knowledge that they had fostered, more often than not unknowingly throughout their lives. The hours spent fiddling with chips, and electronic circuit boards as a hobby, now finding its true importance in their lives. Which is of course one of the truths of every episode of Join Up Dots. Perceived failures, or what seemed like pure time wastage can later on turn out to be the holder of the very thing that you are looking for. And that was certainly the case with young Mr Steve Jobs. However greatness does not appear without a belief and a willingness to take risks. And the Steve Jobs biography is littered with incidents where he seemed to have the desire to go further and quicker than anyone else around him would consider acceptable.. Selling his Volkswagen bus, whilst his friend Wozniak sold his beloved scientific computer they funded their fledgling enterprise, and began to work changing the world. Empowering every home to believe they could posses their own computer, which several years previously would have been thought an impossible dream. With Jobs in charge of marketing— Apple, which they decided to call their untested enterprise, initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, the company's sales increased by 700 percent, to $139 million. Not bad for two guys, who just three years before were unsure as to which direction their future would go. However this was simply the beginning of what Apple was to become and in 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion. By the end of its very first day of trading, and buoyed by its success Jobs looked to find someone with the business acumen and vision to drive the company to even greater heights, and made the decision to bring marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola in as the President of Apple. A decision that among all the decisions made in the Steve Jobs biography was as bad for Steve as it could possibly be. A decision that would bring Steve Jobs to one of the lowest points of his life, being told to leave the company he had founded. Steve Jobs was sacked from Apple. As we had already discovered in Part One of the Join Up Dots take on the Steve Jobs story, he was born at the right time, the right place, with the right interests, and the rest as they say is history. He co-founded Apple Computer when he was 21, and by the time he hit 23 was a millionaire. In just two years, Steve Jobs had become a wildly successful, fabulously wealthy global celebrity. Not bad for a man who just a few years before, had travelled the continent of India, unsure of his path in life, seeking spiritual enlightenment, whilst seeking as many mind altering drugs as he could get his hands on. And then, at 30, Jobs had the kind of humiliating defeat that for so many would signal game over, he was made to leave the company that he had helped create. He was in the most harshest of environments hung out to dry in the newspapers, and reports across the world. Total humiliation was forced on a man who had became legendary, and it seemed could do no wrong. But why persist to put yourself out there, and face the world's media and consumers head on, if in all sense and purpose you had already made it, and could quite easily live the dream. But Steve Jobs, was a man unable to seek an easy version of his future and as Alan Deutschman, author of "Change or Die, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. tells "Steve Jobs persisted, he had this incredible tenacity. He held on and came back with triumph after triumph, driving the company to new heights, creating the greatest corporate success of our time. It's a unique story." So how did it occur? How did everything that Steve Jobs had worked so hard to build, be taken away from him? And looking back was this the key to his later success, or just another obstacle to climb over as he followed his passions and interests within the computer world. Well we need to step back a few years in time, when this fledgling company was tittering on financial collapse to gain a clear understanding of the path that Steve Jobs was unknowingly about to undertake. As amazing as it seems now Apple Computer was a home enterprise, and a bootstrapped company that was prone to the same issues that all new home start ups endure. Cashflow is the killer of so many dreams, and to raise the money they needed to get the Apple II off the ground, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak knew that they needed to bring in investors. Interested outside parties who had the kind of financial clout they needed to see their visions begin to prosper. Finding these people in a myriad of locations, their much needed investments stabilised the company, and allowed the continued development of the Apple II, which just a few months previously had been in question. However as the two Steve's discovered during this period, most of the investors were not too keen to see their money handed over to the two computer whizzkids without some semblance of control on their part. Why would you simply hand over the money for others to use as they see fit, if you also had business experience, and a background of success in the financial and industrial markets of the world, to help direct the returns from those investments? Why wouldn't you seek a place within the company to really keep things moving in your direction? And that is what occurred, with many of the investors claiming themselves a place on the board. And this is fascinating part to the Steve Jobs biography, to which you can clearly see the first division of the dreamer and activator Steve Jobs, and the board of Apple. Moneymen, believed the way to grow a company was to protect the bottom line, and to hell with the vision of consumer perfection that so intoxicated the budding entrepreneur. Make the products, shift the products and move on. Whilst Steve Jobs wanted to change the world and create a legacy. The skills that Jobs would display in such astonishing fashion upon his return to Apple years later were sorely missing at this time, and the board were of the opinion that Steve Jobs was brilliant, but quite simply too young and temperamental to run the company. He had not yet learned how to balance the desire and (occasional) ability to create insanely great products with the need to also ship them — preferably on time and on budget. The lack of this skill doomed not just Steve's tenure as the head of Apple's Mac division, but also one of his subsequent projects, NeXT. And also as most young men are, he was headstrong, full of his own importance, and of the belief that his products were the key to the success of everything. It was his god driven right to bring his ideals and visions to the world, which would be the saviour of the company. Which in all honesty was probably right, but there is a way to go about bringing this desire for perfection to the world, which Steve Jobs had not mastered. He was petulant, abrasive, and likely to steamroller the weaker members of his teams, even though he loved nothing more than people standing up to him. Even presenting awards to the one who showed this brave trait each year. He would argue, shout, demand and put the most amazing pressure on his teams, with very few thriving, and many falling by the wayside. In a fascinating interview many years later Steve Jobs reminisces about an old man who lived down the street when he was a young boy. The man showed him a rock tumbler, and he and Jobs went out and got a handful of plain old rocks, then put them into the can with liquid and grit powder. They closed up the rock tumbler, turned it on, and then the man told Jobs to "come back tomorrow." The next day, the man opened the can and inside were these "amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in through rubbing against each other like this (clapping his hands), creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks." Jobs goes on to say how that is a "metaphor for a team that is working really hard on something they're passionate about. It's that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these beautiful stones." People can only find their greatest strengths, and polish their inherent talents by being tested and challenged constantly. By being placed into the Steve Jobs tumblr they ultimately would find what they are capable of. Providing Steve Jobs and Apple with the kind of groundbreaking products that the world cannot get enough off. So realising, that at that moment Steve Jobs was not the man the board wanted to run the company, Jobs himself set out to find someone that could demonstrate the skills, characteristics and behaviours that he would want in place of him. And he found that very man, in 1983, when he recruited Pepsi executive John Sculley to run Apple, famously asking him "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" John Sculley was inspired by these words and accepted this position. Not realising that less than three years later, he would also be changing Steve Jobs life too. Things did not seem doomed for collision when the relationship was first formed, as both considered the other a close friend. Being on the same wavelength, it was a common occurrence for one to finish the sentences of the other. They thrived in each other's company and were seen to many as a dynamic duo that contributed greatly to the amazing press that the company was receiving across the world at that time. They complemented each other personally, but professionally were very different. They had their own responsibilities and demands on their time and energies that neither could possibly understand. Within the walls of Apple there was no getting away from the fact that things were turning for the worse. Jobs was Apple's chief visionary, a role that put him in charge of the team developing Apple's next revolutionary product, the Macintosh computer. John Scully on the other hand, was interested in appeasing the views of the concerned board members who saw Jobs as a loose cannon, and ensuring that the vision of Jobs did not ultimately become the death warrant of Apple. The Mac debuted in 1984 to rave reviews but disappointing sales, putting a financial strain on the company -– and fraying Jobs' relationship with Sculley. Jobs basically had created his own team to create his own product, the Macintosh. His team actually having its own building. He even flew the pirate flag there. As he often would say, 'It is better to be a pirate, than to be in the navy.' What Steve Jobs had done was ultimately created a company-within-a-company, that became pitted against other parts of the company that actually made money. The cracks were growing wider and wider by the day. The downfall came soon, when buoyed by Steve Jobs largely overestimated expectations of the Macintosh sales, they found that their euphoria about the revolutionary Mac, which they thought they would ship 80,000 units by the end of 1984, and had produced anything but euphoria. They had built, developed and stored 80,000 computers ready for the rush, but encountered a return just a quarter of what was expected. And not only was the figure disappointing, but so was the performance of the Macintosh, that Steve Jobs had deemed as perfection in the making. In fact with its 128 KByte RAM it was not simply not powerful enough, and there were hardly any software applications available yet. During the annual board meeting in 1985, it became clear that the work that Steve Jobs deemed as important was not as important to what truly mattered: the financial bottom line. Compared to the continued sales of the Apple II, Steve Jobs new masterpiece only accounted for 30% of the sales of Apple. It was a dead duck, and to many simply not worth pursuing with. Steve Jobs became more and more angry and aggressive because of the continuing drop in Macintosh sales, and made sure that he blamed everyone for its failure, other than himself. So blinkered was he to the world he had created, that he couldn't see what everyone else would consider to be obvious. The failure was not with the product, but was with Steve Jobs belief in the product. The problem was with him. In the end, he blamed even Sculley for the crisis and wanted to lead the company himself. But this seemed impossible to everyone else: "Steve was a big thinker, an inspirational motivator, but not a day-to-day manager. What was sad was that he could not see it." When Sculley was informed that Jobs intended to remove him from the company, he was quite concerned, but then decided to choose the company's welfare over his friendship to its visionary co-founder. Supported by Markkula and the other members of the board, in May 1985, he dismissed Steve from his positions as the vice-president and as the leader of the Macintosh division; Jobs did not have any managerial power anymore. The record books make it clear that Steve Jobs wasn't sacked, but was demoted. But such was his ego, and love for his creation that is a mute point. Steve Jobs could no longer be seen as someone that could make the company fly high. His wings had been severely clipped, and now like the Macintosh was a dead duck. Perhaps not dead, but a shadow of what he had been previously. Jobs, took awhile to decide on his next move, and by and large spent much of 1985 travelling around Europe and the Soviet Union under the orders of Sculley promoting the Apple II. It was during these endless journeys that Steve Jobs lost interest in what he was doing. He lost interest in the company that he had co-founded. He was depressed and lost. The charismatic young man from just a few month previously forgotten. He stopped coming to work and resigned from Apple Jobs said during the speech at Stanford in 1985 that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that ever happened to him. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything,” he said. “It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life; I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple,” Jobs said. “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.” And so started the third part of the Steve Jobs biography. The ability for him to assess, refocus, play, and learn from his weaknesses. It was during this period when Steve Jobs, as we see everyday on the Join Up Dots interviews, came back stronger than ever. The darkest periods of his life, showed him the light that would lead him to blaze even more brightly than he had thought possible. He would change from the petulant, abrasive, visionary, to as John Sculley himself says “The Greatest CEO the world has ever known” But how did he do this? How did Steve Jobs pull himself from the dark despair that hung all around him, and start to fight back? A despair so intense that some of his close friends were worried for his safety, and considered his moods suicidal in their depth. Once again, as we need to do time and time again with this tale, we need to step back a few months to review the version of Steve Jobs who hadn't yet decided on his next move. The Steve Jobs that was still struggling to come to terms with his demotion from Apple, but not yet brave enough to walk away. The telling part of the story, is the period when Steve Jobs began failing to turn up for work, and started looking around him. Freed in many ways from the constraints of his responsibilities, he had time to think. “Apple was founded when Steve was just 21 years old. So he never really had time to think about big picture, life issues. He obsessed on the same questions over and over: “What went wrong with Apple. What did I do wrong?” It was an important question to ask, and within its few words would hold the answer to his true world changing legacy, ready to be unleashed on the world twelve years later. After Jobs returned from the Apple II tour, he met with The Graphics Group, a team of 3D computer graphics technicians gathered by Star Wars director George Lucas. Steve Jobs began to believe that the high-end 3D graphics business was going to be huge. “These guys were way ahead of anybody,” he said. “I just knew in my bones that this was going to be very important.” He suggested to the Apple board that it consider buying the company — later called Pixar — from LucasFilm. But the board wasn't paying attention to Steve anymore, and less than graciously decided to pass on the deal. Jobs then floated. He spent more time with his daughter Lisa. He gardened. He mused about running for public office. He applied to fly on the Space Shuttle as a civilian, but that didn't work out. He went to Europe on business, but made time for museums. He spent a lot of time by himself, or with his girlfriend. In Europe Steve Jobs met with heads of state, university presidents, artists. He'd been humbled in California, but was having his ego stroked in Europe, where he was still thought of as a “revolutionary business figure.” Although none of these conversations, and museum visits were on their own important, they were in fact a series of dots, leading to the big dot. The one that would create the inspiration within him, to go again. Ready to return to the U.S. hungry for the next big thing. He began meeting with scientists, who were telling him that they needed a personal computer with enough power for real research and modeling — “a radically new high-end computer ‘workstation.'” Although far way from the Jobs family garage, where Apple was born, the same passion and ability for creative thinking was ready to ignite again. Steve Jobs was on the march, and went straight into the boardroom of Apple, to declare that he was leaving start a new company, and would also be taking some low-level Apple employees with him. And what came next, was NeXT. Steve had arrived at a crossroads in his life. After his spectacular rise to the top with Apple, things had turned sour, and he was looking for something to reignite his passions and of course his fortunes. He was still a very rich man, but for the first time in his life had the stigma of failure hanging over him. This was quite unfair in many regards, but as we see time and time again, the world likes nothing more than pushing a person to the top of the pile, and then delighting as they fall back to earth with the rest of us. As the story goes, Steve Jobs had returned from one of his many business trips to Europe promoting the Apple II and met a very old friend of his, Nobel prize winner Paul Berg From Stanford University. The two old friends discussed Bergs work, and it became clear to Steve Jobs that this could be the thing he was looking for. The reason to build a new company thereby restoring the Apple boards faith in him. His friend told him about his work on DNA, and inquired whether the molecules could be simulated on computers. Steve told him No, but that didn't mean that it wasn't possible. And those possibilities excited him greatly. Instead of focusing in on the home computer market as he had previously, he would instead build a supercomputer for the higher education and scientific markets. He did his research as to the computer capabilities he would need, and became even more excited by what he discovered. Steve Jobs, was reinventing the wheel and giving the world something that no one else could, and as we have already seen he was not short of ego, which is why there is no surprise that the idea appealed so much. However, if Steve Jobs had gone further and researched whether the higher education and scientific markets would actually be interested in buying such a super computer, he might have had a very different reaction to the concept. Hindsight as they say, is a wonderful thing. He was still an employee at Apple, so enthusiastically informed the board of his idea. And on the 13th of September 1985 boldly described the vision he had for the computer, the company, and of course himself. Everything went well at first, and the board sided with his enthusiasm, even willing to invest in the plans that Steve Jobs had presented to them. That enthusiasm however was short lived, when Jobs started detailing who he would take with him to the new company. This is when the board of Apple turned bitter. He advised that he would go away with Bud Tribble, the first Mac programmer; George Crow, a key Mac hardware engineer; Rich Page, who had supervised almost all of Apples' development; Dan'l Lewin, and Susan Barnes, an MBA in finance. Steve Jobs had presented these people as “Low-level”, but it was clear to all that they were anything but. These employees were integral to the future progress of Apple Computers, and the board felt threatened. With no other option and determined to push ahead with his idea, Steve Jobs resigned from Apple. Next Computers was born, and it did not start easily. The minute it was created, the six co-founders found themselves sued by their former employer, Apple. The fruit company was accusing them of stealing their technology. As a result, for its first year or so of existence, the new company could not work on any product in particular, since there was a chance they would lose the trial and give all the technologies they had worked on back to Apple. This didn't phase Jobs at all, and in the meantime he set up to build the perfect company. Building a new company from scratch needed huge investment which Steve Jobs for once had at his disposal. After his departure from Apple, Steve had sold almost all of his stock out of disgust. So by early 1986, he was sitting on more than $100 million. These were very different times from the earlier bootstrapping of Apple. He no longer needed to entice the investment of others to his new venture. This was going to be his baby. He was very much back in control. Steve Jobs knew one thing and he did it better than most: When it came to recruiting he ensured that quality and integrity were at the top of his wishlist. He only recruited those individuals that were classed as extremely bright. Next even used to state that even their receptionist had a PHD, and one thing was certain, there was a buzz around silicon valley about this new start up. The hype was growing by the day, and Steve Jobs added more and more computer whizzkids, and extremely intelligent folk to the list of employees ready to create the next big thing in computing. Next appeared very much the place to be. What made this remarkable was the company couldn't work on anything due to the dispute from Apple, and so were not making any income. The salaries, relocation, logo, equipment costs were all being paid out of Steve Jobs very deep pockets. Not bottomless by any stretch of the imagination, but being emptied at an astonishing rate. Why did Steve Jobs do this? Was it to prove a point to his old employers, or was it to prove a point to the industry? Whatever the reason it got him noticed and the word on the street was “look out he's on his way back!” At the same time as this was all happening, the Star Wars legend George Lucas, came calling to enquire whether Steve's previous interest in his company, working within the motion picture industry was still alive. Steve Jobs had taken a huge interest in the work of the team at Pixar, and had even requested that the Apple board buy the company, but was refused. But now with the value of the company being substantially less than he was once offered, he decided to take matters into his own hands and fork out for the computer animation team. Once again, whether this was a dig at his old work colleagues we don't know, but Steve Jobs paid £10,000,000 of his own money to buy Pixar as nothing more than an expensive hobby. His real passion was for the Next cube,the super computer that would change the industry, not for a group of budding artists trying to make splash in Hollywood. It continued to be a very expensive hobby for many years, with him funding it solely something that he was reluctant to do with his bigger passion Next. He finally started to look for outside investors for that company. Fortunately for Steve Jobs and Next, the Apple dispute fizzled out, and they could actually start getting to work. This occurred mainly by their lack of new creation. Holding back on working on anything new, appeared to be a very good decision NeXT still didn't have a business plan or concrete plans for its first product. Apple's case was based on NeXT's raiding of senior Macintosh executives and conspiring to use the confidential knowledge Jobs and the others had about upcoming Apple projects (like BigMac). And that is where it faltered, Apple couldn't then pinpoint any specific trade secrets that NeXT had violated, because they hadn't. A week later, Apple came back with a list of twenty complaints but failed to demonstrate how NeXT had any plans against Apple. The case proved to be a major embarrassment for Apple and just provided Next and of course Steve Jobs, with a great deal of free publicity: A true win win. When we look back at Steve Jobs time working on The Next cube we can see quite clearly, two major flaws: One was Steve's personal obsession with perfection. Everything from the typeface. to the casing had to be perfect. That perfection only made it a pain to build: from the perfect right angles to its materials to its color, it was extremely complicated — and therefore expensive — to put together. In addition, Steve had made a point on also designing a “beautiful” board for the Cube. All the electronic components, which are usually on several different pieces of plastic, were melded on a single square board that the chairman Steve Jobs considered as beautiful as the case itself. However it was a strenuous problem for engineers to solve. The costs escalated beyond anything that a school or higher education department could afford. Steve Jobs obsession with making it cutting edge and radically ahead of its time was to be its ultimate failure. He had built the technological equivalent of the Ipad thirty years too soon. No matter which way they turned, Next and Steve Jobs hit a brick wall. And through all the twists and turns, delays caused the development of what had been cutting edge two years previously to no longer be seen as such. The competitors had quietly brought their cheaper and user friendly machines to market and had killed any escape route that Next had. Steve Jobs had fallen further from grace, and now was being seen as a liability instead of a maverick and technological genius. Interestingly the forgotten hobby Pixar had started making some progress. Only small steps but enough for the people at Disney to take an interest. In the early 90's times were hard at Pixar, and the company had survived several threats by Steve Jobs to cut his losses and close the whole thing down. But for some reason or another, he still persisted with its vision. Pixar failed nine times over by normal standards, but Steve didn't want another failure to be placed on his resume, so he kept writing the checks. He would have sold the company to anybody in a moment, and in fact tried very very hard to do just that, but the bottom line was he wanted to cover his loss of $50 million. In March 1991, he declared he would continue to keep funding it only if he were given back all of the employees' stock shares. The scheme involved shutting the company down on paper, and creating a “new Pixar” where he was the sole owner. He also fired almost half the staff, keeping only the software programmers as well as Lasseter's animation department — which was, by then, the only part of the company to bring cash in, thanks to its work in TV advertisement. The hardware that the company had developed to enable others to create the same groundbreaking animation was classed as finished. Disney who had an investment in the company could never understand why they should be funding a system to teach others to animate. They controlled animation, and certainly wanted to keep it that way. Nearly twenty odd years after starting the company, the team at Pixar were given a lifeline. After receiving a few awards, and even an Oscar for a short animated film, Disney gave them the greenlight to go for the big one…..a full length computer animated movie. Steve Jobs negotiated a three movie contract with Disney, and arranged to keep 12.5% percent of ticket sales received. Little did he know, as he had limited experience in the movie industry, that he had made a very bad deal. But I suppose a bad deal is better than no deal, and after years of self funding the unit, he was about to see money at last come his way. Or so he thought. Toy Story was put into development, and like all things in Steve's life, at that time, became a lot harder to get the product to the customer than he expected. 1993, was now upon us, and without doubt this was the year when everything that Steve Jobs had dreamt, worked on, and developed crumbled in front of him. A year that many people couldn't have imagined happening ten years previously, when Jobs could do no wrong. Whether Steve Jobs had dwelled on the same dark realisations we can only guess, but it was at an end. He was 38 years old and at his lowest point ever. Next computers crashed around him. It began in January 1992, when Steve Jobs made the decision to allow the advanced operating systems to be used in his competitor's machines. He had taken the view that the uniqueness of what he had created would need to be shared, if he had any chance of saving the company. This was the first sign of the true failure to come for Steve, although many experts had the view that he should have done this from the very beginning. However Jobs was looking to create the system of all systems. The kind of processing speed that would leave all his competitors in the shade. Not to help them in their journeys also. The death warrant had been signed. At the same time in an ironic retelling of a previous dot in Jobs life, things got even worse. COO Van Cuylenburg, who was hired by Steve Jobs, betrayed him in a cruel reminiscence of what had happened at Apple some seven years earlier. Van Cuylenberg had phoned up NeXT's competitor Sun, and asked its CEO Scott McNealy to buy NeXT and install him as manager of the new company getting rid of Jobs. Fortunately, McNealy had some sense of honor and told Steve about the outrage. Van Cuylenburg left, but Steve was completely devastated by everything that was going on around him. How could this have happened? How could all his hard work and investment end up in such a way? How could it be that everyone of the company's co-founders, except George Crow would abandon him. He was Steve Jobs, the genius who had created an industry from nothing. A man who had lit up silicon valley and blazed a path across the world. What had he done to deserve all this at once? Next was finished, and in an even crueler twist of fate, his other venture Pixar was in serious trouble too. The lifeline that had been grabbed at when making the deal with Disney was slipping away from them. Disney's Katzenberg had seen what the company had created, and quite simply hated Woody, Buzz Lightyear and all the other characters which we now see as classics. Together with the majority of Disney's creative staff, he declared that the characters were unappealing jerks and the dialogues inappropriately cynical for a children's movie (while he was the one who pushed for such characteristics early in development). Pixar was back to making TV commercials just so it could survive — but it was obvious it would disappear if the work did not start again. Steve Jobs had reached the bottom of his career. He had lost faith in himself, and disappeared behind the closed doors of his home, spending most of his days at home, playing with his two-year-old son. Was there anyway that Steve Jobs could fight back from such a low point? Could he recoup his investment, his self esteem, and be allowed to create the legacy that he so craved? That part of the story will only come on part four of the Steve Jobs Biography.

This episode of Tech Talk we review the highlights and Alicia's visit during the Google I/O conference in Mountain View Ca. Alicia compares the previous year's conference to the current one and highlights the standout issues she experienced. Like always we break off topic comparing the other major players in their sector (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Facebook) with the products and innovations that came out during this conference.

Google I/O is an annual developer festival held at the outdoor Shoreline Amphitheatre in California.  Google I/O brings together developers from around the globe for an immersive experience focused on exploring the next generation of tech.   For episode 5 of Women in Tech, Alicia attends the Google I/O conference in Mountain View California.  Alicia speaks to a few women with different talents she met at the conference on their experience and thoughts on women in Tech. Also little of her experience for the second time at Google I/O

We spend a lot of time talking about Shannon's spent piece of chewing gum this week, but we also talk about the Juicero juice machine (and how you can squeeze its juice pods by hand), we talk about the Sunscreenr camera — which can see if you missed a spot when putting on sunblock, we congratulate Twitter for picking up 9 million new users in the last quarter, and we cover the giant blimp that Sergey Brin has been secretly building on the Google campus in Mountain View California. Check the sweet shownotes here brah - http://www.sam-mallery.com/2017/04/how-to-fill-a-giant-blimp-hanger-with-a-brand-new-blimp-episode-33

Lian Dolan, Liz Dolan and Julie Dolan of the Satellite Sisters cover the Women's March in Washington DC. Lian attended the historic march in the nation's capital and she has a full report about the spirit of the march, the power of Washington symbols, the success of the Pussy hats and, of course, Madonna. But mainly, the marching. Listen to the newest podcast here.Plus:Julie's offers her first First Ladies Desk Report of the new administration. She would like to remind us of the rules of civility that extend not only to the First Lady but to the entire First Family. We can do this, people.Liz tells us about her visit last week San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It's a gorgeous historic city in the mountains and a great example of the UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE site. She read, she walked and she even took a cooking class at a local school La Cocina. What is this world coming to??Julie has Tuesday Trends. The first is about Rustic Cuffs. The second is Daybreaker. She suggests the latter for Liz and Lian in Los Angeles as part of their new morning routines.Liz reaches a laziness low-point. Blame it on the FitBit. Hear all about it, plus the launch of her Operation Sea Turtle with a Twist.We have a few gut reactions to the Oscar nominations. Lots of good movies we can get behind this year but there may be a showdown in Best Song. Julie wants Justin Timberlake, of course. Liz wants Lin-Manuel Miranda, of course. And Lian is solidly behind LaLaLand.We close with a thank you from Liz who is very grateful for all your kind thoughts and messages about the loss of her beloved dog Ferris. Special shout-out to Kathleen from Mountain View CA for a lovely note and to Samantha for posting her fun game on the Satellite Sisters Facebook Group. We love it with a chainsaw.

County by County State by State Country by Country Cannabis Live from the Mountain View California

Kirsten, ELGL's Executive Director, talks with Captain Chris Hsiung from the Mountain View, CA police department about everything from affordable housing in Silicon Valley, to the challenges and opportunities of a modern police career.

Jonathan Olivo is a filmmaker from Mountain View CA. Jorge rambles about the new Sound Session video on Youtube. Jonathan rambles on working on his films, what a living meme is, and Youtube personalities.

Visita la web Ignacio Jaén - Consultor de Branding, formador y conferenciante Google ahora es Alphabet. Pero lo curioso de este cambio es que Google seguirá siendo Google. La compañía de Mountain View (California) es desde hace mucho algo más que "el buscador" y eso tarde o temprano tenía que reflejarse en su Branding y en su estructura corporativa. Como explica Larry Page, fundador de Google, "no somos una compañía convencional y no hemos pretendido serlo nunca". Google, Chrome, Android... serán ahora las patas de un gran conglomerado tecnológico que quiere cambiar el mundo. En los próximos meses veremos como se organizan todos los servicios bajo las diferentes marcas que tendrán ahora un paraguas llamado "Alphabet". Para muchos analistas, este movimiento corporativo y de Branding es una forma de invertir en el futuro, porque permitirá a las diferentes unidades de negocio tener una mayor claridad y una mejor gestión, sobre todo de cara a los inversores, que son los que han situado a Google (ahora Alphabet) como la segunda empresa mundial por capitalización, solo detrás de la todopoderosa Apple. Para sus fundadores, el cambio de nombre quiere conseguir entre otras cosas devolver a la compañía su capacidad de maniobra, de innovación y la agilidad que les llevó "a hacer muchas de las cosas locas que ahora tienen mil millones de usuarios". La entrada Lo que hay detrás del Branding de Alphabet aparece primero en Ignacio Jaén.

There are many things that will surprise you from a Steve Jobs biography.   We all feel that we know the man well.    We have read the stories of success, heard the tales of peculiar behavior and used the products that the man left behind.   But what you will find when you start researching Steve Jobs, is a man who I don't think anyone will truly understand.    A man with so many layers of personality, and distinct characteristics, that we all had the potential to see the type of person that Steve Jobs wanted us to see.   So where do we start on the Join Up Dots take, on the Steve Jobs Biography?   Well we can clearly see on the Join Up Dots timeline, that Steve Jobs was from the moment he was born looking for identity.    Steven Paul Jobs was brought into the world on the 24th February 1955 in San Francisco California, by two students of the University of Wisconsin, who for whatever reason felt that this new born boy, who would grow up to become the king of techonology, was not theirs to keep.   Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, played such an amazing part in bringing this child to the world, but would also play such a small part too, and gave the young Steve Jobs up for adoption shortly after birth.   And this was one of the dots in the Steve Jobs biography that Steve spoke so candidly about in 2005, when he addressed the graduating students on Stanford in a commencement address that has become a firm favourite to the world.   Not least becoming the basis of what became the theme behind the show “Join Up Dots with David Ralph”   The Steve Jobs Biography is a fascinating tale of clearly defined dots that shape what he was going to become right from the start, which would make it fascinating if we could ever go back in time and show the young Steve Jobs the steps that he should take.   Would he follow them, or would this young child with such a fascination for technology, and understanding of the components that made early electronic devices work, listen?   Well probably not, but you can see in the Steve Jobs biography those dots were clearly working in his favour right from the start.   His adopted parents lived in Mountain View California, which would fortuitously become what is known as silicon valley in later years, planting the budding entrepreneur in the centre of where he would later go on to rule.   His father, Paul Jobs who worked as a Coast Guard veteran and machinist, also had an interest in electronics and would show his young son from the confines of the family garage (the birthplace of Apple) how to take electronic devices a part, and then have the confidence to put them all back together.   Paul Jobs could have had fishing as a hobby, but once again the Steve Jobs biography shows that the skills that he would later utilize to such astonishing success were laid before him.   Yes of course, he needed the interest and persistence to make these skills work, but Steve Jobs was nothing but tenacious when that interest was in evidence.   A completely different Steve Jobs, to the one we would see throughout his career when he was bored, or things didn't quite go his way!   And those opposing, and not so dynamic and conscientious personality traits, were more than evident to everyone during his schooling. Steve Jobs was an innovative thinker. He could see things long before most people had started to even consider there was even something to be seen.   Which meant that during school, he struggled with the confines of formal schooling, and the structure of his lessons which as we all know, more often than not are anything but innovative.   The young Steve Jobs, would attempt to keep himself entertained by playing pranks and creating mischief, even once being bribed by his fourth grade teacher to get his head down and study.    But there was no getting away from the fact that being born to two University graduates had provided him with the genes of intelligence. And school tests, even from a boy who had little interest in the work were a breeze. He would sail through the testing with such apparent ease that the school administrators were keen to push him ahead to High School, which his parents were reluctant to sanction.   So already at school age, the Steve Jobs biography shows that we have a child who is living smack bang in the middle of the soon to be formed Silicon Valley, had an interest in electronics, possessed an innovative and questioning mind, and was born in 1955.   And this last fact is probably one of the most interesting of all, as Malcom Gladwell attested to in his bestselling book the Outliers” in the chapter “Timing Is Everything”   Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was born in 1953, Apple founder Steve Jobs in 1955, Sun Microsystems founders Bill Joy and Scott McNealy in 1954, Bill Gates in 1955.   Which made them the prime age when the first do it yourself home computers came to market in 1975.    Old enough to see the potential, and risk their futures by working on what someone already established in a career in computers would consider too much a risk to take on.    But not old enough to be already settled down with children and responsibilities, frightened to take the leap of faith and risk what they had already gained in life.    All of them fascinated with what was in front of them, and on their own paths to becoming household names in computing, making them richer than anyone could hope to be.   So we are building quite a list of dots on the Join Up Dots timeline, and of course the Steve Jobs biography.   We can now add perfect timing of his birth, to the perfect location, an interest in electronics, questioning mind, and a passion to go against the norm.    We can almost see already, the Steve Jobs that we would see a few years later, in the young man huddled over a box of wires and fuses.   But no matter how inspired and intellectual a person is, they will need the support of others.    And Steve Jobs found this when he was introduced to Steve Wozniak, who became his future business partner.   The two hit it off straight away, and as Wozniak spoke about in a 2007 interview, it was obvious from the start that the two had similar outlooks and passions. Passions that back in the early years of the 1970's very few people had.   As he says “We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips. And very few people, especially back then, had any idea what chips were, how they worked and what they could do. I had designed many computers, so I was way ahead of him in electronics and computer design, but we still had common interests. We both had pretty much sort of an independent attitude about things in the world.”    And that was how Steve Jobs life was throughout High School. Limited interest in what was happening within the education system, but along with Wozniack fascinated and consumed by the potential outside its walls.   And now in the Steve Jobs biography we arrive at that definitive time in his life.    The definitive time in everyone's life. They are now ready to go out into the world as young adults and create their own paths.   Would Steve Jobs follow the course that so many people follow and play it safe, getting a job just because it's money in the bank, following in the footsteps of his father, or would he strive boldly into a new future, and create his legacy.   Well surprisingly Steve Jobs did neither, and even against a background off disinterest in studying and education, Steve Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland Oregon.   This appears a decision that was not well thought out, as Steve Jobs quickly realised that he wasn't suited for further education and made the decision to drop out of college and do his own thing.   And that thing was to start attending classes that he thought would be interesting.    He would choose classes to attend, just because he was intrigued by their content, not because how they would look on his resume.   One of those classes, as Steve Jobs recounted once again in the Stanford Commencement address changed his life. The course was in calligraphy, and developed the love of typography that he brought to the world in such a dramatic and successful way with his first foray into the home computer market.   As he said to the students hanging on his every word on that day “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.”   In 1974, the Steve Jobs biography shows, what you would think was a great starting point to his career as a computer genius, and the young Jobs accepted a position with the promising and innovative games company Atari, as a video game designer.   Atari would go onto to dominate the home games console market in the late seventies and early eighties, with children across the world clambering for one of these wooden boxes that they could plug into their television sets. The demand was astonishing.   But Steve Jobs would not play a big part of the success of the company, as just six months later he quit, to go and find himself by traveling the huge continent of India, high on drugs most of the time.   When he did return to the United States of America it was now 1976, Steve Jobs was twenty years old and about get serious about what he saw the future of home computing to be.    Alongside his friend Steve Wozniak, still spending hours and hours inside the Jobs family garage, they would create what would grow to become the most valuable company on Earth.   The two friends set to work experimenting with the knowledge that they had fostered, more often than not unknowingly throughout their lives.    The hours spent fiddling with chips, and electronic circuit boards as a hobby, now finding its true importance in their lives.   Which is of course one of the truths of every episode of Join Up Dots.    Perceived failures, or what seemed like pure time wastage can later on turn out to be the holder of the very thing that you are looking for.    And that was certainly the case with young Mr Steve Jobs.   However greatness does not appear without a belief and a willingness to take risks. And the Steve Jobs biography is littered with incidents where he seemed to have the desire to go further and quicker than anyone else around him would consider acceptable..     Selling his Volkswagen bus, whilst his friend Wozniak sold his beloved scientific computer they funded their fledgling enterprise, and began to work changing the world. Empowering every home to believe they could posses their own computer, which several years previously would have been thought an impossible dream.   With Jobs in charge of marketing— Apple, which they decided to call their untested enterprise, initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, the company's sales increased by 700 percent, to $139 million.    Not bad for two guys, who just three years before were unsure as to which direction their future would go.   However this was simply the beginning of what Apple was to become and in 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion.   By the end of its very first day of trading, and buoyed by its success Jobs looked to find someone with the business acumen and vision to drive the company to even greater heights, and made the decision to bring marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola in as the President of Apple.   A decision that among all the decisions made in the Steve Jobs biography was as bad for Steve as it could possibly be.    A decision that would bring Steve Jobs to one of the lowest points of his life, being told to leave the company he had founded.    Steve Jobs was sacked from Apple.  

Five-time CISO Jeff Klaben, who is currently at a Silicon Valley think tank and also is an adjunct professor, says there is a shortage of skilled security professionals, especially at the management level, to combat an increasingly complex enterprise attack surface. Klaben was exploring the connection between cyber security education, threat intelligence and incident response. He told Security Current's Vic Wheatman that the aim was to create actionable intelligence but the question remained, "how do we prepare folks to leverage these tools and capabilities?" He said education and particularly mentoring within an organization would be integral to a successful security program and encouraged CISOs to mentor up and coming security professionals within. Klaben also called on CISOs to work with security start-up vendors to, at the very minimum, provide them feedback so as to ensure they are developing cutting edge technologies.  He was speaking at the Security Innovation Network's (SINET) Conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California.

James Maxey (author and "big science geek") Emlee Vassilos (actress) and Stephen Euin Cobb (your host) are our featured guests. Topic: Alternative Energy Sources Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the September 21, 2011 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 39 minutes]. This is the second half of a discussion panel recorded before a live audience on June 4, 2011 in Charlotte North Carolina at the SF&F convention ConCarolinas. (The first half is available in last week's episode.) James Maxey is the author of the superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl as well as the Dragon Age fantasy series which includes the novels Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. Set a thousand years in the future, after the fall of our modern civilization, in a world dominated by the intelligent dragons we created through genetic engineering. Humans are reduced to slaves, and the remnants of long forgotten nanotechnology make the world a wondrous place of magic. Emlee Vassilos is an actress who is co-staring (as Lily) in the soon to be released zombie horror movie A Few Brains More, which is the sequel to Fist Full of Brains. She has also performed in Destiny Road, Renee, and the TV movie Trinity Goodheart. Stephen Euin Cobb is the author of Bones Burnt Black and Skinbrain. News Items: [1] Social networks have become a powerful tool for those seeking employment; [2] based on the latest Kepler findings, astronomer Seth Shostak estimates that "within a thousand light-years of Earth," there are "at least 30,000" habitable planets; [3] the Open Science Summit will be held next month on Oct 22-23 in Mountain View CA.

Scott, Mickey, Mike, and Schmoe review Peter Mayer's "Goodbye Hello" album, only about thirteen months after its release; and the concert roundup is from the October 16 Mountain View CA show. (Cameo by Jennifer.) send email: podcast@northcoastcast.com send audio: northcoastcast@gmail.com send Skype: 1-734-274-5959

Phil Haack was our guest on the first Road Trip show! We talked about shipping VS2010, ASP.NET MVC, and Phil told us how he got into the business.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations