Berkeley Blog

Startups and Immigrants in Berkeley?

Berkeley has always been known for its political radicalism, but tonight at Innovate@Berkeley, held at the staid Hotel Shattuck, 26 high-tech startups presented applications and hardware to disrupt everything from commerce to health, social communications, and play. With the support of the Berkeley Startup Cluster, a coalition including the City of Berkeley and UC Berkeley, as well as Alpha Epsilon Zeta and some local companies, UC Berkeley computer science sophomore Sameen Karim -- all of 19 years old and the founder of startup Eventable -- put together an impressive event and the first of its kind to take place in Berkeley. 

The five-hour event started with a roar, as hundreds of avid attendees of all ages streamed into the expo room to check out 28 different offerings. The most popular ones were Dash Robotics, whose engineers earned their Ph.D's by building cockroach-like robots that can climb up any surface and be built from a simple die sheet (batteries provided). Funded by the National Science Foundation and tested by the military as well as by children, Dash Robotics easily won first place. A runner up was Mozio, an airport transportation search engine that solves the problem of getting one home the last mile after arriving from a flight. Dropsense, which won third prize, uses a cell phone screen and a sensor strap to alert diabetics of low blood sugar. 

The sense of excitement among the crowd and the presenters was palpable. It was as if one were going into a museum of living art, where the objects in paintings all popped out and came to life. Only instead of art, most of the objects and services these students produced are functional, and ingenious as well.

This all tied in well with author Vivek Wadhwa's "innovation is alive and well" keynote, in which he pointed out the strides humanity has made in the past two centuries in longevity, education, transportation, food production, and communications. Wadhwa has just written a book on the need for the U.S. to bring in more immigrants to stay innovative. Looking around the event tonight, it was obvious that more than half the presenters were immigrants or children of immigrants, including Wadhwa himself. 

In the middle of this event, I took a bus and attended another event, a Cesar Chavez rally that took place in the Berkeley Adult School, off San Pablo Avenue, where I had to sidestep a man so drunk and disheveled he looked like a Hollywood apparition of a drunk and disheveled film actor.

Inside the auditorium, a jovial line of Mexican and other Latin American immigrants snaked toward a table steaming with tamales, rice and beans. My pro bono clients had set up a table to sell t-shirts with the words Bring Rodrigo Home -- Kids for Kids and a photo of Rodrigo Guzman, looking like one of those kidnapped children one used to see on milk cartons.

This campaign was started when a schoolmate at Jefferson Elementary in Berkeley was denied re-entry to the U.S. after he and his parents visited relatives in Mexico. Their visas had expired and they were told they couldn't apply for new visas for five years. Rodrigo had grown up in Berkeley, although he was born in Mexico, and he had gone to the same school since kindergarten.

The school kids wanted to go on a hunger strike -- this is Berkeley, after all -- but one parent of twin 9-year-olds, Mable Yee, a former high-tech entrepreneur, convinced them that a campaign using the power of the press and social media might work better. And it has.

Change.org helped set up a petition after the Berkeley City Council and the Berkeley Unified School Board passed resolutions to the President and Congress to bring Rodrigo and his parents back to Berkeley. Telemundo in Mexico and Univision in the U.S. took the story national as did NPR's Latino USA and the HuffingtonPost. Representative Barbara Lee invited the classmates to Washington, D.C. and they are raising funds through t-shirt sales to make a trip there next month to testify about the need for immigration reform.

Ironically, Silicon Valley's need for highly educated immigrants dovetails with the growth and influence of the Latino vote, both converging on a demand from legislators for immigration reform. Speculation is that something will change soon.

Walking home from the bus stop late last night, after being roused by Wadhwa's talk and the Chavez rally, where Rodrigo and his mother were Skyped in from Mexico, I wondered whether ten years from now, Rodrigo Guzman would be a presenter in Innovate@Berkeley. If it could happen in Berkeley, it could happen in the rest of the U.S. as well.

Startups Are Like Smoking Crack

Most of my former and present clients are high-tech junkies: they can't resist founding another startup no matter how much they cashed out for the last startup or especially if the last startup went bust. Some people just get high on high-tech startups the way addicts get high on drugs. And there are lots of similarities, from creating a reality away from reality to running at full speed all the time.

Startups -- like drugs -- give life purpose, and whereas 1,000 years ago joining a monastery or a marauding pack of knights might have evoked the same high, today's technology allows those in pursuit of conquering the world through new tools and memes a more harmless high.

If I were a psychologist, I would say that most of my clients want recognition, and that's a driving force for their entrepreneurial pursuits.  Most people with a good idea don't take the next step to start a company.  Larry Page and Sergey Brin could have created their search algorithm by writing a Ph.D. thesis at Stanford and publishing it, but instead they started Google. What drove them to start a company when they could have become distinguished scholars? 

I don't think money is a great motivator for people who do start-ups. Most of them could earn more money becoming realtors or funeral directors, and they'd certainly need to expend less effort. Money might be a distant end goal, but the process of starting and running a company consumes so much brainshare that recognition and adoption rather than enormous wads of revenue become the main goals. 

If you were to ask Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg what he's going to do with all the money he's making, he'd probably say that when he has the time -- say in 10 years or so -- he'll figure out how to dispose of it. But by then, he'll be onto his next startup, the way Mosaic/Netscape founder Marc Andreessen went onto his next two startups and then became a funder of startups.

Maybe it's human nature. It's like a love affair -- far more fun to start than to continue and eventually end. 

 

 

You've Been Hacked: Digital Graffiti

It started with a phone message from a good friend left early this morning, so I knew the news couldn't be good. "I think you're email's been hacked," she warned. And then my son called before he usually gets up to croak in a tone that implied I was a moron to still be using AOL mail, "Mom, you've been hacked." And then he hung up, leaving me to figure out a solution.

This has happened before, and I realized the spammer was one day off -- April 1 was yesterday -- so I didn't panic, just changed my email password and went on reading the newspaper. After a couple of hours, I noticed that I wasn't receiving any mail, so I called up AOL technical support (for which I pay a monthly sum) and discovered that the hacker had blocked all incoming mail. I learned how to reset the mail filter and then reset my password once more and my password question as well, so the next time this happens -- and i'm sure there will be a next time -- I'll know how to reset everything on my own.

As happened last time my mail was hacked, several people I haven't spoke with in ages called me on the phone. A couple were fooled by the impersonator's plea for $1,500 in cash to buy kidney for a cousin in Spain and asked me if they could help. A few were concerned about my well being, as if I had suffered from an invasion of my space, which I had, but since it's all digital, it's not like a robber came and stole my cash with a gun.

I never got to see the spammer. It could have been an algorithm generated by a gang of teenagers in Moldava or Kiev, where kids think spamming is part of the new cold war against rich Westerners. When criminals are anonymous and in cyberspace, it's not that the impact is less real. It's just that the damage can usually be reversed. And by 10:38 a.m. it was.

 

 

An App for Everything

Got ADD? There's an app that helps you focus. And if you have sleep apnea, there's an app that trains you to breathe correctly so you sleep through the night. If you want to be a portrait photographer, plenty of camera apps will turn you into an Avedon, and if you want to avoid boredom, just download a game app among the thousands available for less than you'd pay for a cappucino.

Apps are the cultural DNA for the 21st century citizen. One can glean insights into a friend or colleague by checking out that person's apps, just as in the mid-20th century one could discover a friend's interests and educational background just be perusing their library. About 25 years ago, books began disappearing from the homes of digerati and business types. The primal need to collect is now being supplanted by the manic proliferationof  digital apps, including those that supply the content that used to take up bookshelves.

Using apps requires skills not taught by youth groups of yore, such as the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts in the 50's, when i was growing up. If you were lost, you'd stop and ask people for directions, not consult Google Maps. Nowadays, when someone stops to ask me for directions, it's usually because they lack a smart phone or come from a broadband hinterlands like Mars. 

I went to MacWorld Expo this year, and all I saw were cellphone accessories and apps. And i realized that because of the mobile app invasion, computing has become ubiquitous, a condition that was predicted by the cogniscenti less than 20 years ago. 

Almost everyone I know has an app they'd like to create or at least see someone else create. Even children are making apps. I try to imagine what Leonardo da Vinci would have done with theiPhone. Would he have created an app -- the Mona Lisa Maker --  to turn us into artists? Skipping a few centuries, I'm sure that Andy Warhol would have downloaded a slew of apps for capturing his coterie's antics and perhaps created an app to turn quotidian objects such as soup cans into cultural icons.

Because I'm carless, my favorite app is NextBus, which tells me when the next bus is arriving ... or not... as often is the case. But sometimes I like to go on walks stupid, without a smartphone, and if I hear a bus behind me, run the distance to the nearest stop. Sometimes I make it and sometimes I don't, but without my app security blanket, life seems more exciting. 

 

A Fork in the Road

I'm sure Robert Frost wasn't thinking about which bus line to take -- the AC Transit 18 or 72 -- when writing his iconic poem, "The Road Not Taken." The 18 travels uphill and  east, through Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto, past Chez Panisse, the original Peet's coffee, and multiple upscale student cafes. The 72 rampages over the rough asphalt on San Pablo, once the main thoroughfare of gold miners and Spanish ranchers, and now pockmarked with fast food chains, liquor stores, and street walkers.

Both bus lines are two blocks from my place, which is on the borderline between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Both lines converge in downtown Oakland, whose slit-windowed concrete prison is the first sight one sees when approaching the city from the south. Most of the time, I'll take the 18 to downtown Berkeley BART, and then BART to downtown Oakland, although it would be faster and more direct to take the 72 to get to downtown Oakland.

The other night, as I was about to descend into the 19th St.  Oakland BART station, I saw a 72 hurtling down Broadway, so I decided to get on board. The next 25 minutes took me into another world, one without a lot of smart phones, and one in which some of the passengers lacked the change to get on board. The driver let a young man whose pants looked as if they had never seen soap board for free. Another passenger, riding in front and holding two  crutches, loaned the young man bus fare, unaware that the driver had quietly said he could come on for free. When yet a third passenger pointed out that the passenger didn't need the fare, an argument started between the young man and the man with crutches. A woman reeking of cigarettes and something I couldn't place sitting across from me shot a warning look at the crutches guy, and he gave up the fight.

"Keep the change," he said to the free boarder. "Giving never hurt anyone."

Like an angel dispatched to create justice in the world, the woman nodded her approval and then got off the bus.

I felt like the richest person on the bus, especially since I'd just paid $150 to attend the East Bay Innovation awards given by East Bay EDA at the Fox theater, a gilded Gatsby-like palladium, where Joe Kennedy from Pandora and some German dude from Bayer gave short acceptance speeches about the wealth of talent and innovation in the East Bay. 

Once home, I felt like something was missing from this picture of the East Bay. There's the 18 and the 72, and which line one must take, to paraphrase Frost's poem, "makes all the difference."

Two Masters of Spin Meet Up

As a publicist and an avid cyclist, I'm always spinning my wheels, literally and figuratively. So when I just listened to snippets of Oprah Winfrey's interview of Lance Armstrong confessing to his longtime doping to win bicycle races, including seven Tours de France, I couldn't help admiring one figurative master of spin (America's public therapist) encountering a literal master of spin (America's master cyclist). And yet, this time it wasn't about the bicycle: it was about repositioning the careers of both Winfrey and Armstrong.

If Winfrey can snag more confessional celebrities on a regular basis -- and hey, what can a celeb do except end with a whimper or bang? --  she can create the country's most popular schadenfreude channel on OWN TV.

As for Armstrong, he's got several career options, some of which could even be related to cycling:

1. Endorse energy drinks for athletes. If Armstrong OKs the product, who knows if it's got performance- enhancing drugs inside or not? All the better, if it does.

2. Launch a seven-step recovery organization for obsessive liars: Liars Like Lance, or LLL, with chapters throughout the world. More bucks in trying to cure liars than cancer, and also more likely to get results (especially if publicists are also members of LLL).

3. Outdo Oprah and start a TV channel: Liars Without Borders, featuring art forgers, contractors, union officials, mayors, Chinese politicians, anyone related to Qaddafi, diet doctors, tobacco makers, mortage brokers, and Vladimir Putin's publicist.

4. Move to a country without extradition agreements with the U.S. and good good athletic facilities: Monaco? Cuba? North Korea?

5. Go into politics. Now that you've come clean, what else is there to expose? It's a straight shot to the governship of Texas, where they admire tough guys. 

And if you, dear readers have other career suggestions for Armstrong, let's hear from you.

 

Ecologist-Writer Wendell Berry Doesn't Use a Computer

But his wife, Tanya, does and transcribes all his words. She was in the audience at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Auditorium today as were thousands of students and gray hairs like myself who went to hear the godfather of the ecology movement engage in talk about agriculture, the environment, and culture – or what panelist and UC Professor Miguel Altieri calls agricology. Berry launched a back-to-nature movement 40 years ago in parallel with Ken Kesey’s (a classmate of his at the Stanford graduate program in creative writing) LSD-induced campaign to get us back in touch with our creative nature.  Also on the panel was the eminent epithet maker, Michael Pollan, who proclaimed that “Our culture sees the relation between nature and culture as a zero sum game.”

Former poet laureate and UC Professor Robert Hass read some lines from an early Berry poem in which he tries to reconcile the way he wants to live with “the bitter taste of money.” Berry said that he started writing about our relationship to nature because he was scared. Now, he says, “It’s gotten worse, but the great consolation is that they’re more of us.” He sees an increase in violence and says that as the Bible predicted, after the flood would come the fire. “This world is burning,” he said, from energy wastes and other toxics.

“We’re in an emergency. We have to be patient in an emergency.” He recommends civil disobedience – he’s been arrested for protesting the building of a nuclear plant -- and also urban agrarianism. He also thinks people should get outdoors and enjoy nature’s pleasures – hunting, fishing, walking – rather than the “frantic pleasures” such as computer gaming.

This guy is a bit of a Luddite was my reaction but he sure has a poet-philosopher’s lay of the language.  For example:

 “Unemployment has always been a goal of the industrial revolution.”

Or, “I am increasingly dissatisfied with the word wilderness. The wildest creature around these days is us. Creatures in the woods are leading quiet, domestic lives. We are the ones out of control.”

Footnote: The young person sitting next to me, Jacob, was with a startup that is developing a system to connect small farmers to restaurants and grocery stores within a 100-mile radius. It’s software and Jacob definitely works indoors with a computer, but his company’s technology will enable the sustainability of small farmers who are living the Berry dream. Indeed, the relation between technology and culture should not be seen as a zero sum game.

Das Venture Kapital

In the sixties, I went to a college whose tagline, wrapped around the griffin logo on our sweatshirts, was Communism, Atheism, and Free Love, so of course I got to read a lot of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, even in the original German, which I studied as well as in the Humanities 210 course required of all students, and courses in political science, economics, and sociology. By the time I graduated in 1967 -- a year before the global student uprisings -- I had a good idea about class warfare and its origins in the Industrial Revolution.

Now it's 45 years later and time for a Marxian makeover: a version 2.0 of the Communist start-up guide. It's no longer so much about class warfare as coding warfare: those who code can achieve the wealth that those who can't code can. And those who control the coders -- the managerial, or as Marx would call them the exploitative class -- can attain the Zuckerbergian zillions that much of mankind hopes to be heir to.

Based on my years of insider experience in high tech, I'd title the new version of Marx's manifesto "Das Venture Kapital." It's no longer Wall St. so much as Silicon Valley guys (and a few gals) who have made it in tech who now shape the future of the emergent tech ruling class, not only in the U.S. but also in other parts of the world, including Israel, Singapore, Europe, Latin America, and Russia.

One constant in this new world economic order is cash. The other constant is cheap labor, and thanks to outsourcing, we're able to exploit the masses all over the world instead of just at home. But thanks to technology, the masses can rise up much more easily now and overturn whole governments, whether they're theocracies, dictatorships, or just run by cross-dressing creeps. 

It's true that more people work in service industries now than in manufacturing, but someone is still making our computers and smart phones and tablets. Compare the hundreds of thousands of young Chinese who labor in iPhone factories, surrounded by nets to prevent them from committing suicide,  with the young women who worked in the garment factories and cotton mills during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Although the means of production have changed considerably since Karl wrote his manifesto, capital -- often in the form of venture capital -- is still used to fuel a system that benefits the few whose innovations and skills depend on the labor of the many. If unfairness is built into the capitalistic system, it also can spawn technologies for people to recode the system. The person who comes closest to a modern-day Karl Marx, I think, is Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and GNU/Linux.  

 

Coursera Could Change the World

Andrew Ng, Stanford professor of machine learning and cofounder of Coursera, wants to provide free, high-quality education for all. He goes about it the same way he'd design a machine to acquire human intelligence: by breaking down the way people learn different subjects into sequential steps, and then using digital prompts to help guide them toward correct answers and better understanding of new content.

Coursera is a MOOC: a massive open online course. In what seems the most dramatic payback to education, Coursera, which now serves 1.4 million students in 190 countries and offers 196 courses in partnership with 33 universities, teachers can analyze how students solve problems in science, math, and computing, and then identify ways to help guide them digitally through common problem areas. 

By taking the massive approach, Coursera can personalize the educational experience through a cleverly designed digital framework. Students can watch videos of lectures at their own pace, and replay segments they don't understand the first time. Interactive quizzes are scattered throughout the lectures to better engage students and insure their comprehension of the material before they proceed to the next step. Depending on the course, student grades are determined by their peers, who are trained to grade and evaluate each other's work. And organic communities are built up either locally or globally for exchanging knowledge and support.

Given the massive amount of data Coursera is acquiring on the learning process, Ng said he would like to do to education what Google, eBay, Amazon, and Paypal have done for commerce. Already some of Coursera's partners are accrediting its courses, and Ng said some employers take into account Coursera certificates when making hiring decisions.

Asked by someone in the audience at Banatao Hall on the UC Berkeley campus, where Ng spoke today, whether it's worth attending a real university, he said that a physical university has the potential to not only impart knowledge but also "ignite minds" because of face-to-face interactions among students and teachers. But for those who can't afford to attend a university -- such as the population in sub-Saharan Africa, half of whom speak French -- Coursera, which is being translated into French, provides an alternative to making the world a smarter place.

 

Math Software for Solar Energy

Dan Rosen, cofounder and CEO of Solar Mosaic, spoke today at the INFUSION lunch I host at the Berkeley Rep Theater in partnership with the Berkeley Startup Cluster, about the new investment model his team has developed to finance solar energy quickly and widely. He predicted that PGE and other utility companies based on coal won't be around that much longer...five years at most. That's because the economies of solar, which as an industry is outgrowing all other energy industries, makes it likely that the world (maybe even cars) will run on solar in the not too distance future.

The impediment, said Rosen, has been financing. Traditionally, banks do not finance solar projects, so Rosen and cofounder Billy Parish (the latter a college dropout and the former a high school dropout), structured a way to make it easy for people to invest in solar energy by buying into large projects, such as public schools. In turn, parents of students in the schools would be incentivized to get solar for their residences because they'd be offered a chance to donate part of their investment to pay for the school's solar panels.

Rosen said that math, based on input from big data, is being used in new ways to recalculate energy costs that squarely put solar in first place. Although his company has only 18 employees -- and "about half of them have Aspergers'" -- they've already raised more than 4 million in funding and have secured the likes of Paul Hawken and Van Jones as advisory board members.

Asked if the company plans to go international, the answer was yes. In the meantime, if your school or business or hospital needs a fix of cheap energy, check out Solar Mosaic for funding. Parish, BTW, who was supposed to speak at this event, had been called to be on a panel at the Global Clinton Initiative by none other than Chelsea Clinton.