Thursday, December 19, 2013

Suits vs Surfies


Interesting to observe the micro-cultures of the valley, almost as diverse as the microclimates. I have spent last couple of weeks getting involved with the Telecom community, centered down south in San Jose. They talk about semiconductors and Moores law - actual substance for the real world. But slow-moving.

The urban hipster haven of SoMa feels worlds apart from San Jose.  SoMa talk is Insta and Snap. Lightweight, viral entertainment. And counter-intuitive to the microclimate – hot and sunny San Jose dress code is suit, while cold and foggy city wear is surfer shorts.  

And then there is us in the middle. We are somewhere on the Peninsula – San Mateo, Palo Alto, Mountain View.  We do software and internet and cloud stuff. We dismiss city as fluff and shrug at San Jose as boring hardware.

City is not all fluff of course, and hardware is far from dead or boring. So many new exciting device+service products launched this year, and innovations of Arduino and RasPi making creative process so much more dynamic and accessible. But Telco world keep pitching dead-on-arrival technologies like NFC for mobile payments. As our Lean Startup mentors teach, they need to learn how to fail faster...

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