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Recently in Salon Technology

Books
Is technology unplugging our minds?
We may be able to multitask our way through life -- but at what cost to our humanity? Three new books examine the world technology begat.
By Janelle Brown
[10/07/99]

Can Robert Johnson bring more blacks online?
Black Entertainment Television's founder is launching a $35 million African-American portal site. Will it help mend the digital divide?
By Raymond Rawlinson
[10/06/99]

Column
Strike up the broadband
When the music stops, neither America Online nor Excite@Home is likely to be happy with where it's sitting.
By Scott Rosenberg
[10/05/99]

Technology: View from the top
Linux at the bat
Red Hat's Marc Ewing steps up to the plate against Microsoft in the billion-dollar free-software ballgame.
By Andrew Leonard
[10/04/99]

Why Microsoft doesn't rule the Net
Redmond's observers keep counting on the software giant to become a Net company. What's wrong with that?
By Mark Gimein
[10/01/99]

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Audience members would line up behind a microphone in the aisle. Some would inevitably be clutching brown envelopes stuffed with copies of their novels, which they intended to thrust into the hands of the visiting author before the night was through. This was the mid-1980s, when having a book on the bestseller list was still a viable way to achieve celebrity in America. These people wanted an agent, a contract, a publisher, and they would ask questions that struck me, even in my early teens, as incredibly inane:

"Do you use a typewriter or a word processor, or do you write longhand?"

"Should you bind a manuscript when you send it to an agent?"

"What weight of paper do you use?"

"What’s the ideal length for a book proposal?"

The visiting author would answer the questions as diplomatically and patiently as he could, though a few would protest that the particulars of paper weight and line spacing weren’t factors in landing an agent or publisher. Still, the audience members would go home, pleased that they had been let in on a few of the secrets to becoming a Published Writer.

I was transported back to those author Q&A's this week, when I attended the Bootcamp for Startups in Wellesley, Mass., just west of Boston.

The event, organized by Garage.com, a Palo Alto company that helps connect young, primarily tech-focused companies with investors, was held at Babson College -- a school known for its entrepreneurship programs. Babson, located in the wealthy Boston suburbs, feels not like an army base, but a miniature version of Harvard. There are lush expanses of perfectly mowed grass separating federal-style brick buildings, their white cupolas topped with light green, oxidized copper caps.

Attendees converging on Babson for the Bootcamp for Startups were promised "a conference featuring an established network of industry experts, insiders, venture capitalists, and angel investors." Mostly, it seemed, they were interested in those last two.

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