The correct response: "What is the computer IBM developed to become a 'Jeopardy!' whiz?"

Watson, which IBM claims as a profound advance in artificial intelligence, edged out game-show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Thursday in its first public test, a short practice round ahead of a million-dollar tournament that will be televised next month.

Later, the human contestants made jokes about the "Terminator" movies and robots from the future. Indeed, four questions into the round you had to wonder if the rise of the machines was already upon us -- in a trivial sense at least.

Watson tore through a category about female archaeologists, repeatedly activating a mechanical button before either Ken Jennings or Brad Rutter could buzz in, then nailing the questions: "What is Jericho?" "What is Crete?"

Its gentle male voice even scored a laugh when it said, "Let's finish 'Chicks Dig Me.'"

Jennings, who won a record 74 consecutive "Jeopardy!" games in 2004-05, then salvaged the category, winning $1,000 by identifying the prehistoric human skeleton Dorothy Garrod found in Israel: "What is Neanderthal?"

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Meanwhile, Facebook gets the capital to keep buying talent and startups, and to fuel its expansion in all kinds of other ways -- and it gets to sell stock in what amounts to a shadow stock market that's growing faster than regulators seem willing or able to understand, much less deal with.

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(Please see the note at the bottom of this piece.)

Yahoo says it will try to sell its Web bookmarking service, Delicious. This news, posted on the Delicious blog, comes a day after widespread reports -- unchallenged until now by Yahoo -- that the company was shuttering the service.

One result of the earlier reports was a frenzied search for a new social bookmarking service to replace what many people, including me, have used over the years to stockpile and organize links to online material we've found interesting. A second result was a further hit to Yahoo's declining reputation.

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These changes appear to make plenty of sense for Netflix, because the company will avoid the cost of buying and then mailing the millions of DVDs customers like me have been receiving. And, indeed, on Monday Netflix announced it was going to offer customers an all-online streaming plan for $8 a month.

I suspect there's been a misstep, however, if I'm any example of the Netflix customer base. I'd been paying $17 per month for a plan that allowed us to have three DVDs out at a time, plus being able to view streaming content anytime. But Neflix has raised our rate by $3 a month, or about 18 percent.

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The new option announced Wednesday will allow Gmail users to choose whether they prefer their incoming messages stacked in chronological order, instead of having them threaded together as part of the same electronic conversation.

Gmail has been automatically grouping messages by topic or senders since Google rolled out the service six years ago.

But this so-called "conversation view" confused or frustrated many Gmail users who had grown accustomed to seeing all their newest messages at the top of the inbox followed by the older correspondence. After all, that's how most other e-mail programs work.

The complaints grew loud enough to persuade Google to revise the Gmail settings so users can turn off conversation view and unravel their messages.

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In little more than half a decade, Arrington has founded and built TechCrunch into one of the most -- maybe the most -- influential technology news companies. Now he's decided to cash out.

As speakers like Google's Eric Schmidt held forth on the conference stage, buzz in the conference center was about the confirmation of rumors that Arrington has sold the operation, which includes what appears to be a highly profitable conference arm, to AOL. The terms weren't disclosed.

AOL has been bulking up on content for some time now. A few years ago it bought a collection of blogs, including the popular tech blog Engadget, and it's investing what looks like serious money in Patch, one of many competitors in the local-news site category that's growing like topsy.

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Earlier in the week, one of the valley's top new-media players accused some of the most important tech investors of collusion, too, by meeting to discuss (among other things) how to "keep out new angel investors invading the market and driving up valuations." Jaw-dropping if true.

Let's look at them in reverse chronological order. First, the big companies' little scheme:

The frendlies included Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar. Their deal was simple: No cold calling each others' employees -- they actually kept a list of people they wanted to protect -- to offer jobs. And they did this in one of the most competitive employment landscapes on the planet, a place where the best employees are pure gold.

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Ellison and his company cast an outsized shadow in Silicon Valley, but they're much less known outside. The reason is what they've been selling for decades: products that are aimed at what they call "the enterprise" in tech and financial circles -- enterprises like governments, universities and an assortment of big and smaller companies. The flagship for years was database software; a database is, essentially, a place where people store their digital data in various ways so they can easily retrieve and manipulate it later.

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Consider this sequence: Last month, Hewlett Packard showed its CEO, Mark Hurd, the door after uncovering (according to the company) some ethically squirrely behavior. A couple of days later, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called HP's board a bunch of idiots, calling the firing "the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago." Yesterday, Oracle announced it had hired Hurd as co-president. Today, after Oracle's stock price jumped, HP sued Hurd in an attempt to block the move.

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The suit claims that the companies have violated patents granted to Interval Research, a Silicon Valley research lab Allen founded at the height of the dot-com boom, poured $100 million into, and then closed up after failing to successfully commercialize any of its technology.

Interestingly, as the Wall Street Journal reports, "notably missing from the defendants' list are Microsoft, in which Mr. Allen remains a major investor, and Amazon.com Inc., which is based in Mr. Allen's hometown of Seattle. [A spokesman for Allen] "declined to comment on the selection of defendants."

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But what we do know is this: HP hasn't come close to making sense about Hurd's resignation, which was demanded by the board several weeks ago. There's clearly a scandal, but what is it, exactly?

When a journalist as smart as the New York Times' Joe Nocera is reduced to sheer speculation -- he believes the board canned Hurd essentially because they and the employees had come to despise the guy -- you know that the situation has spun wildly out of bounds.

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The culture had evolved by then. Getting rich was always a motivation for people in the tech industry, but so was innovation and competition that could be fierce yet fair.

Whitman, at least, knew how to run a company. She was a strong leader at eBay, a company that innovated in many areas as it became by far the largest service of its kind.

Like some other big tech companies of the era, however, eBay also resorted to over-the-top tactics to stifle competition. In 2000, it persuaded a federal judge in California that Bidder's Edge, a company that offered price comparisons across multiple auction sites, was "trespassing" on its servers -- a ruling that threatened "the very foundations of the Web," according to some of America's top cyber-law experts. (An appeal was dropped in a settlement, and a California Supreme Court decision in a different case appeared to contradict the district judge's ruling.)

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I was especially intrigued by one writer, bbulkow, who suggest that Silicon Valley isn't set up to do green power because "we don't do chemistry."

An excerpt:

What I do hear is that Silicon Valley might not be the right time and place for "green". We don't do chemistry. You can't set up a lab for chemical research -- permits. You can't buy chemicals easily -- there's no Fry's for a research chemist who wants to strike out on his own. Federal restrictions are onerous.

We have pieces of the puzzle -- silicon, genes, software, and capital -- but we don't have chemistry. For a friend working on a bio-fuel company, it's chemistry and genetics from Berkeley, huge pools of sludge in Mexico, capital from Menlo Park.

No Fry's for chemists?

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But how much of the terror is real, and how much of it is a negotiating tactic aimed at getting government largess rained down on Valley start-ups? And what to make of one whopping internal contradiction illustrated, but not explored, in the article?

First we have this:

Areas such as India, China and the Middle East are betting on the sector while in the United States, the industry is still struggling from a dearth of financing because of the credit crisis and waiting for more action from Washington on federal policies for renewable energy ... For the United States to really play in the cleantech game, more federal money is needed for research, development and demonstration projects, said Google's Weihl, noting $10 billion to $30 billion a year would be a sustainable budget.

But then, we conclude with this:

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But not as big a deal as it might once have been. Not so long ago, tech company CEOs in the Valley lived in mortal fear that Microsoft would notice them, and then lazily crush their dreams and business models with a flick of Bill Gates' mouse. Back then, Microsoft vs. Yahoo would have been seen as a titanic struggle for the soul of the computing industry. Just the names of the two companies signified everything you needed to know. You can't get more button-down, corporate and boring than the word "Microsoft." As for "Yahoo"? Even without the silly exclamation point, the word still works as a free-spirited yodel. But when the Borg comes, the hilarity drains away. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times: Resistance is futile.

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But the U.S.-China angle means the dispute immediately carries with it all the tensions inherent in that most fractious of all current global trade relationships. Could this be another case of Asian pirates, supposedly incapable of true innovation, stealing hard-earned proprietary technology from the West? And the high-tech gizmos at issue -- state-of-the-art chip equipment manufacturing machines -- occupy a symbolically potent niche at the top of the semiconductor ecosystem, a niche that has traditionally been dominated by Japan, the U.S. and a few European countries.

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The headline on the San Jose Mercury News story that originally broke the news was a little different: "Valley's faces of diversity: Census offers snapshots of 4 immigrant groups." The Merc looked at populations of four different groups in Santa Clara County: Mexicans, Vietnamese, Chinese and Indians. Of those four groups, Indians have proven best able to land the American dream: They boasted the highest median household income -- $81,000 -- and owned the most valuable homes -- $860,000.

The irresistible quote, which ExpressIndia repeated in full, and so must How the World Works, comes from Kailash Joshi, described as "a prominent Indian entrepreneur in Silicon Valley," who "thinks Indians flourish in the United States not just because of their commitment to education, but because their native country prepared them for America's ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity, and its aggressive market economy."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/11/19/indians_in_silicon_valley/feed/ 8 http://www.salon.com/2007/09/28/3com/ http://www.salon.com/2007/09/28/3com/#comments Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:07:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works//2007/09/28/3com We really knew the whole Internet thing was getting out of hand when, in 1996, Candlestick Park, the home of the San Francisco Giants and 49ers, was renamed 3Com Park at Candlestick Point.

True, 3Com had an illustrious Silicon Valley heritage -- founded by none other than Xerox-Parc veteran Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet. And like so many other Silicon Valley hardware companies, 3Com saw its fortunes soar on the back of the Internet boom and the explosion of computer networking. Even so, in solidarity with many other Bay Area residents at the time, I was revolted by the switch from the elegant Candlestick to the gauche and ungainly "3Com." Everyone except the sports broadcasters willfully ignored it.

In retrospect, however, the sponsorship deal was simply another sign of the transformative impact Silicon Valley was having on the entire world. Other stadiums were renamed after banks and airlines. But our new name was a mashup of "Computers, Communication and Compatibility." That's what the Internet was all about. Touchdown!

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/09/28/3com/feed/ 3 http://www.salon.com/2007/07/02/reverse_offshoring/ http://www.salon.com/2007/07/02/reverse_offshoring/#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:11:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works//2007/07/02/reverse_offshoring Top software engineers in Bangalore are getting too expensive, complained Like.com CEO Munjal Shah in his personal blog in late April. Shah was explaining why he had decided to relocate his company's engineering staff from India back to Silicon Valley, a gambit dubbed "reverse offshoring" by the Financial Times.

Bangalore wages have just been growing like crazy. To give you an example, there is an employee of ours who took the first 5 years of his career to get from 1 percent to 10 percent of his equivalent U.S. counterpart. He then jumped from 10 percent to 20 percent of his U.S. counterpart in the next 1 year. During his time with us (less than 2 years) he jumped to 55 percent of the U.S. wage. In the next few months we would have had to move him to 75 percent just to "keep him at market."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/07/02/reverse_offshoring/feed/ 8 http://www.salon.com/2007/02/09/bangalore_express/ http://www.salon.com/2007/02/09/bangalore_express/#comments Fri, 09 Feb 2007 16:54:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works//2007/02/09/bangalore_express I have become accustomed to getting my tips on what to read in the San Jose Mercury News from Kamla Bhatt, a writer and podcaster who splits her time between Silicon Valley and India. Today she references an article about "the Bangalore Express," a Lufthansa flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt to Bangalore that is reportedly the fastest, most convenient way to get from here to there, or there to here.

The article is full of mildly amusing color and detail (young engineers and start-up founders sit in the back, executives in the front; people bring lots of business cards). But it's missing some context. There's no mention of the irony that the relationship between Silicon Valley and Bangalore is so close, in large part because the Internet has collapsed distance between the locations, and yet, the ensuing virtualization of the enterprise has increased the need for executives to physically travel from here to there, or there to here. But that's a well-worn irony.

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