Designs That Move: Wright’s Xanadu Gallery

The San Francisco Maiden Lane gallery (previously a gift store) was used by Frank Lloyd Wright as a physical prototype, or proof of concept for the circular ramp at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. More on wikipedia.

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Google Enters Enterprise 3.0 Collaboration

Google has just acquired a small Swedish Webex competitor, Marratech, entering the Enterprise 3.0 collaboration game. Earlier, Cisco acquired Webex for $3.1 Billion, and postured to take on Microsoft, a leader in the enterprise collaboration space. I used to wonder for the longest time why Google wasn’t buying Webex. Well, now all the pieces of

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Leadership Profile: Tom Werner (Part 10)

The core of SunPower’s success has been its dominance of the high efficiency solar cell. Tom breaks down the marketplace by product type, and explains where SunPower fits into the picture. SM: Is your technology the most efficient on the market today? TW: We are the highest efficiency in the world, although Sanyo is close.

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Will Sun Shine Again?

Struggling under the pressure of a vertically integrated business that had become obsolete over the last 7 years since the dotcom bust, Sun Microsystems changed CEO in April 2006. Scott McNealy stepped down after 22 years at the helm. Jonathan Schwartz assumed the chief executive’s responsibilities. In the last 12 months, however, dotcoms have come

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Leadership Profile: Sass Somekh (Part 10)

I conclude my discussion with Sass on hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles. He evaluates the positions of major world automotive makers, and illustrates how activities in the Valley can affect change by having Silicon Valley emerge as a technology center for hybrid / battery technology. SM: The goal is to let you cover your entire

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From Katoor to the World Stage

The time was pre-world war II. 1937 to be precise. A young boy was born into a reasonably well off family in a small village in South India. A third child, after two other boys. The father once had a car (Ford Model A), some horses, and a lot of land. By the time this

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Sudden Windfall For 3Com?

An interesting Patent infringement situation seems to be brewing, with Verizon suing Vonage for some fundamental Voice-Over-IP intellectual property violation, and then a former US Robotics engineer, Michael Musiel, who wrote another patent on similar technology, suggesting that 3Com (which acquired US Robotics) actually owns the patent now. From Muriel’s email: “I originally wrote up

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The Virginia Tech Massacre

All news channels are focused on the Virginia Tech massacre. Few, however, drill down to the key big picture issue : what is wrong with the US Mental Health Legal System? For those of my international readers, if you are not familiar with the incident, a short description from Wikipedia follows: “The Virginia Tech massacre

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