Turn Your Head and Cough: The Startup Tour Questionnaire is Coming!

We’re halfway through the selection process for the Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour with more than 300 companies nominated including half a dozen still in stealth mode. I love to sign NDAs and welcome more stealth mode nominations because they tend to be interesting companies that are fresher. With a major PR push about to begin I am still hopeful we’ll get 500 companies from which to select the final 24.

If you have a startup and are discouraged about the competition for those 24 slots, I urge you to try anyway for two important reasons: 1) The nomination process alone offers real publicity for your company and has already produced unexpected […]

By |April 8th, 2010|2010|56 Comments
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The Last Ed Roberts Story

Thinking about Ed Roberts, who died last week, reminded me of the best story he ever told me about Bill Gates and Paul Allen, explaining why Gates was always richer than Allen and why that differential may not have been fair. Here’s the short version:

There was a time when Paul Allen, not Bill Gates, was the boss at Microsoft. When it came time to visit Albuquerque to demonstrate that first BASIC interpreter to the folks at MiTS, Allen made the trip, not Gates. It was Paul Allen, not Gates, who was later offered the job as head of software for MiTS — a job I have in the past characterized as the single most expensive […]

By |April 6th, 2010|2010|50 Comments
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Terminal Man

Ed Roberts died yesterday in Georgia. He was the founder of MiTS, the designer of the Altair 8800 and as close to being the father of the American personal computer as anyone can get. I say the American personal computer because French readers constantly correct me on this. Where, again, are all those French computer companies?

I knew Ed Roberts, though not very well. I never worked for or with him but I met him many times even years after he gave up computers for medicine in his late 30’s. That transition from digital hardware to medicine is key to Ed’s story and I think provides the crux of this column, which is […]

By |April 3rd, 2010|2010|71 Comments
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Why Your Favorite App Isn't Yet Available on the iPad

Update — The very real problem with the iPad simulator described below is affecting hundreds of developers and turns out to be an artifact of a documentation error by Apple.  Literally what should have been a ‘>’ was made a ‘<‘ by mistake (or vice versa).  The result is that some applications were built in a way that was within the tolerance of the simulator but not of the target hardware.  Now that iPads are coming available the solutuion is simple: test your app on the actual device.

It’s iPad Day and the fanboys and girls are out with their credit cards buying the non-3G, non-GPS early model iPads that go on sale […]

By |April 2nd, 2010|2010|41 Comments
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A Tale of Two H1-Bs

A friend for many years who happens to be chief financial officer for a Silicon Valley startup has this story to tell about his immigration problems at work:

This is the immigration battle that I fight day-in and day-out.  How do we attract the best and brightest to our shores (H1-B visas) so the jobs stay in America instead of transferring overseas?  The technologists that we work with could work anywhere.  We have to make it easy for them to come here and to contribute here and to have bright babies here and to have those babies set higher standards here.  I see very, very few Smiths or Joneses or Johnsons who contribute […]

By |March 31st, 2010|2010|195 Comments
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