commbasics

In fact if a job seeker were to place on roulette bet or buy one lottery ticket for every job they apply for on a job listing service, they would be more likely to win a living wage from gambling than job searches. Finding a job is not easy and there are no shortcuts no matter what is said by the human resources industry, including Job finding services, independent recruiters, and in-company human resources (HR) staff.  Even with an unemployment rate of less than 5 percent there are 100 million skilled, experienced people who are looking for or have given up looking for work in the United States. In fact, the conclusion of a year long New Tech Press investigation of the employment industry is it is doing a disservice to job seekers, employers and the investment community by making the claim that they can help people find work or employees. While some of these services can point to a few areas of success and some are better than others (our research shows Linkedin is the most re...

I didn’t go to the 2011 Design Automation Conference in San Diego because this year I decided to stay home and see what I could pick up virtually from video, audio and news coverage day to day.  It was much more cost effective and focused, despite the usual bandwidth problems with the convention center. My apologies for mixing metaphors but this is how I wrap up the issues arising out of DAC.  It is said that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door, but when your customers are up to their asses in alligators, vermin are not their critical problem.  Gary Smith gave his usual glowing report of the future for the industry (he thinks it’s well on the way to being a $6.6 Billion industry by 2015, and once again he claims that this year Electronic system level design (ESL) is going to be really big this year (just like it has every year for the past decade, according to Gary.)  But this year he added a big caveat. He said that the indus...

Now that things are calming down to a dull roar I should be able to get back to my series on location-based web apps next week.  But today I just wanted to give you aheads up on an overall new direction for me and what I write about.   I'm working on several fronts with people that want to change the world.  I wish I could say that  that some of those people are in the semiconductor and EDA worlds but that is just wishful thinking.  I recently helped launch a new organization that is aiming at being a movement to change how start ups are launched and nurtured called the 12 Entreprenuers ( here's the NTP report ).  These are people from a handful of countries in Europe as well as US businessment, government representatives, angel investors and people who are thinking about things in new ways.  Here's a couple of snapshots. The first signers...   Me as the MC at the kickoff meeting... These vibrant people are working in online vi...

   So I just got back from a 2 hour meeting with a handful of on-fire entrepreneurs from Europe who want to shake up the establishment and start building relationships, companies and jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.  "The 12 Entrepreneurs," as the group calls themselves (12 stars in the EU logo... get it?), come from all over Europe ( Austria, France, Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, Romania, Poland, Portugal, Norway, Italy, Czech Republic, Netherlands and Centrope Region (encompassing Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Hungary)  and h ave launched multiple successful companies, but they have grown frustrated with Euro-reticence and Silicon Valley no-it-all-sim (yes I spelled it that way on purpose). They want to get our respective economic engines humming again. I like these guys so I have volunteered my time to get it started. The kickoff event will be a small gathering of no more than 50 invitees at the Plug-and-Play Center in Sunnyvale on Septe...

I concluded a great week with a sit-down with Paul Miller, CEO of EE Times Group  for United Business Media, regarding what the new format and philosophy for the venerable publication will mean for entrepreneurialism and investment in the electronics world. To me, everything looks to be moving up and to the right.  This interview was sponsored by Magma Design and Vpype . Watch video live on Vpype Live Broadcaster

Today I started a new series of interviews on my Vpype channel, Investors and Entrepreneurs, where we will be exploring, anecdotally, where venture investment is going as we come out of our recession.  We started with Piers Cooper, a partner at Point Bonita Partners , and a founder of a new type of venture capital organization called Nano Holdings.  We talked about where venture capital and innovation has been in the past couple of years (Piers called it "nuclear winter" ) and where it is going in the next couple of years (he says going up and steady).  Piers has been involved in early stage startup investment for some time and has made a good living at it, so he has something to say.  The first video is the interview, that got cut off before we could wrap up, the second video is my wrap up of what we missed. Watch video live on Vpype Live Broadcaster Watch video live on Vpype Live Broadcaster

For my first post of the new year I'm looking at reports from journalists (remember them?) and analysts predicting nothing short of chaos for the semi world this coming year. On the one hand, everyone is in agreement that the industry will be in growth mode, but on the other, they are also saying the industry is not prepared to grow. No one has a plan for an economic turnaround and in spite of every indicator to the contrary, their collective heads are firmly jammed... in the sand. Fabs like TSMC, UMC, Global Foundries and the rest are at capacity, China fabs are starting to tank and companies with fabs are shutting down operation, right at a time when additional capacity is required. No one is buying capital equipment and equipment manufacturers are looking to consolidate, making technology advancements for the next level rare. And the venture capital world, which is supposed to be the spark plug for innovation, is still pouring money into gaming, cloud computing and alternative...

A few months ago I did a post on having courage in down economies.  Today, an essay popped up in CNN on the same subject.  It was a good reminder. Anyone who starts a business in this time is a hero.   Anyone who funds one of these businesses is a hero.   It doesn't even matter if the idea for the business is a brilliant one or a mediocre one.  What matters is that someone is making an effort to overcome fear. There were too many companies that should never have been funded in the 1990s.  That's a given.  There are too few companies being funded and founded now.  And it's all based on fear.   We really need a few heros right now.

Everyone likes to say they're leaders.  In fact, in the past week alone, more than 21,000 companies around the world have called themselves "a leader" in something according to Google.  But if we have so many leaders, why aren't we going anywhere? Footwasher Media and New Tech Press have decided to do something to find at least one real leader in the technology world.  If you think you are a leader ... or you know a company of investor you think is a leader, let us know and the best candidate will be given an unsponsored video interview on New Tech Press.  Here are the guidelines: 1. Anyone can recommend any company, including their own 2. The nominated company must have a product or technology that is truly game changing.  The technology can't be an incremental improvement over an existing technology but a complete restructuring of the way things are done.  For example, when ARM and Rambus first came onto the scene, not a ...

About three years ago I attended a financial conference where a big VC stated, categorically, that the reason they were not investing in semiconductor or EDA startups was because there was a lack of informational coverage to validate research.  In other words, because media coverage of the industries had significantly degraded, they couldn't afford to pull the trigger on investment. This same VC firm has invested heavily in Web 2.0 and green technology over the past three years and you can see why.  There is lots of coverage on those areas.  There is pretty much nothing but coverage on those areas.  The only coverage on semi and EDA is negative. You might say that that is the media's fault because, after all, the semiconductor coverage is all about the economics of the industry, not the technology so it's naturally going to be bad.  But I would like to point out that the the green Web 2.0 industries has yet to turn a profit, yet the media contin...

A big problem the VC community has right now is that they don't know what they don't know.  The VComm Venture Faire was developed, using a large dose of social media, to give them a little bit more information they didn't have.  Like what? Conventional wisdom:  With the media dying, the best way for them to find potential companies is to go to the venture meat-market events with dozens of companies presenting information that the VCs know is useless and presented poorly.  Why do they believe that?  Because everyone believes that.  It's not the greatest process, but it's the only one we got.  Right? What they don't know:   There is always another way to get the job done.   Someone just has to do it.  Doing the job like everyone else doesn't make it any better.  Going another way may not make it better, but there's a chance it might. VComm didn't bring a ton of companies in front of the ...

The cornerstone of the VComm program was the understanding that most companies looking for VC financing really have no idea what a VC wants to hear.   Two years ago I sat with a group of investors at a major conference and listened to them complain about the quality of the material and, in the end, how useless it was. Understand this:   There are, at any given time according to Dow Jones, 5000 tech startups in the US alone that are seeking funding.   But less than half of those companies have any credible research into their technology market.   The press covering those markets has shrunk almost to the point of non-existence.   The VC's are flying blind nowadays, which explains why so many are having poor returns.   What they need is real information about market potential. But most companies pitching VC's spend 90 percent of their time in front of them explaining how great their technology is.   Get a clue!   They know you are do...

I got a little flack for the past month about all the bad news coming through this blog about media and the tech industry.  But here's some good news.  A major player in real estate development has thrown financial support to a small investment event called VComm Venture Faire for the simple reason that promoting the investment in technology is just good for everyone.  The interview can be seen at New Tech Press. So there you go.  Happy new year.