Good Morning Silicon Valley

“It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online. There are myths about kids spending time online — that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social [...]

“I’ve got a traditional Kentish accent and the thing kept on spitting back ridiculous things. I asked it to find my nearest pizza take away and it came back with something about volcanoes. I asked it to find my nearest pub and it gave me a link to some kind of weird dating Web [...]

“Please help! I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never [...]

“What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience. What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say ‘perhaps there is a need over here — let’s meet that need’. Now I think [...]

“Over the last few years, many students who have had innovative ideas ultimately chose to take a more risk-averse career in investment banking or consulting. Now, there is less of a pull to go in a traditional route, and the upside of that is it makes start-ups more compelling as a career path.”
– Travis May, [...]

“Well, I really hope you hire me. I’m no bad guy, just a little misguided.”
– Accused German hacker Axel “Ago” Gembe, in a note to “Half Life 2″ maker Valve Software after an over-the-phone fake “job interview” intended to lure him to the States so that he could be arrested and charged with stealing [...]

“J.P. Morgan’s Imran Kahn just slashed projected growth next year of U.S. online display advertising from 16% to 6%. We should be so lucky. These supposedly brutal layoffs at Time and other titles amount to only 6% of headcount at the bloated Time Warner magazine group. Other media groups such as the New York Times [...]

“They’re not listening to the experts, they’re not listening to the industry, they’re not listening to consumers, so perhaps some hard numbers will actually help. Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we’ll be publicizing it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we’ll be publicizing it.”
– Michael Malone, managing director of [...]

“He’ll ask you 10 questions. If you answer them right, he’ll ask you 10 more. If you do this for a year, he’ll start asking you nine questions. Get one wrong, and he’ll ask you 20 and then 30.”
– Steve Doil, a former co-worker of Apple COO Tim Cook’s, suggests that if Cook ends up [...]

“Silicon Valley is going to lose if it doesn’t go to Washington. … We’re moving into a much more regulated world where winners and losers are not chosen by who is best in the market. You do not have the luxury of thinking: ‘That’s Washington, we don’t have to think about that, Barack’s in there [...]

“The atheists’ planned advertising campaign seems to have renewed the debate in pubs and around office water-coolers as to whether there is a God and we’ve seen some of that being transferred into bets. However we advise anyone still not sure of God’s existence to maybe hedge their bets for now, just in case.”
– Irish [...]

“The answer to that is, what if we pushed ourselves back about a hundred and fifty years and you heard a story about a guy finding gold out in California?”
– Montana State University researcher Gary Strobel explains why he’s not revealing the exact location of a tree fungus he discovered in the Patagonian rainforest [...]

“They hate everybody and we love everybody, and that’s pretty much the difference. We even love Microsoft. … This is our core strategy, love.”
– Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff says an open heart is the key to beating Microsoft and winning affection in the cloud computing market.

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“I think we’ve all experienced the frustration that sometimes occurs when you try to get a new toy or electronics product out of its package. It will take many years, but our vision is to offer our entire catalog of products in Frustration-Free Packaging.”
– CEO Jeff Bezos announces the start of Amazon’s war on finger-slicing [...]

“Sun is a problem child, and the problem child has to change.”
– Brent Bracelin, a hardware analyst for Pacific Crest Securities, after Sun Microsystems on Thursday reported a first-quarter loss of $1.67 billion. CEO Jonathan Schwartz said the Santa Clara company was adversely affected by the upheaval in the financial services industry.

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