The Walt Disney Co. was reported to have refused calls made by Sen. Dianne Feinstein to join in a discussion on SOPA and PIPA with members of Silicon Valley. Sen. Feinstein was attempting to broker a truce between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, both powerful constituents in her state.

The Huffington Post is reporting that the Senator called up both Hollywood and Silicon Valley to broker a compromise on PIPA and address concerns that the tech sector had with the bill.

Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger declined the invitation on behalf of Hollywood. “Hollywood did not feel that a meeting with Silicon Valley would be productive at this time,” a spokesperson said.

Unfortunately, the meeting took place with only tech companies present. Senate Democratic aides tell The Huffington Post that Sen. Feinstein is now working to amend PIPA.

To make matters worse, there is no common ground between the two sectors when it comes to these bills. As the blackout yesterday confirmed, the tech sector is completely against the bills and want them dead. This echoes what a senior Senate aide told The Huffington Post when they said that the tech sector refuses to specify precise changes to PIPA so the bill would get killed outright.

It seems that the only party that actually wants to change the bills are the senators and representatives working on PIPA and SOPA respectively. The content producers in Hollywood wants to push them through and the tech sector wants them to die. There is no compromise there and Washington is attempting to broker one. Doing so would allow them to stay on good terms with both Hollywood and the tech sector, both of which are powerful lobbying allies in Washington.

It remains to be seen if there will be any compromise on these bills, but it’s not looking good. Considering how many members of Congress dropped their support yesterday during the blackout, it’s looking more like Silicon Valley is going to get its way.

The company announced Friday morning that it will open its first dedicated research lab on the west coast early this year. The facility will be used as a way to collaborate with all the tech firms that are in the area.

“Ford has an incredible heritage of driving innovation in the transportation and manufacturing sectors during the past 107 years,” Paul Mascarenas, Ford chief technical officer and vice president of Research and Innovation, said. “Now it’s time to prepare for the next 100 years, ushering in a new era of collaboration and finding new partners to help us transform what it means to be an automaker.”

Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally will speak more on the new research lab during Ford’s CES Innovation Power Panel keynote on January 11.

The company said that Ford Research and Innovation, the company’s engineering arm, will open the new research lab in the first quarter. Its focus will be keeping pace with consumer trends and preparing for the future by investing in technologies like cloud computing.

The lab will connect with Ford’s Advanced Design Studio in Irvine, California and Ford employees working with Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.

“Silicon Valley represents a deep and dynamic technology neighborhood and is far from Dearborn,” K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior technical leader for open innovation with Ford Research and Innovation, said. “With so many opportunities and so much potential, our new lab will allow us to scout new technologies and partners in their own environment and continue our expansion beyond the traditional automaker mindset to drive innovation for a better mobility experience.”

The number of employees at the new lab will be comparable to a tech start-up. The emphasis will be placed on quality over quantity.

The new lab will not replace work already being done at Ford’s other research labs in Dearborn, Michigan, its European lab in Aachen, Germany or the recently opened technology office in Nanjing, China.

Some of the things that Ford’s R&D groups are working on right now include OpenXC, a research platform that allows developers access to Ford vehicles to connect with cloud-based apps and services, and allowing access to the cars’ sensors to develop apps that connect with their vehicles.

“Ford integrates technologies, software and electronics at the same pace as the most innovative companies in the world – our platform just happens to be the car,” Mascarenas said. “The new Silicon Valley lab will propel us further as we look at the many facets of life where mobility interacts with society and see how we can make those experiences better for millions of customers around the world.”

"Silicon Valley will add to Skype’s excellent engineering team in Estonia, Prague and Stockholm, and will also become the home of regional marketing, business development, and the Skype for Business team," says Skype CEO Josh Silverman.

"Making this move is an exciting step for us," he adds. "Skype’s Silicon Valley offices are currently in San Jose and Brisbane, where approximately 80 employees work today. The plans are to relocate our Silicon Valley teams to the new Palo Alto space as early as October 2010. And, we hope to attract some of the best and brightest talent in the Valley, especially engineers who are skilled at building ultra-scalable infrastructure."

Skype is looking to build up its cloud technology team, and has numerous job openings listed here.

Google is trying its best to get in on Skype’s territory. Just yesterday, the company released a video and printable guide to show grandmas how to use its video chat feature in Gmail.

Vallewag’s Owen Thomas relayed the news from Gawker that his best paid-per-page-view staffers were on the list of newly unemployed. Among a 60 percent reduction in Valleywag’s staff were associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West, and Silicon Valley deviant behavior reporter Melissa Gira Grant, queen of page views and vessel of working-girl related news.

Instead of citing a decline in Valley-area prostitution, Gawker cited expected declines in advertising revenue, especially in the consumer electronic sectors, Valleywag’s biggest clients. Sure enough, Apple stock has been hammered in anticipation of an impending, if uncertain in strength, recession. Fewer people are going to have the cash to luxuriate their subprime home offices with Apple products.

The anticipation of financial difficulty, not actual difficulty, seems to be driving cost-reduction moves among many ventures. New York Times’ Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller don’t want you to panic or anything, but “a pall of anxiety seems to be spreading over the land.”

Cue spooky music and soliloquy by Vincent Price.

Noticeably, financial services and automakers are pulling back advertising, and at the top of every web startup’s mind is the trimming of the ol’ budget. Looks like those salad days are at least put on hold for a while, at least until the credit crunch subsides. 
 

New York City led the nation with 316,500 technology jobs in 2006, according to the most current data available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The region added 6,400 tech jobs in 2006, the second fastest growing cybercity behind Seattle, which added 7,800 jobs. The average wage was $91,500, 46 percent higher than the average private sector wage in the area.

"The factors that have long made New York City a center of finance, culture and entertainment – a uniquely talented and diverse workforce, top academic institutions and a spirit of creativity not found anywhere else – are today making the City a center of technological innovation," said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

"The high-tech industry is a valuable and increasingly important part of the New York City economy, and its continued growth will foster New York’s evolution as a ‘cybercity’ and keep us ahead of the curve."

The highest average wage was in Silicon Valley, where the average tech worker earns $144,000 a year. Other cities paying the highest salaries include San Francisco, Oakland, Austin, and Seattle.

The top cities for tech employment other than New York City included Washington, DC, San Jose, Boston, and Dallas-Fort Worth. The highest tech industry concentration was in San Jose/Silicon Valley, where more than one in four private sector workers were employed by the tech industry.

"This is the first national Cybercities report AeA has published since 2000, before the high-tech bubble burst," said Christopher Hansen, president and chief executive of the AeA. "With the industry experiencing three consecutive years of job growth we decided it was time again to drill down to see which cybercities are growing the fastest and across which sectors."

"High-tech jobs make critical contributions to local economies in terms of innovation. They also pay extremely well – the average tech industry wage is 87 percent higher than the average private sector wage."
 

Apple, Google and Yahoo are collectively buying-up large parcels of land in the Valley and driving up commercial real estate values in the process. Collectively, the three big tech companies spent more than half a billion dollars on land and buildings in 2006.

Google’s expansion in Mountain View, in particular, has reduced vacancy rates, in turn driving up costs.

Mountain View’s Shoreline park was one of them, according to Ellis Berns, Mountain View’s economic development manager. “After the dot-com bust, there was 28 to 30 percent vacancy,” he said. “We’re now running in the neighborhood of 8.5 percent.

Now that Google’s running out of options in Mountain View, they’re looking at options around the country.

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The topic is something that is near and dear to my heart (i.e. Boston as a center of software entrepreneurial activity). As much as it pains me to say this, there seems to be increasing evidence that Boston (and New England in general) is losing further ground to the West Coast as the place to be to start an exciting new software company.

I’ve long accepted the fact that Silicon Valley has the edge when it comes to the necessary ingredients to foster the right kind of entrepreneurial energy for high-tech startups. They’ve got more VCs and angels. More successful serial entrepreneurs that are putting their cash back into new companies. More startup employees that made money on earlier startups and going back and doing their own thing. Generally speaking, The Valley has much more of the right stuff to spark a ton of exciting new companies. I’ve known this for a while, but was reminded of it today when I came across an article titled “Capital Between The Coasts” in the Mercury News. If you’re involved in startups on the East coast (either as an investor or an entrepreneur), you should read it. Hopefully, it’ll keep you up at night, like it will do for me. Another article (which cites the original) that I didn’t really agree with is the one from Venture which claims that the east coast loses the modesty game too. Hard to believe

I want to get on the record that I love living in Boston. My wife does too. We wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. We love the culture, the academic institutions and the overall energy of the city (we’ve lived here for about 7 years now). I’ve been an active member in the startup community here, invested in a few early-stage companies and have co-founded a new startup of my own in Cambridge. But, the evidence is mounting that Boston may not be the place to be for software startups (particularly world-changing software startups). A number of people for whom I have great respect are beginning to convince me that the Silicon Valley edge is large and growing. From the above cited article, Harvard Professor Josh Lerner says “There’s considerable evidence that except for biotechnology, where Boston has a strong advantage, the advantage of California is becoming more pronounced.”

What’s Wrong With Startups In Boston?

Here are some random thoughts and ideas I have on the East Coast vs. West Coast theme.

• Where did we go wrong? On a relative basis, Boston is still the second best place to be if you’re involved in startups (of the software kind). There’s no decision or moment I can point back to and say, “There! That was moronic, we shouldn’t have done that” Reality is, we still have lots of the right ingredients here too (just not as much as what can be found in the valley).
• As an entrepreneur that has bootstrapped two prior companies (and working on my third), I think one of the biggest “costs” of raising capital is not dilution, but distraction. I wrote about this in my article “Fatal Distraction: The True Cost Of Venture Capital“. Though not specifically targeted at Boston, I think the problem is worse here than in The Valley. We simply take too much time and energy to get early-stage companies funded. Instead of spending time building companies, our entrepreneurs are spending too much time raising capital.
• As investors on the East coast, we are too careful. As entrepreneurs, we are not careful enough. This is the point that keeps me up a lot, because I think I’m part of the problem. Or, more accurately, I’m not enough a part of the solution, and so I’m part of the problem.
• In my own small way, I’m trying to change this. Last year, I made three early-stage investments (and when I say early stage, I mean early-stage). The average due diligence for each of these investments was < 24 hours. Actually, to call what I did due diligence is a grave distortion. I really didn't do any due diligence at all. I tried to understand the idea (as best I could), I tried to understand the entrepreneur (as best I could), and I made my bets. That was it. For those deals I said no to, I said so quickly and convincingly. At some level, I think that's how it should work. This is why I have a fair amount of respect for Paul Graham and Y Combinator . You may not agree with their investment thesis, but I think it’s closer to what entrepreneurs actually need. [Interestingly, the smart folks at Y Combinator actually divide their time between both coasts].
• This year, I joined CommonAngels (a local angel investment group here in Boston with a great reputation). There are a great bunch of folks involved in CommonAngels, and they are certainly moving in the direction that I think early-stage investing should go, but we’re still not quite there yet. It simply takes too long. It doesn’t matter if the startup doesn’t have financials to ponder or customer references to check up on. It still takes months to get a deal done. That’s too long. But, it’s changing for the better and I’m encouraged by this.
• As for the entrepreneurs themselves, I think many of them are not understanding the reality of the mindset here. Sure, you might have a game-changing, paradigm-shifting, belief-shattering idea for a consumer Internet play. But, you’re going to spend a couple of months finding the right people to talk to, another couple of months educating these right people and the last couple of months (if you make it that far) convincing them to invest. At the risk of alienating a lot of the people I know in the investment community (and even a few entrepreneurs), I’ll give you my sound-bite: Many software entrepreneurs may be better off moving to the west coast than dealing with the pain of trying to get funded on the east coast. There, I said it. I’m going to walk around for a little while now because I feel so traitorous. pause As much as I hated to do it, I think it needed to be said.

If I sound frustrated, I don’t really mean to. I think I’d sound a lot more frustrated if it weren’t for the fact that I’m not really looking to raise large funding for my own startup, HubSpot, which is in the online marketing for small business space. I’m fortunate in that I can bet on myself and keep writing checks until the money runs out, sanity runs in, or the idea itself succeeds. Let’s see what happens there. But, not everyone else can do that, and there are lots of entrepreneurs here in Boston/Cambridge that have ideas and would possibly make great startup founders.

For all of you budding software entrepreneurs (and the investors that invest in them), am I off-base? Is the East Coast actually closing the gap (instead of widening it) when it comes to being a great place to launch an exciting new software startup? Is raising money even necessary now for software startups? Can’t most people just bootstrap? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. This is one of those cases where I’d really, really like to be proven wrong. I really like it here in Boston. Go Sox!!

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Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur. He is the author of the
widely read startup blog OnStartups.com which focuses on advice and ideas
for startup founders and management teams. Dharmesh is also the co-founder
of HubSpot.com, a software company building applications that help small
businesses transform their website into a marketing machine.

Then he pointed me at Rumor: Yahoo executive powwow after market closes and Yahoo Execs Meeting To Discuss Major Shakeup.

And, as you might expect, the internal rumor mill was already in full swing.

At one point in the IM conversation, shortly after I suggested that Britney Spears should be our new CEO (since she’s so popular here anyway), I wrote the following:

Maybe this will make wall street happy and our stock will rocket up before we all have to find new jobs…

Being a quick-witted one, he wrote back: that should be codified as the “Prayer of Silicon Valley”

Sounds good to me.

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Everything from computer chip information, cutting edge military equipment plans, and company trade secrets are being pilfered in a lowkey manner by a variety of hackers, usually initiated by countries competing with the United States in worldwide markets, including allies like France and Israel.

China seems to be the most prominent player in this illegal game due the results of numerous ongoing FBI investigations. These cases have led authorities to shut down a slew of operations setting up in Silicon Valley which were allegedly financed by Beijing venture capital firms linked to the Chinese military and government.

In June 2006, two ritzy Silicon Valley homes were raided by FBI Agents and two engineers, Lan Lee and Yuefei Ge, were arrested on computer espionage charges, which included the charge that they stole copyrighted software from NetLogic Microsystems of Mountain View and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, based out of San Joes, CA.

Economic espionage is an emerging and continual problem for the United States, especially in today’s globally competitive marketplace.

To stay on top of the developing problems in Silicon Valley, the FBI added the San Jose economic espionage and counterintelligence unit in September ’06. It’s sometimes very difficult to weed out the bad guys, though, because they don’t stand out in a crowd. As opposed to being obvious heavy’ types with scowls, leather jackets and questionable citizenship, espionage criminal masterminds are recruiting students, businesspersons, and even employees working within the infrastructures of U.S. companies to get what they want.

If left unchecked by authorities and internal computer security watchdogs, these types of crimes can be potentially dangerous for the U.S. government. Recent pending cases have allegedly involved subjects like nuclear secrets being transferred to the Chinese government.

Surprisingly, money is sometimes not a major motivation for spies committing these espionage crimes. More times than not, it’s someone’s loyalty to a cause or a nation’ that inspires them to steal information for a foreign government. Authorities, however, are quick to point out that money is a factor behind the scenes, more than likely.’

“America’s being robbed blind. … We simply don’t want to believe it,” said John Tkacik Jr., of the conservative operation Heritage Foundation, who headed China intelligence analysis at the State Department in the early ’90s.

Naturally, the Chinese government denies its part in all computer espionage cases, downplaying it to a “few overzealous radicals” when they’re caught.

It’s interesting to note that despite the seriousness of these thefts, the economic espionage units usually end up charging alleged perpetrators with a lighter charge of trade secret thefts’ as opposed to heavier espionage charges. In the meantime, most corporations that are victimized by such crimes handle the problem internally and don’t end up prosecuting perpetrators to the full extent of the law, fearing that bad publicity and tumbling public stock prices will hurt them far more than what has already been stolen by spies.

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Tim Ritter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.