I'm a business and technology columnist at the San Jose Mercury News where I think about innovation in Silicon Valley. I also run The Next Newsroom Project where I think about the future of journalism. This site aggregates all my online writings and conversations.
// August 6th, 2010 // Comments Off // Apple, Innovation, O'Brien, Silicon Beat, Strategy, facebook, google
Since the announcement that it was killing Google Wave, Google has turned on the spin by proclaiming how they “celebrate our failures.” There is a lot to admire about Google, and one of those things is its ability to experiment and, as CEO Eric Schmidt said, “try things.” It’s not just hard for many organizations [...]
// July 23rd, 2010 // Comments Off // O'Brien, Silicon Beat
Over the past few years, as I’ve moved into a more public role at the Mercury News as a business and technology columnist, I’ve found myself being called on to do more and more public speaking. At the same time, I’ve also been involved in organizing various digital journalism conferences and bar camp-type conferences.
One of [...]
// July 21st, 2010 // Comments Off // Future of Media, O'Brien, Silicon Beat, berkeley
Upon returning from vacation this week, I saw that Reel Video in Berkeley had indeed closed. I had written about its problems before leaving. Founder Stuart Skorman was trying to pull together some investors to buy it back from the corporation, but couldn’t get a group together in time.
Sorry to see it go, but thanks [...]
// June 16th, 2010 // Comments Off // Future of Media, O'Brien, Silicon Beat, Technology, knight foundation, news challenge
Starting today, I’ll be at MIT attending the Future of News and Civic Media conference sponsored by the Knight Foundation. You can follow tweets from the conference at #fncm.
The conference brings together past winners of the foundations’ News Challenge program (of which I was one) along with some other folks working at the edge of [...]
// June 9th, 2010 // Comments Off // O'Brien, Policy, Silicon Beat, Strategy
During much of the election, the tech world’s attention has focused on former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina in their respective gubernatorial and senate races. Both had big war chests, and both won big. Now we’ll see if they can do the same in the general election.
But there were [...]
// June 7th, 2010 // Comments Off // Future of Media, O'Brien, Silicon Beat, berkeley
That Reel Video has become a treasured community institution in Berkeley is an accident of timing and strategy.
Beloved by local cinephiles and neighborhood residents alike, the 8,000-square foot video store is actually a relic of the dot-com bubble that developed a devoted following among people who love to browse its extensive collection of titles that [...]
// May 19th, 2010 // Comments Off // Innovation, O'Brien, Silicon Beat, Social Media, Technology, facebook
I spent Tuesday at the Internet Identity Workshop at the invitation of Kaliya Hamlin. I met Hamlin a couple of years ago while working on another conference, and had some fascinating discussions at the time about the Semantic Web and the future of news.
Hamlin was named by Fast Company last year as one of the [...]
// May 14th, 2010 // Comments Off // O'Brien, Silicon Beat, Strategy
Call me an securities filings nerd, but one of my favorite things about any merger of public companies is when they file the “background of the merger” proxy. Today, Palm filed its latest proxy giving us the details of events that led to the merger with Hewlett-Packard. I’m still digesting the timeline, but in a [...]
// May 3rd, 2010 // Comments Off // O'Brien, Silicon Beat, Strategy, Technology
Now that I’ve had time to digest the news of Hewlett-Packard’s $1.2 billion acquistion of Palm, I’ve been thinking more about the man who sits at the heart of this deal:
Jon Rubinstein.
He’s hardly a household name in Silicon Valley. But in many ways, he’s got more on the line here than anyone else in the [...]
// April 28th, 2010 // Comments Off // O'Brien, Silicon Beat, Strategy, techcrunch
UPDATE: I just got a call from someone close to Elevation Partners who walked me through the numbers. Bottom line: Elevation expects to receive $485 million from the HP deal for the $460 million it invested.
Why? The original $325 million that Elevation invested was guaranteed in the event of an exit. In other words, out [...]
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