David LaPlante

Oracle's Safra Catz, Senator Ensign and Nevada's Workforce Future

Quick event summary:

• The time, money and energy we --America-- waste on the IRS and our ridiculous tax-code evasion game if invested in R&D and education would ensure our global dominating class-barrier-breaking affluent economy. We piss our advantage away on lawyers and accountants playing a stupid cat-and-mouse game with the IRS. Stupid we collectively are.
  
• Most of the most common practices of successful, profitable and consistently performing businesses-- accountability, terminating weak performers, employee and management incentives, innovation culture, free markets, access to union-free labor -- is absent in our public schools.
  
• Our H1B Visa policy is insanely bass-ackwards. "Let's educate our global competitors here in the US and then kick them out so we can outsource our jobs back to them." Sweet.
  
• Sarbanes-Oxley ('Sox') has exported our best small and mid-sized public capital offerings to foreign countries. While well intentioned, the lawyers and accountants again are making all the money while small businesses that used to be able to raise public financing in the US are headed to Canada, Europe and anywhere they can but the US.
  
• Safra Catz for President in 2012. What kind of person can put up with Larry "the Largest Ego in the World" Ellison? Safra Catz. Cool. Level headed. Smart. Witty. Plays the game to win. Humble. Self-depreciating. All the skills to lead one of the largest and most relevant businesses in the world...Oracle. Safra, please come back!
  

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Like most businesses that depend on technology workers, we're constantly hurting for talent. Human capital is as important -- if not more -- than financial capital. Most sage entrepreneurs will tell you...and I'm one of them...human capital -- your workforce -- is what makes or breaks you. (By the way, we're looking for super cool talented kick-ass developers and creative's!)

First-off, what a great event. Awesome. I jotted down notes for about about 15 blog posts. It really got me thinking...

About the the only thing that sucked is that because it was organized by Senator Ensign & Crew a lot of "binary" people of the "D" flavor will immediately discount it and get crimped in their R v. D Kos-style black-and-white politics that dominates most dialog in an October predating an November election. If Reid had organized the event, the 98% of the same things would have been discussed.

So, kudos to Ensign & Crew! He did this event in Las Vegas yesterday as well. Yeah, he's trying to get re-elected. Duh. If you're not a fan of R's -- then at least respect the marketing. Splendid marketing. But at least my 'BS' detector didn't go off to many times today as I thought it would. The dialog was real and genuine. Education and workforce development is CRITICAL to Nevada. No matter what the attendees political flavor, everyone left with their thinking caps on.

The event stimulated great thought and dialog on education and workforce development to make help ensure that businesses (like mine) in Nevada can meet our human capital requirements. The silly thing right now is there's no shortage of "capital capital". We're consistently challenged (like most growing western cities) with attracting and/or retaining enough "human capital".

Again...kudos to Ensign. He's the MAN on the High Tech Task Force. That's a very good thing for Nevada.

While today's event was very science-math-education oriented, I think that there were a few facets of this problem that were not discussed and I'll pick those up in some future posts. Here's the teasers:

1. The Internet is not through trashing the paradigms of society and social institutions as we know it. Mainstream media is under the gun today. Education -- and our traditions built around education -- are about to be blown apart as well. Homeschooling and socialschooling(C) (I made that term up) is going to reshape how we educate.
   
2. I bet you can name 10 people most likely featured in any given issue of People magazine, can you name the top 10 scientists and mathematicians? Why Paris Hilton, Bono and Angelina Jolie will have more influence in solving our dilemma than the gray-haired PHD wielding education majors or the unions.
   
3. My experiences with public schools and parenting. New thoughts on what matters...can you say THESPIAN?
   
4. If access to knowledge, education and information is ubiquitous and a commodity, what separates a Stanford from a UNR? And why "who" you know still matters more than calculating the area of a dodecahedron...
   

tags: ensign, senator, senatorensign, Nevada, Reno, Las Vegas, education, workforce, schools, hightech, high-tech, oracle, Safra, Catz, TMCC, UNR

  Technorati : Catz, Las Vegas, Nevada, Reno, Safra, TMCC, UNR, education, ensign, high-tech, hightech, oracle, schools, senator, senatorensign, workforce
Del.icio.us : Catz, Las Vegas, Nevada, Reno, Safra, TMCC, UNR, education, ensign, high-tech, hightech, oracle, schools, senator, senatorensign, workforce

Wi-the-Fi Can't You Get WiFi at a Convention Center Here?

I write this sitting from a local casino convention center floor with the thumping beats of Huey Lewis & the News in the background...groovy.

While I've written many times how wonderful our EV-DO and EDGE connectivity is in the Reno and Tahoe destination, it's only been in the last year that WiFi connectivity has been lit up aggressively. Visit even the smallest privately owned coffee shop/bar and you're likely to find free WiFi. Places like Java Jungle, the Chocolate Bar, Deux Gros Nez, the Record Street Cafe, Walden's, and of course every Starbucks on "Every Corner" offers T-Mobile HotSpots. Even Anchors Bar & Grill in Sparks has better WiFi than most.

So Wi-the-Fi can't most of the convention centers at the casino gaming properties get it dialed in!? (Insert image of me throwing my cell phone  against a wall and it bursting in to a 1,000 pieces to highlight the emotions that well up while contemplating that last statement.)

For the record, my best experiences have been at the Siena and Harrah's. While pretty much every property touts WiFi of some sort, it's pretty hard to find and reliably connect.

At right is a picture of my desktop as I sit and write this on the floor of one of our largest local hotel convention centers. Bleak. Barren. Devoid. Zip. Zero. Nada. Crazy.

Thanks Sprint for the EV-DO. You should sponsor me. I'm your biggest fan!

While I respect that our visitor demographic on the whole is not part of the "Always On" generation, northern California is our market and that place is lit up.

Perhaps it has in large part to do with local casino executive leadership? When's the last time you saw a local gaming executive hanging out in Java Jungle or Starbucks for that matter banging away on a laptop?

Most casino executives in this region are self -admittedly "unconnected". This doesn't mean they're "bad people", it simply means their priorities are perhaps out-of-sync with the 20/30/40 something's that are living out their business careers in Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton properties. The "unconnected" will never never prioritize WiFi until they get plugged in themselves.

So as we businesses leaders continue to move our office infrastructure to VOIP soft-phones and access to our business intelligence systems and functional processes management to online web applications, I can assure you I will not be the only frustrated business professional "stranded in the desert". Help. Please. 

MTV Gets It: Content for the Short Attention Span Generation

So Randy Kennedy at the NY Times wrote an amazing and well thought-out analysis of why MTV will not die (MTV turns 25 this year), but will adapt and transmogrify to survive perhaps another 25 years on the third screen.

I'm something of a freak and a modern-day wonder in that I have somehow made it to this ripe 30-something age without ever having a cable subscription. I was never addicted to and had to have"my MTV"...

I have, however, in the last year become a "video snacker" of MTV podcasts. I've been socially aware of my pop-culture surroundings for the last 25 years to know who Kurt Loder is. Without these MTV Podcasts tho' I'd never know who Sway is.

Here's some choice quotes from the NYT article to get you to read it:

"Short-Attention-Span-Theater Consumers in one test said that any show longer than three minutes was simply too long."

"Even now, in its infancy, mobile video is starting to make the very definition of television, as a place where people watch "shows" on "channels," sound pleasantly anachronistic, like a description from an old issue of Popular Mechanics."

"MTV's research seems to support Calloway's impressions, showing, for example, that more than 40 percent of the network's viewers use phones with text-messaging ability."

"People prognosticating about this world talk a lot about "video snacking," with all the implications for brevity and empty calories that the term suggests."

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End notes:

As I finish up posting this, Logan (age six) comes bouncing in to the house from Yoga with mom . He sees my iPod on the table, snags it, plugs in headphones and navigates to all the ESPN X-games content and starts watching it. He can barely read but he can navigate, access and enjoy content on my iPod. NOTE: He's sitting 6 feet away from a large TV that he could have had on in 2 seconds. He would rather watch the iPod.

A Long Tail Thriller

It is with great pleasure that I note that Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video on iTunes is right back up in the number one slot. How long is MJ's tail...historical economists 100 years from now will most likely still be asking that question!