7.26am Friday 21st September. Par 3, 180 yard 5 iron in hand…. slight mist rising over the Palo Alto Course….

With a fading left to right ball flight, the ball hits the pin with a thud on the full and lands 18 inches away from my first ever hole in one chance. I’ve been playing golf regularly once a week for many years and started golf when I was 8 years old. So close, so far away from the penultimate…. that’s Silicon Valley for you… be it on the course or off it! Thank for the photo Jose!

My good friends, Gower and Robyn Smith, throw a good party every 4th July at their well appointed artsy-folksy town house near Coit Tower in San Francisco’s North Beach. The food, wine and friends from all over the world congregate each year to celebrate Independence Day to watch the fireworks over San Francisco’s Bay from the rooftop.

Yesterday’s party had a great addition whilst amid the conversation, the filming of a reality TV show featuring a Silicon Valley start up technology company which is going to be aired on Bravo TV.

Here’s a video of them Filming of Silicon Valley Reality TV Show.

As I often  say “Only in the Valley”….

Most VC’s you talk to in Silicon Valley will say they like experienced management teams. What was interesting last week when I dropped into a Los Gatos Coffee Shop was that the majority of keyboard tappers were over 50 years of age.

As I waited for my coffee, I thought about the “Empty Nesters”, that term refers to the demographic whose kids have left home for College or University. It’s a marketing term bandied around in the 1980/90s to describe the baby boomers. Here in Silicon Valley, the modern day empty nesters are the entrepreneurs who invade the coffee shops hogging free WiFI and consuming content on those addictive iPads and Mac Computers.

I wonder how long it will take to see a billion dollar start up come not from the college dorm but from the coffee shop old timers who are a little wiser yet just as tech savvy as the kids who don’t know life without 3 devices on their desk!

At the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley – I attended a luncheon as one of Australia’s ’50 for the Future’.

50 for the Future is part of Advance’s global program to profile some of Australia’s exports who are shaping Australia’s innovation agenda. The 50 were chosen via a consultation process and it was an honor to be in the company of so many talented Australians who are inspiring to create strategies to foster Australia’s innovation footprint.

Thanks to Serafina Maiorano, the CEO of Advance.org and her team for inviting me and putting on such an event.

I’ve been critical of Twitter in the past for it’s frequent meltdowns. Unless you’re a celebrity, not everyone’s micro-movements and thoughts are interesting. Retweeting someone else’s work in my opinion is just viral plagarism.

On a recent trip to London, I saw Zeebox and met up with the founder/CTO Anthony Rose. WOW! What an amazingly rich web and mobile application for watching television that actually brings meaning to Twitter. Perhaps Twitter is the interstitial for television delivered on web/mobile. It scrolls constantly as you’re watching the program and you can follow people related to the show. You can join and watch with friends, commenting about it with them in a private IM and then following stars in the show. Pretty darn cool for the ultimate couch potato!

But watching Zeebox on the iPad is the game changer. That is it’s sweet spot and brings an experience of web 2.0 tagging (using real time natural language processing) and links to ecommerce sites where you can buy products contained in the television content.

Tweet Tweet just might have found it’s home and saviour in Zeebox.

It was bound to happen. Last week I visited the product marketing folks at www.elance.com to give strategic input into their product and was greeted by this robot. Rachael’s voice boomed “Good Morning” and I thought the lady was in the office behind the empty reception. She wasn’t.

It was a freelancer located in the mid west of America which was sourced from www.elance.com. That’s the kind of receptionist that a cloud based crowdsourcing company that just hit $US 500 Million in gross revenue with 60 staff has. Only in the Valley….

The bottomline is that Google+ means you’re now working for Google! Huh? Well, YOU are doing the work. And what’s more, the quality of the output from Google results now includes what your Google circles have searched on.

Try it, do you really want Google – a great intent based directional search engine – to include what your co-worker or friend or family member has searched on. Where’s the church and state divide gone? The team at Mountain View, CA are now playing the social game that Facebook wrote the book on.

For the first time, Google is following Facebook – chasing down eyeballs and using a business model that isn’t their own. Google works just fine. I don’t need “Circles” to tell me what Google can already tell me pretty darn well.

No clouds in the sky today in Las Vegas… with CES underway,  Ray Mercedes from Panasonic Cloud  explained their cloud based phone system offerings for small and medium sized businesses.

The consumerization of the enterprise is a term more commonly used here in Silicon Valley – referring to enterprise software which is being hosted in the cloud and sold on a monthly fee versus an annual licence fee.

The Panasonic Cloud Service Pricing starts at $39.95 per month and offers businesses a real advantage on cashflow in these challenging economic times. Ray is leading the charge in this nationwide rollout in the USA for Panasonic Cloud.

This meeting would not have been possible without the super-human co-ordination skills of Mr. Raymond Norwood (the best dressed man in Brooklyn). Here’s a photo for you big guy…. we missed you!

Several of our clients are working with Google Maps Premier Edition – which offers some incredible functionality with respect to creating slicker interface designs, more customizable features and even has HTML5 compliance.

Click http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=114790027484863334369.00048ca58081513464dbe to view some of the applications in the Enterprise Edition. There are some incredible applications for mapping for optimization websites such as Asset Tracking but perhaps the biggest benefit is “Control of advertising” – so competitors can’t advertise on your locations!

Steve Jobs died here in Silicon Valley yesterday. Here’s a video of Steve Jobs’ house in Palo Alto on 6th October 2011 my daughter took today as I was driving. The video shows a small group of people and flowers outside the main gate.

For most of us living in and around Palo Alto, we know that Steve Jobs lived in relative modesty. In May 2010, I saw Steve Job at CVS Pharmacy at Town & Country on El Camino Real. He was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt with runners. No frills, airs or graces. Just a humble person. He didn’t wear a watch.

My kids had a dental appointment today at 10am this morning, 1 mile from Steve Jobs house. On the way back, I drove them down Waverly Street, Palo Alto where Steve Jobs house is located. It’s on the corner of Santa Rita Avenue.

As Anneliese shot the video of Steve Jobs house on an Apple iphone4, it seems like only yesterday, I was typing away on the Apple IIe in Melbourne, Australia as a 15 year old.

It all happened so fast. Perhaps that’s why  never wore a watch?