back to article Startups? Silicon Valley? SHELDONVILLE? It's the dotcom bubble again!

There has probably never been a better time to launch a startup in Silicon Valley. In fact, it’s the dotcom boom era all over again. Venture capital money is washing over the land from San Francisco to well south of San Jose, along with waves of intelligent people and the easy accessibility of near unlimited reach and …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    What you are describing is hardly new.

    It took decades for the tools of the first industrial revolution to be applied to transport (trains & steamboats) and generations to be applied to agriculture (combine harvesters and even barbed wire). It took a similar amount of time for the electro-mechanical advances of the second industrial revolution to be applied to those fields.

    High technology is much the same. But before you start denigrating the impact on the hospitality industry, ask yourself where the travel industry would be without websites like Kayak or Expedia or where coal companies would be without computerized real-time energy trading at both the commodity and utility grid levels.

    1. cracked
      IT Angle

      Re: What you are describing is hardly new.

      I agree, the article isn't a revelation. People will chuck money at all sorts of daft stuff. Have been doing since money - and daft stuff - were invented (or, at least, were discussed in Blue Sky stand-up-only meetings in the balloon filled, 50s style cafeteria provided for such productive sessions).

      However, I can tell you where the travel industry would be without hotels.com - It would be in the high street, where it always was, getting people out of the house and paying them just about enough to have cheese on toast every night for their supper.

      Now, all of those lovely shops - their windows gaily decorated with myriad posters of sunny and snowy scenes - have been turned into cafe-bars, the windows of which you can't see for the throng of smokers shivering* outside.

      I have always assumed all of the travel agents - now replaced by three Chinese folk who spend their days photoshopping cranes from images of otherwise beautiful holiday destinations - are wandering around this Valley** everyone keeps talking about, trying to sell timeshare apartments to the only people left on the planet with a truly disposable income.

      Anyway, isn't Channel brilliant? I hardly ever come here, but when I do there's always something of interest. If it isn't a discussion on the end of life for PCs, then it's a discussion on the notion - quite clearly correct - that most technology is both rubbish and useless, but makes quite a bit of cash before folk discover that's the case.

      It's quite probably the only bit remaining that still bites hands ;-)

      * Why doesn't shivering have two Vs?

      ** I once visited the Valley ... well, actually I think I visited somewhere near to the Valley ... You'd have to ask the lovely people I stayed with ... I was most disappointed not to be able to climb the valley slopes - or indeed, find them - to see what was on the outside.

  2. Herby

    Reality??

    What a concept. It may take off soon.

    From an observer that has lived over 60 years in "sillycon valley".

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