This is an oxy moron. Stanford’s endowment fund contributes to Venture Funds. They can’t afford the Internet to End. That said I’m attending this discussion at Stanford Law School for no other reason than the pure optimist knows that pessismism (yes, I don’t know how to spell it) “is a state of mind.”

As a graduate of Economics, I refer to this state of mind/thinking as “animal spirits, the term John Maynard Keynes used in his 1936 book ‘The General Theory of Employment,  Interest and Money’ to describe emotions which influence human behavior. It’s commonly referred to as consumer confidence.

So if consumer confidence in the Internet is down, I think the Internet isn’t dead  but interesting to note that seed investing has grown 483% in the last 10 quarters vs 51% for Seres A deals, according to data from CB Insight.

Conversations in Silicon Valley those of us in the online industry are different to anywhere else in the world. People talk about issues, concepts, trends and have big ideas and interests. In many ways, Silicon Valley is a melting pot of ideas and this collective stream of consciousness which leads to how technologies can solve issues. This was one of the reasons why I’m involved with Gridium.

To give you an idea of how power can change New York City, check out http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/apocalyptic-photos-of-new-york-city-in-the-dark.

With Hurricane Sandy leaving the bottom half of Manhattan with no electricity for days, a buddy of mine, Chris Brinkworth was kind enough to show me this Wind Map at http://hint.fm/wind/

Our house is full up. Four macs, 2 PCs, iPad, Kindle and now a Nexus 7. Tablets have really signaled device overload and

there’s not many smaller versions of tablets or larger versions of phones before the proliferation of devices is more accurately referred to the saturation of devices.

I was invited to the launch party at Google Head Office in Mountain View, California and was given a Nexus7. It’s pretty cool, voice activated search launches the Chrome browser and the results are really accurate. That said, the atached video inside the foyer of Google’s reception was worth capturing. Can they put that on the tablet? Click below  to play the video I shot…

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….