Shopping on line can be easy, simple and save you lots of money. It can also take a lot of your time, frustrate you, and result in unwanted purchases. Now the same can be said for regular high street shopping, but with the vast opportunity presented by the Internet it will pay you to spend a few minutes reading this and understanding how to better optimize your Silicon Valley shopping experience:
1. Compare - without doubt the biggest advantage that the Silicon Valley offers shoppers today is the ability to compare thousands of Silicon Valley at a time. This is a great thing, but not necessarily all the time! Too much can be daunting at times so take advantage of the great comparison sites and where possible let them do the hard work for you.
2. Research - if it has been said it will be on the internet. Ignorance is no longer a justifiable reason for buying the wrong thing. Take the time to research in detail everything that you could possible want to know about
3. Testimonials - don't know anybody that has bought a Silicon Valley? Wrong! If the Silicon Valley is good the internet will let you know. Use the Internet as a friend and get testimonials before you buy.
4. Questions - Got a question about Silicon Valley then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....
5. Reputation - Never heard of the company selling Silicon Valley? Don't worry, no reason why you should know every company in the world, but you know someone that does! Use the internet to find out what people are saying about Silicon Valley and build up a picture of their reputation for sales, returns, customer service, delivery etc.
6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your Silicon Valley wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.
7. Feedback - happy with your Silicon Valley then let people know, after all you are depending on others people input in your buying decision, so why not give a little back.
8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the Silicon Valley site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site
9. Contact - got a question about Silicon Valley, or want to leave a comment then check out the sites contact page. Reputable companies have them and respond.
10. Payment - ready to pay for your Silicon Valley, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.
San Jose, California, the self-proclaimed "Capital of Silicon Valley."
Silicon Valley is the South Bay (San Francisco, California) of the
San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California California in the
United States. The term originally referred to the region's large number of Integrated circuit innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading high-tech hub because of its large number of engineers and
venture capitalists.
Geographically, "Silicon Valley" encompasses the northern part of Santa Clara Valley and adjacent communities in the southern parts of the San Francisco Peninsula and
East Bay (California). It now reaches approximately from San Mateo, California (on the Peninsula) and the Fremont, California/
Newark, California area in the East Bay down through San Jose, California, centered roughly on Sunnyvale, California. The
California State Highway 17 corridor through the Santa Cruz Mountains into Scotts Valley, California and Santa Cruz, California in Santa Cruz County, California is sometimes considered a part of Silicon Valley.
Origin of the term
The term
Silicon Valley was coined by Ralph Vaerst, a Northern California entrepreneur. His journalist friend,
Don Hoefler, first published the term in 1971. He used it as the title of a series of articles "Silicon Valley USA" in a weekly trade
newspaper Electronic News which started with the January 11,
1971 issue.
Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of
San Francisco Bay, while
Silicon refers to the high concentration of
semiconductor and computer-related industries in the area. These and similar technology and electricity firms slowly replaced the orchards which gave the area its initial nickname, the Valley of Heart's Delight.
History
--> (downtown is at far left) and other parts of Silicon Valley
Since the early twentieth century, Silicon Valley has been home to a vibrant, growing electronics industry. The industry began through experimentation and innovation in the fields of radio, television, and military electronics.
Stanford University, its affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the evolution of this area.
Roots in radio and military technology
The
San Francisco Bay Area had long been a major site of
United States Navy research and technology. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in
San Jose, California. Later that year, Stanford University graduate Cyril Elwell purchased the U.S. patents for
Arc converter radio transmission technology and founded the
Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto . Over the next decade, the FTC created the world's first global radio communication system, and signed a contract with the U.S. Navy in 1912 .
In 1933, Air Base Sunnyvale, California was commissioned by the United States Government for the use as a Naval Air Station (NAS). The station was renamed NAS
Moffett Federal Airfield, and between 1933 and 1947, US Navy blimps were based here. A number of technology firms had set up shop in the area around Moffett to serve the Navy. When the Navy gave up it's airship ambitions and moved most of its West Coast operations to
San Diego, California , NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of
NASA) took over portions of Moffett for aeronautics research. Many of the original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was soon filled with aerospace firms such as
Lockheed Corporation.
Stanford Industrial Park
After World War II, universities were experiencing enormous demand due to returning students. To address the financial demands of Stanford's growth requirements, and to provide local employment opportunities for graduating students , Frederick Terman proposed the leasing of Stanford's lands for use as an office park , named the Stanford Industrial Park (later Stanford Research Park). Leases were limited to high technology companies. Its first tenant was Varian Associates, founded by Stanford alumni in the 1930s to build military radar components. However, Terman also found venture capital for civilian technology start-ups . One of the major success stories was Hewlett-Packard. Founded in
Packard's garage by Stanford graduates
William Hewlett and
David Packard, Hewlett-Packard moved its offices into the Stanford Research Park slightly after 1953 .
In 1954, Stanford created the Honors Cooperative Program to allow full-time employees of the companies to pursue graduate degrees from the University on a part-time basis. The initial companies signed five-year agreements in which they would pay double the tuition for each student in order to cover the costs.
Hewlett-Packard has become the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world , and transformed the home printing market when it released the first ink jet printer in 1984 . In addition, the tenancy of Eastman Kodak and General Electric undoubtedly made Stanford Industrial Park a center of technology in the mid-1900's. .
Silicon transistor
In 1953, William Shockley quit Bell Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the
transistor. After divorcing his wife, and returning to
California Institute of Technology for a short while, in 1956 Shockley moved to
Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California and created Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Shockley, unlike many other researchers using germanium as the semiconductor material, believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to supersede the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the Shockley diode), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor . As a result, Traitorous Eight engineers left the company to form
Fairchild Semiconductor. Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and
Gordon Moore, would go on to found
Intel Corporation.
Venture capital firms
By the early 1970s there were many semiconductor companies in the area, computer firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. The growth was fueled by the emergence of the venture capital industry on Sand Hill Road, beginning with
Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion
IPO of Apple Computer in December 1980.
The rise of software
Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and
Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems,
software, and user interfaces.
Using money from NASA and the
U.S. Air Force,
Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s, while at
Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). When Engelbart's
Augmentation Research Center declined in influence due to personal conflicts and the loss of government funding, Xerox hired some of Engelbart's best researchers. In turn, in the 1970s and 1980s, Xerox's
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in
object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs),
Ethernet, PostScript, and
laser printers.
While Xerox marketed equipment using its technologies, for the most part its technologies flourished elsewhere. The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to 3Com and
Adobe Systems, and indirectly to Cisco,
Apple Computer and Microsoft. Apple's
Apple Macintosh GUI was largely a result of
Steve Jobs' visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel. Microsoft's Windows GUI is based on Apple's work, more or less directly. Cisco's impetus stemmed from the need to route a variety of protocols over Stanford's campus Ethernet.
Internet bubble
Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the dot-com bubble which started in the mid-1990s and collapsed after the NASDAQ stock market began to decline dramatically in April of 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time, Sand Hill Road was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion.
Even after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006
Wall Street Journal story found that 13 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley. Reed Albergotti, "The Most Inventive Towns in America,"
Wall Street Journal, 22-23 July 2006, P1. San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents.
Ibid.
Economy
Notable companies
Thousands of
high-tech companies are headquartered either in or near Silicon Valley; among those, the following are in the
Fortune 1000:
building
Additional notable companies headquartered (or with a significant presence) in Silicon Valley include (some defunct or subsumed):
Silicon Valley is also home to the high-tech
superstore retail chain Fry's Electronics.
Universities
Technically the following universities are not located in Silicon Valley, but have been important sources of research and new graduates:
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of California, Davis
- California State University, East Bay
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- Monterey Institute of International Studies
Cities
A number of cities are located in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):
- Campbell, California
- Cupertino, California
- East Palo Alto, California
- Fremont, California
- Los Altos, California
- Los Altos Hills, California
- Los Gatos, California
- Menlo Park, California
- Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California
- Milpitas, California
- Palo Alto, California
- San Jose, California
- Santa Clara, California
- Saratoga, California
- Sunnyvale, California
Cities sometimes associated with the region:
See also
Further reading
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday (1984)
- Behind the Silicon Curtain: The Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era, Dennis Hayes, London: Free Association Books (1989)
- Silicon Valley, Inc.: Ruminations on the Demise of a Unique Culture, The San Jose Mercury News (1997)
- Cultures@Silicon Valley, J. A. English-Lueck, Stanford: Stanford University Press (2002)
- The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy, David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, New York University Press (2003)
- What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, John Markoff, Viking (2005)
- Silicon Follies: A Dot. Comedy, Thomas Scoville, Pocket Books (2000)
- The Silicon Boys: And Their Valleys Of Dreams, David A. Kaplan, Harper Perinneal (April 2000), ISBN 0-688-17906-1
- Cities of knowledge: Cold War science and the search for the next Silicon Valley, Margaret Pugh O’Mara, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, (2005)
- Accidental Empires: How the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions, battle foreign competition, and still can't get a date, Robert X. Cringely, Addison-Wesley Publishing, (1992), ISBN 0-201-57032-7
References
External links
- California's Historic Silicon Valley
- Reference about Don Hoefler
- Website focused on Silicon Valley news, backed by the San Jose Mercury News
- The Silicon Valley Cultures Project
- Stanford Linear Accelerator center
- Growth of a Silicon Empire by Henry Norr published at the end of 1999 in the San Francisco Chronicle
- Douglas Engelbart
- Red tile roofs in Bangalore: Stanford's look copied in Silicon Valley and beyond
San Jose, California, the self-proclaimed "Capital of Silicon Valley."
Silicon Valley is the
South Bay (San Francisco, California) of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California
California in the
United States. The term originally referred to the region's large number of
Integrated circuit innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading high-tech hub because of its large number of engineers and
venture capitalists.
Geographically, "Silicon Valley" encompasses the northern part of
Santa Clara Valley and adjacent communities in the southern parts of the
San Francisco Peninsula and
East Bay (California). It now reaches approximately from San Mateo, California (on the Peninsula) and the Fremont, California/
Newark, California area in the East Bay down through
San Jose, California, centered roughly on
Sunnyvale, California. The
California State Highway 17 corridor through the Santa Cruz Mountains into
Scotts Valley, California and Santa Cruz, California in Santa Cruz County, California is sometimes considered a part of Silicon Valley.
Origin of the term
The term
Silicon Valley was coined by Ralph Vaerst, a Northern California entrepreneur. His journalist friend,
Don Hoefler, first published the term in 1971. He used it as the title of a series of articles "Silicon Valley USA" in a weekly trade newspaper
Electronic News which started with the
January 11, 1971 issue.
Valley refers to the
Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, while
Silicon refers to the high concentration of semiconductor and computer-related industries in the area. These and similar technology and electricity firms slowly replaced the
orchards which gave the area its initial nickname, the Valley of Heart's Delight.
History
--> (downtown is at far left) and other parts of Silicon Valley
Since the early twentieth century, Silicon Valley has been home to a vibrant, growing electronics industry. The industry began through experimentation and innovation in the fields of radio, television, and military electronics. Stanford University, its affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the evolution of this area.
Roots in radio and military technology
The San Francisco Bay Area had long been a major site of United States Navy research and technology. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the first
radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in San Jose, California. Later that year, Stanford University graduate Cyril Elwell purchased the U.S. patents for
Arc converter radio transmission technology and founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto . Over the next decade, the FTC created the world's first global radio communication system, and signed a contract with the U.S. Navy in 1912 .
In 1933, Air Base Sunnyvale, California was commissioned by the United States Government for the use as a Naval Air Station (NAS). The station was renamed NAS
Moffett Federal Airfield, and between 1933 and 1947, US Navy blimps were based here. A number of technology firms had set up shop in the area around Moffett to serve the Navy. When the Navy gave up it's airship ambitions and moved most of its West Coast operations to San Diego, California ,
NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of NASA) took over portions of Moffett for aeronautics research. Many of the original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was soon filled with aerospace firms such as
Lockheed Corporation.
Stanford Industrial Park
After World War II, universities were experiencing enormous demand due to returning students. To address the financial demands of Stanford's growth requirements, and to provide local employment opportunities for graduating students ,
Frederick Terman proposed the leasing of Stanford's lands for use as an office park , named the Stanford Industrial Park (later
Stanford Research Park). Leases were limited to high technology companies. Its first tenant was
Varian Associates, founded by Stanford alumni in the 1930s to build military radar components. However, Terman also found
venture capital for civilian technology start-ups . One of the major success stories was Hewlett-Packard. Founded in
Packard's garage by Stanford graduates William Hewlett and David Packard, Hewlett-Packard moved its offices into the Stanford Research Park slightly after 1953 .
In 1954, Stanford created the Honors Cooperative Program to allow full-time employees of the companies to pursue graduate degrees from the University on a part-time basis. The initial companies signed five-year agreements in which they would pay double the tuition for each student in order to cover the costs.
Hewlett-Packard has become the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world , and transformed the home printing market when it released the first
ink jet printer in 1984 . In addition, the tenancy of Eastman Kodak and General Electric undoubtedly made Stanford Industrial Park a center of technology in the mid-1900's. .
Silicon transistor
In 1953,
William Shockley quit
Bell Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the
transistor. After divorcing his wife, and returning to
California Institute of Technology for a short while, in 1956 Shockley moved to
Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California and created Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Shockley, unlike many other researchers using germanium as the semiconductor material, believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to supersede the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the
Shockley diode), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor . As a result, Traitorous Eight engineers left the company to form
Fairchild Semiconductor. Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and
Gordon Moore, would go on to found
Intel Corporation.
Venture capital firms
By the early
1970s there were many
semiconductor companies in the area,
computer firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. The growth was fueled by the emergence of the venture capital industry on Sand Hill Road, beginning with
Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion
IPO of
Apple Computer in December 1980.
The rise of software
Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and
Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems,
software, and user interfaces.
Using money from NASA and the
U.S. Air Force, Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s, while at
Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). When Engelbart's
Augmentation Research Center declined in influence due to personal conflicts and the loss of government funding,
Xerox hired some of Engelbart's best researchers. In turn, in the 1970s and 1980s, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs),
Ethernet,
PostScript, and laser printers.
While Xerox marketed equipment using its technologies, for the most part its technologies flourished elsewhere. The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to
3Com and Adobe Systems, and indirectly to Cisco,
Apple Computer and Microsoft. Apple's
Apple Macintosh GUI was largely a result of
Steve Jobs' visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel. Microsoft's Windows GUI is based on Apple's work, more or less directly. Cisco's impetus stemmed from the need to route a variety of protocols over Stanford's campus Ethernet.
Internet bubble
Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the
dot-com bubble which started in the mid-1990s and collapsed after the NASDAQ stock market began to decline dramatically in April of 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time,
Sand Hill Road was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion.
Even after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006
Wall Street Journal story found that 13 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley. Reed Albergotti, "The Most Inventive Towns in America,"
Wall Street Journal, 22-23 July 2006, P1. San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents.
Ibid.
Economy
Notable companies
Thousands of high-tech companies are headquartered either in or near Silicon Valley; among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000:
building
Additional notable companies headquartered (or with a significant presence) in Silicon Valley include (some defunct or subsumed):
Silicon Valley is also home to the high-tech
superstore retail chain
Fry's Electronics.
Universities
Technically the following universities are not located in Silicon Valley, but have been important sources of research and new graduates:
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of California, Davis
- California State University, East Bay
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- Monterey Institute of International Studies
Cities
A number of cities are located in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):
- Campbell, California
- Cupertino, California
- East Palo Alto, California
- Fremont, California
- Los Altos, California
- Los Altos Hills, California
- Los Gatos, California
- Menlo Park, California
- Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California
- Milpitas, California
- Palo Alto, California
- San Jose, California
- Santa Clara, California
- Saratoga, California
- Sunnyvale, California
Cities sometimes associated with the region:
- Redwood City, California (home to Oracle and PDI/DreamWorks)
- San Mateo, California
See also
Further reading
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday (1984)
- Behind the Silicon Curtain: The Seductions of Work in a Lonely Era, Dennis Hayes, London: Free Association Books (1989)
- Silicon Valley, Inc.: Ruminations on the Demise of a Unique Culture, The San Jose Mercury News (1997)
- Cultures@Silicon Valley, J. A. English-Lueck, Stanford: Stanford University Press (2002)
- The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy, David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, New York University Press (2003)
- What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, John Markoff, Viking (2005)
- Silicon Follies: A Dot. Comedy, Thomas Scoville, Pocket Books (2000)
- The Silicon Boys: And Their Valleys Of Dreams, David A. Kaplan, Harper Perinneal (April 2000), ISBN 0-688-17906-1
- Cities of knowledge: Cold War science and the search for the next Silicon Valley, Margaret Pugh O’Mara, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, (2005)
- Accidental Empires: How the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions, battle foreign competition, and still can't get a date, Robert X. Cringely, Addison-Wesley Publishing, (1992), ISBN 0-201-57032-7
References
External links
- California's Historic Silicon Valley
- Reference about Don Hoefler
- Website focused on Silicon Valley news, backed by the San Jose Mercury News
- The Silicon Valley Cultures Project
- Stanford Linear Accelerator center
- Growth of a Silicon Empire by Henry Norr published at the end of 1999 in the San Francisco Chronicle
- Douglas Engelbart
- Red tile roofs in Bangalore: Stanford's look copied in Silicon Valley and beyond
Silicon Valley - a technology inspired company
Welcome . We are a leading UK Systems Organisation focusing on information technology, communications, real-time systems and electronics. A successful track record exists in ...
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High-tech and computer related news, with focus on technology related financial news. From the San Jose Mercury News, a widely read newspaper in Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley Group
Contact information . If you have any enquiries about Silicon Valley Group or 4mat please contact us at the addresses below: Silicon Valley Group plc
Silicon Valley Sleuth
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News, Comment, Case Studies, Photos, Video/Audio and White Papers Relating to SILICON VALLEY listed by relevance.
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