“Successful Global Strategies during Economic Downcycles“

Date/Time: Saturday, July 19, 2008, 12:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue: Santa Clara Convention Center
5001 Great America Pkwy, Santa Clara, CA
(408) 748-7027
Website: http://www.caspa.com
Fee: FREE Admission
Agenda:

12:30 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Registration and networking
1:00 p.m. - 1:15 p.m. Opening remark for CASPA/GSA 2008 Summer Symposium
1:15 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Symposium presentation (Semiconductor Outlook by regional perspective)
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Moderated Panel Discussion (Entrepreneurship Forum)
Speakers/Panelists:

• Ms. Vivian Pangburn, Vice President Global Marketing and Membership, GSA
Presents: “GSA Perspectives on the Global Semiconductor Marketplace”

• Mr. Mario Morales, Vice President, IDC
Presents: “Taiwan and Asia Pacific Semiconductor Market Trend and Outlook”

• Mr. Mark Ding, President, SEMI China
Presents: “China Market Updates: Semiconductor, FPD, and PV”

• Ms. Lilly Chung, Partner, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Presents: “Key Considerations in the Different Phases of an Merge & Acquisition Deal”

• Mr. David J. Lam, Vice President, The Carlyle Group
Presents: “Start-up Challenges, Venture Financing and Exit Strategies”
CASPA and the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) are joining forces in providing a mid-year review and industry outlook in the semiconductor IC market from the global and regional perspective. The CASPA/GSA 2008 Summer Symposium will examine semiconductor IC industry statistics, significant trends, regional changes, issues and opportunities in the US, European, Asia-Pacific and China semiconductor markets. Following the presentation sessions, a panel discussion will further explore opportunities and exchange dialog with the audience on entrepreneurship, start-up challenges, venture financing, exit strategies, and Merge & Acquisition opportunities

Health Net, Inc. is one of the largest publicly traded managed health care companies in the U.S. The company’s HMO, POS, insured PPO and government contracts subsidiaries provide health benefits to approximately 6.6 million individuals.

I recently met with Michael Burchfield, National IT Staffing Consultant, Sr., of Health Net to get more information on Health Net’s job openings and to learn about their Web Center of Excellence, an internal department that designs and manages their online sites.

Their current openings are in Rancho Cordova, CA which is right outside Sacramento. They are looking for Web Developers, Business Systems Analysts, Project Managers and other technology positions.

Here are their job postings - Health Net.

And please go to the video below for an insiders view.

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This annual CASPA Job Fair is free to all individual attendees. You are welcome to visit www.caspa.com to view updated participating companies and submit your resume. Please also make sure to bring plenty of resumes to the Job Fair.

Earlier this week I sat down with Daniel Parillo who recruits for Replay Solutions, which produces software products that help software developers check their code and have as few bugs as possible. It is the “Tivo of Software”

According to Mr. Parillo, the Redwood City, CA company has a great balance of work and life. Replay Solutions has a great culture and environment that rivals some of the best companies in The Bay Area.

Click on the video interview below for more details.

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Replay Solutions is currently looking for Java Core Technologies Software Engineers

According to the job description:

You will be responsible for researching, designing, and developing the Replay suite of software solutions. Work with the latest Java technologies and software engineering methodologies to create our “TiVo for Software” product line for Java enterprise application development.

Research, design, and coding the Java implementation of record/replay products. Techniques used include API wrapping, agents, and binary instrumentation. This position requires object-oriented design skills as well as low-level systems programming experience. Systems experience should include exposure to threading, synchronization, memory management, I/O systems, interrupts, performance optimization, and micro-architectures.

Code will be written primarily in Java with some C++, and requires strong debugging skills. Some experience with Java byte code and the JVM is required, and preferably some assembly language programming. Working knowledge of servlets, containers, application servers, and other Java enterprise technologies is expected. Having worked on development tools and in a startup environment is preferable. You can send your resume to jobs@replaysolutions.com.

According the press release:

As a social network that caters to college students, Pyuple sees itself as providing a service similar to what Facebook gave up before it opened its doors to the general public. Unlike Facebook, however, Pyuple doesn’t require users to have a dot edu email address to accommodate the vast majority of colleges that don’t offer them to their students. In addition, Pyuple allows students to search for courses across multiple schools using a service powered by another startup called Courseopedia (www.courseopedia.com).

Courseopedia was also developed by Pyuple’s founder and CEO David Yahya. If a student is looking to take an accounting class, they enter the keyword, and Couseopedia will show them which classes schools are offering. Though in still in beta form, it shows promising results.

For educators Pyuple can help market their schools. Teachers are able to manage their courses and communicate with their students via a Web 2.0 platform. Instead of schools building their own network, they can use Pyuple to develop their online community. I can see smaller colleges taking advantage of this since there is not much a school’s IT department has to create and costs are minimal compared to others out there. Pyuple has started working with schools in the Bay Area and will be expanding in the near future.

View press release

AssociationDate/Time: Saturday, March 1, 2008, 12:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue: Santa Clara Convention Center,
5001 Great America Pkwy, Santa Clara, CA 95054
(408) 748-7027
Website: http://www.caspa.com
Fee: FREE Admission
Agenda:
12:30 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Registration and networking
1:00 p.m. - 1:15 p.m. Welcome from CASPA President
1:15 p.m. - 4:15 p.m. Symposium presentations
4:15 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Moderated Panel Discussion

What’s next for semiconductor? As the industry matures, competition is fierce and growth becomes slow. The resulting impact to consumers is many affordable electronics from entertainment to security. On the contrary, the price of energy keeps rising. We realize that our natural resource is not unlimited, and we have to develop renewable energy and conserve energy. There is also growing consensus about the connection between climate change and carbon emissions from fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas). These bring forth the birth of Green Technology that would stimulate innovation and growth for semiconductor.

In retrospect, the evolution of societal needs has kept bringing in new arenas for semiconductor. The first wave was pumped by military and industrial applications. Then the wide adaptation of computers and telecommunication devices fertilizes the boom of semiconductor in the 90s. We are witnessing another dawn for emerging-growth semiconductor in green technology.

Green technology is in its early stage of deployment. How big is it going to grow? To answer it, just think about the sum of your personal bills in gas, electricity, waste, and water. It is more than your expenses on cell-phone and the Internet. The tightening standards for environmental protection also signals the wake of sustainability for an environment that can provide for our needs now and for future generations. All of these needs propel the growth of green technology, which would pave a new way of living.

Semiconductor will play a major role in green technology. And it’s hard to imagine how Green Technology will come into reality without the semiconductor. Semiconductor IC segments have put priority on power management for the efficient use of energy. Recent breakthroughs in areas such as fuel cell, solar cell, and solid-state lighting, ignite the hope for a sprout of semiconductor growth in green technology. To prepare for the new trend, CASPA is hosting the symposium to explore the technology and business opportunities. We will cover semiconductor in green technology from the perspectives of technology, investment, and market. The speakers will present updated progress in solar cell and its applications, promising research for the next-generation battery, and an overview of this exciting market. Green technology will open a new blue and sunny sky for semiconductor.
Distinguished Speakers:

· Mr. Steven Chan – Chief Strategy Officer, Suntech Power Holdings Co., Ltd.
Presents: “Solar Energy - Rapidly Approaching Grid Parity”

· Dr. Chen H. Wu – CEO, Leotek Electronics Corporation

Presents: “LED’s Role in Green Technology”

· Dr. David Padowitz – Senior Staff Scientist, Symyx Technologies

Presents: “Materials Discovery for New Energy Technologies”

· Dr. Yi Cui – Professor, Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University

Presents: “Next Generation of Battery Technology: When Nanotechnology Meets Energy Storage
Applications”

· Mr. Mohit Bhatnagar – Group Director, Cadence Design Systems

Presents: “Economic Impact of Green Electronics”

· Mr. Ted Lin – Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP)

Presents: “Cleantech investment opportunities and the trend”

· Mr. Chris Eberspacher – Senior Director, Applied Materials Solar Business Unit

Newspapers across the country are reporting double digit losses from last year and layoffs, with advertising continuing to decline, who knows when the bleeding will stop.

Last week, Gannet, Tribune, The New York Times and Hearst Corporation announced a joint venture to sell advertising on their respective sites. It’s called quadrantOne and it will sell online ads for nearly 200 websites, including The Los Angeles Times, The Des Moines Register, The Houston Chronicle and The Boston Globe. According to the announcement, usatoday.com and newyorktimes.com will not be sold by this new company because each of those respective papers has a team in place to sell for those specific sites.

QuadrantOne is a financially smart step for these businesses. For a media buyer, executing a multi online-media buy is a nightmare. (It’s even worse if you are doing a buy for the printed newspaper because they have different sizes, deadlines and costs. And don’t even think about asking to add color to that ad!)

Years ago, companies like Newspapers First and Metro Newspaper Advertising Services were formed to help advertising agencies buy newspaper space. Now, as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21^st century (and 20 years after the Internet was opened to commercial interests), those companies are shifting their emphasis to online buying strategies.

These news companies will save on commissions since they won’t have to pay newspaper brokerage agencies. What does this mean for companies like Centro, which specialize in buying ads on local websites? The next few months will be telling. The new joint venture will likely make their buying easier, but it might also cut down on their commission.

ON PARTNERSHIPS

What can newspapers do to increase revenue quickly and stop the hemorrhaging and layoffs? Here’s an idea: stop selling other companies products and start creating from within. There are so many partnerships within a newspaper, that their overall margins shrink and they lose their brand. Companies such as Monster, Yahoo! Hotjobs, Careerbuilder, Cars.com, Apartments.com have all partnered up with various newspapers. So, instead of a newspaper getting a 30-to-40% margin, they are more likely getting half of that, if not less.

Take Yahoo! partnerships for example. More than 250 newspapers are currently locked into a contract with Yahoo! Hotjobs. That means the papers cannot create new online initiatives on their own. Ergo, they are prohibited from starting their own low-cost job board or online real estate solution.

The contract with Yahoo is a great deal for newspapers that had a weak online solution, but for those who had strong online identities and solutions before the partnership, it stymies their business and any potential for growth. There is a clause in the contract indicating if a newspaper wants to create new online revenue channels (specific to its own website), it has to be cleared by Yahoo.

THE DEMAND FOR LOCAL, LOCAL

The demand from readers is local, local, local. They can get national news from television news and websites like cnn.com, wsj.com and nytimes.com. Readers want to know what is going on in their neighborhood without having to click through several tabs to find out what is going on within a 5 –to-10 mile radius of their house.

To fill the void of ultra-local news, newspapers need to create micro-sites for neighborhoods and niche categories complete with blogs, neighborhood events and even (dare I write it?) gossip. They need to embed reporters in the neighborhoods, instead of writing from the periphery.

Here are some other examples of filling the void - TechCrunch, Mashable and Venturebeat; although these are not local news sites, they are technology heavy sites and they are pretty successful. It probably didn’t take much money to start these sites. But they do use talented writers and business people. Newspapers need to do this now before more of their writers flee to new media. Just look at Dean Takahashi, one of the better technology and gaming writers (until recently of the Mercury News). He’s joining Venturebeat, which just happens to have been started by another (former) Mercury News writer, Matt Marshall.

SOME SOLUTIONS

Here are a couple of thoughts on how to make newspapers get back on track. First, the papers need to create new sites, but they need to take their names OFF of them. Right now newspapers to advertisers have bad connotations.

Readers don’t want just the online version of the paper (which they already view as dated and not-so-timely), so give them something new, hip, relevant, ear and eye-catching. Second, papers need to stop sharing information with all other media outlets (think AP wires, Reuters. Readers use SEM so there is no need to repackage content); this is a great arrangement for national and international news, but for local stories, have local reporters/people write about their own neighborhoods and neighbors. If you have information that is on your site ONLY, then people must go to your site to read it. There is no other option. That’s one way to drive traffic to your site. And newspapers need to act quickly; not toss an idea out and hope that 20 managers throw their support behind it eventually. I’m talking right now, make decisions and then execute them. Don’t just sit and discuss it ad nauseam and wait and wait for everybody’s approval.

A couple of years ago I worked on a business plan at The Mercury News for a technology magazine to target technology workers and early adopters. We even had a meeting with Wired Magazine co-founder, Industry Standard founder and now chairman of Federated Media - John Battelle for his feedback. I believe every one at the table wanted to pursue it but it came down to money to start it up. Now, just take a look where John (and his business) is, and where the Mercury News is. It’s a major case of “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.”

Comments: rpang@techklix.com

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