Silicon Valley

The wait for tables is getting longer at Buck's, a popular breakfast spot for the tech elite and a weather vane for the Silicon Valley economy. Here, like everywhere else, Facebook is the talk of the town. "Charles Schwab was in the restaurant the other day, and I asked him to hook me up with some Facebook shares," said Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck's, in the wealthy suburban enclave of Woodside. "He told me even he can't get Facebook shares. " The new tech boom officially gets underway Friday when Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rings Nasdaq's opening bell remotely from the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, launching the largest initial public offering of stock in Silicon Valley history.

SAN JOSE -- Hours after President Obama's campaign launched a new video touting his record on gay rights, a group of Silicon Valley campaign supporters cheered him on for publicly embracing same-sex marriage. Obama asked those who attended the campaign fundraiser - which cost $35,800 per person --  to help him win another term to cement the progress he has made.  “The strides that we've made over the last 3 1/2 years have been extraordinary,” Obama said. “But we've still got a long way to go.  “We may not even finish it in five years,” he said, “but I certainly need another five years to lock in what we're trying to accomplish.” The day's events showed new faith on the part of the campaign that Obama's public affirmation of gay marriage this month could work for him, or at least would not hurt his reelection chances.

The biggest home in Los Angeles County is ready for a new nickname: The 56,500-square-foot Manor, dubbed Candyland after owner Candy Spelling, has been sold to another wealthy socialite, British heiress Petra Ecclestone, in an all-cash deal for $85 million. As steep as that price is, it's not a record or even close to what Spelling was asking. The priciest Southland home transaction was the 2000 sale of an 8-acre estate in Bel-Air to financial executive Gary Winnick in a deal that included the trade of other land, for a total value of about $94 million.

She's a 26-year-old former party girl with social anxiety issues, a motorcycle-riding iconoclast who dropped out of USC and attends meetings in Led Zeppelin T-shirts. Megan Ellison is also the most powerful new producer in Hollywood, running a burgeoning movie company from her $33-million compound in the hills above the Sunset Strip - and giving a critical boost to the kinds of adult dramas the major studios have all but abandoned. Hollywood has long attracted wealthy, star-struck investors who don't appreciate the difficulty (or "complexity")

Evan Beard, a 23-year-old fresh out of Duke University, and his college classmate had created what they just knew was a great product – a cool new way for people to manage their mountains of email. But they needed an angel, someone willing to gamble on a two-man venture with no balance sheet, no revenue and no profit. They were praying that angel would be Ron Conway, a grandfather with a thick head of silver hair who, though barely known outside the tech world, is the most influential and best-connected angel investor in Silicon Valley.

Technology. It's not just for Democrats any more. While President Obama is busy in Silicon Valley trying to sell his jobs package and raising money during a campaign-style swing, Republicans are also trying to make their own electron tracks through the politically cloudy universe of the new technology. A trio of GOP House leaders on Monday will join an online conversation at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, where they will take questions beginning at 3 p.m. Pacific time in front of an audience of employees and guests.

SAN JOSE -- Hours after President Obama's campaign launched a new video touting his record on gay rights, a group of Silicon Valley campaign supporters cheered him on for publicly embracing same-sex marriage. Obama asked those who attended the campaign fundraiser - which cost $35,800 per person --  to help him win another term to cement the progress he has made.  “The strides that we've made over the last 3 1/2 years have been extraordinary,” Obama said. “But we've still got a long way to go.  “We may not even finish it in five years,” he said, “but I certainly need another five years to lock in what we're trying to accomplish.” The day's events showed new faith on the part of the campaign that Obama's public affirmation of gay marriage this month could work for him, or at least would not hurt his reelection chances.

Joel Katz stands before a clutch of wordsmiths assembled one recent Thursday night on mismatched folding chairs at the back of Willow Glen Books. There is a wall of cookbooks behind him, titles shouting, "Onions," "Salads," "Fruit!" With his rimless glasses, rumpled khakis and maroon polo shirt adorned with corporate logo, Katz looks more like a software consultant than a published poet. He happens to be both.

The secret to Silicon Valley's success, we've been told, is its ecosystem: Where else in the world can you find such a large, symbiotic collection of expert visionaries, engineers, marketers, financiers? How about influence peddlers? Technology news bloggers' curious habit of accepting investments from the very people they're presumed to be covering objectively blew up last week over what might be termed the Path Affair. Path, a San Francisco social networking company, got caught downloading users' address books from their iPhones without their permission.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. and other big tech firms may operate thousands of miles from the nation's capital but they're not beyond the reach of federal regulators. That was the message Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz delivered this week when he revealed during a swing through Silicon Valley that he had hired a prominent litigator to dig deeper into allegations that Google had violated antitrust laws. Silicon Valley likes to hold itself out as a paragon of corporate virtue, but increasingly federal and state authorities are not buying the "don't be evil" slogan.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. and other big tech firms may operate thousands of miles from the nation's capital but they're not beyond the reach of federal regulators. That was the message Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz delivered this week when he revealed during a swing through Silicon Valley that he had hired a prominent litigator to dig deeper into allegations that Google had violated antitrust laws. Silicon Valley likes to hold itself out as a paragon of corporate virtue, but increasingly federal and state authorities are not buying the "don't be evil" slogan.

SAN FRANCISCO - All eyes are on Facebook Inc., which is on the verge of a $100-billion initial public stock offering. But the people to watch are an elite group of former company insiders. Already loaded, or soon to be, thanks to the looming Wall Street payday, these Facebook pals are furiously building the next generation of Silicon Valley companies. And they're doing it together. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, the world's youngest billionaire at 27, has teamed with Facebook alumnus Justin Rosenstein on Asana, which makes online software that helps people work together more effectively.

Los Angeles is casting itself in a leading role in advertising. For the first time in its 95-year history, the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies is holding its annual conference in Los Angeles. The event's title, Transformation LA 2012, acknowledges the city's rising profile as a major advertising hub. Although the region's ad community has produced award-winning television spots for years, advertisers increasingly are focusing on integrating their messages into digital media, video games and music videos.

The clamor for Facebook shares in the lead-up the initial public stock offering has officially reached a fevered pitch. One Silicon Valley executive has put out a news release with an unusual offer : He's willing to trade his 10,000-square-foot home on an 11-acre private park in Los Gatos for a stake in the social networking giant. Silicon Valley has been bracing for a real estate boom with more than 1,000 Facebook employees expected to become stock-option millionaires.

NationBuilder — a Los Angeles start-up that helps politicos and social causes build support for their campaigns — has gotten some big backing of its own. The company this week announced that it got a $6.25-million investment led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Former Facebook executive and Silicon Valley veteran Sean Parker participated in the investment and joined the board of NationBuilder along with Andreessen Horowitz's Ben Horowitz. Founded by Jim Gilliam of Brave New Media, NationBuilder combines technology and the Internet to help politicians and others organize and gather support for their campaigns or causes.

Israeli President Shimon Peres praised Facebook Inc. as a vehicle for social change during a visit to the social networking company's Menlo Park, Calif., campus. Peres, 88, came to Facebook on Tuesday to launch his official personal page on the site that he hopes will open a dialogue with Arabs throughout the world and to meet with Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. "The matter of peace is no longer the business of governments but the business of people," Peres told Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, in an interview streamed live on Facebook.

California regulators Thursday adopted the world's first mandatory measures to control highly potent greenhouse gases emitted by the computer manufacturing industry. The new rules would cover 85 plants, mostly in Silicon Valley. They require most computer chip makers to slash releases of sulfur hexafluoride and other fluorinated gases by more than half over the next three years.

A 2006 documentary about General Motors Co.'s ill-fated EV1 famously asked, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" Silicon Valley is helping to bring it back to life. Tuesday's scheduled stock market debut for Palo Alto-based Tesla Motors Inc., the first by a U.S. automaker since Ford Motor Co.'s in 1956, is the highest-profile sign of the region's role as a vibrant hub of the growing electric-vehicle industry. But Silicon Valley is also home to some of the top companies working on the infrastructure needed to keep the cars charged up and on the road, including Better Place of Palo Alto and Coulomb Technologies in Campbell, Calif.

A group of Silicon Valley technology leaders is working to help undocumented students attend college, prepare for jobs and, when possible, find ways to legalize their status. The group, described by Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins as a loose coalition, is looking to provide assistance and guidance to students in the absence of legislation such as the Dream Act, which would create a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants who are college students and military service members.