PenLUG meeting THIS WEEK on Thursday Nov 9 - David Weekly, speaker

Sun Nov 5 02:30:26 PST 2006

Remember, due to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, we are
moving to the second Thursday for November and December.  So our next
meeting is this week, on Thursday November 9!!

You are invited.  RSVP is not required, but so we can
get an idea of how many people to expect please send mail to
rsvp at penlug.org to let us know if you are planning to attend.  For
full details about the group, as well as directions to the meeting,
visit www.penlug.org.

Free pizza, hors d'ouvres and soft drinks, courtesy of Open Country,
will be provided.  Free review copies of books from O'Reilly,
Prentice-Hall, APress, and/or other publishers, will be given out as
door prizes.  Be on time for the eary bird drawing.

Date: Thursday, November 9th, 2006
Time: meeting 7:00 - 9:00 PM, social/networking until 10 PM
Location: Twin Pines Park, 1225 Ralston Ave, Belmont, CA 94002
Speaker: David Weekly
Topic: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: or How Silicon Valley Got Its
Groove Back.

To some, the bubble in Silicon Valley feels a little bit like a
terrifying repeat of the dot-communism of the late 90's. But in
reality the Valley is more closely mirroring its roots of the 70's
with more garage hackery and late-night codeathons than blowout
parties and IPOs. The tools for building useful products have become
so cheap and easy that people are running services for hundreds of
thousands of users as hobbies. Lower costs mean less capital
requirements; a boon for smaller investors and a bane for VCs. Steep
Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and a skittish public market have dried up
IPOs for early liquidity events and the relatively small number of
large acquirers mean that most of the "easy exit" money is gone. At
the same time, increasing customer sophistication and the
proliferation of payment solutions make it easier than ever to drive
revenues from customers and build a real business. These trends
represent steps towards a healthy and sustainable ecosystem of hackery
in Silicon Valley, leveraging college students, Open Source, and
low-cost hosting to blitz the Internet with an astounding array of
low-cost, high-impact ideas.

David Weekly is the founder and CEO of PBwiki, the world's largest
wiki host, with over 120,000 groups on board. He graduated as a
President Scholar from Stanford in 2000 with a BS in Computer Science
and has worked for such institutions as Harvard Physics, MIT Lincoln
Labs, Stanford Graphics, atWeb, Legato, and There.com. David wrote the
first layman's level description of MP3 in early 1997, reverse
engineered the Napster protocol in an evening, and was a finalist in
the ACM International Programming Competition. David lives in a
Hillsborough mansion with five others and throws periodic all-night
hackathons called SuperHappyDevHouse there. He is also the Executive
Director of the non-profit Online Policy Group, which provides free,
donation-supported colocation services to other non-profits (including
PenLUG).