Temples of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The term originally referred to the region’s large number of silicon chip 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 growth in the technology sector throughout the United States, Silicon Valley continues to be the high tech hub because of its large number of engineers and venture capitalists.

A temple (from the Latin word templum) is a structure reserved for religious or spiritual activities, such as prayer and sacrifice, or analogous rites. A ‘’templum’’ constituted a sacred precinct as defined by a priest, or augur. It has the same root as the word “ template,’’ a plan in preparation of the building that was marked out on the ground by the augur. Though a templum, technically speaking, is not a “house of the gods” but a diagram that for the Romans linked the geometries of heaven and earth, it was also indicative of a dwelling place of a god or gods. Source Wikipedia

Silicon Valley sure has many temples…but rather different kind. Let me differ a little from Wikipedia, and commit blasphemy.:)

For starters, priests are neither dressed in black nor worship at altars. A mass here is an all hands meeting where the priests listen to the gospel of worshippers. And who are these worshippers? Which nationality they belong to? What religion, what caste? Well, take a pick….or just ‘google’ these terms. For once, all the ‘googol’ search results apply.

 

No matter who you are or where you are from, your entry is guaranteed if your grey matter is intact. Once you enter, you join thousands of others who are toiling away to ‘technology’ nirvana and in the process even churning out a few billions. And when you are ready, you simply go ahead and create your own (No need for a sanction from Vatican, a walk-out from the current employer would do). This is how all those temples in silicon valley came into being—HP, Intel, Apple, Yahoo and Google—to name a few.

The religion caught up all over the world…the products and innovations being their missionaries.  No wonder there are these tiny little vallies and temples all over the world now, each one practicing their own version of this religion.

 

 

 

And the religion? better not talk about it. It’s all about practicing it.:)

Folks! It’s time to pray in one such temple or better still, create one. Amen!

 

Web 3.0: Machines take control?

To take the Web to the next level — to move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 — the information in those documents will have to be turned into data that a machine can read and evaluate on its own. Only then will computers be able to take over tasks we now do by hand: find the nearest restaurant, book the best flight, buy the cheapest CD.

More at Business2.0

One point of clarification, just in case anyone is wondering…

Web 3.0 is not just about machines — it’s actually all about humans — it leverages social networks, folksonomies, communities and social filtering AS WELL AS the Semantic Web, data mining, and artificial intelligence. The combination of the two is more powerful than either one on it’s own.

Nova Spivack clarifies in his blog