Speakers include Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures; Ron Stern, Marvel Entertainment; Bob Guccione, Jr., SPIN Magazine; Derek Sivers, CD Baby; Gavin McInnes, Street Carnage, Vice; David Cho, The Awl; John Sloss, Cinetic Media; Dennis Crowley, Foursquare; Jay Rosen, PressThink; Richard Tofel, ProPublica; Steven Brill, Journalism Online.

Gavin McInnes’s panel should be fun!

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• Video Interview From DLD: Dennis Crowley, CEO of Foursquare (paidcontent.org)
• Thoughts on Buzz (avc.com)

I started this post while at SFO waiting to board my Virgin America flight back to NY. I could have waited to board thanks to the free on-flight WIFI courtesy of Google on Virgin flights over the holiday season but instead I’m writing this on the wpToGo app on my Motorola Droid running Google’s Android 2.0 on Verizon’s 3G network. Free WIFI isn’t as prevalent as you might think in the world’s most important tech hub. One of the paradoxes of Silicon Valley is how lo-tech and frankly outdated the hard infrastructure is compared to the second-to-none soft infrastructure.

We just wrapped up the 12th CBS Silicon Valley trip which by many counts was the most successful yet. It was CBS’ largest ever tech trek (helped by the fact the CBS Green trek happened in parallel) and arguably included the finest selection of valley companies including Apple, Facebook, Google and IDEO.

What a refreshing start to the new decade. The entreprenurial techno-utopian approach of this coast is inspiring. Every other person seems to be working at a startup, on a startup or at the very least is concerned about competition from a startup. I am guessing the valley has one of the highest engineer / capita ratios out there. The economic gloom affecting NY and most of the world hasn’t dampened the sunny outlook in the valley. Most companies we met are growing and hiring. That naturally made many of us job-seeking MBAs happy. Although it was tempered by Columbia’s outsider status in the valley.

We touched on many of the components that make the valley what it is. Staying at the Sheraton Palo Alto right across from Stanford, meeting startups Zynga and Meebo, valley giants eBay and Yahoo, hosting a VC panel with CBS alums and meeting some of the new green wave of companies and VCs that many expect to be a growth area for the valley.

Company Visits
The Googleplex is as bonkers as you’d expect. Free gourmet food, massages, day-care, the whole place has an Alice in Wonderland, Adult Kindergarten video going that is infectious and impossible not to love. The company is obviously going through some organizational teething problems to be expected with the all the growth and change it’s going through but still seemed like an awesomely exciting place to work. Hiring.
The Yahoo! campus is purple and yellow ALL over (right down the flowers and window frames) with lots of the valley perks (24-hr gyms, free weekly concerts etc). The firm seems to be getting back on track under Bartz’ leadership. Hiring.
eBay seemed fun although more on the corporate side than most other companies we met. They’re a lot bigger than a lot of the CBS students expected (campus size, # employees etc). If eBay were a retail company, it would be the 10th biggest in the US just after Target. Hiring.
Facebook was one of the most eagerly awaited visits and it did not disappoint. 2010 is going to be a key year in revenue realization for these guys and we got some insight into their tightrope approach balancing privacy and advertising dollars. Hiring.
Zynga was a company few of us knew much about (apart from those annoying Mafia War updates on our fb streams) but the startup left a big impression. They are experiencing crazy growth rates, more than doubling their workforce in the last year and hiring upwards of 300 people. They’re on cutting edge of social gaming and are trying to figure out their industry as they build it. Fun! Lots of Hiring.
IDEO was as inspiring as expected. Workplace second only to Google. The recession hasn’t been as good to them. They are branching out heavily into the greenspace (as most of the valley seems to be). Maybe hiring.
Apple was super secretive so a little more difficult to figure out / describe. Hiring for retail (and corporate – marketing, finance etc but not necessarily from CBS).

All in all an amazing trip. I have pretty much decided to apply to the Berkeley-Hass exchange program in the Fall.

Lots of other B Schools were out in the valley at the same time including Sloan who had this report on their tech trek.

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• Lehman collapse: Dubai and Gulf give a glimpse of a new world order (telegraph.co.uk)

As the recession spirit grips hoteliers all around the world, with cheap chic and rough luxe becoming watchwords in Paris and London and New York, the die-hard luxury hound in search of a hit of the pure stuff is left with fewer and fewer options. Fortunately they’ll always have Dubai, the one city where the gilt edge has yet to wear off.

Dubai’s comparative advantage is in the area of five-, six-, and seven-star opulence, and in these tough times their hoteliers are sticking to their strengths. Our friends at Emirates Airlines have chosen the very best: they’ve put together a selection of hotels in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Amman, Jordan that run the gamut from plush desert oases to urban-luxe palaces to the daddy of them all, the towering Burj Al Arab. And they’ve provided their own Tablet Guide to the Middle East as well, featuring recommendations from Amman’s legendary Citadel Hill to the highest of high-end Dubai dining.

Peter Manice and Drew Patterson founders of Jetsetter.com, Gilt Group‘s entry into the travel market, were at Columbia a few weeks explaining how their membership model addresses one of the luxury travel industry’s main problems: optimizing revenue without damaging brands through discounting. Gilt have got off to a good start in the same space for luxury fashion (they have a kick-ass iPhone app btw). It will be interesting to see how Jetsetter does and how both models scale up while maintaining the cachet necessary for the luxury brands to use them as a channel.

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• Dubai Metro Opens On Time But Over Budget (news.sky.com)
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• Tweet! (fakeplasticsouks.blogspot.com)
• Dubai DOA? (fakeplasticsouks.blogspot.com)

How apt then to have watched a super documentary about Josh at the IFC a few weeks after finally moving to NY. Ondi Timoner‘s We Live In Public tells the story of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”. Josh got the internet early, founded Jupiter Communications and made a lot of money very quickly and then went on to spend it all in the most awesome possible ways. Like so many of the early web pioneers, Josh could see where it was all going but mistakenly assumed it would all happen far quicker than it did. Many of the ideas he spent his millions on would only emerge as viable web2.0 businesses a decade later. His failed experiments were windows into a collectively narcissist, exhibitionist, sensationalist future that is now unfolding in the mainstream.
Many of his post-Jupiter projects involved living life continuously streamed onto the internet which means Timoner must have had no shortage of archival footage to draw to tell Josh’ story. I have always been fascinated with notions of doing away with privacy (and more recently the bolted on idea of the quantified self / life). Josh very publicly did the former and it didn’t end happily. The digital natives have grown up living in public and are much more prepared for it than the web1.0 generation. Crucially though, they can always switch the lifestream off as and when they choose whereas Josh’ more extreme experiments amounted to an enforced public living mode with no opt-out. There’s immense learning we can draw from taking societal trends to their logical extreme. The world isn’t going quite as far as Josh’ visionary investigations but there remain broader lessons to be drawn about where things are moving from them.
The doc is a lot of fun and is making its way around the US and Europe. Watch it.

Movie, visionary, WIRED. Pseudo parties. New York allure. Quantified Self.

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• For Him, the Web Was No Safety Net (nytimes.com)