The whiteboard is a sacred Silicon Valley office artifact. No matter how scrappy your startup, if you ain’t got 2 whiteboards for every warm body in the office/garage/homeless-box, you ain’t a real company.

The whiteboard is a company’s mission statement, its values, its creed and its soul rolled into a smooth white surface. Whenever I walk into a startup’s office, I look at their whiteboards like women look at their date’s shoes. Are they squeaky clean because the admin has a mild case of OCD (no joking matter, btw)? Are they littered with pseudocode scribbles because some engineer drank down a 40 and decided to show off? Did someone draw a naughty version of Dijkstra’s shortest path (don’t ask)?

As with shoes and men, you can tell a lot about a company from their whiteboards.

That’s why I’m pissed off when people use whiteboards for stupid, obvious shit that discredits the written form. I’m in a meeting and we’re brainstorming ideas, discussing tasks for a project, figuring out timelines. Someone will invariably stand up suddenly and motion excitably with a hand wave; they’re looking for a marker.

At this point, I get myself primed! I clear my brain; something interesting is about to happen. Maybe he’ll write down an algorithm that will solve my problem. Maybe he’ll just scrawl a mathematical formula John Nash-like and demonstrate to me superior intellect while I nod along like a chump. Sometimes, I just blank my brain and get ready to be schooled like I’m back in junior high.

But then they pick up the stupid marker and start making a dumb list. Or put down a stupid non sequitur like “Its about persistence”. Or start drawing a crude Gantt chart, which just makes my head explode.

People: whiteboards are for math, code and software architecture diagrams that are simply too beautiful to be put down on Visio. Do NOT draw dumb “strategy boxes” on them.

This shit has to stop (random aside, I’m thinking about copyrighting that line. Idea of the year?).

I’d rather not blog than be a lameass lazy habitual linker. But this article is different. Written last month about how Apple was courting developers aggressively, the article presciently talks about the marvel that is the AppStore.

To me, this is the true disruption. For the first time that I can think of, mobile developers can bypass carriers altogether and get to the end consumer. Sure, they gotta write some bitchy Objective C code (vomit) but hey, whatever. Have you seen some of these apps?

Its like a tasty tech snack.

Oh yeah, and the Samsung Instinct. What chump would make an argument that this POS is an iPhone killer after July 11th?

As a card carrying yet-to-surrender-to-buy-and-large (thanks Wall-E) member of the startup cult, I’m just giddy over this.

First, Valleywag started bitching over Google’s callous “disregard” for children and for fleecing employees by charging a boatload for daycare.

Then, The New York Times (please pronounce propuhly) dove right in for a nice hatchet job. Brin is evil. His sister in law is a witch. Parents are pissed off and are holding their now-neglected poor kiddies up towards the sky, Simba-like, in a desperate prayer for deliverance.

WTF?

Now - I get it. I’m 26, irresponsible, immature, nowhere close to even considering marriage and absolutely worthless as a potential father. Sometimes, I pay 80 dollars for a shirt while completely forgetting that I came from NOTHING. In other words, I don’t know much and am a carefree yuppie freak.

But I’m just amazed that Google even paid for daycare in the first place. I’ve seen and heard of companies where the cashews in the kitchen are counted as perks. And that’s in Silicon Valley! As a 19 year old, I worked in the marketing research department of a Midwestern utility company (this was pre-Enron and trading utilities was actually kind of hot. Ewww).

You know what the kitchen contained? Black coffee. If you wanted half and half, you had to carry your happy ass down to Starbucks. Failing that, you could use the little creamer packets and be happy you had a job in 2001.

I know its Silicon Valley and we’re all special, but get a grip, people. While Google clearly fux0red this BIG TIME, cheap daycare is not common. Let’s be real.

For n00bs to this blog check out: http://wordpress.com/tag/corporatespeak/

This one is borrowed straight from the marketing trash bin of good, old fashioned brick and mortar products. Let’s say that you have a web site. Let’s say that the site serves as a marketplace for connoisseurs of udon. I know, the wholesale market for a wheat-based noodle is probably small, but work with me here.

Let’s say that your site is just a royal crap-hole. It stinks. You’ve got an animated ticker on the home page with noodles flying from one end of the screen to another. Your users hate it. Your wife hates it. Even the annoying-ass kid who has a snot problem claims to be able to do better.

What do you do? You start building “version 2.0″, of course!!! Its a whole version up from the current version - it MUST be better.

But what do you do with version 1.0? You can’t dis it too much - people may get offended.

That’s when you start calling it CLASSIC.

N00bs to this blog, check out the rest of the valleyspeak series here: http://bitbubble.wordpress.com/category/corporatespeak/

This one isn’t Valley specific, but oh well. I’ve spent several years walking around office hallways and cubos and overhearing people saying, “Let’s jump into a conference room and touch base”, or “My crack dealer and I are touching base at the street corner tonight, want to join?” and it has been getting to me.

As far as I understand it, touch base == call or meet someone irrelevant about something immaterial. No one or nothing is being touched (at least I hope not). And whose base is this anyways? Why is there a base involved in the first place? Is anyone climbing a mountain?

So why the hell do we keep using it?? “Touch base” is yet another example of corporate America’s slow but continuous emasculation and withering of plain, simple, understandable English.

I only wish Hemingway were alive so he could get into a cagefight with anyone who’d dare to use the phrase in his presence. Now that’s a fight I would pay to watch on HBO.

I just love this. The New York Times reveals that cash heavy Bollywood entertainment companies are trying to throw cash around Hollywood and are promising to cut through Hollywood “bureaucracy”.

I am now fully assured that I will - in my lifetime - see an A list Hollywood movie star prance around a tree, Bollywood style. Bonus points if they line up a 100 extras behind him/her performing the same dance move in unison.

See here for the gory details.

This is a rant.

I have a violent love hate relationship with IKEA. I love big box retail convenience as much as the next guy (and screw you if you think I’ve sold my soul) but absolutely HATE Ikea’s ridiculous arrogance.

What the hell is with IKEA’s stubborn insistence on naming all their products in Swedish????

Are you frigging kidding me? You’re selling me a piece of shit 5 dollar ottoman that’s gonna disintegrate in six months and cause me a goddamn back injury while I’ve got my feet up on it.

The least you can do is name the stupid thing in English so I don’t have to squint at the letters and look like a jackass trying to pronounce it.

Plus, let’s face it. It’s not as if you are some classy company that gets to charge more money by naming crap in “European” so us stupid US dwellers get easily conned. Your demographic is kids fresh out of college and young families who’d rather be shopping at Z Gallerie instead of your dumpy-ass store. Get with the program.

And here’s the last problem: your language isn’t as pretty as you think. French this ain’t. There, I’m glad I said it.

Exhibit A: Walking through your interminable maze of Swedish crap, I came across and picked up a grill pan. Of course, even such a mundane object had to be classied up with a Swedish moniker. Only problem is, here is how this word is spelled:

SKANKA

I’m 26 and should know better, but I couldn’t stop giggling.

For an intro to the series, see here.

While in India, my folks and I decided to take a family trip to Kerala, an absolutely gorgeous southern state in India. Kerala is full of wonderful cultural shocks and different from the rest of the country: highly educated, a heavy Christian population, lots of folks who don’t speak Hindi, greener than the rest of the country, the list goes on.

Here is a photo that I snapped at the Cochin airport as soon as we landed:

This is not a sign that you will see at any American domestic airport. Questions: what exactly are they facilitating? If I walked in, would I see a helpful fella who would facilitate me by picking up my bags for free? Are they renting out elephants in there? What could it POSSIBLY be?

I guess I could have just asked, but this is more entertaining. To me, anyways.

In the short amount of time since Anand (co-founder of Kosmix, the company that funds my rather expensive Star Wars costume habit) has edited a personal blog, I’ve become interested in the following question:

How much does a well-respected blog translate into tangible benefits for a startup? Can a blog’s impact be measured in terms of valuation dollars?

Anand started his blog a couple of months ago and has used it for the following reasons:

• Trends and ideas related to the business of search. Kosmix is a player in the search ecosystem and these posts tell the world that we’re not a bunch of monkeys with a lot of VC dollars. It tells potential recruits, investors, advertisers and bystanders that we (or at least some of us) know what we’re talking about. It tells Stanford PhDs that we hire them for a good reason and that they’d feel at home with us.
• Posts plugging the technology that portfolio companies are building. A great way to give a fledgling startup completely transparent, totally biased but technically strong point of view.
• Details on conversations with tech heavy hitters like Peter Norvig. These depend upon the 1-2 punch of access that most of us don’t have and a degree of technical competence that most journalists don’t possess. Very unique, compelling content targeted at a niche audience of rabid tech heads.

You get the point. His blog is an excellent mouthpiece for him as an individual and for Kosmix as a company. I now routinely run into people in Silicon Valley who don’t know Kosmix but have heard of Anand’s blog. That is absolutely shocking.

Take another example: Marc Andreessen’s horribly brilliant blog that came out of nowhere with an absolute bang two years ago. Marc has publicly claimed (on his blog, where else!?) that he’d rather blog in his undies - stay with me here - than deal with reporters to plug his message.

But these 2 guys are established Silicon Valley commodities. What of those who aren’t well known and/or don’t have a few million safely tucked away under a mattress? That’s what leads me to be most impressed with Andrew Chen’s Futuristic Play, a highly thoughtful blog on web monetization models, virality and other things that I don’t quite understand. It so happens that Andrew is doing a startup with a good friend from Stanford, so I’ve been following the blog for quite some time and watching it grow from nothing to over 3000 subscribers (yikes!). If I were a VC, I’d put some money into the guy.

So the million dollar questions: how do you quantify this impact? If the value of PR is notoriously hard to measure in hard dollars, is this harder? And why hasn’t every founder/CEO in Silicon Valley gotten off their sorry asses and started a blog? Lastly, should I focus more on having a life than asking these questions?

I recently visited my folks in India for three weeks. I hadn’t been back in years and its always fascinating for me to hang out in the land of my birth and adolescence. India 2008 is in so many ways so different from India 1999.

But the best parts for me have nothing to do with India’s non-Hindu blazing growth rates. They have to do with the cultural differences that make themselves known in that most mundane manner: billboards, street signs, banners.

Here is a fun example from my hometown.

“Banjaara” - which means nomad for the uninitiated - is a little restaurant in my folks’ neighborhood.

I already have an issue with the name; why name a RESTAURANT after people whose sense of hygiene is, well, nomadic. Why christen a place of good after people who move every time the sand blows in their face? But fine, I can deal with it.

Here’s my real problem: these guys really can’t make up their minds! Is it a hotel? Or an inn? Is it a family restaurant? And if so, why is the word BAR prominently tacked to the end?

And last but not least, why the gratuitous use of the word “PRESIDENT”?