Obama’s Immigration Actions Bring Relief for College Students

U.S. News | Allie Bidwell | Nov. 21

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/11/21/obamas-immigration-actions-bring-relief-for-college-students

Among the millions of undocumented immigrants shielded by actions President Barack Obama announced Thursday night are college students, who now may be able to apply for cheaper tuition and aid in some states and have a chance to remain in the country longer after graduating. Obama’s actions include plans to expand and extend the federal Optional Practical Training program, which allows foreign students to work in the U.S. while they’re in school and for some period of time afterward. Students in science, technology, engineering and math fields – or STEM – can remain in the country on visas for 29 months after graduating, while others can remain for 12 months. Obama in 2012 expanded the STEM category to include computer and information sciences. The exact details are unclear, but Obama has directed the Department of Homeland Security to propose changes that could include expanding the definition of STEM fields again or lengthening the visa times even more. “Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us?” Obama said in his Thursday address. “Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs here, create businesses here, create industries right here in America?”

 

There Might Be a Bubble in Tech, but It’s Not the One People Think

Business Insider | Jay Yarow | Nov 21

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-bubble-in-tech-2014-11

Perhaps we are about to see the implosion of the tech bubble. I don’t think we will. Since 2007 people have been saying we’re in a tech bubble as investment dollars have poured into the tech industry and valuations have skyrocketed…We’ve had lots of companies soar and crash. Today, for instance, we’re seeing Fab sell for $15 million after reaching a $1 billion valuation. Aereo is going bankrupt after raising $100 million. Groupon rose and fell. Zynga rose and fell. Angry Birds was a thing and now, that’s not so. At the same time, Apple has grown in value. Uber has gone from $0 to a $2 billion net revenue run-rate. Facebook has grown in value and utility. Google has become more valuable. Netflix has grown. Twitter is a big company. Alibaba came out of nowhere and is huge. Even AOL has stabilized and grown. And so on and so on. It seems to me that we have something pretty healthy going on here. Some companies are succeeding, some are failing, but the entire sector is not being dragged too violently one way or the other. Sure, the overall investment dollars are up, but so is the overall usage of technology, so that makes sense. If the bubble bursts, it won’t be because of a fundamental problem with the entire tech industry. I believe it will be a macroeconomic event that hits, which then leaks into the tech sector.

 

Tech Reacts to the Demise of Partial NSA Reform in the Senate

Tech Crunch | Alex Wilhelm | Nov. 20

http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/tech-reacts-to-the-demise-of-partial-nsa-reform-in-the-senate/

The failure of the Senate to advance NSA reform in the current Congress isn’t too popular with the technology community. The demise of the USA FREEDOM Act — a half-measure at best — in the Senate is another loss for the technology industry, which saw many of its leading companies repeatedly call for the bill’s passage. The FREEDOM Act was aimed at ending the NSA’s collection of American’s telephone metadata, a controversial program that the Snowden leaks uncovered. The Act was no panacea, but it did appear to be an achievable piece of legislation. The House passed a version of the bill that was mocked after it was neutered before passage. The Senate’s variant was stiffer. It was called a first step. Even that couldn’t pass. Reaction by tech industry groups to the 58-42 has been negative. The group Reform Government Surveillance, which counts Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook as members released a small statement saying that it was “disappointed in the Senate procedural vote.” The influential Business Software Alliance called it a “missed opportunity.” The big tech companies appear content to speak through groups that they are members of, sparing them the need to directly criticize member of Congress that, in many cases, are about to take the majority position in the upper chamber.

 

Tech is Outgrowing the Tech Industry

Wall Street Journal | Deborah Gage | Nov. 19

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/11/19/benedict-evans-tech-is-outgrowing-the-tech-industry/

For the first time, the technology industry is selling to everybody—not just the big companies that bought mainframes or the middle class families that bought PCs—and that has big implications for companies of all types, according to Andreessen Horowitz Partner Benedict Evans. Speaking at the Demo conference in San Jose, Calif., Mr. Evans predicted that by 2020, about 80% of the world’s adults will be online, largely because of smartphones. “Everyone gets a pocket computer,” he said–one with a camera, sensors, location, payment capabilities and so on–and they spend more time in mobile apps now than they do on the Web. So the era of mouse, keyboard, Web browser and finding information by page rank, which dominated the tech industry for 20 years, is coming to an end. “We don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Mr. Evans said, because Google and Apple aren’t done yet. But new, large opportunities are being created and there will be many winners.

 

Goldman Sachs Recasts Its Reputation to Woo Tech Talent

Deal Book | Nathaniel Popper | Nov. 13

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/goldman-sachs-recasts-its-reputation-to-woo-tech-talent/?_r=0

The Goldman employees knew they had an uphill battle. They were fighting against perceptions of Wall Street as boring and regulation-bound and Silicon Valley as the promised land of flip-flops, beanbag chairs and million-dollar stock options. Their argument to the room of technologically inclined students was that Wall Street was where they could find far more challenging, diverse and, yes, lucrative jobs working on some of the world’s most difficult technical problems. “Whereas in other opportunities you might be considering, it is working one type of data or one type of application, we deal in hundreds of products in hundreds of markets, with thousands or tens of thousands of clients, every day, millions of times of day worldwide,” Afsheen Afshar, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, told the students. The push within Goldman Sachs is a sign of how things have changed since the financial crisis. A few years back, critics of finance were wringing their hands about the high proportion of graduates from elite schools like M.I.T. who were going into finance rather than lending their talents to new start-ups. In 2007, for instance, 28.7 percent of M.I.T. graduating seniors took a job in finance and only 9.3 percent went to software companies. At graduation last year, those numbers had flipped, with 21.5 percent of graduates taking software jobs and only 11.8 percent going into finance.