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Welcome to my website. I am a longtime resident of Silicon Valley and enthusiastic champion of new technologies that meet important needs of people and society, focusing on startup companies in the Valley and Australia.
Perhaps we met at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale (where I was an executive in residence), at Santa Clara University (where I served as dean of engineering), or at Nortel, Bay Networks, HP, or IBM. In California, North Carolina, or Switzerland. Or prowling Downtown Palo Alto restaurants, but that's another website.
Author Archives: Dan Pitt
And now what? OpenFlow!
My eye-tracking chapter has ended and while I’ve enjoyed in recent months mentoring some very interesting startups that range from hardware acceleration to retail shopping acceleration one phenomenon that has really captured my attention is OpenFlow (www.openflow.org). OpenFlow is actually a specific example of a larger movement called Software Defined Networking. In other words, putting [...]
My how things have evolved in six months
Okay, I’ve been busy with another startup and kind of neglected my blog. I would, however, like to highlight two observations that have come to me during this time. First, the iPad spells – in my opinion – the decline and ultimate end of the single-purpose appliance. That includes all the e-readers, new Android-based virtual [...]
This Macworld was probably my last
One pleasure of living in the Bay Area is that I get to go to Macworld every year for only the cost of a Caltrain (commuter rail) ticket, around eight bucks. I’ve been going every year, just to the Expo (trade show), with my son, who is now 18. (We always manage either to get [...]
A new office phone: a big step in the right direction
I got to see a demo of the new enterprise desktop phone from Cloud Telecomputers, called the Glass Platform, and it’s a huge step forward from the tired, pedestrian sorrows I saw at VoiceCon. First of all, it’s almost entirely touchscreen (about 8 inches), with two or perhaps three real (but tiny) buttons at the [...]
I used to like telephony
The old days I started disassembling phones as a boy, which was a bit risky since only AT&T owned the instrument and you could not go to the store and buy a replacement if you broke it. There was no such thing as spare phones for experimenters. I worked on speech compression in graduate school, [...]
My ears are slow
The Wall Street Journal recently did a piece on the end of the email era. The Journal maintains that email is too limiting and ineffective compared to the new media, especially the social media. I’ll get into that more in another post (especially regarding Twitter, IM, and text messaging for short, immediate communications) but right [...]
Downtown Palo Alto Restaurants site has moved
Dear loyal follower, My opinionated compendium of downtown Palo Alto restaurants now has its own site (www.downtownpaloaltorestaurants.com) and is no longer on www.danpitt.com. As you can see, I am using www.danpitt.com for my blog on matters technical and otherwise. Yes, there is a link to the new restaurant website (on the right) but it’s better [...]
Impressions from WebPlay conference on social media
The WebPlay conference was held 19 November 2009 at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale (www.plugandplaytechcenter.com). The speakers and panelists mainly offered advice to startup companies seeking to exploit social media for their business, if not actually monetize it. Twitter was the hottest topic, in all its variations (and with the CTO of [...]
ONF launches; come see at Interop http://goo.gl/tPZ8X #Interop (via@opennetfound)