In a nod to its humble beginning in the garage of a Silicon Valley house, Google Inc is building “campuses” around the world intended as fertile ground where entrepreneurs can flourish.
A campus that opened last month in Madrid was the fourth such start-up nurturing facility opened by a Google for Entrepreneurs team at the California-based Internet titan.
The first campus opened in London in 2012, followed by one in Tel Aviv and then a third in Seoul.
“We began as a start-up in a garage 17 years ago and really believe in empowering the next generation of start-ups,” Google for Entrepreneurs director Mary Grove told reporters. “The goal is to foster entrepreneurship all over the world.”
Google plans to open startup campuses in Warsaw and Sao Paulo later this year.
Campuses provide spaces for start-ups to meet, work and learn. Partners are brought in to provide cafe services for which Silicon Valley tech companies are renowned.
Each campus has large event spaces that groups can apply to use free of charge.
The London campus averages four big events daily.
Coworking desk spaces can be rented, with certain operations contracted out to partners such as TechHub, which provides work space for tech entrepreneurs, and investment fund Seedcamp.
The campuses have about 1,858m2 of space and 200 desks.
Membership is free, and about 55,000 people around the world have signed on, according to Grove.
She said the process of users going from being a new arrival to learning from mentors, meeting potential investors and gaining traction is referred to as “working their way through the building.”
“It’s a hive of activity and has a tremendous energy about it,” Frugl founder Suzanne Noble said. “I’ve lost count of the interesting workshops and talks that I’ve attended there and have really helped to grow my business.”
Her company is behind an app that helps people on budgets find affordable things to do and she is taking part in a freshly launched London campus program devoted to tech company founders over the age of 50.
In contrast to typical start-up accelerator programs, being at a campus is more about sharing skills and maximizing use of resources made available, according to Noble.
Wikikids cofounder Inbal Miron-Bershteyn attended a baby friendly start-up program for entrepreneurial mothers at the Tel Aviv campus. There are mattresses on the floor for nap time and children are free to crawl around while their mothers talk to mentors, experts and women who have started companies of their own, according to Miron-Bershteyn.
Diaper changing and breast-feeding are accepted parts of the routine.
“Even sometimes a crying baby will be held by a mentor,” Miron-Bershteyn said, while describing her Campus for Moms experience.
“It is a great community, everybody comes together. It works, I think, on good karma. Mentors come for nothing and the women get encouraged and empowered,” she said.
Wikikids is a talking encyclopedia tailored for children, launched just a couple of months before Miron-Bershteyn took part in Campus for Moms last year.
Google does not earn any revenue from its campuses, and did not disclose how much it spends on the facilities or the programs.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to