Ads offer gauge for changing tech landscape

Returning to Silicon Valley after any sizeable time gap is always slightly surreal.

On one hand, the place is comfortingly familiar I spent my childhood here, so I know the region well, from the days when San Jose still had cherry and apricot orchards rather than silicon chip manufacturers, and Palo Alto was the sleepiest of towns. But now, there's always some new strangeness.

Sometimes, it's an environmental shift - greater traffic congestion on the freeways caused by ever-swelling ranks of tech workers, all converging on the off-ramps that lead to employers like Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Netscape, and Apple. Or the fact that Sandhill Road, the long sloping avenue that cuts down from the oak-covered hills towards Palo Alto, once was lined with book publishers and is now home to all the venture capitalists, the people that really matter.

There's so many of them there that they even have an annual Venture Capitalists Soap Box Derby.

Teams of VCs and other brave souls hammer together some fairly dubious vehicles and race down the hill for charity. Most noticeable, however, is the way in which the entire region seems to have accelerated into an Internet-driven technological space far beyond the rest of the world. And for some, far beyond where they want the rest of the world to go, but most of us will end up there anyway, count on it.

Usually the San Francisco Bay Area, to name the full region and not just the high-tech pocket on the south peninsula, is about three months ahead of where the rest of the US is. And the US is about 12 to 18 months ahead of the Republic and the rest of Europe.

So I come to Silicon Valley (which is not actually a valley at all, but a flat stretch of land hugging the San Francisco Bay) several times a year to see where the future is going, at least some of its possible permutations.

Most noticeable this time is the sheer proliferation of all things Internet, far beyond what it was like even at the start of summer.

In particular, I've been noticing advertisements. Adverts for Net-based companies and services are everywhere some radio programmes seem to be sponsored by nothing but "dot coms".

Billboards tout the latest online shopping site or service, with the Webvan.com advert for online grocery shopping on walls and billboards everywhere.

Smaller print tech adverts are also ubiquitous, with full-page adverts common in the daily papers (note, we're not talking about specialist magazines these are adverts you stumble across every few pages as you peruse the morning paper and sip your latte).

Ashford.com has a full page spread offering a free Mont Blanc pen for ordering online ("You'll need it," reads the copy. "Santa doesn't have e-mail.").

Dealtime.com plugs its comparison shopping service. Another full-page advert promises $150 (€144) back for signing up for a digital subscriber line - a high-speed Internet access technology.

Buzzsaw.com touts its business-to-business service for the US construction industry.

Another advert flogs routers - the digital valves that control and direct traffic over the Internet.

This is not because the manufacturers think they'll reach customers in a daily paper, it's one tech company preening before the others.

Television is just as saturated with dot coms, ironic since all surveys pinpoint television as the medium most under threat from the Net.

One TV advert points towards the ever-more flamboyant and inventive means employed by Net companies to attract "eyeballs".

IWon.com, a new search engine backed by broadcaster CBS, pays out $10,000 each day to one user of the site, and $1 million once a month.

Does such blatant purchasing of users work? Of course: iWon.com started with 27,000 site visitors daily last month at its launch and now is up to about 350,000. Technology also saturates news coverage. The media out here know what their readers, viewers and listeners want.

On average, half to two-thirds of the daily business section of the region's two major morning papers, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, consists of tech-industry stories.

Often, tech news is considered front page material the San Francisco Chronicle led on Monday with the story that the first of an expected barrage of class-action suits against Microsoft was filed in San Francisco.

In the Mercury News, a tech story nearly always graces the front page. Technology can even be a social issue. One paper had a story about the growing problem of people who read other people's computer screens on flights.

One Silicon Valley man had come up with his own special deterrent. As soon as he notices roving eyes nearby, he loads in a file that causes the screen to fill with the warning: "If you can read this, you should be ashamed of yourself." "Get's 'em every time," he confided to a reporter. The one area in which this region, as well as the rest of the US, falls far behind the Republic and Europe, however, is in mobile phone usage.

Calls are still costly and service choppy in many cases mobile phone users cannot send or receive calls across the country, making them useless for travellers.

Using a phone to send text messages is unheard of, although many people do send e-mail by phone.

On the other hand, you can sit in a trendy restaurant or bar and not hear Dublin's grating form of public music, the incessant ring of mobiles. So maybe low-tech ain't all that bad.

Tech-soaked adverts and news stories are a fascinating and revealing barometer of change in the technology industry.

That's why I think the true sign of the Net having real social impact in the Republic will not be a Government announcement or yet another survey sizing up Irish Net use, but whether we wake up to breakfast and a dot com invasion of the morning papers.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie