Startups for 10

NET RESULTS:Stanford University, seedbed for Yahoo and Google, holds a jobs fair specifically for startups, an idea Irish universities might take on board

STUDENT JOBS fairs are fairly common these days. Lots of companies set up stall to woo potential employees, and university students close to graduation check them out and apply to firms that interest them.

But Stanford University, that innovation powerhouse in Silicon Valley that has produced a phenomenal number of the tech industry's stars, does it a little differently. Last week, it held Startup 100, a jobs fair with representatives from 100 startups run by - but of course - Stanford alumni and current students.

Yes, students. After all, Yahoo and Google grew from Stanford students fiddling on the net. Stanford now openly encourages such fiddling - Startup 100 was part of Entrepreneurship Week, at which the university makes a special attempt to support and nurture its students who come with creating a company in mind.

And why shouldn't universities in Ireland adopt such an approach? Currently the focus is on finding ways to support faculty entrepreneurship, expand research and development, and build relationships with companies. But maybe some time should go towards nurturing budding entrepreneurs as they head into their college years, not after they emerge from them.

That doesn't mean encouraging them to do MBAs. As well-known Valley tech evangelist and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki said pointedly during his keynote speech last week at the Irish Software Association conference, the last people you want to employ in a startup are MBAs.

Valley money takes such events as Startup 100 seriously too - local venture and law firms were there to see what was on offer.

Meanwhile, Stanford star spinoff Google is in the news for its announcement that it intends to go into managing health records online. The idea is that patients themselves would upload medical data from a range of sources and store and manage it online. Google has been talking about doing this for some time. Microsoft launched its HealthVault service last year.

Digitising and centralising health records and making them easily searchable has been mooted for years, but implementation has been slow, in part because it is hard to collate data in a coherent way from so many sources.

But another key stumbling block has been privacy concerns. Medical records obviously contain sensitive data and making them easily accessible in one place for health practitioners or patients also risks making them easily accessible in unwanted ways - vulnerable to misuse and theft.

Privacy advocates have been particularly uneasy about Google's foray into this area, given that its main income generation model is based on using personal search data to generate revenue via advertising.

Google said it would not sell health data "without explicit consent" from the record holders, and a Google official emphasised it had no plans to sell data, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. But neither stance would greatly reassure those concerned about how such data might be used commercially. Plans often change, and "explicit consent" implies such uses are at least there for future consideration.

Google tends to get more grief for what it might do with search data than rival Microsoft, busy eyeing up Yahoo at the moment. But overall Microsoft is viewed more warily in the Valley, perhaps in part because, while it has a Valley office, its main operations are two states to the north and it isn't considered one of the locals.

Hence the rather "damning with faint praise" headline in a San Jose Mercury News frontpage story on Sunday, about what happens when the software giant purchases Valley companies (a situation sometimes referred to as being assimilated by the Borg).

"A warmer, softer Microsoft in Silicon Valley takeovers?" the headline asked, its scepticism implicit in the subheading: "Working for tech giant isn't so bad, some employees say."

Some employees? Ouch. The fact that the first evidence offered in the piece for this gentler Microsoft is that startup Tellme Networks didn't have to give up its "dog room" and "game room" (I do not jest) just about says everything. "It's been better than we expected," said one engineer.

Maybe someone should let the Valley know that Microsoft is always voted one of the top 10 companies to work for in Ireland. Though maybe we start from a lower competitive base - I don't know of any Irish company which has a dog room that might be threatened in a buyout.