Even though books have been around for well over 500 years, we're still dealing with a working definition for the word book. Tina Seeling (Executive Director of STVP, author, and Stanford professor) threw out the following definition: "A committment to a deep-dive on a topic using the written word." The panel took a deep dive (with the spoken word) on what a book is and what the future of the written word is, but only after Tina showed off some of her favorite students and their exploration of the future of the book publishing industry. Apple's iPad, the Nook, Amazon's Kindle, and the entire concept of ebooks have forever changed an industry that fell asleep at the wheel.

Communication is about the experiences we create, the devices we use, and the services are enabled. As the shift occurs from a few big players in the 70s to literally hundreds of choices, we are discovering that it’s really all about how you match service to devices to create the communication experience. Hard on the heels of HP’s acquisition of Palm, Phil talks about how the three fundamental building blocks of communication can all come together in the mobile cloud.  

AlwaysOn is proud to announce its inaugural Top 25 Women in Tech to Watch list, presented by Accenture. These pioneers have been involved in creating innovative technology companies and securing venture capital deals, creating jobs and strengthening the Global Silicon Valley marketplace.

As the tech and VC industries recover from the recent credit crunch, these women are continuing to score big wins in terms of revenue, reach, innovation, and return on their stakeholders' investments. The AlwaysOn Top 25 Women in Tech to Watch is a collection of the most prominent and influential women in the global technology industries.

This is the inaugural year for the list, which was hand-selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team. The team looked at data from across the entrepreneur universe, examining contributions from hundreds of talented women who are changing the technology landscape. The AO team used five criteria for choosing this year's list: overall innovation, the ability to identify new market opportunities, commercialization of new products and services, creation of stakeholder value, and media buzz and awareness in the tech community.

I have a confession.

I'm in Silicon Valley's gay mafia.

No, I'm not gay. I just love sourcing deals where other VCs can't go, won't go, and don't even know about.

The gay mafia here has its fingers in EVERYTHING. Yes, some of them are mad that I'm the only straight guy, but I add value into the societies that I infiltrate.

For the record, I love gay entrepreneurs.

Two great videos here. One is a taste of Qualcomm's new game (with Mattel), a 3D augmented reality "rockem sockem robots" that we saw live during Matt Grob's talk, the second link below in red. Qualcomm is leading the way to bring pretty sophisticated augmented reality to your cell phone. They've developed a way to scan, compare, position, and render images 30 times a second to produce the "rockem sockem robots" game in the video below. Enjoy! Matt Grob is the Senior VP of Engineering and the Head of Corporate Research and Development at Qualcomm.

We kicked off day 2 of the STVP/AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford with a keynote from Doug Merritt, EVP at SAP. The message from Doug about cloud computing was clear: Change will be constant, the OnDemand model will continue to perform, this is just the beginning, and SAP will be there for the longhaul. This talk starts off with Tony Perkins' intro for the day and rolls right into Doug's talk.

Tuesday's Stanford Technology Ventures Program & AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford 2010: Satjiv Chahil and  Vivienne Tam unveil HP's newest sexy netbook. Satjiv, Global Marketing Whiz at HP, was Tony Perkins' first surprise. Vivienne Tam was Satjiv's surprise guest. If you want mobility, power, and fashion you'll find it here.

HP and Vivienne came together to make this hot mini netbook. Check out the video, slide deck, and live group discussion here.

The AlwaysOn X Fund portfolio advanced 5.3% for the week, while the NASDAQ was up 4.1%, and the S&P 500 was up 3.1%. For the year, the AO X Fund portfolio is up 5.7%, the NASDAQ is flat and the S&P 500 is down 1.1%.

All our companies reporting last week posted positive results supported by strong growth. New Oriental Education beat expectations by 2 cents, posting 114% EPS growth and 45.8% sales growth. Apple beat expectations by 40 cents, posting 160% EPS growth and 61.3% sales growth. VmWare beat expectations by 2 cents, with Q2 EPS up 70% and sales up 48%. Management guides up for Q3. Baidu.com beat expectations by 4 cents, with EPS down 78%, while sales were up 74.4%. Management raised its Q3 guidance. F5 Networks posted 5 cents better-than-expected EPS results, up 65% YoY, and sales up 45.7%. FFIV raised its Q3 outlook.

A couple of weeks back I blogged that the increasing importance to startups of partnerships with companies like Facebook are making the internet more and more like traditional areas of tech like software and semiconductors and is a sign of the maturing of the internet sector.  This morning I have been struck by a similar thought this morning reading two articles in the FT.

The first was a report on Domino’s Pizza UK’s first half results – Domino’s is a traditional offline business that was in existence long before the web rose to prominence and they now take fully 33% of their orders over the internet.  Moreover they cite an increase in internet orders as one of two reasons their first half results came in ahead of expectations (the other reason was a boost from the World Cup).