Analysis of the Silicon Valley Context for Entrepreneursip and Innovation - Essay Example

High-tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Cisco, eBay, Pixar, and many other commonly known technology-based companies all call Silicon Valley home. In recent years, such groundbreaking advances as digital video recording and high speed wireless internet have been part of a non-stop stream of innovations that have facilitated a new way of life based on mobile and on-demand telecommunications capabilities. Other important advances have reshaped the way we utilize the internet, further integrating it into the normal course of our day-to-day existence.

This extraordinary success not only devising hi-tech advances, but also bringing them to market in a wildly successful way, has rendered the Silicon Valley economy the envy of the world. Web innovations have been the latest hot developments to come out of Silicon Valley. Levy and Stone (2006) maintain that innovative new websites such as MySpace and Flickr “are milestones in a new high-tech wave reminiscent of the craziness of the early dot-com days. This rebooting owes everything to the enhanced power and pervasiveness of the Web, which has finally matured to the point where it can fulfill some of the outlandish promises that we heard in the ‘90s.

” Some refer to this latest phase in the evolution of the internet as “Web 2.0.” This new web generation holds great promise for a stream of innovative new solutions that will redefine the extent to which the internet is integrated into daily life. “Aided by faster broadband connections, consumers are using the web more than ever and are publishing their own content to it in droves. At the same time, the web is morphing into a platform for applications that once existed only on computers – such as marketing and customer support tools for businesses – and providing a new distribution for products” (Bazeley 2005).

The exuberance resulting from this success has certainly not come without cost. The 1990s produced a glut of dot-com