Oakland Focus News | Oakland News Online Blog

Arrington and Carol Bartz New York, NY - (Zennie62's trip to TechCrunch is sponsored by Christine Smith Associates, Inc. , the Premier Female Contractor in NYC.) Yahoo!'s CEO Carol Bartz is known via Fake Carol Bartz on Twitter for getting off the occasional "F-bomb." But even with that, one doesn't actually expect a person to live up to a Twitter persona created by someone else. Not the case with Carol Bartz; she did. Bartz, who's taken a beating from a very critical Michael Arrington in TechCrunch, walked into what TechCrunch Co-Editor Eric Shoenfeld called "the lion's den" and talked with Michael for 25 minutes. While we have the entire 25 minute interview, this exchange on video was the talk of TechCrunch Disrupt and served to solidify Carol Bartz' combative reputation. To set the stage, Arrington was pressing Bartz on the idea that the best companies are often "single-revenue-source" producers, and was implying...

To characterize Oakland Mayor's Race Green Party candidate Donald Macleay as upset that U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein (D - California) endorsed former California State Senator and Oakland Mayor's Race candidate Don Perata for Mayor, is an understatement. Donald Macleay, who I now give the name "Donny Mac," and who I interviewed here .... ...is just plain pissed off. Macleay fired off this hot letter to me just 10 minutes ago and that I'm about to present to you for inspection below. Indeed, Don sent the letter to a number of media people, which means he really was hopping mad over the issue and wanted to pick a fight or draw attention to himself or some combination of both. That's politics. It's also necessary. The problem Donald Macleay has is he's a "Don" like Perata, so his name gets lost in the sea of Don. Call this a scream for help from someone lost on a castaway island in Oakland politics. Donny Mac's competing in...

In a great online video Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland's President & CEO, Bertram Lubin, MD, talked about why parents should bring their kids to Children's Hospital. He says the main reason is "You get a feeling of warmth. That you're around people who care about your children. The children are why we are here." In all, Children's Hospital has 58 videos in its well-designed YouTube channel . What's missing is a link to a blog where the videos can be housed in an online publication. In this way the videos can have another source of viewers and not just the channel itself. The channel also needs to group the videos in playlists. I could go on, but the videos themselves are excellent. The videos come together to show and tell a compelling story about a great environment for both parents, kids, and employees. And as a note to Children's Hospital, my request to be a friend on YouTube is still outstanding; friend...

Sunshine The Clown  The month of June means San Francisco Festival Season and that means events like The Union Street Festival and San Francisco institutions like The San Francisco Sunshine Flower Girl. The San Francisco Sunshine Flower Girl , is "Sunshine The Clown" and appears at San Francisco festivals from Union Street and the North Beach Festival, to The Folsom Street Fair. But one thing happened at Union Street last year which should not happen to the San Francisco Sunshine Flower Girl: harassment from so-called festival representatives. What the San Francisco Sunshine Flower Girl is make flower balloons for money, and not a lot. But the nature of what Sunshine The Clown does such that she's mobile. Asking Sunshine The Clown to get some kind of festival booth permit, which runs into the thousands in some cases, is anti-business. The San Francisco Sunshine Flower Girl should be hired by the festival producer to add to the ambiance of the event. Let...

YouTube turns 5 years old and this is my third installment to celebrate YouTube's fifth birthday.  This blog post presents the video called Y ouTube Turns 5: My YouTube Story . For me, all of this started when I was using a camcorder at the 2006 NFL Draft and interviewed my friend Oakland Raiders Legend and Stanford Hall of Famer Michael Dotterer as we were walking to 21 Club restaurant in New York City. On the way, Michael said "you're a vlogger, You should start video-blogging" or words to that effect. He also mentioned an online show called Rocketboom.   That was here : Later that year I was lucky enough to attend Vloggercon in San Francisco, and met a lot of interesting people including Irina Slutsky and Schlomo Rabinowitz, who produced the event : The stars of Vloggercon were Amanda Congdon and Andrew Michael Baron the founders of Rocketboom. While not YouTube stars, Amanda and Andrew's daily video news show with videos hosted on their ow...

This blogger just received a letter from an unnamed source and written by Jeff Leung of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in San Francisco that announces a formal economic relationship between Hong Kong and The United States beneficial to California wine makers. The bottom line is that for winemakers in America, and particularly in California, Hong Kong has made doing business there much easier. US wine exports to Hong Kong totaled $49 million in 2009-2010. The U.S. is Hong Kong's fourth largest wine importer; America wants to be number one. The Secretary of Commerce of the United States, Gary Locke, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Hong Kong Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development, Rita Lau, in Hong Kong. The "Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in Wine-related Businesses" (MOU) was signed between Hong Kong and the United States on Monday, May 17, 2010. Because of the MOU, Hong Kong will facilitate in the pairing of wines with regi...

BRT Along Geary in San Francisco  AC Transit has embarked on a program to construct Bus Rapid Transit in Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro and the East Bay. Bus Rapid Transit is best described as combining the "dedicated lane" advantages of light rail systems with the cheaper equipment purchase and maintenance costs of buses to have a new kind of urban transit system. Bus Rapid Transit has become "the thing" Worldwide; there are scores of examples of successful programs and systems. While AC Transit has worked for four years to advance Bus Rapid Transit, the latest round of voting by elected officials in Berkeley proves that more education is required. In Berkeley, the City Council was under the impression Bus Rapid Transit would harm deliveries to businesses along Shattuck Avenue. In the last blog post this blogger presented a photo where a Bus Rapid Transit system was in the middle of Shattuck Avenue and asked how such a configuration would harm busine...