Results tagged “alex tcherkassky” from Capitol Valley

Ok, I admit it. I've been bad.

Our last entry was in October of 2008. It's...April of 2009. Bad.

What happened? Well, last May, I began a stint at Communications Daily, during which I was not permitted to compete with my own employer, which publishes a series of daily newsletters that aren't quite the same as what Alex and I had going here, but similar enough in subject matter that things were a bit...awkward. I left CommDaily after about six great months to begin law school, and sporadically thought about doing something to this site and returning it to it's "glory days."

Alex, family man that he is, had a whole other set of things to fill his time, including a move and another new job. But he's not as guilty as I am.

I intend to do something with this site again one day. But right now, I've been involved in a far more exciting project.

Since January, I've been lucky enough to be working with Drew Clark, a veteran DC telecom journalist in building a news operation at Broadband Census, where we're following the Broadband Stimulus package, privacy, telecommunications policy, pretty much anything broadband. And while admittedly it isn't as fun doing "straight news" as it is blogging, it's not that bad.

Anyway, I'll be returning to the Tech Policy Summit in a few weeks to report for Broadband Census, but will have myriad pictures and multimedia content to go with it that may go along with my reporting, or may go here.

But I intend to do something meaningful with this place.  Any suggestions, let me know.

--Andrew

Alex and I will be live, for one hour, tonight at 10:30 PM EST / 7:30 PM PST. We'll talk about SXSWi, how awesome we are, and how cool anyone who listens to us is. Also other stuff.

I see that already the much imitated, never duplicated Robert Scoble has a very flattering write-up of a very informative meeting we had last night in downtown SF. I was going to wait to see what he has to say about it, and he's definitely got a complete lock-down of what I think on the subject.

If this is the first time you're hitting the site, here's the deal: so much of what goes on in Silicon Valley is totally dependent on the goodwill and lack of oversight of a 535 old men and women in a town several thousand miles away who, given a reason to get on their soapbox, could cut the entire industry (which is a driving force behind the U.S.'s economy) down at its knees.

As I told Robert, the tech industry just doesn't care about Washington until they're being screamed at by a bunch of old men in an ornate room and they see their Venture Capital or Market Cap go through the floor. And when the old men start looking at you funny, bad things happen.

I'm going to be posting in the next several days a series of fictional "case studies" on companies that have done wrong, could be doing wrong, and how they could do right and either dig themselves out of the hole they're in, or keep themselves from putting the shovel in the ground in the first place. You'll also see my plan for how the little guys and the big guys can stop trying to kill each other just long enough to keep the old white guys off their backs. It's never happened before, but that's because as Robert puts it,

"Because we don't care."

You should care, and I think by the time this is all over, you will.

So I don't need to tell you there's some good stuff on the way, so please watch this space. I'm heading back to the east coast within the next few hours and then I'll be able to better keep up on what's going on in DC as it happens instead of from a 3 hour time lag.

Hopefully I can catch a webcast of the FCC's do-nothing meeting on Monday and report from there, as well as get some other cool stuff out onto the tubes for your discussion.

Disagree? Shout loudly. I encourage it.

See you from back in DC.

Capitol Valley is a multimedia venue for all things technology and policy, with a focus on how the two are connected.  One major goal is to impress upon Silicon Valley, land of technology and home of the many startups that drive a massive economic engine, that what happens inside the Beltway matters to them.  Of equal importance is demystifying the goings on of both so that the average citizen can see how the two, the Capitol and the Valley, impact their lives on a daily basis.

The people who write and read here really dig this stuff and hope that they successfully walk the tightrope of simultaneously entertaining and informing you on serious subjects while not taking themselves too seriously.

So, who are these guys, anyway?

• Andrew Feinberg has been around technology since receiving his first family computer in 1992 (and subsequently "customizing" it) and into tech policy since his stint as a Debian GNU/Linux developer during the Linux boom of the late 1990s. Eventually, Andrew figured out he couldn't code very well, but couldn't quite break that obsession with computers, networks, and how they affect law and society.  In 2005, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where in addition to spending three years on the mens' Varsity Rowing Team, he wrote one of his two senior capstone papers on the history of technology with special regard to the chilling effects of poorly conceived intellectual property and copyright
  law, particularly the Audio Home Recording Act.   After founding Capitol Valley in early 2008, Andrew took a brief break from blogging to learn some real journalism at Warren Communications News as an assistant editor for Communications Daily and Washington Internet Daily. An avid (and allegedly capable) photographer, Andrew often supplements his writing and live-blogging with pictures, and his enthusiastic event coverage, once described by CongressDaily's Andrew Noyes as "snapping photos like a paparazzo who had just witnessed Britney's emergence from the psych ward" has been featured in National Journal's Tech Daily Dose as well as other popular publications and blogs.  Most photos he takes can be found here for use under Creative Commons license terms.

Besides his technological and legal interests as an undergraduate, Andrew has taken graduate coursework in Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, with subjects such as the legislative process and public policy formation and implementation, including authoring a policy formation paper on the history of the FCC's print-broadcast cross-ownership rules. In addition, Andrew completed AU's 2007 Public Affairs and Advocacy Institute, and currently studies law at the Catholic University of America.

This base of knowledge acquired over a decade of hobby and study allows him to write and analyze  the goings on of not only K Street, Capitol Hill and agencies like the FCC, but to also write about them in a way that the "geeks" out west can understand and hopefully spur better dialog between all parties. Andrew is always open to new ideas and projects, and would love to hear from you about anything that you think he might want to collaborate with you on. He can be contacted at 301-637-0219 and tries to answer every call, but rest assured he will also read and answer every email you send him. If you really want to get his attention, send your message directly to him by courier along with a cold case of Diet Coke, in 12oz glass bottles, if you can find them.

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• Alex Tcherkassky, who also grew up in the Washington, DC area, and over the years has worked in the consumer wireless field on both coasts, having been with Sprint both before and after their 2005 merger with Nextel.  After a stint in sales and support at TeleNav, Alex has returned to the mobile phone industry as sales management, fighting evil one satisfied customer at a time.
  

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