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Day 7:

            Today we returned Home and our trip concluded, we left the hotel around 10 AM for our 1 PM 

flight from San Francisco back to Logan. I had a great trip overall, I met some really great people and made many memories and it was an experience that I will never forget. We arrived back in Logan around 10 PM and we were all exhausted and happy to be back but sad we had to leave because it was so beautiful there and it also signaled the end of our spring break. I want to thank both Professor Gibbs and Gordon for such a great trip because without them this would never have been possible, they worked very hard to make this work and I appreciate everything they did to make this week such a great time and now that it is over I can look back on this experience and have the memories and hopefully the future contacts that made this trip great.

Day 6:

               Today was the final full day of the trip, and it was an early start as we had to get to the van early at 7:30. Our first stop of the day was to Tune In radio, and they are a radio streaming company that streams over 120,000 channels globally. They have been in business for over 10 years and are thriving in their industry. Their main competition is Iheartradio and Radio.com but Tune In is doing substantially better than the other two companies and is in a good place financially. After Tune In we went to our final company stop of the trip and that was Target where we met up with a Curry Alum who currently works there, we spent about an hour or so at Target and learned a good amount of information. After that we were done for the day and had time to explore San Francisco, we first got lunch at the Marketbar and it was good but the food took forever to come and we had to rush to get to the Cruise as a result. We made it in time though to the Cruise but not before being jammed in a single car train to get there which was uncomfortable to say the least. The cruise was amazing we got to see Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge and they were both incredible sights to see and we got some good pictures too. Tomorrow marks the end of this week and this trip, I have learned so much this week and it has been a great experience and I can’t thank both professors enough for taking us it was an amazing week in the Valley. 

Day 5:

               Today marks the second to last full day on the trip as the week winds down and we get closer to Saturday when we leave and go back home. Today we visited two major companies and they were Facebook and Apple, we got to Apple around 9:30 and stayed there until 2, while we were there we met a few different employees and one was named Jim, and his job is a consulting engineer. He told us about his background when he worked for his dad’s gas station as a kid and he also told us about the lean culture and how there are not many job titles and layers of employees. Following that we had lunch and spoke with a few other employees over lunch who gave us there stories and also we got the chance to exchange business cards. Our next stop after Apple was Facebook and before we even got to our appointment we had to deal with awful parking, there were cars parked everywhere, it was a disaster. Once we finally got in to Facebook we took a tour and Vicky was our tour guide, she took us around the campus, which looked more like a small village. The campus has a lot of things in it such as a barber shop, numerous food places and a woodshop. The campus has 8 buildings that they use for offices and they are numbered 10-18 with 13 being left out because it is unlucky. There were a few cool things at Facebook such as this brick road through this grass that lead to a coffee shop, the story is that employees would cut through the grass and destroyed the grass. Facebook’s solution was to put a brick road in and some employee painted it yellow after hours and it became the yellow brick road. Following Facebook we had a poolside with Priyanka Sharma who is the Co-Founder of WakaTime and she was very informative and gave us very good information about her company and the technology and IT parts that go into it. Overall I thought today was a successful day, my favorite trip was to Apple but the other two were good as well I thought. Tomorrow we are headed into San Francisco for the day on our final full day in the Valley. 

Day 4:

               Today was an interesting day that started off a little bit rocky, our first stop of the day was to Google where we tried to get a tour of their campus but did not have any luck. We still got to walk around the campus for a little bit before basically being thrown out by Google security which was a little disappointing but how many people can really say they got thrown out by Google. The second stop was lunch and the computer history museum which I did not get a chance because lunch went longer than expected. The next stop was to Box Fish, which is a media content company and their biggest client is Netflix. They also work with NBC, GE, and Nestle and they tripled there income last quarter alone. They are a company that seems to be on the rise and can do great things if they play their cards right. The final stop on the day was to Criteo where we met Amber Rice who was n Curry College alum who went to Curry from 1999-2003. Her position is the Executive assistant and started her career at Ebay. Criteo is an Ad targeting company, they are the ones who take something you search and make an ad in the corner of the page out of it. Something else I found interesting was Criteo started out as the French version of IMDB before coming to the United States. We also met Dennis Domingo and his position is Director of technical solutions and he previously worked at Google. The final person we talked to was Dmitri Pavlov and he is the Vice president of engineering, they all talked to us and gave us some very important information and I really liked the company. Out of all the companies we visited today I still liked Google the most because even though we didn’t have a tour it’s not every day you get to walk around Google’s campus. Tomorrow looks very exciting as we are going to Apple for a while tomorrow followed by Facebook and I cannot wait to go to both companies tomorrow.  

 

Day 3:

               Today was a very busy day, we visited four different locations, the first stop we made was at Stanford University for a tour of their campus, and the second place was the computer history museum, following that we went to Hacker DoJo and ended the day at Contastic. Stanford has 16,000 students and a beautiful campus that is very old but very nice and the school was built in 1885. The school’s tuition charge per year is $60,000 but when the school first started charging tuition in 1920 and the cost was only $140. Our tour guide’s name was Collin and he did a very good job and was very energetic and very knowledgeable about the campus and its history. The next stop was the computer history museum and only the main lobby was open but there were a few cool things such as the google car that can drive itself and the software that goes into it, also there was a multi-screen google earth exhibit that was really cool. After the museum we quickly stopped into Hacker DoJO and it is an incubator for new startup ideas, and one cool fact we learned there was the creators of Pinterest started the idea for the company there. The last stop of the day was to Contastic, I really was interested in this company, it is a startup but by looks of the company it is going to do great things, the company is a data driving sales automation and has less than 10 employees but there future looks very bright. Tomorrow is going to be a fun day with tours to Apple and Google; I am very excited to see both companies.

                                                      Picture from Stanford Campus 

Day 2:

   Today we got to tour two companies, they were VMWare and NetApp and they were both similar and different in their own ways. First was VMWare, our tour guide’s name was Jeff Goodall and he has been working there since 2006, VMWare created the ICloud with Apple and the Cloud is used as a way to store data virtually. VMWare is currently transitioning from a cloud based company to more of a service company to expand and broaden themselves more. They are a totally green company and all of their 17 buildings being built completely with recycled materials. The land that they are on is owned by Stanford University and they lease it from them. After VMWare we went and visited NetApp and our tour guide was Evelyn and Justin. They are more of a data storing company which is a little different than VMWare, NetApp was listed at #408 on the Fortune 500 Company listing, and they have 13,000 employees globally. I preferred VMWare over NetApp because I thought VMWare had a better presentation and was more personal, Jeff had so much energy and made it fun and very memorable. That is all for today, tomorrow is a little up in the air but it will be a fun day regardless.   

Blog #2

      I have a few expectations for this trip; I am very excited to see all of the companies we have been told we are going to see such as Google and Apple. I have never flown before so I am not exactly sure what to expect but I am just overall excited to experience California and sight see as well a little. I really want to tour apple and see how they run their company and how they make everything run, as well as experience the atmosphere that is Silicon Valley and see if the atmosphere is as relaxed and unique as everyone says it is. I cannot wait to get to California and take the experience in and get out of it as much as I possibly can.