Silicon Valley and its component cities are constantly reinventing themselves, and a new multipronged buzz is emerging in San Jose these days.
The city is already a place where planners use just one main portal, Team San Jose, to orchestrate their event, as opposed to dealing with venues, accommodations and everything else independently. In addition, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed is moving full steam ahead with an ambitious Green Vision, designed to establish San Jose and Silicon Valley as the world center of clean technology, not just for conventions, but for everything. Movers and shakers from every sector are also coming together and wielding Silicon Valley’s already existing collaborative spirit to transform San Jose into a worldwide leader in the intersection of art, science and technology, each intertwined through such international events like the 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge and NVISION08, the world’s first visual computing megaevent.
The nearby city of Santa Clara also puts planners right smack in the middle of the high-tech corridor, with giants Intel and NVIDIA setting up shop right in town. And like San Jose, the city is fine-tuning its green machine, not just to attract meetings and conventions but to provide a better quality of life for its residents as well.
To boot, no Silicon Valley conversation would be complete without unabashed nods to the adjacent enclaves where it all actually began, Palo Alto and Menlo Park, each of which is steeped in high-tech history and each of which provides planners with numerous options that speak for themselves.
San Jose
Team San Jose—an alliance of representatives from the San Jose CVB, plus hoteliers, concert venues, arts institutions and labor unions—functions as the main point of entry for any planner doing a meeting in San Jose. According to Dan Fenton, Team San Jose’s chairman, planners tend to appreciate this approach.
“We have a model that really gives the planner the ability, when they’re working with San Jose, to work with one person and essentially navigate everything they need,” he says. “It delivers better results for them because they’re able to essentially not get caught up in a lot of details in executing an event, but can really sit down with us and strategize on how to build audience and how to deliver their goals. And they’re dealing with one team that has access to all of it.”
In addition to Team San Jose’s model, planners also expect to experience a full-blown initiative to go green, far beyond just the feel-good stuff, both from a preconference standpoint and the conference itself. The effort includes forward-thinking methodologies on how to limit what used to be called trash, how to create compostable and recyclable materials from just about anything and how to eliminate the use of all materials that aren’t environmentally friendly.
“Frankly, we believe that’s where the future is going to be, period,” Fenton says. “We are heading in a direction where we can offer that to any client. We think that very soon, it will be the way we do business. You won’t be able to have us do it any differently.”
Green is no longer just a buzzword and such a strategy fits like a glove with Reed’s Green Vision, an ambitious 15-year plan adopted last year by the San Jose City Council to transform San Jose into a world center of clean technology innovation. For example, Reed recently challenged several Silicon Valley solar companies to come up with ways to allow homeowners to go solar without the initial thousands of dollars usually needed to get started. Surprisingly, a few companies came right back with solid, workable ideas.
San Jose also teamed up with the San Jose Mercury News and the California Newspaper Partnership last June to produce Green Fair Silicon Valley, a gathering of businesses and consumers dedicated to implementing the green machine any way they can.
“Our attendees stayed for hours,” says Nikki McDonald, the partnership’s consumer events manager. “And I saw the same people come back the next day. That you don’t see very often. So to me, that really hit home—that people were coming back and wanting to learn about it. They weren’t just saying, ‘Oh, I just wanted to know what the buzz was about.’”
And after years of joint collaboration between many different entities, the 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge launched in 2006 and then again for its second incarnation last June. San Jose, along with the Cadre Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University and the San Jose CVB, all joined forces with the corporate sponsorship of Silicon Valley powerhouses like Adobe and Cisco to promote and establish the festival as an integral part of how San Jose will be branded from now on. (See sidebar, this page.)
Meanwhile, San Jose maintains a diverse lineup of venues for gatherings, including its San Jose McEnery Convention Center, offering 425,000 square feet of meeting and exhibition space.
The city’s hotel selection is well suited to groups, with meetings-friendly properties such as Hilton San Jose, Marriott San Jose, Fairmont San Jose, Hotel Montgomery, Hyatt San Jose, Doubletree San Jose, The Saint Claire and Hotel Valencia.
One of the destination’s most unique meetings-friendly options is the newly renovated Dolce Hayes Mansion, an inviting historic property with 33,000 square feet of IACC-approved function space.
Santa Clara
While much smaller in population than San Jose, Santa Clara calls itself home to Silicon Valley heavyweights Intel and NVIDIA, as well as attractions like California’s Great America (formerly Paramount’s Great America), the area’s definitive family amusement park that also has event space.
The 10,000-square-foot Intel Museum is, however, the most “Silicon Valley” of Santa Clara’s attractions. Free and open to the public, the museum offers a wealth of constantly changing tours, exhibits and educational programs. Visitors get a behind-the-scenes look at every part of the chip-designing process, including what it’s like in the ultra-clean chip-fabrication rooms, where the human employees have to wear those now-legendary “bunny suits.”
While Intel is the world’s largest silicon chip-maker, NVIDIA has become the world leader in high-performance graphics processors and just last August staged NVISION08, the world’s first visual computing megaevent at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Just like the 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge, NVISION08 was an event that bled into a zillion different disciplines. Not just a computer science conference, a video game powwow, a corporate investor summit or a hacker symposium, it was all of the above.
According to Fenton, NVISION08, like 01SJ, completely dovetails with the branding of San Jose and Silicon Valley as a global mecca for the intersection of art and technology, a place naturally suited for such events.
“We think that’s the big buzz, and that’s what the NVISION conference does,” he says. “We’re active in it because we believe it’s the future of San Jose.”
Reed even proclaimed the week of NVISION08, Aug. 20-27, 2008, as Visual Computing Week. He declared that the Santa Clara-based company has “demonstrated the market growth and cultural shift that can happen when art and technology come together.”
And like San Jose, Santa Clara is also playing an integral role in Silicon Valley’s green transformation. Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy named Silicon Valley Power, the city’s municipal electric utility, one of its Green Power Programs of the Year. The Santa Clara Convention Center was also recently recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency at its Green Power Partnership level.
Meanwhile, the city is improving its group facility offerings with a ballroom expansion at the Santa Clara Convention Center, scheduled for completion next summer.
The city’s major meetings properties include Hyatt Regency Santa Clara and Santa Clara Marriott, both newly renovated, as well as the Hilton Santa Clara, Embassy Suites Santa Clara and Biltmore Hotel and Suites.
In addition, an ideal option for conferences and training meetings is the IACC-certified Network Meeting Center at Tech Mart, offering a variety of function spaces.
Palo Alto and Menlo Park
Entire books have been written about Palo Alto’s role in Silicon Valley history, as it was the original root from which everything else branched out. The original Hewlett-Packard garage is located here. Stanford University and Palo Alto Research Center are also here. Palo Alto’s affluent environs have made it a long-established stomping ground for upscale residents and high-tech companies alike.
East Palo Alto is also now at the forefront with the Four Seasons Silicon Valley. High rollers are consistently choosing the hotel and its restaurant, Quattro, for major rendezvous and corporate meetings. With floor-to-ceiling windows in the rooms and high-speed Internet access in the poolside cabanas, the Four Seasons has become the destination for luxury business travel, especially for extended stays.
Maria Dowd, a planner at Essex Woodlands Health Ventures in Palo Alto, says the hotel functions like a tranquil resort in the middle of bustling Silicon Valley. The facilities and amenities are overtly top-notch and state-of-the-art, but the fracas behind the scenes is completely unnoticeable.
“It just has a very calming feeling,” she says. “It’s like an oasis in Silicon Valley. It’s a mix of being highly professional, but yet it has a very cozy, warm feeling about it. The meeting rooms are always full, but you’d never even tell.”
Aside from East Palo Alto’s hot new Four Seasons Silicon Valley, Palo Alto is home to several other properties suited to groups, including landmark hotels like Dinah’s Garden Hotel, Cardinal Hotel and Crowne Plaza Cabana Palo Alto, as well as the Sheraton Palo Alto, Westin Palo Alto, Garden Court Hotel and Stanford Terrace Inn.
Menlo Park, another hidden gem in the middle of fast-paced Silicon Valley, is also steeped in history. Stanford Research Institute, now called SRI International, birthed a few generations’ worth of ideas. SRI, one of the original nodes of ARPANET, the world’s first electronic computer network and the predecessor to the Internet, continues to be one of the leading research facilities in the country.
The community’s largest hotel is the Stanford Park Hotel, which has several meeting facilities.
For More Info
Palo Alto COC 650.324.3121 www.paloaltochamber.com
Santa Clara CVB 408.244.9660 www.santaclara.org
San Jose CVB 408 408.295.9600 www.sanjose.org
San Mateo County CVB 650.348.7600 www.sanmateocountycvb.com
