Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg will be able to send a personal friend request President Obama’s way tonight. You can Google it on your iPhone. Zuckerburg, Eric Schmidt, and Steve Jobs will all be meeting with the President tonight when he arrives for a visit to Silicon Valley. They’ll be discussing innovation and jobs (despite the temptation to discuss Michelle Obama’s recent statement that her girls are too young for Facebook). It’s a perfect match. Together those three companies alone have a market cap of over half a trillion dollars, and together with some of the other attendees and the companies they represent, there will be fabled amounts of money in the room.
On Friday morning, the President will be heading off to Hillsboro, Ore., where he will be visiting an Intel plant. That’s hardly just a courtesy call either, and it’s not even about the money. Mr. Obama has said that education, especially in math and science, is a high priority for his administration this year, and he wants to discuss Intel’s K-12 STEM program, which promotes science, technology, engineering, and math. Obama could just as well discuss it here.
Last month, a record 26 students from the South Bay were named as finalists in Intel’s Science Search competition, including 13 from two San Jose schools, Harker Academy and Lynbrook.
