• Palo Alto Power Outage Affects Up To 240 Startups

    Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

    The tragic plane crash which killed three Tesla employees flying out of the Palo Alto airport at approximately 8 AM this morning also took out the city’s power.  The accident has left over 28,000 Palo Alto residents and businesses without power in the heart of Silicon Valley.

    According to the data in CrunchBase, up to 240 of these 28,000 customers are local startups, VC firms and other companies which include the likes of Facebook, Socialtext, Tapulous, and VMWare.  (The TechCrunch office is also out of power).

    The interactive map below will give you an idea of who else is affected by the outage. We arrived at this estimate by looking at companies who are within a 1.5 mile radius of the middle of Palo Alto; thus encompassing most of the city. Although this is not a perfect number (some companies shown might have power, while omitted companies may not), it is a rough estimate of which startups might be without power.  There is no current estimate for when power will be restored, but the last estimate, as of 930 AM PST, was 5:30 PM PST.

    Startups have reacted differently to the outage. While many have moved to nearby coffee shops, such as Starbucks, in order to have access to Wi-Fi, some are simply working from home (assuming they live outside of Palo Alto). A few outliers are taking the day off and enjoying the warm California sun.

    If you were affected by the power outage, let us know how you’re dealing with the situation in the comments section below.

    Company: Facebook
    Website: facebook.com
    Launch Date: February 1, 2004
    IPO: NASDAQ:FB

    Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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    Company: Tapulous
    Website: tapulous.com
    Launch Date: February 2008
    Funding: $2.8M

    Tapulous is a developer of applications for the iPhone and Android platforms. Some of their apps include Tap Tap Revenge (the sequel to Tap Tap Revolution), Twinkle (a Twitter client) and Collage (a real-time collaborative photo sharing application) and the newly launched Riddim Ribbon.

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    Company: VMware
    Website: vmware.com
    Launch Date: 1998
    IPO: NYSE:VMW

    VMware, Inc. provides virtualization solutions. Its virtualization platform products include Player that enables individuals to run virtual machines on their desktops; Fusion, a desktop virtualization product for users of Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers; Workstation for software developers and enterprise IT professionals; Server, which enables virtual partitioning of a server; ESX Server, an enterprise-class virtualization platform that runs directly on the hardware; Virtual SMP that enables a virtual machine to use four physical processors simultaneously; and VMFS, which allows multiple...

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