LinkedIn hosts President Obama; Google Now a Teen

Every week, Mountain View makes news with technology developments, discoveries and sometimes controversies.

Today, Mountain View Patch brings you “Bits and Bytes,” where we’ll relay the past week’s news highlights from our backyard giants, start-ups and small businesses alike.

Professional networking site, LinkedIn hosted President Barack Obama’s town hall meeting at Computer History Museum in Mountain View on Monday, Sept. 26. Mr. President primarily talked jobs and “putting people back to work,” highlighting the various facets of his $447 billion job creation plan, the American Jobs Act.

While the President was in Silicon Valley, he kicked off his West Coast fundraising tour with a small dinner at Atherton home of Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook which came with a price tag of $35,800 per couple. Among attendees was Lady Gaga, who made a notable entrance in an eight-foot-tall costume, and spent eight minutes with the President.

Mountain View-based social gaming company, studied gaming habits across 10 million users and found Zynga games rival core games in total playtime and franchise strength. The study revealed that Ville-series fans average eight quick sessions a day, Zynga top games rack up three times more hours of playtime than the rest of the top 10 social games combined, and it has one of the industry's highest conversion rates from game to game.

Provider of scalable memory arrays, Violin Memory reportedly launched industry’s first all-silicon storage systems with the reliability, performance and economics to be deployed as mission-critical primary storage. The company hopes to end the reign of mechanical storage arrays in the data center with its “Rack in a Box” approach.

Provider of business and financial management solutions to small and mid-sized businesses, Intuit, showed off new mobile tools for small businesses during its Innovation Gallery Walk. The highlights included Quickbooks Mobile which allows users to track estimates, invoices, sales and receipts; Online Payroll that can handle both hourly and salaried employees in three steps; and GoPayment which can now be used in conjunction with a debit card.

Google plans to invest over $200 million in infrastructure to build its first data centers in Asia. The tech giant has reportedly bought land in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Also this week, the Internet search engine, Google became a teenager and doodled itself some birthday fun to mark the occasion.