Silicon Valley Techies Fight to Save a Popular but Illegal Haven

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

The Hacker Dojo, a work space for technology entrepreneurs. It is inexpensive and popular but doesn't meet code.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Hacker Dojo is equal parts shared office, lecture hall and after-hours salon for a variety of tinkerers, software coders and entrepreneurs who intend to reinvent the future. The idea for Pinterest was cooked up here. The makers of Pebble watches used the space as their West Coast headquarters. Today, however, it is threatened with extinction. City officials in Mountain View have ordered Hacker Dojo to comply with city regulations for offices or move out.

And so the inhabitants of the cavernous warehouse in a city of office complexes have found themselves scrambling to raise money, not for their start-ups, but to save their start-up space. A Kickstarter campaign to raise money expires Friday. (Contribute $256 and get “a box of hacker stuff.”) They have already held a charity run through Mountain View - in their underwear. A continuing charity auction offers, among other things, sex advice and financial tips for start-ups.

The Dojo is an example of the new work spaces that underlie the start-up culture of Silicon Valley. Coffee shops around here can be packed with coders, huddled over glowing Macs for hours at a time. Technology incubators are sprinkled across the valley, but getting into the hottest ones can be as hard as getting into business school; besides, many of them, like Y-Combinator, just down the road from here, extract equity in the start-up in return.

Some shared offices are upscale, providing on-site bookkeepers and full-service cafes. And then there are hacker spaces like this, with distinct identities of their own. Noisebridge in San Francisco calls itself a “space for artistic collaboration and experimentation”; Ace Monster Toys in Oakland offers a laser cutting machine.

The Dojo is among the largest and fastest-growing of these shared hacker spaces. It has leased 13,000 square feet of abandoned warehouse, though it is currently permitted to use barely two-thirds of it. You'll find the usual office supplies: staplers, printers and copy machine.

But in the pink-painted electronics room, you'll find a brand new three-dimensional printer and trays full of diodes and silicon chips. Perks also include a bike rack, high-speed Internet, a cabinet of cellphones on which to test out applications and, on evenings and weekends, classes on things as diverse as patent law and machine-learning. Inside, Tim Sears is building a mobile application to let consumers compare grocery store prices. V. S. Joshi has spent the day at a library table upstairs, refining a Facebook tool for dating. At sundown, Chris Agerton ambles in; he is designing what he calls a “wearable polygraph test.”

The Dojo charges members $100 a month.

“We pride ourselves on our community,” said Katy Levinson, a robotics engineer who now works full time to raise money for the Dojo. “It's more fraternity dues than rent.”

The warehouse used to be a stained-glass factory, and some of the old samples still shimmer on the walls. What it does not have, according to city officials, are things that would make it an office. It doesn't have enough fire exits, sprinklers or wheelchair-accessible bathrooms, as required by city regulations. “If they can't comply, they can't use the building as they want to,” said Anthony Ghiossi, the chief building official for the city.

Hacker Dojo opened without a permit, Mr. Ghiossi pointed out. It is currently prohibited from hosting events that draw more than 49 people in any one room, he said. That means no large classes or overly enthusiastic happy hours, which are a regular feature on Friday nights.

Ellis Berns, the city's assistant community development director, was eager to point out that Mountain View, which is home to tech giants like Google, did not wish to evict Hacker Dojo. “We try to be as supportive as we can,” he said. “Businesses spin out of there. We are not at all interested in them closing down.”

But retrofitting the space will cost upward of $250,000, according to the Dojo's estimate. It has so far raised $173,000, including donations from its neighbor, Google.

Its members say they treasure it for its network of like-minded technologists as much as for the equipment and spare parts.

Mr. Joshi, the dating-app maker, comes every day to sit upstairs at that long library table, with mismatched chairs and a view of an oak tree outside the window. Some of his partners have day jobs; they come when they can. “I found my graphic designer over here. I found a database consultant here. You meet different people with different skills,” he said.

Mr. Sears stumbled into the Dojo soon after he moved to nearby Palo Alto two years ago and attended a machine-learning class. He considered working at home but found it isolating. “Just the environment is vastly more stimulating,” he said.

Once he looked up from his makeshift cubicle and asked for tips on where to find an FTP server to ferry large files. “A guy down the hall set it up,” he said. “It took about five minutes.”

Coming Soon, Google Street View of an Arctic Village

Google

Karin Tuxen-Bettman, above, captures images of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, with a Google Street View tricycle.

OTTAWA - There are no cars in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Aside from a few trucks, snowmobiles are the preferred form of transportation for much of the year in the hamlet high in the Canadian .

And given that only 1,477 people live in Cambridge Bay, and that the population lives on about a quarter of a square mile, probably no part of it is unknown to its residents.

All that would suggest that Google Street View has limited value there. But a pitch to from an Inuit man brought a tricycle fitted with Google's camera system to the streets of Cambridge Bay on Monday as part of what the company expects to become a long-term project in Canada's Far North.

The Inuit man, Chris Kalluk, said he approached Google with the idea of bringing Street View to the Arctic last year as a way to educate the rest of the world about the region. “People that have never been in the north, past trees, in communities you can only get to by airplanes; they just don't know,” Mr. Kalluk said by telephone from Cambridge Bay, where he has lived most of his life. “They wonder if we live in igloos and travel by dog team. I spoke with an elder the other day who said that the land belongs to all the people, so everyone should be able to see it.”

Fishing and hunting trips, often covering long distances, remain an important part of life for the Inuit in Cambridge Bay, or Ikaluktutiak as its known in the native Inuinnaqtun language. But because magnetic compasses do not work in the far north, paper maps were rarely used for navigation in the past.

“People got around by recognition,” said Mr. Kalluk, 28, who is a geographical information systems coordinator for Nunavut Tunngavik, an organization that manages land claim settlements between the Inuit and the federal government and runs wildlife management programs.

The arrival of GPS, which is unaffected by the magnetic pole, has now made maps, digital and otherwise, a fixture in the lives of hunters and fishermen.

Nevertheless, Mr. Kalluk said that while he was dealing with Google, he had to educate the other residents of Cambridge Bay about Street View. While the Internet came to the community several years ago, it is a relatively low-bandwidth satellite connection. Mr. Kalluk said that if just one person watched an online video, the rest of the community was temporarily shut out of the Web. As a result, he said, most residents stay away from image-laden online applications like Street View.

Mr. Kalluk proposed the northern excursion to Karin Tuxen-Bettman, a geostrategist with the Google Earth Outreach, a branch of the company that develops projects with nonprofit groups. Last August, Ms. Tuxen-Bettman led a group that created Street View images of some of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil. “It was very exciting,” Ms. Tuxen-Bettman said of the meeting with Mr. Kalluk. “What place is as different and the opposite extreme to the Amazon as the Arctic?”

Currently the most northern place available on Street View is Deadhorse Airport near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. While it sits about one degree of latitude farther north than Cambridge Bay, it is far less isolated and is connected by a road to the south.

Because Cambridge Bay can be reached only by air or, for a few weeks in the summer, by barge, using one of Google's camera cars to photograph the community was quickly ruled out.

“A car seemed like overkill,” Ms. Tuxen-Bettman said.

Ms. Tuxen-Bettman said that it would take several months for Google to process the final street view images, a step that involves, among other things, blurring out faces. The trip to Cambridge Bay will create a higher amount of blurring than normal. The trike has generally been followed by a small army of children on their own bicycles while making its rounds.

F.T.C. Ends Investigation on Facebook-Instagram Deal

After months of anticipation, Facebook is now closer to completing its takeover of Instagram, the popular photo-sharing application.

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it had closed its investigation on the proposed acquisition. Facebook now faces a fairness hearing on the transaction next week. While the hearing cannot technically stop the deal from closing, objections may push back the final closing date. Facebook previously said it expected the deal to close by the end of this year.

“We are pleased that the Federal Trade Commission has cleared the transaction after its careful and thorough review,” Facebook said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Instagram deal, brokered in April, was once trumpeted as Facebook's first billion-dollar deal. However, the transaction, which includes $300 million in cash and about 23 million shares, is now worth far less, in the wake of Facebook's rapid decline in the public markets. Based on Wedn esday's closing price of $19.44, the deal is now worth about $747 million.