Net Results: Things don't get much more Silicon Valley than this: a service that allows you to drop off the stuff you want to sell on eBay, and auctions it off for you. There are those who would argue that eBay itself is about as Silicon Valley as things could get (it's called eBay because it's based here, by the bay).
What is eBay if not the perfect, miniaturised, digital entrepreneurial experience? Take something, put it on the Net, sell it.
Pure, efficient, the market at its most basic, and online to boot. Cool.
But maybe you don't have time, or couldn't be bothered, to sell the things cluttering up your hall/bedroom/attic/office/ garage. Yet the cash would be nice. Now, Valley residents can resolve this stressful dilemma by going to AuctionDrop (why, of course, there's a website!). Their slogan says it all: "You drop it off. We sell it on eBay."
Four years ago, such a service probably would have appealed most to people who were working so hard in the booming Valley that they didn't have the time to do something like - well, get rid of their junk (or is that collectibles?) on eBay.
These days, the service is more likely to draw those who are flogging their personal belongings to raise some needed money in the downturn.
Maybe they're selling what they can prior to heading back to where they came from, before travelling West in search of Silicon gold.
Maybe they're trying to hold it all together while out of work, keep up the rent payments until a new job - hopefully - materialises. Maybe they're working darn hard, putting in long hours in a viciously downsized company.
The Valley continues to ache with post-dotcom misery. A staggering 196,200 jobs have been lost in this area in the past three years. The San Francisco and San Jose daily papers, once full of chirpy stories about youthful millionaires and their whimsical dotcom work environments, now routinely run self-help sagas about how those out of work for months, or years, are filling their time.
In the Valley, the long-term unemployed are increasingly those with white, not blue, collars.
Even those who exited jobs with plenty of padding in their bank accounts, having scored at the Valley game of Get Rich Fast, are getting worried, moving back in with aging parents and contemplating going elsewhere. The unemployment rate for Santa Clara (the heart of the Valley) stood at 8.4 per cent in April.
While the lost-job numbers are the broad brush strokes in the overall Valley picture, it's the subtle indicators of the economic malaise that provide the revealing detail. Like traffic: one of the main Valley commuter highways shows an extraordinary 51 per cent decline in congestion since the tech implosion began in 2000; other key commuter arteries have had traffic jams decline by 21 and 17 per cent.
The number of passengers who arrived at or departed from San Jose International Airport is the lowest since 1998, a 7.7 per cent decline over last year. Freight shipments through the airport, perhaps a more meaningful indicator, are even worse - 36.3 per cent down on last year.
Bankruptcy filings are at their highest in four years, up 16 per cent on the same period in 2002. Home sales are down 4.6 per cent, while hotel occupancy rates are a lowly 48.2 per cent.
But it's not all grim. The little details also reveal that, as in any good painting, much more is happening that initially meets the eye, with the really interesting bits off in the corners. For example, building approvals are up 75 per cent on last year.
New business applications are also up - only 0.2 per cent, but hey, they show some entrepreneurs are coming up for air again.
And in May (the most recent month for which a broad range of Valley statistics were compiled), the index measuring the stock performance of the Valley's top 150 companies, maintained by the San Jose Mercury News, rose for the sixth time in eight months, with May up 14 per cent on April.
On the glass half full side, the roads have less traffic and there's plenty of office space available, at far lower rents than in the past, if you do have a start-up looking for a home.
And on the much lighter side, I enjoyed a Mercury News story this week about the song that made San Jose's name (and taught millions how to pronounce it correctly) - Hal David and Burt Bacharach's lovely little Do You Know the Way to San Jose. Released in 1968 - three years before the term "Silicon Valley" was coined - the song climbed the charts for Dionne Warwick.
Since then, it's appeared on 97 albums and has been recorded by Nancy Sinatra, Neil Diamond, Percy Faith, the Boston Pops Orchestra, the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Baja Marimba Band, amongst others.
According to the piece, the now-82-year-old Hal David says Bacharach wrote the melody first, and the ditty about finding one's way back to San Jose came to David afterwards. He was familiar with San Jose from visits during the second World War, when he was a soldier posted to a military base in Monterey (along one of those highways that is now so less congested).
By 1968, San Jose was one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. I remember this because my father mentioned that factoid nearly every time we drove through or around it on the Valley's growing network of freeways.
I was a young child then and San Jose was on our way to holidays at the beach from our home in Palo Alto.
I would gaze longingly out the window of our Ford station wagon as we whizzed past the fruit stands and orchards that lined the roads around the city then - few words can be more tempting than "fresh cherries!" and "juicy peaches!" painted crudely on a wooden sign in the dry heat of a California summer.
To me, San Jose was synonymous with luscious fruits, always desired and never received.
I suppose that is what it must still be like to all those people out of jobs, whose hopes crashed before they could cash out. I don't know if anyone these days would say, like Dionne, that they were "going back to find some peace of mind in San Jose".
But the region has its own odd allurements and always, always that extraordinary promise.
The fruits are there and, who knows, you might well be the one that gets them the next time round.
Karlin's tech weblog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103966
