In elections, some voters matter; some don't. And Hillary Clinton has just told a powerful Silicon Valley constituency — graduates of India's most prestigious technical school — that they just don't rank an in-person visit. Clinton was supposed to give a keynote speech in Santa Clara today at the Indian institute of Technology 2007 Global Alumni Forum, an event sponsored by Google, Yahoo, Cisco, and Microsoft. But earlier this week, she announced that she'd be MIA. What's she doing instead?Why, she headed off to New Orleans, where she's vying with Barack Obama for African-American votes at the Essence Music Festival. Good luck with that. Sure, Clinton's still going to address the IIT conference — by satellite. That will hardly lessen the sting for the IIT alums, a brainy group which includes venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Rajeev Motwani, the Stanford professor who advised Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And it also can't send a good message to sponsors like Google, which surely counted on Clinton's presence to score them points with the IIT engineers who make up a good portion of their staff. (Photo by Getty Images)

So you've been at Cisco for ten years and been a key player on several major deals, including the recent Web-Ex acquisition. What should you expect as an anniversary gift from the company? "A Bose noise-canceling headset. They're great for when I have to fly coach. You know we're pretty frugal around here when it comes to travel." [CNET interview with Cisco M&A head Ned Hooper]

Google pulls ahead of Cisco in the race for Silicon Valley's largest market valuation. [VentureBeat]

Earlier this month, Cisco bought Five Across, makers of social media add-on Connect Community Builder. Marc Canter of Broadband Mechanics pegs the purchase price at $25 to $30 million, which seems like much too much for a two-and-a-half-year-old startup with 1 product and 11 employees. More than meets the eye? Explain.

Science mag Nature.com says,

The Weber Shandwick takeover of Valleywag continues with WS legal practice guru Lucas Mast's report on this week's Third Thursday. In this edition of the PR and marketing talk series, PR blogger Jeremy Pepper MC'd a panel of corporate-blogging masters. If you're feeling cynical this morning, just read Lucas's three bullets and be done with it. We'll see if our boy Lucas can learn to stop paying attention to the actual talks and give us the nitty gritty, like whether someone got Steve Rubel drunk. In the meantime, Mr. Bright and Sunny pimps Third Thursday.

Even Drudge is crowing and FuckedGoogle is swearing like a sailor at a strip bar — the SF Chronicle says a whopping $500 million of California's $4-billion tax income spike for 2005 came from Google insider stock sales. Of course, a big chunk of that comes from Larry and Sergey, who dumped almost $3 billion in Google stock last year.