Jobs, Zuckerberg, Schmidt to talk with Obama in California

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt are among the technology industry executives President Barack Obama will meet with today in the San Francisco area, according to a person familiar with the private session.

The president will discuss the US economy and job creation with the executives as he promotes the $3.7 trillion budget he released this week that aims to keep up government funding for education and research.

The White House hasn’t released the names of those who will attend. The person familiar with the meeting spoke on condition of anonymity because the details haven’t been made public.

The person said that General Electric (GE) CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who Obama picked to lead a White House council on competitiveness, also will be at the meeting.

“The focus of the discussion is innovation and job creation,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said on Wednesday. The executives attending “know a lot about private sector job growth,” he said.

“All the smart graduates today want to go to Google and Facebook instead of Wall Street,” said Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who co-founded a company that became Nextel, now Sprint Nextel. “Without innovation and a growing economy out in” Silicon Valley, “we’re not going to be competitive,” he said.

Warner, who met Zuckerberg on January 19 at Facebook’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters to discuss innovation and tax policy, said in an interview that the internet and social networking have been one of the rare areas of growth in the US economy during a decade without “a massive amount of innovation”.

Along with proposals to improve US public education, Obama’s budget includes $18 billion to build up wireless networks for emergency workers, expand access to high-speed wireless service and supplement communications research.

The initiative fleshes out a pledge he made in the State of the Union address last month to make wireless high-speed internet, or broadband, available to 98 per cent of Americans within five years as a way to accelerate economic growth and job creation.

In that address, Obama cited technology companies as the heirs to the industries that made the United States the world’s biggest economy.

“We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook,” he said. “In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.”

Warner said the executives will likely ask Obama’s help in improving the business climate in the US. That would include lowering corporate taxes, shortening the patent approval process, helping new businesses get the capital they need to launch and expand, and shortening the Food and Drug Administration approval process, he said.