What's up with those British red telephone booths?

Foosball tables and bean bag chairs are so Web 1.0. If you want real street cred as a tech startup or innovation powerhouse today, then you must get a British red telephone booth.

Yes, those fire truck-colored rectangle boxes with TELEPHONE scrawled across the top, right underneath a crown.

Normally, you would find the booths in Parliament Square on Great George Street in London, where tourists like this blogger (see above photo) snap endless photos of this British relic of yesteryear.

But lately, these boxes have been popping up in Silicon Valley or any corporate office that wishes to look high techy.

On a recent trip to San Francisco, where retailers like Target and Wal-Mart are trying to tap tech talent, this blogger first spotted the booth in the offices of Luvocracy, a social media/shopping startup founded by ex-Google executive Nathan Stoll and backed by venture capital heavyweight Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Two days later, this blogger noticed not one, but two booths in the offices of Wal-Mart Labs in nearby San Bruno.

And this past week, on a visit to Target Plaza Commons on Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, the blogger found….you guessed it….another red telephone box.

It might seem odd that tech startups and retailers, who are trying to develop unique mobile technologies and smartphone apps, would gravitate to something as quaint as the telephone booth.

But as the website noted: "The telephone was a marvelous technical innovation, but for that reason was very expensive, so their use in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was limited to wealthy homeowners and businesses."

Ah. So a symbol of both innovation and exclusivity. That makes some sense.

But of course, nobody really gave that explanation.

Fiona Kirkpatrick, office manager for Luvocracy, said she found the booth on Craig's List. Since the phone booth is obsolete, there are quite a few of them up for sale on the Internet, she said.

"Plus the booth looks very cool," she said.

That's probably as good of an answer as any. Like any fad, people like to copy what's cool but never admit they are copying something to be cool.

How else can we explain why exposed brick, open worktables, bean bag chairs, foosball tables, pop culture quotes, whiteboards and markers have become mandatory for any startup office?