I’m at Stanford today, not for my favorite campus skating, but for the Stanford Women In Business conference.

Morning started with the reative and fun speaker keynote fromTina Seeling (Executive Director, Stanford Technology Ventures Program). Here are my notes:

• Leverage limited resources and turn problems to opportunities

• Allow experiment & learning

e.g. free pump service asking for donation raised more money than charging the service

• Value is not only measured by money; don’t limit yourself by money

• projects that she created in her Stanford entrepreneur class:

• 10 paper clips with 4 hours
• post-notes with 4 days
• rubber band with 4 days

• her class became an international event: students around the world would take one challenge a year; some of the projects were being filed and can be found on www.imagineit.com

2nd Morning keynote speaker, Sue Gardner (Executive Director, Wikipedia. Here are my notes:

• a nice wikimedia video with nice music told us: wikipedia is a tiny organization with 21 people & one office room
• one question that I asked is: how Wikepedia can leverage Twitter? How about letting people twitter into Wikepedia directly?

Comparing with the Berkley Women In Leadership event that I went, this one has better keynote speaker session; but the workshop sessions has less choices.

Tags: live blogging, Stanford University, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, women in business

This is my afternoon live blogging at Web 2.0  expo in SF. Check out my morning web 2.0 session post too.

Here are the sessions I’m going and my notes:

Session: It’s the People, Stupid (Deborah Schultz and Brian Oberkirch)

I have to introduce Deborah a little more (I found her bio interesting)

An Internet-industry veteran and innovator, Deborah passionately believes in the power of technology to connect people, communities and business. She currently advises both start-ups and the Fortune 50 on the impact of social software on business strategy & customer relationships. She is also currently Procter & Gamble’s Strategic Adviser for Social Media and is developing a P&G Social Media Innovation Lab designed to actively explore and gain insights on the impact of the social web on business.

Previously, Deborah was Marketing Director at Six Apart, ran her own marketing consultancy firm, was a management consultant at AnswerThink and spent five years at Citibank where she developed many of the global bank’s first Internet initiatives. One of her proudest accomplishments was launching the Downtown Info Center, a lower Manhattan community center & online hub to revitalize lower Manhattan after the attacks of September 11th. Deborah is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University.

The former Manhattanite is now a tireless road warrior and can be found in SF, NYC, or Tel Aviv. But wherever she is, she’s always ‘connected’.

Interesting things from her passionate and very social/human speech:

• Break down the human factors in the social world: handshake, greeting, response, handoff, feedback, make me smarter about me

• How to bring these human factors to your web experience? Some examples are:

date stamp is a social contact (I’ll come back);

sign-in is a greeting (acknowledge me, e.g, Flickr greets people when they sign up);

give to get (make me smarter about me & you). e.g. http://www.dopplr.com/ tells where you traveled by presenting your foot prints in a nice way without you do much;

Handoff (did you know…)

Entertain me (in unusual way) e.g. etsy.com makes shopping human

meet others like you (wee this is fun) e.g. threadless

• Use “face” (image) when possible - to build human relations
• Use word differently - let people “heart” things, in stead of “favorite” (Etsy)

Tags: event, live blogging, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo

Web 2.0 Expo is in SF this week. I’m attending the Thursday sessions. Of course, I’m live-blogging - my new favorite thing to do I’m planning to have two posts (morning and afternoon sessions)

As I’m writing, do come back to check out the news that I’m adding during the day.

Quick Social Check of Web 2.0 Expo (it’s kind of interesting):

Facebook Web 2.0 Expo page shows 360 attendees so far

LinkedIn Web 2.0 Expo page shows 532 attendees & 214 interested so far

Twitter Web 2.0 Expo page shows 10669 attendees

The day started with a 2-hour keynote session from 4 speakers:

How the Web Ate the Economy, and Why This Is Good for Everyone Douglas Rushoff (Author, “Get Back in the Box”)

The Year of the Mobile Computer: Mobile Computers as Personal (Mobile) Computers Anssi Vanjoki (Nokia)

A Conversation with Ellen Miller, (Sunlight Foundation)
Keynote, Kevin Lynch (Adobe Systems Incorporated)
A Conversation with Will Wright (Electronic Arts)

What impressed me the most is still the Nokia Morph Concept Phone Video introduced by Nokida Anssi Vanjoki. It’s simple so cool and so exciting:

Tags: live blogging, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo

It sounds a very interesting topic to me: a panel of women who build, create, and work in virtual worlds. It’s organized by SD Forum Virtual Worlds SIG

Here are the panelists:

K. Estelle Dodson, NASA CoLab, on virtual worlds in science collaboration and education. Her work at NASA Ames Research Center in virtual research institutions includes telepresence, hyperwalls and meetings in Second Life and Qwaq.

Orna Michael, Arts Devt. Director at Sims Studio  at Electronic Arts, will discuss art and game development for the “Sims”, which is a simulation game of family, personal, career and personal development.

Mary Duda,  CEO/President of VirtuePlay Inc. which is releasing a game  called “The Lunar Racing Championship ” (LRC) in late Spring 2009.

Martha Russell, Associate Director of Media X at Stanford University, will discuss her experiences with remote collaboration in Qwaq Forums.

Jeska Dzwigalski (aka: Jeska Linden), manager of Customer Market Development, Linden Lab (creators of Second Life). Jeska has been a (virtual) Jill of all Trades at Linden Lab, working on everything from the new user experience to community management.

Susan Tenby, online community manager and virtual world evangelist, TechSoup Global

The room is full - we have about 70-80 people (60% women & 40% men).

The panel started with the self introduction of each panelist’s experience and what they do in their virtual world work. What impressed me the most are:

• Mary Duda: A passionate real woman entrepreneur. CEO of VirtuePlay. You can see how much she loves game. Check out the VirtuePlay Inc later in several months. They are releasing a real time simulation game using the real Moon’s data. They are partnering with NASA and their business mobile subscription based on. I can see how kids are going to go crazy with this game!
• Orna Michael: A very fun woman works at EA and the director of Sims Studio. Her work is fun - creat the games for woman. She shared with us: women who play games like changing clothes during the game; they like changing shoes really often; they like building - building a room, a garden…
• Susan Tenby: She is building a non-profit island in Second Life. They give away free offices to non-profit organizations in this island. Virtual Worlds can really help serious social causes.

It’s a fun night…

Tags: Electronic Arts, Linden Lab, live blogging, Multi-User Systems, NASA, NASA Ames Research Center, Second Life, Stanford University, Virtual reality, virtual worlds, women, women in tech, women leadership

Back in Feb, I posted one blog about Stanford Entrepreneur Week that I went. Here are more learning from Stanford eWeek with several downloads and videos:

• Quick review of the full event agenda
• Pitching & Presenting Workshop Handouts (I found this session very practical and helpful to all of us as individuals and businesses)

• What is the Next Big Thing? (It’s a fun podcast to listen to. One thing stayed with me in my head is: “think about the big problem you want to solve; create a new kind of bank!” It’s the chat between Tony Perkins, CEO of AlwaysOn; Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Director of Draper, Fisher Jurvetson; and Michael Moe, Founding Partner of ThinkEquity - discuss the evolutions in online media, the power of partnerships, and other next-generation opportunities for the global marketplace.

• Innovation as the Crux of Entrepreneurship from Stanford University President John Hennessy

Enjoy!

Tags: entrepreneur, eweek, stanford

I’m attending Annual Haas Women in Leadership Conference today at Berkeley. It’s the first time for me to sit among another 200-300 professional women, who all look nice and intelligent. I will try to make my sentences short during the day, since this audience loves talking for sure…I’m sure that it will be a very inspiring and fun day!

• Morning session started with the presentation from Judith Estrin, CEO of JLABS, around Innovation and Entrepreneur. She is the author of Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (McGraw- Hill; Hardcover, September 2008). Estrin serves on the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney Company (since 1998) and the FedEx Corporation (since 1989). Formerly, she served on the boards of Rockwell and Sun Microsystems. She also serves on the advisory boards of Stanford’s School of Engineering and Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and is a member of the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board.

• I attended two sessions in the morning:

Personal Evolution Throughout Your Career. Tips that I picked up from this session are:

Bonnie Wild (consultant, corporate director, Johnson & Johnson): Constantly build the bridge (between where you are and where you want to be); Plan! Plan! Plan!

I asked her after the session, “what’s your dream or goal in your life?”Bonnie answered immediately: “help other women. I knew that since I was 18.”

Susan Bernstein (Career Management Coach): Don’t only measure your ROI in terms of money; look at your return on your energy; Listen to the good voice from yourself (good voice feels good; bad voice feels bad); she also recommended a book “women don’t ask”.

Industry Session-Marketing. Tips that I picked up from this session:

Use your marketing skills to market yourself; when you look for a job, do some primary research around the job/company/product, not only secondary research; build your own marketing tool boxes.

The moderator, Lynn Upshaw (lecturer, Haas), opened a question to the audience, “how can you market yourself as a marketer”. My answer to the audience was: I think the best technique is to apply what we(marketers) do everyday to ourselves, which I found not many marketers do well. Create a high level of strategy for yourself, develop a list of tactics to execute your strategy -find out what your target audience is, utilize all the channels to market it all the time. One important channel is to utilize the social networking tools (Facebook, LinkedIn, meetups…).

Below is the full-day agenda in case you are interested.

Tags: entrepreneur, haas, innocation, leadership, live blogging, women, women entrepreneur, women leadership