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

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

I had chance to ask John W. Thompson a question during his recent speech in Silicon Valley. Before I get into my question and his answer, it’s relevant to look at who he is.

By now, a lot of people know who is John W. Thompson, as a business leader, a social figure and a potential candidate for the Commerce secretary post in the Obama administration. Here is the quick overview I found about him from Google search’s first page:

• Based on Wikipedia, “John W. Thompson (born April 24, 1949) is a former vice-president at IBM and the current Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Symantec Corporation. Thompson is currently the only African American leading a major technology company.”  In September 2002, Thompson was appointed to the National Infrastructure Advisory Committee (NIAC) which makes recommendations regarding the security of the critical infrastructure of the United States.
• He is board member of Symantec Corporation, UPS, Seagate Technology, Florida A&M University Cluster, Illinois Governor’s Human Resource Advisory Council, and Teach for America
• He is seen as one of the best SEOs in Silicon Vally. He has transferred Symantec to a multibillion-dollar security software juggernaut
• Forbes published his pay as CEO
• Answers.com has some interesting highlights of John’s career and personal life
• He is named one of Digital 50 by Times. And the best line mentioned on Times is “The real issue here is the degree to which I’m able to help the team at Symantec and the shareholders of Symantec. If we do well there, then perhaps that is an indication to all that the color of your skin has absolutely nothing to do with your capability to perform.”
• HIDDEN TALENT: Initially he was a music major and plays clarinet. Another quote that I personally like is “”Philosophically, I believe that business is personal, that if you don’t take it personally, you won’t get anything out of it. If you don’t get personally involved in what you get done–if you’re not emotionally committed to it–it’s unlikely that you’re going to have a high degree of success.”
• You can find some videos of his talk at Stanford in 2003
• Here is the collections of some quotes that he has given

The more I learn about him from so many pieces of information, the more I see him as a regular guy like us. What made him unique is that he is so confident and comfortable about who he is. He pursued what he wanted to accomplish while keeping his own true “color” - who he is. This sounds easy, but it is not.

Now, let’s come back to the question that I asked him during his speech:

I asked him: what was or is your dream? has it changed?

He looked at me across the crowd, and said, after 4 seconds of thinking: Well, I looked at my manager and said to myself “I think I can do that as well”. And I did. Then I looked at my other manager and asked myself again, “Can I do her/his job”? I did it again.

He smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

Tags: career, career goal, John W. Thompson

The power of free data and the power of API:

Amazon’s “newest project Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services began offering more than 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) of fascinating public data for developers to access on the fly through Amazon’s cloud computing service.”

New York Times is making its huge database accessible to the developer community and bringing developers together for Times Open, the publication’s inaugural API seminar.

We have seen this free data and API trend across all industries inluding education and government. I am a big fan of free data - no body owns any particular data; it’s how the data is being used matters.

The free data and API somehow reminds me one practice from Dao - you don’t control anything; you simply be with it.

Tags: amazon, api, developers, new york times

During the weekend, I went to one event as part of the Stanford Entrepreneur Week. Most of the events are free. If you are interested in anything related to startups or entrepreneur, do check it out. It is a good event to learn, share and network with people in the entrepreneur fields of business and research.

The event I went is “Pitching and Presenting Workshop: How to Make Your Story Compelling”. The material from the workshop and presentation was nothing new, but very practical. What amzaed me is the fact that there are so many people are interested in “pitching”, yet there are few people who really knows how.

Here are my key learning that I would like to share from my own experience:

• Pitching happens every day on almost everything we do.

Pitching is not only a business activity. It happens at work, at home, at movie theatre, among colleagues, between wife and husband, among friends, online and offline…You and your friend were discussing if they would all go to the movie you want, it’s a pitch. Your husband or wife wants to buy a Graco car seat versus a Chicoo brand, it’s a pitch. You have an innovative idea on how to improve one project and you need to get your boss’ buy in, it’s a pitch. You run into a person at a bar, who could be your potential client, and you want him/her have more interests in your offering, it’s a pitch…

• Practice your pitch skills when ever you can.

With your wife, your boss, your colleagues, or someone you run into at a bar…

• Develop your pitch on your own brand - who you are - and always keep it in your back pocket

Have a short 2-3 sentence long pitch around your self: who you are, what you do, what might be interesting to your audience at the time. I found this tactic really helpful. It’s like the real and juicy inside-content of your “business card”, that helps others to know about you and what you do as a real person.

• Other common successful pitch elements:

The workshop summarized 3 main tips on how to create a compelling pitch from business perspective:

1. what’s the problem you are trying to solve
2. why it matters /why it is a problem
3. how you are going to solve the problem and why it’s different

I broadened these tactics to the general use for our day-to-day activities, not only business activities. The methods is actually quite simple: make it interesting to your audience at the time and keep it short.

Tags: entrepreneur, event, pitch, stanford, story telling

Sequoia Capital recently made a presentation to its portfolio companies. Not sure how real this presentation is, but it’s interesting to take a look.

Tags: entrepreneur, vc, venture capital