A friend just shared a video with me. All I can say is “Wow”! It is really inspiring to look at how new technology is being developed. Here is a new Sixth Sense mobile technology from MIT Media Lab. No words can explain it better than seeing it. Enjoy

Tags: Media lab, MIT, mobile, technology, TED

Five towns in California and four on New York’s Long Island have made it into the top 10 wealthiest towns in America, according to a recently released list from BusinessWeek.

I’m not sure if what this data means to business, but it’s simply interesting to know:

Tags: business week, wealthiest town

Such a funny video about Twitter:

A young man struggles against the pressure to Twitter his life away. From: “SuperNews!” An animated sketch comedy series airing on Current TV. Every Friday night at 10 PM ET/PT.

Tune in and twit it

Tags: social network, Twitter

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

Here is my weekly wrap up around the online market research and trends:

February’s top 50 web properties: Romance, Taxes & Hulu from comScore

• This is really lovely and encouraging (especially in the economy like now): “Valentine’s Day was a key driver of online activity in February;
• What’s surprising to me is: Hulu, the online video joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp., surged 55% to 7.8 million unique visitors in February
• Traffic to tax sites surges as tax season continues
• Bargain hunters seek budget travel deals

Up and Downs of Big Brands

• according to CoreBrand, Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson have maintained the #1 and #2 spots on a list of top companies with the most “Brand Power” in the US
• JApple continues to grow its corporate brand and now ranks at #91, up from #119 in 2007 and #128 in 2005
• Credit card company brands are improving: Visa is now #23, up from #36 in 2007 and #44 in 2005; MasterCard is #31, up from #44 in 2007 and #57 in 2005, and American Express is #11, up from #13 in 2007 and #16 in 2005
• Starbucks had a notable loss as it dropped from #10 in 2007 to #14 in 2008
• PepsiCo has been dropping at an alarming rate and has gone from #4 in 2005 to #11 in 2007 and to #18 in 2008
• General Electric is losing steam, dropping from #12 in 2005 to #17 in 2007 to #24 place in 2008
• Procter & Gamble has dropped steadily from #31 in 2005 to #39 in 2008
• General Motors has fallen steadily from #30 in 2005 to #41 in 2008
• The full report can be downloaded as PDF

Hitwise: online search queries get wordier

Generations Online in 2009 Report from Pew Internet

No surprise: social is the main activity that young generation are living with online

Tags: American Express, Coca-Cola, ComScore, Hulu, internet trends, market intelligence, market trends, NBC, NBC Universal, Procter & Gamble, Valentine's Day

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

One true and beautful thing about working on the websites is that you can let your imagination fly and do a lot of possible crazy or cute things.  I was reading Nokia Lab’s articles and found one page interesting enough to share with you.

Business Case: Nokia Lab has a beta database that failed one time. The situation impacted a lot of users who were using that database. Of course, that was a very bad experience and definitely bad impact on Nokia’s brand.

How Nokia reacted to this: They published one article about the problem the next day explaining the cause of the problem and they apologized. The article’s title stated clearly “my deepest and most sincere apologies”.

How they communicated this out: let a sorry dog tell visitors how sincerely they apologized

Result: The comments on this page show a strong positive feedback. This is how you can handle a bad situation with creative idea and even turn it into a good experience. Well done!

Tags: communication, creative, design, nokia

I watch Amazon. What caught my attention this week is that Amazon asked users to vote on “What ZIP code should AmazonFresh deliver to next?”

AmazonFresh is Amazon’s grocery delivery service in Seattle area.

Tags: amazon, crowd sourcing

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