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