Saket Vora

Yeah, I did very, very little work this weekend. On Friday, Nader and I met up briefly to talk about our circuits project, but really watched some TV and played Super Smash Brothers. Gene’s happy hour was in full swing and I joined in. There was a nice mix of people, some humanities and engineers. Veronica is a grad student in structural engineering and we talked a lot about how that applies to NGO work. She spent three months in India advising rural villages in northeast India about seismically sound structures. She’s graduating in March and will work with a locally based NGO on an eight month project in Guatemala. Simon, Luke, and I were finally able to convince Darcy (a french literature grad student) to try some Vegemite. She’s actually from the Triangle area too, so she picked up on NC State pretty fast.

On Saturday I woke up very early and went over to the SAP campus at 8:30am for the Cyber|West conference. This is the west-coast event for Harvard Business School’s Cyberposium event. Some of the discussions there were on the future of the mobile web platform, an interview with Rich Redelfs, a video from Ray Kurzweil’s keynote that was given at Harvard just a few hours before, and a panel on clean tech with cities. Some pretty neat guests and speakers were there: VP of PayPal Mobile, venture partner from Menlo Ventures, Product Manager for Google Mobile (maps and gmail), VP of AdMob, solar power consultant, VP of SAP, head of corporate environmental at Intel, and even the Mayor of San Jose. It was really interesting to hear how SAP is starting to look at ways of integrating green/clean tracking and monitoring into their venerable ERP platform, for including externalities into executive dashboard as well as compliance monitoring. These are the kinds of things that my friend Lei and I have been discussing a lot too. Tobias Dosche, of SAP, said that in the 1980s the focus was all about cutting costs, and in the 1990s it was about competitive advantage. Going ‘green’ is no longer in the realm of feel-good treehuggers. Going green for many corporate clients is now about both improving the bottom line and gaining a competitive advantage. The Mayor of San Jose explained the ‘green vision’ for his city. Very ambitious. Consider though that there are 8 known solar power companies in the Bay area — we’re talking technology firms creating new solar technology. And more are in stealth mode. Tesla Motors is here, and there is also Better Place, the electric car promoting venture by Shai Agassi, of SAP fame. His vision is to make Silicon Valley the ‘Detroit’ of the next generation of [electric] automobiles. When it comes to IT, Silicon Valley is still king. For biotech and medical devices, Boston/Cambridge is the leader. But in this emerging green/clean tech, Silicon Valley appears to be rapidly securing its leader position. The discussion on mobile web was nice, with all of the panelists criticizing the cell phone carriers for not being progressive. Their inability to work together and their over-protective mentality has resulted in an absolute nightmare of regulatory and technical redtape which is slowly the spread of a great mobile web. Verizon was deemed the worst of the major carriers. In the future, we’re going to be paying for things using cell phones. It’s commonly said that downloadable ringtones/wallpapers for your cellphone is a $2 billion business, but if you start opening transactions to things over $5, $10, or $20, you start talking about market sizes in the couple of trillion of dollars. The future is the mobile web.

I got a Harvard Business School branded laptop sleeve as my swag. This conference was free to Stanford students (instead of $50) and its a shame I didn’t see more students there.  At around 6pm Lei came over and we just sat back and watched college football for a few hours. USC-Cal game was really sloppy, and Stanford lost. Lei’s Buckeyes (he’s an OSU grad) lost too. But talk about the Wolfpack’s win over Carolina! Later we talked at length about what classes to take and looked at Rise of Nations a bit.

Woke up late Sunday, looked at EE 278 homework (oh the horror it is so long), watched a bit of Chargers vs Colts, cooked some pulao, in the evening went over to Packard with Nader, Morris (almost-finished PhD in the VLF group), and a few of Morris’s friends and we watched two episodes of Planet Earth on a projector. Deserts and the Ocean Deep. One day I gotta watch that entire series on Hi-Definition.

So yeah. Didn’t really do a whole lot this weekend. This week I gotta finish that awful 278 homework. Nader and I will get a first working draft of our circuit by Friday. I’ll be staying here over Thanksgiving break and working on the 214 project full time. I am extremely motivated in making my project very good for that class. I’ve got something to prove after my less-than-stellar ECE 511 project.  It’s getting more chilly here too.