Digital Vision Fellows Group

Around the world. Constantly. Something is happening. The snap of the moment. A flash. A picture. A video. A short text message. A reflection.

A pitch is a performance, an oral presentation. But too often, entrepreneurs think they're doing the audio version of their business plan. (Think Books on Tape) instead of doing the movie version (or better yet - the movie preview) of their book. (Think more action and highlights, less exposition)

Steve Ketchpel (RDVP Fellow 2005) was kind enough to remind me of the fantastic Technology Formation course offered in the school of engineering. MS&E 273 (aka IE273) has a very nice webpage of resources, including a section on venture pitches.

In my roles as executive director of the Women's Technology Cluster, VC and social entrepreneur I have heard ALOT of pitches. Here are my thoughts (not terribly original, by the way) on how to improve your game.

In preparation for next week's Mock Pitch Workshop, I offer a few links on how to give a venture pitch. Read and review!

Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

Alertnet: Hundreds feared dead in Philippine mudslide

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who had expressed concern on whether I have friends/family affected in the disaster area. Thankfully, there are none. I live on the southern part of Mindanao island in the Philippines and Leyte island is located somewhere in the middle. (map image below)

I'v attached the Powerpoint presentation from the seminar Cheryl Dahle and I did on January 24th.

Periodically, I need to go and feed my inner techie. This week I spent some time playing with the www.bubbler.net Instant Publisher tool. Similar to Typepad and Blogger, Bubbler lets you quickly create professional looking websites with blogging capability.  The advantage of Bubbler vs TypePad is that you can create a traditionally looking website AND have blogging capability whereas the other sites tend to be, well, bloggy.

Attached is the powerpoint presentation from Paul Ranking about his current project, Living Cultural Storybases. Please feel free to contact Paul if you are interested in collaborating with him on this project.

As requested by some users and the usability group, I have enabled an enhanced directory with current fellows contact information.

This directory is only visible to fellows.

Please make sure you add the relevant information to your user profile so that it's listed there.

A map of actors and ecosystem of the DVF.

To follow up on the topic of changing the Monday meeting times for winter term, we will be holding our DV meetings on Tuesdays from 3:30pm-5:00pm, starting January 10, 2006.

Please plan accordingly.

When I was a venture capitalist, I was often asked what it would take to create a venture capital industry in Mexico or Indonesia or just about anywhere outside of Silicon Valley. There were often many very good reasons why it couldn't or hadn't happen - deal flow, amount of money that needed to be invested, cost of managing a fund, a service provider ecosystem, etc.

A colleague wrote this alternative perspective on WSIS that I've attached as a PDF file.

He's trying to get it published, so I'm only posting this for RDVP fellows...but I thought it was good...a

"Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World" by Devesh Kapur and John McHale, the book recently mentioned in the New York Times article, illustrates best the multi-dimensional issues surrounding brain drain in a way that breaks us out of the simplistic thinking of having polarized views, either the laissez-faire attitude of "brain circulation will happen" or protectionist "globalization is damaging the local economy" answers. It is exactly the complexity of brain drain effects that makes this go beyond a black-or-white stand, and very different from issues of poverty, environment, human rights, health or equality.

Unless research groups remain in continuous contact, interaction and exchange communication with the rest of the stakeholders, their separation from the actual development and deployment process generates a dangerous discontinuity and an unnecessary gap between observation, design, deployment and redesign.

I would like a mechanism to send mini requests/questions to fellows that is by default private to a group and that has a short expiration. I think of it as a hybrid between IM, forum and mailing list. I think Drupal has it already:

The Different Nature of ICT Projects

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) projects are different from common manufactured or consumer products in that they are not built through an expensive production line that requires physical resources difficult to change and modify.

Please express your preferences about posts being profiled on the front page of RDVP.org. Click here for More information on this issue...

Currently, every public blog post appears on the rdvp.org frontpage. Does that make sense?

I've been talking to some people about this and wanted to get others' feedback on the idea that you would like your posts to become public (that is, other people should be able to view them without logging in) but that you would not necessarily want them to show up on the RDVP public homepage. My specific example is detailed project progress that our guidelines had suggested we leave off the frontpage. There are pros and cons to adding an option such as this and I list some below. I hope people have opinions about this and that we can work out a decision using this forum (as Vi has recently asked us to do).

The Illusion and Negative Effect of Social Impact from Information and Communication Technologies

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are wonderful tools with an enormous potential for Social Impact, Human Development and improving the lives of the people they serve.

Note: This note is old, I just updated it with some additional information and clearer instructions.

Users can now upload podcasts or audio files to the collaboration framework that visitors can listen to on-line or download for offline listening in their computers, Ipods or mp3 players.

Several of our projects aim to become sustainable by offering some sort of service or product on-line and charging for it.

I thought it would be a good idea to enable a couple of e-commerce applications, on-line stores and shopping carts for the fellows to play around with them and explore their configuration and how they could be used easily for their projects.

Here is the schedule for today's seminars:

3:00pm: Talk with Tech Laureate, Tahis Corral. Tahis is with CEMINA.

4:00pm: Talk with Joshua Reeves with Zazzle 

Dear All,

Does anyone know how to change their own picture on the PUBLIC RDVP website? I know how to change it on Fellownies, but need to know on RDVP. I actually do not want a happy face picture of me out there when my last few blogs have been about death and destruction in Pakistan.

Candle Light Vigil for Earthquake Victims in Pakistan

The situation in Pakistan is still worse. People are still suffering and dying. Aftershocks are still rocking the country and making it impossible to work and live. 

In the New England Journal of Medicine is an article about the brain drain of physicians, The Metrics of Physician Brain Drain.. I heard about it on NPR. Check it out.

In the article "What Works: Lo Pequeño Es Hermoso (Small is Beautiful) - Banks in Mexico say that microloans are helping the poor while boosting their profits"

“Access to capital in developing countries is a vexing problem,”

I and a colleague in the Philippines are helping Sam in his Reliefopedia project by building a prototype for the extension of existing protocols that will allow users to search and view up-to-date feed entries from blogs, people finders and relief websites through any mapping service, allowing for real-time monitoring of disasters and relief operations through a visual/graphical interface.

I have just finished setting up several new servers for my projects.

If any of you needs hosting for your projects, I'll be more than happy to set up you up on any of my servers. No fee involved (unless you want to pay, of course).

When fellows.rdvp.org fails to respond, you can always access the collaboration framework directly at http://rdvp.fellownies.org

Apparently the old rdvp server is having difficulties and there seem to be delays with setting up the new server for rdvp.org. If rdvp.org is down, there is no access to our collabortion framework via fellows.rdvp.org.

Today's speaker in our seminar series was Mr. Sohaib Abbasi. He is a 20 year veteran with Oracle and now is CEO & Chairman of Informatica Inc. It was interesting to listen to his understanding of the IT Industry and how it has grown in the past many decades. Mr Abbasi had a clear vision of how one should work in the industry. He was of the view that one should clearly focus on an aspect of the business and try to excel in it rather than try to dab into many things and not get anything right.

I spent my Saturday installing/configuring Drupal and collecting feeds, links and images on Web 2.0 to create a pilot website for RSSRSSRSS, my project that proposes to introduce Web 2.0 to computer science schools and universities, in preparation for my school visits in Davao City, Philippines on December.

Last Oct. 20, Roberto Milk of Novica gave a talk of how his business, Novica, grew from a concept to an internationally operated retail and distribution dot-com.

His story of leveraging the Internet and global connections, and the emerging market segment called the Cultural Creatives, inspired me to look at the artisans living in my province, and consider taking their products with me when I return from Davao City, Philippines.

I spent my usual hour browsing my feeds in Bloglines and found a highly relevant topic. It describes the necessity to link any design with the userbility. This is a highly relevant topic that cannot be to highly prioritated when building any kind of product.

Jose has been really creative with how to enrich the fellows' virtual meeting experience. Starting this week, we're going to call into a skype account and leave an audio project update report. Jose will then compile all the voice messages into a podcast that we can then download. This accomplishes a couple of things:

OK< so now I have your attention [this should be Shel Israel & Robert Scoble's moment - they the authors of soon to be published Naked Conversations...]. Speaker Graham Flint revealed the powers of magnification - in multiple dimensions of the term - of one if his densely packed, ultra-giga-resolution photographs of "ParaGliders @ Torrey Pines - La Jolla CA" in which magnification by several orders of magnitude reveals naked men walking the beach. 

Recently ran into a former colleague who is now VP Education at Kintera (www.kintera.org) which describes its mission as follows:

Kintera is dedicated to helping nonprofit organizations fulfill their mission by providing Knowledge Interaction technology to build vibrant communities of supporters, beneficiaries and staff. By sharing a set of dynamic data and content, organizations can motivate and engage community members to achieve marketing, programming and fundraising success. With leading edge technology and innovative leadership, Kintera is committed to making a difference in the nonprofit sector.

Starting this Friday 10/21, I will be working remotely from home on Fridays.