Helen Wang's blog

At Commonwealth Club’s book signing event in Santa Clara Convention Center, the former Senator and Vice President Candidate John Edwards talked to a roomful enthusiastic crowd about his new book Home, and how our homes shape the ways of our lives and unite us as a nation.

The last day of our trip to the east coast, we were strolling around Annapolis - the capital city of Maryland. At the Café Normandy on Main Street, I picked up a local newspaper - Bay Weekly. The following lines caught my attention:

Like most people, I want to have a good life. I like to dress myself up beautifully and elegantly, I enjoy healthy food and fine dining, I am fascinated to make my home look like an art gallery, and I love to travel around the world to see places and learn different cultures.

These days, nobody writes letters anymore. With Internet and telecommunication technologies, we have emails, IMs, and better yet, my folks in China are mostly writing SMS on mobile phones.

My dad in China, unaffected by whatever the technology, still wants to write letters to me. I would send him the pre-printed address labels so he doesn’t have to struggle to write my address in English on the envelope. Each time, I would remind him: “remember to put your own address on the upper left corner and put my address on the lower right corner of the envelope. This is the American way.”

Last week, there were many criticisms about Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and other technology companies’ submission to the Chinese government’s request to censor the information on the Internet. It has become a public concern that these companies are doing business there at the peril of human rights.

In TiE Women's Leadership Forum, Rayona Sharpnak, founder and president of Institute for Women's Leadership, brought together three panelists from industry to share with a roomful of women their successful stories as female leaders, and discuss the topics that are mostly of concern by women in their career.

When I first came to the United States, in a social event, someone asked me:

“What’s your name?”

“Helen,” I answered.

She looked at me ambiguously…. Obviously, I am not a blond, I don’t have blue eyes, and I probably spoke English with an accent. Then she asked again:

At SVASE (www.svase.org) main event “Where the Hot Money Will Be Going in 2006,” the panelists from Onset Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson talked about the innovations they see that are coming to reshape the landscape of software, semiconductors, Internet, telecom, energy and bio-tech industries.

Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, was nominated as one of the 25 most influential business leaders in the world along with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Alan Greenspan, etc.

In an interview with Nightly Business Report, Muhammad Yunus said poverty is unnecessary. Human beings are quite capable of taking care themselves. but we have created a society that denies some unfortunate people the opportunities.

The biggest problem facing micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries is the inability to access the larger public market and its market information. They do not have efficient channels to reach customers. This creates a significant barrier for the working poor to rise from poverty.