Jason Banico's blog

Last May 12 and 13, 2006, Vipul and I attended TiECon 2006, the annual conference organized by TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs). The theme of this year is Disruption and Convergence: Entrepreneurship Unlimited. This well-attended event has brought an impressive line-up of distinguished speakers, such as Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary General of the UN, John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins Partner, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dr. Larry Brilliant, who heads Google.org, and Guy Kawasaki, author of the Art of Start.

IDEO has identified 10 roles that make a design firm be successfully innovative. These ten roles have been grouped into three types of personas: the Learning Persona, the Organizing Persona, and the Building Persona.

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)

"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.

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 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.

Here's my report on my project for week Oct. 10 to Oct. 14.

As shared during my meeting with Stuart last Oct. 10, my plans for this quarter are as follows:

OCTOBER
- Present BGN.ORG to Filipinos in Stanford.

(No, the title is not a typo. Let me explain...)

After yesterday's talk by Tony Perkins of AlwaysOn, my head was a-buzzing with thoughts about the implications of what he was saying. From that talk, I brought with me two things:

Last October 6, Stuart, Sam, Rita and I, attended a meeting on Recovery 2.0, which was part of the Web 2.0 conference. The Recovery 2.0 meeting was meant to discuss lessons learned from the wake of Katrina and how the web was used to get and provide help.