Silicon Valley, Ashoka, and Ajit Jaokar welcome DV Fellows

The DV Open House was a hit - more than 80 members of our Silicon Valley network came out to formally welcome the 20 new DV Fellows, including some of the generous partners who make our Program possible - the Reuters Foundation, SAP, and Motorola) and our speakers from that day (Susan Davis, Ashoka and Ajit Jaokar)

Also in attendance were industry leaders such as Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Zazzle, AMD, and WorldChanging.com; esteemed Stanford faculty such as Terry Winograd, Byron Reeves, and Stig Hagstrom; and social sector organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Inveneo and OneRoof. Many of our alumni came by to show their support and it was wonderful to catch up on their recent developments.

Our alumni were instrumental in making the event a success. Erik Sundelof designed most of the story boards and 2007 brochure, Atif Mumtaz also designed several of the story boards and Adam Tow documented the entire event with his top quality photography skills – is so great to have such talented, and generous alumni in town! Thank you Erik, Atif, and Adam!

Right before the reception, we had a very rich discussion of social entrepreneurship with Susan Davis – she leads Ashoka’s Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship. Susan’s definition of social entrepreneurship really resonated with me – she calls it a “meta profession” because social entrepreneurs are engineers, doctors, teachers and lawyers...She said that social entrepreneurship starts with the heart and her sincerity and ability to immediately and deeply connect with our social entrepreneurs made it evident that she herself is a social entrepreneur.

Earlier that morning we learned about MoSoSo, or mobile social software, from Ajit Jaokar. Ajit is a prolific blogger, author of the book 'Mobile web 2.0' and a member of the web2.0 workgroup. Ajit focused on Generation C (under 25 year olds). Some of the statistics he discussed were fascinating, and a tad scary, he mentioned that some 90% of kids' allowances are now spent on mobile phone usage and that only 20% of kids' airtime usage is actually spent talking - they mostly use the phones for SMS messages - to the point that 16 years olds are sleep deprived because they receive text messages all night.

All in all it was a fabulous day at the DVP and a great start to what we know will be an exciting year here at DVP at Stanford.