Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford

What promised to be a promising day was to some extent marred by assignment deadlines ... and compounded by my inefficiency to complete the assignments well before time. Anyways ......

The annual "Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford" event was held at Said Business School today. Some of the speakers were:

- Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives at Google
- Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn
- Matt Cohler of Facebook

We had a DEM assignment submission, and as I am the leader of "last Minute" club, I was running against time today. There were two sessions ..... early afternoon, and evening (by UK standards and daylight conditions) .... Each session had a 'garage' workshop and master classes held by one of the speakers.

I attended the evening garage workshop by innovation and creativity consultants Synectics to brainstorm and resolve problems. Chris Sacca from Google drew our attention to the Net neutrality debate, which is about the ISPs thinking of charging big websites such as Google and Yahoo for ..... for being online (because an ISP is the medium to reach these sites). Our task was to use metaphors/analogy/catchphrases that will help the masses understand the problem, and the importance of an open & neutral Net, in a simple and understandable manner. To know more about the debate, here's a link on 'Series of tubes' from Chris' blog.

The 30+ participants were divided into three groups, and the facilitator led the session in a un ique but very effective manner.

The workshop ended with us presenting some of our ideas. The most apt analogy as per me was the one suggested by Sunil that compared the Google with Air ...... Charging for Google is like charging for Air ...... I think he was pretty impressed with this thought ... The title for his day's blog entry is: Charging for air . . .

Chris rightly mentions in his blog ...... "We are all extremely Lucky. The internet is nothing short of a gift"

The remaining part of the evening was spent in completing my assignment which I submitted with 20 minutes to spare ... Phew !!

The Cutting EDGE !!

Said MBA is surely rigorous ... but I have managed to find time to do some social service for fellow classmates ..... Here's the most inexpensive barber in Oxford (if there is a cheaper one ... do lemme know) ...... I tried to postpone my haircut for quite some time ... but finally started looking like anything but a prospective employee for a Consulting or a Financial role ...... So found this place on Walton Street called - 'Edge Barber'.... They charge 8.5 pounds for a haircut (student discount included)

I will not vouch for the quality though ..... neither will my friends Sudheer and Sunil :)

All The Best !!

Castle Mill

That's the name of the place where I stay !! ... Its a university accomodation ... which means that its 'relatively' lighter on the wallet. The word relative is very important here ... especially for the Indians back home.

The good thing about this place is that its new ... and this time its not relative to the age of the university ...... its about 3-4 years old (believe me on this one). I am not gonna tell u about the merits of this place coz neither am I gonna get any commission nor a rent rebate.... so why waste time.

I am attaching some snaps of the place ..... You wont find it on the Oxford maps as such..... For the die hard 'googlers' ... here's the postcode - OX1 1AD.












This place is practically on the railway tracks .. as you can see from the pictures below:

My Picasa Albums !

My Oxford Albums on Picasa ...... Here are two of the Oxford related albums on Picasa (U'll find more there)... As I do not have a camera ...... the credit of these photographs must go to some of my talented classmates - Ruzbeh, Saheel, Chris, Brian & Takashi (our official photographer)..... That was an acknowledgement for anyone with a copyright (One can expect anything from MBAs - One of them might have a secret business plan to make money from suing people voilating their copyrights on snaps ...... Just kidding!!)

Said Business School - University of Oxford

Oxford 2006-07 : Matriculation

Brrrrrrrrr !!!

And I thought I was a Kashmiri .... Hah ! ..... Its the start of November, and I am already freezing here. The day was foggy throughout. We had our MBA Class photograph, and the sun God was kind enough to bless us with some sunlight just during that one hour.



By evening time, it was just too cold, and our formal suit was not helping at all in keeping the cold out. As per the BBC website the minimum temperature was 3 degrees .... Celsius !!

Somebody told me that the temperature drops to minus 10 in Dec-Jan ...... SHIT !!

Here are some foggy snaps (must be around 6:00 pm ....

Diwali again !!

On Diwali I heard not even a single firecrack sound the whole night. But today evening was different. There was this not stop sound of fire crackers going off all over the town ... and some of the fireworks were simply spectacular.

Somebody said that Diwali was being celebrated this weekend in UK ..... My next question was why now ?? Are firecrackers banned in UK in October ?

Anyways, I have to study, so let me cut this short ..... Its Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night as it is referred to ... There are local firework displays organised across town...... Click here for more info ..

I better get back to Decision Science. I studied the subject for 4 hours today, and when we got down to doing the assignment, I was completely stumped. So lemme give it another shot !!