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 !!