Northeastern Japan is rebuilding itself after last year's earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. The devastation to the region is unquestionable, but so are the opportunities for energy industry reform and innovation. Masahiko Aoki and Kenji E. Kushida spoke with the Stanford News Service about developments in the region, and about possible links to Silicon Valley technologies.
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Tokyo Electric Power Company's Tama substation in northwest Tokyo, May 2010.
Steve Hilton, senior advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, will join Stanford as a visiting scholar at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Hilton, who will also be a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, will arrive in May and spend his year on campus teaching, researching and writing.
“We look forward to having Steve Hilton in residence at FSI starting later this spring,” said Coit Blacker, FSI’s director. “Lively and engaging, Steve is certain to bring a fresh perspective to many of the issues and challenges that are of ongoing concern to our faculty, fellows and students.”
As Cameron’s top advisor, Hilton’s primary responsibility is the development and implementation of domestic policy. He specializes in the promotion of enterprise and economic growth, public service reform, family policy, decentralization, and government transparency and accountability.
Hilton will focus on innovation in government, public services and communities around the world while at Stanford. He will work with a wide range of centers and organizations across the university, including FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and The Europe Center; the Graduate School of Business' Center for Social Innovation; the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society; and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.
"I'm delighted to be joining the academic community at Stanford and greatly look forward to an exhilarating and productive year,” Hilton said. “It will be a huge pleasure to be able to focus on our most pressing social and governmental challenges."
Before Cameron’s election as prime minister in 2010, Hilton served as his chief strategist and developed the ideas associated with the modernization of the British Conservative Party.
Hilton previously ran Good Business, a corporate responsibility consulting firm, and is the author of Good Business: Your World Needs You. The book makes the case for businesses to play a more direct and active role in advancing social progress.
The authors contend that cloud computing is historically unique by simultaneously being an innovation ecosystem, production platform, and global marketplace. In the first part, they define cloud computing as a "dynamic" utility, listing key characteristics of what it is and what it is not, both from providers' and users' vantages. In the second part, they characterize three competitive battles in the broader cloud ecosystem: winning the user (cloud providers), the search for value (network providers), and the device wars (device providers). They then provide a new and simple, but powerful and practically applicable typology that combines the type of providers with the commonly understood architecture types. The third part applies this framework to analyze the business strategies of global cloud service providers and select others in the broader ecosystem. They conclude with policy implications and where to take research from here.
Binswanger-Mkhize's talk will look at past and likely future agricultural growth and rural poverty reduction in the context of the overall economy of India, in which growth has accelerated sharply since the 1980s, but agriculture still has not followed suit. Despite slow growth, urban-rural consumption, income and poverty differentials have not risen. This is because urban-rural spillovers have led to a sharp acceleration of rural non-farm growth and income. Binswanger-Mkhize proposes an optimistic vision can be realized if agricultural growth accelerates, high and widely shared economic growth leads to strong spillovers to the rural economy, and the rural non-farm sector continues to flourish. This would enable the rural sector to keep up with income growth in the urban economy and rural poverty would rapidly decline. However, if agricultural growth fails to accelerate, and overall economic growth falters, a more pessimistic vision is also possible. Binswanger-Mkhize will also discuss the role of prices and wages in determining agricultural growth, rural poverty and nutrition, and the two interlinked income parity issues: rural-urban and agricultural-non-agricultural incomes parity.
Marianne Banziger, Deputy Director, Research & Partnership at International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) will provide commentary.
Download the podcast and listen to executives and entrepreneurs from the Valley sharing their insights on how they are building successful businesses which leverage cloud computing to re-shape their industries, from enterprise solutions to mobile consumer applications, in this featured event at Stanford Graduate School of Business for Stanford's annual Entrepreneurship Week.
About the panel discussion
“Cloud makes it easier and cheaper than ever for anyone anywhere to be an entrepreneur and to have access to all the best infrastructure of innovation”, noted Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn.
By reducing IT design and deployment costs significantly, enabling greater access to data and services across geographies, and harnessing flexible computing power, cloud enables innovation in firms and fuels a start-up boom across the globe. CHAIN and SPRIE are pleased to present a panel of executives, investors and entrepreneurs to share their insights about building successful businesses by leveraging cloud computing.
PANELISTS
James Dai, CEO and founder of CalmSea Inc.
Jim Dai, Chief Executive Officer, CalmSea
Jim is the CEO and founder of CalmSea Inc., a provider of business optimization solutions for retailers. Jim has 25 years of experience in software industry, with a proven track record of delivering quality product and services to customers. Before founding CalmSea Inc, Jim was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Altos Ventures. Prior to that, Jim was the Sr. Vice President of Products for DemandTec, responsible for Product Management, Engineering, Operations, Customer Support and IT. Jim was instrumental in DemandTec’s successful IPO in 2007. Prior to joining DemandTec, Jim held executive management positions at Siebel, Vivant!, DoubleTwist, Informix and Oracle.
Jim holds a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master Degree in Management from Stanford University.
Sam Ghods, Vice President of Technology, Box.com
Sam Ghods, Vice President of Technology, Box.com
Sam Ghods, Vice President of Technology, Box.com
Sam Ghods is the Vice President of Technology at Box, where he manages the design and architecture of Box's application and technology stack. Prior to joining Box, Sam was a developer at essembly.com, which is now part of Project Agape. Before essembly.com, Sam was the lead developer at zexsports.com, where he was responsible for development, server management, and architecture.
Sam attended the University of Southern California, where he studied computer engineering and computer science for two years before joining Box in 2006.
Ken Oestreich, Senior Director of Marketing, EMC
Ken Oestreich, Senior Director of Cloud and Virtualization Marketing, EMC
Ken Oestreich is Sr. Director of Cloud and Virtualization Marketing at EMC. With over 20 years in enterprise software and data center technology, he is now helping EMC define the market for cloud computing and IT transformation.
Prior to EMC Ken was with Egenera Inc, a data center infrastructure play (funded by Pharos Capital and Kodiak Venture Partners) and Cassatt Corp, a data center automation startup (funded through Warburg Pincus). Earlier in his career, he was with Sun Microsystems in various new product management capacities. Ken also helped found the Liberty Alliance, an industry-wide body defining federated identity standards for the internet.
Ken began his career in Electrical Engineering, controlling adaptive optics with Litton Industries. He holds a BSE in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Columbia University.
He frequently blogs at fountnhead.blogspot.com and tweets as @fountnhead.
Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director, Illuminate Ventures
Cindy Padnos is the founder and managing partner of Illuminate Ventures, an early stage, high-tech venture capital firm. Illuminate invests in start-ups leveraging new technologies and business models, with a focus in the fast growing category of cloud computing. Current investments and board seats include BrightEdge, CalmSea, Hoopla and Xactly Corporation.
Named by Fast Company as one of the Most Influential Women in Technology in 2010 and by the San Francisco Business Times as one of the Most Influential Women in Business in the Bay Area in 2011, Cindy has been helping accelerate emerging technology companies for over 25 years - as an entrepreneur, advisor, investor and board member. She has raised and deployed more than $100 million in venture funding to help launch dozens of innovative start-ups and bring them to successful outcomes.
Cindy is an advisor to Astia and Project Olympus and sits on the Business Board of Advisors for Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business where she received her MBA/MSIA.
Robert Scoble, Start-up liaison, Rackspace; Blogger of 'Scobleizer'
Robert Scoble (Moderator), Startup Liaison Officer, Rackspace
Robert Scoble is a blogger, technology evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure at Microsoft from 2003-2006, and he was one of the five guys who started Microsoft's famous Channel9 video community. Subsequently, he worked for Fast Company as a video blogger. He currently works at Rackspace as Startup Liaison Officer through the sponsored content and social networking site building43.com. He is the co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. Described by The Economist as a “minor celebrity among geeks worldwide who read his blog religiously”, Scoble has the distinction of followcost.com naming a unit of measurement to quantify how annoying it will be to follow someone on Twitter as the “milliscoble.”
The Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) is dedicated to advancing the understanding and practice of innovation and entrepreneurship in leading regions around the world. Through interdisciplinary and international research, seminars and conferences, publications and digital content, as well as education for students, industry and government leaders, SPRIE impacts the arenas of academia, business, and policy.
China America Innovation Network (CHAIN) is committed to build an ecosystem of mentors, experts, professionals, and peers based in U.S. and China that will enable entrepreneurs to access resources from both countries and realize their entrepreneurial ambitions. The CHAIN network currently has over 6000 members from 1,000+ companies, representing a diverse range of sectors in the technology and related financial industries.
About Entrepreneurship Week (E-Week) at Stanford
Stanford E-Week
E-Week celebrates the power of the entrepreneurial spirit at Stanford. The university continues to play a major role in the inception and development of many entrepreneurial ventures. Many of our faculty, staff, alumni, and current students have started businesses or bring entrepreneurial approaches to their work. To concentrate this passion for entrepreneurship, E-Week is presented anually by the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network, a federation of two dozen entrepreneurship-related campus groups.
N302, Oberndorf Event Center
3rd Floor, North Building (above Arbuckle Dining Pavilion)
Knight Management Center, Stanford Graduate School of Business
655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA 94305-7298
N302, Oberndorf Event Center
3rd Floor, North Building (abo
James Dai, CEO and founder of CalmSea Inc.
Sam Ghods, Vice President of Technology, Box.com
Ken Oestreich, Senior Director of Marketing, EMC
Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Director, Illuminate Ventures
Robert Scoble, Start-up liaison, Rackspace; Blogger of 'Scobleizer'
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CHAIN logo
Stanford E-Week