HBS Cyberposium and Warzone

One of the priveleges of spending 2 years of your life at HBS is the awesome opportunity to meet all these great folks who are the "movers and shakers" in our world today.It is just past midnight and I need to hit the sack soon to wake up for HBS Cyberposium tomorrow. Cyberposium is a great event organized by TechMedia Club where every year the coolest ideas in Tech are up for display through panel discussions. I am planning to sit into some exciting panels on social networking revolution, digital home and the new face of enterprise software (btw, I will get to listen to Geoffrey Moore as well).Before signing off, I will leave you with couple of thoughts on another doomsday setup.I have been dabbling with writely and numsum of late and my conclusion is that these are two incremental steps in bringing software utilities and products to a web based platform. No wonder our friends at Redmond launched live.com in a hurry. Google is also slowly but steadily developing an internet platform to put personal utilities (like calendar, email, weather, IM etc.) and editing software online (Picasa and Blogger). Picture this - if we have an intel processor supporting Linux OS on a computing device (assume for now that it is a PC indeed) on one hand and an internet platform that can run on Firefox (or some other non-IE browser) hosting numerous applications online, Microsoft may be suddenly missing from the family picture. This is probably an extreme characterization of the situation but the threat to MS seems real. the battle just got interesting and the exploits may start showing soon.On the other hand, Google is fighting a battle of sorts on different fronts. So, the ABM (anybody but microsoft) attitude in the valley is slowly making way to ABG. Google is expanding aggressivley and burning bridges on the way. But the biggest and most uncertain challenge right now is thier bid for the implementing wireless infrastructure in the entire city. The idea itself is giving carriers, device manufacturers and competitors (AOl, MSN, Yahoo) sleepless nights...

HBS Cyberposium

As mentioned in my previous blog, I attended HBS Cyberposium yeaterday. I attended three sessions - Digital home, Changing face of news (due to blogging) and Social networking.The sessions were fine but not as good as last year. The blogging session was fun with David Sifry of Technorati and others blogger in audience taking on Boston Globe and traditional media. But, there seems to be enough love going around and the traditional media does not seem to feel threatened (or so they say!). Andreas Stavropoulos from DFJ was moderating the panel with enthusiasm so typical of him.The Digital home panel was banal with the gentleman from WSJ (who was moderating) turning it into a lecture monologue.Social networking panel was interesting - Konstantin Guericke of LinkedIn (who was mistaken for CEO of LinkedIn)...

This blog is a journey through our Spring / Summer (depending on which part of the world you are in) 2006 trip to Europe. It was a two and a half weeks trip through history, natural beauty, man made wonders and a whole new enriching world out there.

One obvious thing about this blog - it is short on textual commentary and rich on pictures. Hopefully, my brevity in text will be made up by the pictures.

There are 4 subsequent blogs to this one -

II - Spain: Old and New capitals

III - Italy: Cinque Terra and the ancient Capital of the world

IV - The fashion capital of the world

V - The financial capital of Europe