Check out The Anatomy of a Large Scale Social Search Engine, best paper I’ve read since coming to Stanford. What if there were a social media 2.0? Something to build on the mass of friend networks and status updates to do something really interesting—beyond just interesting visualizations? Vark does that. It’s invented social search. Right ...
[friend asked for this story, so I’m posting it] After college I decided to go into movies. I’m a terrible actor, but as a young, 6’ Chinese guy, I made a good human prop—also called an movie extra or background performer. Got an agent to pimp me out and ended up on a Jeep Cherokee commercial, ...
Tuesday night had dinner with Stanford University President John Hennessy at the Buttery with some other grad students. I asked him about his view of blogs and twitter, and his preferred new media is actually podcasts, specifically iTunes U and listening in on lectures around Stanford campus. Another student asked him which field he’d ...
Note to self, get funded by someone on the below list. From Business Week: It’s no surprise that most angel investors are successful entrepreneurs. You can see that in the list of names below—Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, to single out a few. But are they as successful in the role of angel investor? ...
Thanks to everyone who sent feedback on my previous post on whether I should run for eClub leadership. Really appreciate the kind encouragement and thoughtful feedback to consider, e.g. doing more for entrepreneurs in non-tech endeavors, connecting with the d.school, and other excellent points I’m incorporating for a future post. Yesterday I met with teams ...
Entrepreneurship club elections are coming up and I’m considering running for co-president. The Stanford GSB eClub is one of the largest organizations on campus, and one of the nation’s oldest organizations for the kind of work it does: The current leadership set a high bar: top shelf eWeek, BBLs, treks, dinners, and a host ...
Former president of Warner Brothers, producer of Batman Returns, two-time Oscar-winning director and head of content and distribution at Hulu—what do they have in common? Each was kind enough to speak at a panel on Film, Television and Video I co-chaired at Stanford’s Future of Media Conference, which got written up in Forbes this month. Some ...
While business school rocks, one of the my favorite courses this quarter is in computer science. In CS 294H, Sep Kamvar and Jeffrey Heer teach social software design principles (e.g. tips for online dating) to teams of 2-4 developers building apps over 10 weeks. This quarter, buddy Neema Moraveji and team built out LineHive—a site ...
Dan Greenburg from Sharethrough shares the Art of Video Storytelling at Stanford. My top takeaway: Persuasion happens with one of 6 levers—Pleasure, Pain, Hope, Fear, Belonging, Rejection. If it’s not one of these, it’s probably not working. Favorite example today (on hope): Template from Dan on creating compelling videos: Goal – What are you trying ...
@charleneli, co-author of Groundswell speaks on social media at Stanford GSB social media class. This was a treat, as I’ve followed Charlene Li’s work at Forrester. while at Microsoft. My personal takeaways: Trend is to quantify value of social media investments (e.g. customer lifetime value) “We tend to overvalue the things we can measure, and undervalue ...