Monthly Archives: February 2010

Happy (Belated) Birthday to Me!

I’m usually pretty on the ball when it comes to other peoples’ birthdays. It’s a time to celebrate the day that someone you care about entered the world. I’m big on birthdays – I like to spoil the people I love. It’s almost as much for them as it is for me. I’m grateful to have them in my life as a positive influence.

While I do know my own birthday (October 5th for any of you who care to take note) I did miss my blog’s 2 year birthday. Happy Birthday Torn Paige! 


My first post was written on February 11, 2008 – over two years ago now. Time has an eerie way of startling you. When you measure a child’s age, how long you’ve been in a relationship or had that same job — that thing that is always just there suddenly has a metric that can feel right on or completely disproportionate. 2 years has flown by.

To commemorate Torn Paige’s birthday, I want to celebrate my first post by reposting it here – the post is called Watch This Space:

I’m crumbling under the pressure of the first post. This is the big one. Where the stage is set. I need to define my voice and purpose so you’ll either read on or move on. *Gulp* Here goes:

In an effort to capture the technological evolution we are in the midst of, I want to document the surfacing trends that appear where business and technology collide. This change is crashing rather loudly into the enterprise from various angles. As the next generation of the workforce — my generation — begins to permeate the market, my older colleagues must rise to the occasion and evolve with them.

As a 25 year old woman in the web 2.0 space, I bridge the gap between the old and new ways business is conducted. I am part of the community building the next generation of the Internet. And I hope we don’t screw it up. I’m a witness to the socialization and democratization of the web. This cultural phenomenon is pretty exciting stuff, as it changes the way we interface, work and play.

The implications of a social web are left to be discovered, but as the enterprise strives towards agility, transparency and increased collaboration, my bet is that the early adopters will surge forward. Watch this space.

Happy birthday to meee (screeching, off-key voice)!

Increasing the Likelihood of Fission

I’m delighted with a recent invitation to moderate a panel on Social Media Revolution in the Workplace on February 24, 2010 down in Mountain View at Google.  The event runs from 6 to 9 pm PST and is hosted by the IIT Madras Alumni Association of America (abbreviated as IITMAANA, pronounced as eye-eye-tee-maa-na).

Did you know that one of the definitions of ‘moderator‘ is (in physics) a substance, such as water or graphite, that is used in a nuclear reactor to decrease the speed of fast neutrons and increase the likelihood of fission?

IITMAANA’s goal is to gather together friends and alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and promote charitable, educational events for their community. I’m intrigued to see what the IITM community’s level of understanding is of social computing in the enterprise. I have a feeling that this panel discussion will be geared more towards the workplace shift we’ve been experiencing and the consequential change in moving towards people-centric vs. data-centric tools, the broad advantages of collaborative technologies, and we’ll address questions pertaining to obstacles to adoption. I don’t think this will be a very technical discussion that will discuss with granularity the specific tools from the vendors my panelists represent. However, I could be entirely off the mark. I’ll just need to take an audience pulse up front and let the conversation flow (although I hope there is some controversy – no one likes a panel where everyone nods their heads and agrees with everyone else’s opinion). 

I’ll be joined by:

  • Anshu Sharma – Sr. Director (Force.com Product Management), Salesforce
  • Greg D’Alesandre - Product Manager (Google Wave), Google
  • Oliver Marks - Founding Partner, Sovos Group 
  • Raju Vegesna – Evangelist, Zoho 
  • Christopher Morace – Sr. Vice President of Products, Jive Software
  • Ross Mayfield – Co-Founder, Socialtext

Here’s a bit more detail on the event: 

The way we work is changing rapidly, offering an enormous competitive advantage to those who embrace the new tools that enable agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration to distributed workforces and networks of partners and customers.

Collaborative technologies liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Collaboration allows the collective intelligence of many to bubble up to the surface, translating to a competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation and productivity.

In this panel we chat with industry experts and vendors to explore topics such as:

  • Who is driving the adoption of collaborative tools?
  • What are the biggest barriers to adoption and how does one prove the business value /   ROI around social computing?
  • How does one be a better evangelist with their organization?

If you’re in the Bay Area, come down and hang at Google with me, this stellar lineup of panelists and the eye-eye-tee-maa-na. Looking forward to the discussion.