| Ripped from my diary.

Conference Warrior Princess

Posted on May 2, 2010 | 2 Comments

‘Tis the season. For conferences.

Flowers are in bloom, winter feels like a distant memory, and suddenly my calendar looks like a bad game of Tetris (must add though that I really love Tetris).

I’m going for 3 in 3 consecutive weeks – having attended Cloud Computing Expo in New York at the Javits, Interop Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay, and last but not least – Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco at the Moscone. Phew. Just typing this list exhausts me.

Having attended many conferences in my life, here is a list of items I’ve come to realize are essential in making a conference successful / bearable / enjoyable for yourself:

Breath Mints: better than gum, because no one likes talking to someone that looks like they are chewing a cud.
Comfortable Shoes: no they are not the sexiest, but even your comfortable shoes will cause your dogs to bark if you’re on your feet for 16 hours.
Hydrate: two parts hyrdogen, one part oxygen.
Charge Your Devices at Night: there’s nothing worse than running out of juice when you need your phone / machine / pager to work for you
Business Cards: lots of ‘em. You think you have enough? Throw in 50 more. Seriously.

Fun Fact: Xena was played by Lucy Lawless in the Xena TV series. I want my last name to be Lawless.

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Posted in cloud computing, Conferences, Social Web, Uncategorized

Tagged breath mints shoes, cloud, Conferences, Interop, web 2.0 expo, Xena

Sass & Claberation in Cloud

Posted on April 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

I had a strategy meeting earlier this week to discuss Evening in the Cloud – a program at Enterprise 2.0 Boston on June 14, 2010. My colleague’s 9 and 10 year old sons joined us for the meeting as they’re out of school on spring break. We asked them to take notes from the meeting and I have to share….

I love seeing this because it makes me take my job less seriously. I talk about Sass all day!

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Posted in Conferences, Corporate Culture

Tagged be serious, Claberation, Enterprise 2.0, kids, Sass

Google TechTalk Vid Highlights

Posted on March 20, 2010 | Leave a comment

Last month I posted about the panel I moderated on February 24, 2010 down at Google with the IIT Madras Association of North America called the Social Media Revolution in the Workplace. The panel was part of Google’s ongoing TechTalks hosted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.

It’s your lucky day – all one hour and forty-two minutes of the panel are now available on YouTube!

We had a good crew of folks assembled for the panel. Some highlights for me:

Poor Oliver Marks (the only non-vendor) sat squarely in the middle of all the vendors.
Matt Tucker, CTO of Jive Software told Anshu Sharma, VP of Product Development at salesforce.com that adding a layer of social functionality to CRM does not constitute social enterprise software.
Greg a.k.a. ‘Dr. Wave’was wearing jeans with the Wave emblem on the back pockets.
Anshu figured out what hump day meant that very day (it was a Wednesday).

Got some time to kill? Here’s the vid:

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Posted in Uncategorized

Happy (Belated) Birthday to Me!

Posted on February 20, 2010 | Leave a comment

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)!

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Posted in Blogging, Social Web

Tagged 2 years, birthday, celebrate, torn paige, watch this space

Increasing the Likelihood of Fission

Posted on February 12, 2010 | 2 Comments

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.

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Posted in Conferences, That Damn Word Again - Community

Tagged eye-eye-tee-maa-na, Google, Google Wave, Jive Software, Salesforce.com, social media, Socialtext, Sovos Group, Zoho

Email is Annoying

Posted on January 30, 2010 | Leave a comment

My boss asked some of us sales folks to put together a story, a tale from the field, or a little preso to share with our fellow colleague at a recent Sales Summit.

Email is friggin’annoying. It can really bury you and hinder your sales process. Unfortunately it’s the preferred method of communication for many of my clients in the business technology market.

My little contribution was this Ignite style preso entitled ‘How to Make Email Less Annoying: A Tiny Guide to Outlook Best Practices for Sales People.’

Spoiler alert: Like all good Ignite talks, there’s a picture of a cute cat in it (and a bald Britney Spears!). Enjoy!

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Posted in Conferences, Corporate Culture

Tagged annoying, Britney Spears, cat, email, Ignite, Outlook, sales

Big Ups to Lenovo

Posted on December 24, 2009 | Leave a comment

I’ve been asked to play around with a Lenovo IdeaPad S12 and give feedback as to whether this netbook would meet a sales person’s needs. I’ve had this little baby for a few weeks and I wrote a tidy list of how I feel about it, in case any of you out there are evaluating a netbook for your own use.

To sum up: I love it.

Pros

· Size & weight make it easy to carry to meetings, take notes electronically

· No issue connecting to the wireless network setup behind the firewall

· Full size keyboard, so no hand cramping (just like typing on any standard 15.4″ notebook)

· Changed resolution to make icons bigger – no issue with screen size as a result (12.1″ display)

· The charger is tiny; take up no space when travelling

· Built in video camera means I can Skype with clients; make better (read realer) client connections

Cons

· Resetting the resolution to create bigger icons/font on the netbook means the display on the monitor can look a bit distorted and Comic Sans-like. I hate Comic Sans!

· The Video cable has 2 screws to hold the cable firmly to the video port (for the monitor) but the netbook doesn’t have the feminine parts to bolt on; this means you have to be extra careful and not jostle the video cable.

· Mouse pad is tiny.

· Only 160 GBs on the netbook, so external desktop hard drive is recommended (especially for music and videos)

· Lots of stuff to plug in vs. docking station (mouse, speakers, keyboard, monitor, e tc.) which only leaves one spare USB port available

Breakin’it down . . . some serious specs:

Display: 12.1 WXGA (1280 X 800) LED 200 nit, 250g
Processor: Intel Atom N270
Graphics: Intel integrated GMA 950, Nvidia ION
Memory: Up to 1GB DDR2 533 MHz
Hard Drive: Up to 160 GB SATA (160, 250, 320)
Battery Life: 3 hours with 3-cell, 6 hours with 6-cell
Weight: 1.4kg with 3 cell, 1.55kg with 6 cell
Dimensions: 292 X 216 X 22-28.9mm
Connectivity: 10/100m Ethernet, Broadcom 578M, Intel WiFi Link 5150 1X2 AGN, Intel WiFi Link 5100 1X2 AGN, Non-Intel wireless b/g, Non-Intel wireless b/g/n, Bluetooth
Other: 3 USB, 1 Expresscard slot (Intel and VIA platforms), 4-in-1 card reader, VGA, RJA45, HDMI
Software: XP Home SP3 (32 bit)

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged comic sans, ideapad, lenovo, love, netbook

How to Properly Mug Someone

Posted on December 9, 2009 | Leave a comment

Just had the cool experience of being interviewed by Kaitlin Pike, the Web 2.0 Expo Community Manager. She asked some pointed questions about my Ignite presentation and I wanted to share an excerpt (my favorite part):

In response to her experience, Paige created “A New Way to Mug” for robbers to follow:

State the other person’s behavior: “She has a laptop, and she’s just walking around with it.”

State your emotional response: “That pisses me off. I want that laptop.”

State choices to the other person as a result of your emotional response: “If you don’t give me that laptop I’m going to get violent.”

Although the example for these three steps involves muggers, Paige believes they should be applied much more broadly. “This can be used in any situation requiring negotiation,” she said.

For instance, imagine your boss gives you a deadline for a project you know needs more time. 1) State the other person’s behavior: “The boss has given me a deadline that isn’t realistic if we want a quality product.” 2) State how that makes you feel. “This makes me anxious.” 3) State choices to the other person as a result of your emotional response. “Boss, I am anxious this deadline as it stands will force us to cut back on important features. If you give me 4 more days I can deliver a much higher quality product.”

The important thing to remember, Paige said, is that the person cannot “make” you feel anything—your response to your boss could have been ambivalence; “It’s not my fault the product will suck. Oh well.”

Paige did not make the mugger feel angry—that was simply her response to Paige’s behavior. When in a negotiation or conflict, say things such as “While you were doing this, this is how I felt.” People aren’t mind readers, and if you want to resolve issues with them you need to be straightforward with your feelings and what you want out of the discussion.

Thanks Kaitlin, for not asking if you minded if you unzip your pants, and for making me sound smart

Full interview can be found here.

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Posted in Conferences

Tagged Ignite, interview, pants, smart, web 2.0 expo

Sass & Claberation in Cloud

Google TechTalk Vid Highlights

Email is Annoying

Big Ups to Lenovo

How to Properly Mug Someone

Hi I’m Paige.

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