ValleyZen - At the Intersection of Zen, Modern Life and Technology

Step inside William H. Draper III’s James Bond-like San Francisco office. Bill Draper is one of the West Coast’s first venture capitalists, starting his VC career in 1962. He was founder of Sutter Hill Ventures and led it for 20 years. In the eighties, he served in diplomatic positions such as head of the Export-Import Bank and chief of the United Nations Development Program. Currently, he is the General Partner of Draper Richards and Director of the Draper Richards Foundation. ValleyZen interviews him. Don’t miss this amazing video!!

ValleyZen’s Bill and Drue spoke with Prof. Hiroshi Ishii after his Stanford lecture for Prof. Terry Winograd’s CS Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. Ishii granted ValleyZen an exciting satori-inducing interview at Drue’s studio. Watch the video…

ValleyZen covered the Computer History Museum’s sold-out lecture kicking off the “Exhibit Launch of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No.2″ by Dr. Doron Swade, the world’s expert on Charles Babbage and by Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO, Microsoft, founder of Dynamical Systems and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures. Dr. Swade has a unique perspective, because he successfully undertook an experiment completed in 1991 to determine whether Babbage in the period 1847 to 1849 could have built the Difference Engine No. 2. The experiment required Dr. Swade to use 19^th Century tools…

Set against the backdrop of the warmest weather yet this year, Dr. Larry Brilliant’s talk about our global problems took on even more urgency.

As he spoke about climate change, I thought of the weatherman earlier this morning, “Scorching hot today…Get ready for the triple digits.”

The heat inside the lecture room was appropriate. As Brilliant explained Google.org’s initiative to Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (RE less than C), there was no escape for the audience into air-conditioned complacency. Bodies against bodies…

Prof. Jeremy Bailenson is turning heads (real and virtual). With all the media attention he has received lately for his research at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), you might suspect he was making use of multiple avatars to sit in for all these interviews.

The New York Times, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Science Magazine, and The TODAY show have got Prof. Bailenson in the media spotlight right now.

Today TIME magazine features…

“If you want to be at the heart of the intellectual universe come to Stanford,” said Stanford Law School Dean, Larry Kramer, introducing Jonathan Zittrain to a pumped-up pro-Stanford audience at the Ritz Carlton, San Francisco. This book signing event was organized by Dean Kramer and Stanford Law School in an effort to recruit the Oxford professor and internationally-known cyberlaw scholar to come to Stanford.
“There is no place like Stanford Law School,” Zittrain agreed and began his talk centering on his latest book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Flanked by giant digital images from the book, Zittrain described the magic of the early Internet…

“This exhibition was carried around by Indian elephants,” said Peter Friess, President of The TECH Museum of Innovation, on a gala evening celebrating “100 Years of the Nobel Prize” and its installation at The TECH. Traveling through India, China, Egypt, and now Silicon Valley, the exhibit was conceived in the spirit of the Nobel Prize as an international project…

“Remember that 10 words is not a speech. It is a statement!” said East Bay Business Times Publisher Mike Consol. Over a thousand businesspeople had gathered in San Francisco Hilton’s grand ballroom for the presentation of the 2008 list of the 100 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area.

“You get 10 words…Or Less!” Consol prepped the winners in the audience for their moment on stage and urged them to start consolidating their ideas right away. Realizing that they had to create a “corporate haiku” on the spot, the audience…

On Tuesday April 22nd ValleyZen was invited to observe “The First Amendment in the Digital Age,” a Stanford seminar by Beth Noveck. She is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School. Noveck teaches in the areas of intellectual property and innovation law and policy, constitutional law, e-democracy and e-government. The topic for this week concerned the development and use of impenetrable anonymizing software which makes it impossible to identify the source of a posting on the Internet. The class discussed the effects on the constitutional rights of freedom of press and individuals’ right of privacy. The guest presenter was Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation Defender…

Dr. Peter Diamandis is the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, which awarded a $10 million prize for private spaceflight. Today when I met him and heard him speak about the importance of incentivizing risk (see video clip below), I thought of a Zen maxim from Hagakure, Book of the Samurai…