Alcatraz 

Palace of fine arts..SF 

Innovation Links PART 1 - MIT Sloan

I wanted to document some of the interesting innovation and entrepreneurship centers in the B-schools that I have applied, partly for my interest, and partly for future applicants. While each school has a plethora of student clubs and conferences, I am trying to indicate some which are of interest to me.

Deshpande Center
IDEAS Competition.. Competition for social entrepreneurship ... check out some past projects.
MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition The much revered B-plan competition
MIT Sloan Venture Capital & Private Equity Association VC/PE club
The MIT Innovation Club
CIMIT | Innovative Technology for Medicine
Tiny Technology Initiative
Social entrepreneurs for International Development
MIT Global TIES Last year's TIES was focussed on India and China's entreprenurial trajectory
Sloan Entrepreneurs Excellent resource!

DRAFT-1

Wow, how times have changed!! When I was writing essays in R-1, I had my essay word files with suffixes as xx-essays-draft5.doc, xx-essays-draft6.doc and so on. On the other hand, my sloan essays were completed with xx-essays-draft1.doc and submitted without too many revisions. This doesnt mean that I have my act together. Its just that I am very tired of the application process (for now), I just got back from LA, and I am sleepy, but just wanted to "hit" submit on the last application of the season. I do hope that its a home run...

But I guess this means the application season is over... (Yay... I mean, hmmm....I mean, whatever, .. I mean....aaarghhh). Congrats to WC and others waiting for Chicago's decision...Its awesome!!

Whats next ... entertaining the in-laws who are due to visit this weekend!! Should be fun .. (Yay.... I mean, hmmm.... I mean.... aaaarrrggghh :)

Explore and innovate..

Took off from work yesterday to work on Sloan apps, but couldnt do much. Instead went to the city and checked out the famous exploratorium - the science musuem with interactive exhibits. I loved the exhibits.. my wife was bored stiff with all the geekiness. For me, the exhibits reinforced the "innovation mind-set": fodder for my Sloan essays.

One of my recommenders is out-of-town today, so I had a bit of a scare since the date for recommendation submission is today (and he had not submitted on monday). Thankfully, I checked the online app and he had submitted it last night. Unlike S, MIT doesnt notify you when a reco has been posted. Anyways, now I need to really sit down and finish those essays..

Desi-spidey!!

Globalization at its best. Marvel has launched an indian-ized version of Spiderman. Peter Parker is Pavitr Prabhakar, and sports an Indian garb, battles rakhshasa, and swings about Mumbai and the Taj Mahal. Artist Jeevan Kang has done some amazing work in creating this new version of Spiderman, and the CEO of Gotham comics Sharad Deverajan deserves accolades for bringing Marvel comics at reasonable prices to India.

Till I was about 10 years old, I wanted to be a comic book illustrator.. so I guess this is a really interesting news to me that comic book careers are finally taking off in the rest of the world. Awesome...

Technical Writer

As if the application essays were not mind-bending enough, I am tasked with writing a technical user's manual for a product I developed for a client. Initially, I thought that this would be an easy task, but soon after I started to realize how difficult it is to "teach" people how to use a simple software through a manual. My respect for tech writers has shot up tremendously after this...

Well, i got hold of some old user's manuals for some archaic software I use at work to see the style and delivery.. I think all of them have to have:

• Installation
• Quick start : for the impatient (like me :0)
• Define project/ Setup ...
• -
• -
• Troubleshooting

Ah, I guess this is one more skill to put up on my resume!!

Damp weekend

The bay area has been transported in a tele-porter or an "inter-galactic transponder" (from Dude, wher's my car?") to London or Seattle. We have been hit with rain for the past 2-3 weeks, and from the looks of it, it will continue for some more time.

To ward off the weather, we decided to stay home and partake in some trans-atlantic humor - Coupling - a mix between "friends" and "sex and the city", shows that I love btw. Main difference: take "friends" away from the coffee shop and transport them with British accents to a pub, and then seperate the sexes, and make them comment on the body parts of the opposite sex. Hmm, the show actually grew on me as time progressed, and I am eagerly booking the next seasons on netflix.