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AT THE CENTER
The electronic newsletter of the
Silicon Valley World Internet Center

Thursday, January 20, 2005

 

Past copies of Newsletters and Directions to the Center are available on the Web site.

All programs are held at the Center unless otherwise noted.

To join our community, click on this link: http://center.infopoint.com/join.php

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GREETINGS FROM DR. SUSAN DUGGAN, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SILICON VALLEY WORLD INTERNET CENTER!
More information below.

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SUMMARY: HOLIDAY POWER PUB & PANEL: THURSDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2004
"eSUCCESSES IN SOUTH AFRICA: LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY FOR ADVANCEMENT"
Panelists included:
Dr. Joachim Schaper, Vice President Americas, SAP Research Center &
Mr. Jay Visvanathan, Market Development Manager, Higher Education, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Summary and links below.

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WORLD INTERNET CENTER'S GALA: NEW DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON!!! GALA WILL NOT BE HELD ON JANUARY 20, BUT IN APRIL!!!
More information to follow in upcoming newsletters.

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GREETINGS FROM DR. SUSAN DUGGAN, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SILICON VALLEY WORLD INTERNET CENTER!

Happy New Year! We wish you all the best of good health, prosperity, and collaborative creativity for 2005!

We wrapped up a very interesting year of collaboration with a session on leveraging high technology solutions for the advancement of education and economic development in South Africa. More on that fascinating session, below. In review of the activities at the World Internet Center in 2004, we would like to share the breadth of topics tackled by our clients and members of our community of innovators. Last year, the sessions at the World Internet Center covered some of the following areas of high tech advancement:

  • The IPv6 vs. EPC Debate and the Promise of RFID in SCM
  • Ubiquitous Computing
  • Sensor Networks for Homeland Security
  • Nanotechnology and its convergence with IT
  • Extended Manufacturing Models
  • Cross-cultural Adaptation for Enterprise-level Software
  • Searchable Email
  • Advances in Supply Chain Management
  • Innovations for Multi-Channel Access to Enterprise systems
  • Smart Items Leveraged for Safety in the Oil Industry
  • Semantic Web
  • Open Source
  • Airline Security Models and eBusiness Advances
  • End-user Process Modeling
  • The Future of Analytics
  • Leveraging eLearning Models for Education in Developing Countries

All of these topics were driven by one or several of our clients and sponsors interested in advancing Internet-related products and markets through either select, multi-corporate or internal think tank sessions or through open discussions with the rich community of innovators associating with the World Internet Center.

We expect a similarly broad array of topics to fill the Center's calendar for 2005 and encourage individuals, corporations, government representatives, and other organizations to engage in this very much-needed dialogue to advance innovation in our industry.

JOIN US AT THE WORLD INTERNET CENTER as a sponsor of an event, a series, or of the Center, itself. Join us also, as an on-going participant at our many public-oriented sessions, including our famous Power Pubs! We look to you as the source of inspiration for the next generation of innovation in the Internet space. For more information on the Center's services, click here.

We look forward to seeing you in 2005!

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SPECIAL HOLIDAY POWER PUB & PANEL: THURSDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2004
"eSUCCESSES IN SOUTH AFRICA: LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY FOR ADVANCEMENT"
Panelists included:
Dr. Joachim Schaper, Vice President Americas, SAP Research Center &
Mr. Jay Visvanathan, Market Development Manager, Higher Education, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Summary and links below.

The World Internet Center was pleased to convene a savvy group of technology and education innovators around the topic of leveraging high technology for the advancement of education and economic development in the developing world, with a specific emphasis on South Africa. Over 80 attendees participated in this special Holiday Pub and Panel, which was sponsored by SAP Research, one of the Center's Corporate Sponsors. High tech representatives from the stalwarts of the Valley included SAP, Sun, HP, Apple, Network Appliance, IBM, and Adobe. Many smaller companies interested in providing last-mile connectivity in rural areas attended, as well. Additionally, we were pleased to draw representatives from the famous NetDay organization, as well as from SRI Consulting Business Intelligence, the Monterey Bay International Trade Association (which is doing work with South Africa), and from Stanford University's Center for African Studies. Our special guest was Mr. Simphiwe Mdingi, the Vice Consul from the South African Consulate, who came up from Los Angeles specifically to share ideas with our community about the reality of contributing to emerging markets through technology-based educational initiatives.

The panel consisted of presentations from Dr. Joachim Schaper, Vice President, Americas, for SAP Research and from Mr. Jay Visvanathan, Market Development Manager for Higher Education at Sun Microsystems.

You may access their respective presentations on the Center's Web site:

  • Click here.
  • Scroll down to the "*December 9, 2004, Power Pub & Panel" and select.
  • You will see links to the presentations in PDF format.

Dr. Schaper summarized SAP's contributions to the Africa Drive Project (http://www.adp.org.za). The Africa Drive Project (ADP) is a research and development project designed to spearhead the use of "blended learning" (i.e., eLearning complemented with face-to-face instruction) in rural and urban areas challenged by insufficiently trained teachers, health and environmental problems, and access to up-to-date instructional content and pedagogical strategies. The goal is to provide in-service teacher education in content areas integral to the future economic and medical health of South Africa, including the sciences, mathematics, information technology, as well as support for the educator as a mentor to students in the areas of AIDS/HIV and Tuberculosis education and environmental conservation. The project is meant to inform an African Continent policy and strategy on the rollout of appropriate education and training methodologies to educators, and thus to graduates, ultimately in all nine Provinces of South Africa and the Southern African Development Region (SADC) countries, and to Africa, at large. The initial deployment of this university-based certificate program will be in the North West Province due to the active participation of the North-West Education Department and the University, as well as the existence of a sound communications backbone and an applicable rural/urban school mix. The collaboration between the high tech community, universities, high schools, international funding organizations, and local governments serves as a great example of the power of "coopetition" in this highly competitive emerging market space. SAP, Siemens Business Solutions, Network Appliance have all contributed to the success in working with a provincial government in Africa to bring this project together.

Mr. Jay Visvanathan of Sun Microsystems, underlined several international initiatives which Sun is supporting for long-term economic development. These included their "Global Education Learning Community" (GELC) which is bringing leading-edge content to a broad community for free or very little cost. He also addressed Sun's work in building a "Digital Campus" which would be built on top of an existing campus, such as MIT, to make a tremendous amount of content available to a global community for little cost or for free. He also underlined the African Information Management (AIMs) initiative and the African Institute of Science and Technology (AIST), both of which are addressed more fully in his presentation which may be accessed through the World Internet Center's website by clicking here.

The audience members raised several pertinent issues and questions, summarized below:

  • "Technology is not our savior." How do we apply "open source," as a philosophy to education at the content level?
  • What is the likelihood of sustainability for projects like the Africa Drive Project? How can we plan for success?
  • What is the infrastructure for voice in data in rural areas, like the one being addressed by the African Drive Project in South Africa? In other words, how do we deliver multi-media courses over two telephone lines?

We thank SAP Research, as a Corporate Sponsor of the World Internet Center, for their continued support of publicly-oriented sessions such as the Holiday Pub and Panel on December 9th.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

ABOUT JOACHIM SCHAPER

Joachim Schaper is Vice President Americas for SAP Research Center, guiding 6 research programs. He is tasked with building up corporate research and focusing on the following research programs: eLearning, Smart Items, Mobile Computing, Technology for Application Integration and Advanced Customer Interfaces. Previous to his role with the Research Center, Dr. Schaper was Manager of the European Research Center, CEC Karlsruhe.

Prior to working at SAP, Dr. Schaper was a member of the research team at the European Applied Research Center (EARC) of Digital Equipment GmbH. There, he was responsible for user interfaces and object-oriented modeling and programming of teaching and learning systems. Following his research at EARC, he took a position as project manager for a four-year research program with Deutsche Telekom AG to develop broadband multimedia teleservices in association with other research institutes and system manufacturers.

Since 2001, Dr. Schaper has been a member of the advisory board of DFKI and FZI, as well as a member of the advisory group for IST and of various SMEs. In addition, he has been the Mini-Track chair of the HICSS conference regarding "Next Generation Learning Platforms." Dr. Schaper received his doctorate and computer science degree both from the Technical University Karlsruhe.

ABOUT JAY VISVANATHAN

Jay Visvanathan's role at Sun Microsystems as Market Development Manager is to promote open architectures and Sun technologies in higher education. His special emphasis is on usage of Sun products in administrative computing and deployment of Web-based services. He is also responsible for driving revenues for Sun in the market for portal-based service provisioning.

Mr. Visvanathan drives market strategy to meet the above charter and implements this strategy worldwide through Sun's Education field organizations. One of the important ways that he accomplishes mindshare and market share for Sun in higher education is to partner with best-of-breed software vendors and systems integrators to ensure that Sun is the platform of choice for their applications. Mr. Visvanathan has also established Centers of Excellence at various universities, each highlighting Sun and partner technologies. In addition, he is also driving the implementation of reference architectures for higher education. These are integrated product stacks (from Sun and partners) that are engineered to take cost and complexity out of IT infrastructures.

Mr. Visvanathan has been with Sun for 18 years in various roles in Finance, Customer Service and Marketing. He has extensive experience in customer relationship management, marketing and selling to Service Providers, and a track record in managing partners to provide superior service to customers. Before his tenure with Sun, he was a Financial Analyst with Intel Corporation for 3 years. Mr. Visvanathan holds a CPA and obtained his MBA from Case Western Reserve University.

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The Silicon Valley World Internet Center thanks its Corporate Sponsors and Knowledge Network Partners for their continuing support:

CORPORATE SPONSORS
SAP http://www.sap.com/

KNOWLEDGE NETWORK PARTNERS
• Halleck http://www.halleck.com
• IC Growth, Inc. http://www.icgrowth.com
• Market Wire http://www.marketwire.com
• Incucomm http://www.incucomm.com

Xterprise http://www.xterprise.com

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To join our community, click on this link: http://center.infopoint.com/join.php

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