Newsletter 3

Greetings loyal reader! Sorry it's been a while, but I have several exciting updates.

January was a big travel month for me. My first destination was Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I did some field work. My friend (who wishes to remain anonymous) is working there, so I visited Colombo and met some of the local folks she works with. It was an amazing place to be; there is tremendous hardship but also tremendous potential. One of the Digital Vision fellows from last year did a project in Sri Lanka, so I also met his local contact. He is working to set up business process outsourcing companies in rural areas that already have computer literacy and English education available.

After Sri Lanka, I went to Switzerland for the Schwab Summit for Social Entrepreneurs. I was very honored to be invited, and it was extremely inspiring to be chatting with the same people who were my initial inspiration for this type of project, such as Nick Moon and David Green.

My favorite panel at the Schwab Summit was called "The Business Case for Working with Social Entrepreneurs." The panel was made up of executives from Microsoft, Salesforce.com, BCG, Deutsche Bank, Swiss RE, and Ernst & Young. All of the companies were working with social entrepreneurs in some capacity. For example, Microsoft has a group that works with social entrepreneurs, which increases their employee retention as well as exposing them to new business ventures. Akhtar Badshah, a Senior Director at Microsoft said that their long-term view was toward changing how society views poverty and development.

The Project VIEW team is also growing. In addition, to me, myself, and I, there are now four Bay Area Video Coalition interns on the team as well as a professional product manager, who volunteered from a Stanford class.

Finally, my big news is my first academic publication. I am presenting at the Digital Stream Conference in Monterey, and my paper will be included in the conference proceedings. Voila! A publication!

The next big step in the project is the website. I have registered a domain and the web interns and I are working on a full website to showcase everything. Stay tuned, I'll announce the launch in the next newsletter.

Until then, please email me if you have any ideas or feedback.

Best,
John Kuner
Digital Vision Fellow
jkuner AT stanford DOT edu

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Links:
Bay Area Video Coalition: http://bavc.org
Digital Stream Conference: http://wlc.csumb.edu/digitalstream/
KickStart (Nick Moon): http://kickstart.org/home
Aravind (David Green): http://www.aravind.org/