Yesterday Keiretsu Forum held their Summer Solstice for Women Investors. I found it promoted on the Astia web site and thought that it was a co-sponsored event between the Keiretsu Forum and Astia. It was in a way, but I did not find anyone from Astia there, at least not broadcasting the fact.

It was a great networking event for non-technical contacts. I talked with HR people, lawyers, a few women looking for funding for their companies and a few women investors, but it was strange to be in a room talking business with so few men.

The speakers representing Keiretsu Forum are trying to increase the number of women-owned businesses that get funded and increase the number of women angel investors. They brought up some very interesting points . (I am directly quoting from the material that they provided at the meeting.)

1. Women possess over half the wealth in the United States, but make up less than 8 percent of the angel investment community. -2006 Kaufmann Foundation Report

2. Only 9 percent of all angel capital proposals are made by female entrepreneurs, even though they have an equal chance of receiving funding as male entrepreneurs. -University of New Hampshire Center for Venture Research

Why do women end up with so much money? Traditionally they live longer (about 8 years on average). Also women tend to marry a man that is older than they are (about 4 years older).

I applaud the Keiretsu Forum for putting together this wonderful event to give women investors and entrepreneurs some time in the spotlight. But are women expected to do this working from women-centric groups that are already under represented and limited?

Last night, HispanicNet had a wonderful series of talks and a panel presentation on the state of multimedia and the web version 2.0. I was very impressed by the quality of the speakers and the material that they presented. I also got a great many suggestions from the people that I spoke to on how to improve my networking and expand my number of contacts.

The presentations started with Cheryl Contee. Her talk was on how Web 2.0 and social networks can help your business.  She had two charts that really had an impression on the crowd. The first showed the percentage of 30 year olds in the US who read the newspaper. It peaked around 70% back in the 30’s. The invention of the radio started to bring the percentage down slowly. The invention of the television increase the drop (or negative slope, for those of you who remember how to graph a line). With the Internet, the percentage is currently down to 30% and looks like it is falling off a cliff. There was some discussion in the audience on if there will be paper-based newspapers or magazines in the future.

The second chart showed the popularity of various social networking sites across the world. Facebook and MySpace rule in the US, but Bebo is where it is at in Europe. If you want to follow the crowd in Asia, you should look at Friendster (remember them?).

The second presenter was Carlos Melcer of intouch group inc. His talk focused on US Hispanics and the mobile phone and Internet market. I knew that Spanish TV was growing fast, but I had no idea that radio was still so popular among Hispanics. Also Hispanics save a very small percentage of their money compared to the general US population, which is great for marketers but maybe not so great for Hispanics. One out of every $12 spent in the US comes from Hispanics. I am sure that there would be a great market for Spanish language tours from Geogad. More for my To-Do list.

The third presenter was Jeff Ulin. He gave a brave effort at speaking during his talk with his terrible cold, but his voice completely gave out later during the panel discussion. It was a real pity because his talk was all about revenue and permission models for multimedia content on the Internet. This is his specialty in his practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The crowd was really eager to learn more. Hopefully, he will be able to return at another time and continue the discussion.

The last talk was given by Kul Wadhwa, Director of Business Development for Wikipedia. Wikipedia has hired Wadhwa to increase revenues without changing its non-profit status or, more importantly, alienating its 100,000 volunteers. So how do you make money with completely free-to-use-any-way-you-want content? You work with book publishers to create paper versions of your content. You partner with YouTube on providing video content on Wikipedia pages. I had also heard of an effort by Wikitravel to package their content as paper-based travel books. Don’t laugh. Lonely Planet did something very similar with their users’ travel suggestions when they published their Blue List.

What I thought was very interesting is that China has banned Wikipedia because Wikipedia insists upon retaining its neutral point of view in its articles. Even so, the inventive Chinese hackers have managed to make the banned Wikipedia site one of the top 200 sites in China. Wikipedia has some serious competition in China from Baidu. Baidu has copied the content of Wikipedia’s pages, reformatted it into their own pages and presents it as their content. It is a new take on the quote:

We have met the enemy and they are us.

The new 2.0 version of the Geogad web site is available, and new features are being continually added. Since the basic platform is together and expanding, it is time to start networking for more opportunities for Geogad. So I am taking more time away from the site to build up a better network of contacts.

One event that I recently attended to get more contacts in the tech community is the HYSTA speakers series. I wrote about my first HYSTA talk that I attended a few weeks ago. It is a very impressive organization with a large base of people. The talk itself was standing room only.

I had registered in advance online for the previous talk, but I could not register online this time. I thought that their site might have had a temporary problem. Turns out the overload from the last meeting had caused them to limit the number of people registering. I should have realized that when I showed up for this Saturday’s talk. Since I had not preregistered, I could not attend the talk. But the people who run HYSTA where kind enough to let me chat with people before the talk.

The few people that I spoke with had some great advice for me. One piece of advice is to check out YCombinator, a kind of seed-funding tech incubator. The YCombinator site has a great section on keeping up with tech news in the Valley. This news could be a big help on building up a dynamic tech network. It will be interesting reading their advice for startups.

Attended the NewTech meeting last night.  Came late and left early because I have so many other things to do.  It is really terrible because it is a great meeting to network.

Of the presentation, the two best were neighboroo.com and thinkfree.com.  Neighboroo was one that had popped onto my radar earlier, but I did not have a chance to research them.  They are essentially a mashup between statistical data and local market locations.  For example, they mash Google maps with the U.S. census data to show in visual format the percentage of people between the ages of, say, 20-30 year old that live in a certain zip code.  They can also how areas are divided based on numbers of Democrats and Republicans or Muslims, Jews, and Christians or by level of income.  Basically, if someone has polled for this data and they can get their hands on it, Neighboroo can show it.  It is a great use for people moving to new areas and for retailers interested in opening new stores in other locations.

Thinkfree is essentially Office-on-the-web.  You can work on and create your own doc, xls, and ppt files in your free account at their web site.  This company has been working on creating the software from scratch since around 1999.  It is based on Java and should be pretty solid.  This service would be great for people who want to collaborate over long distances or who are traveling and want to use Office products from anywhere in the world without having to drag all the files with them.  Basically, it would be great for any world travelers to work as they travel. The best feature is that it is supposed to work almost seamlessly with Microsoft products.  So you can open a basic Office file in Thinkfree (they support 85% of Microsoft features), work on it on the web, and then save it back to your hard drive in the future as a completely compliant Office doc. The one feature that they seem to be missing is the ability to trace changes at the line level for groups of people working on a single file.  This feature will probably be added in the future.

Technorati tags: NewTech, Neighboroo, Thinkfree, networking, Silicon Valley, travel, travel tools

Yesterday I expanded my network by attending the very excellent SVC Wireless Networking Dinner.  If you are not familiar with SVC Wireless, they are the Silicon Valley-China Wireless Tech Association.  They are a great organization that has a ton of events with all sorts of relevant speakers and networking events.  I usually am hard pressed to get time for all their events, but I always try to attend their annual meetings.  They take about half of a Saturday and include speakers from the top mobile companies.  For me this is a short cut to actually going to Asia.  I have been told that Asia is about a couple of years ahead of the US in cell phone usage, although the US is catching up.  If something works in Asia, then there is a good chance it will work here. 

The dinner was a wonderful networking opportunity.  Everyone was interested in talking about their business and searching for possible collaborations.  It was a very energetic environment.

I was so interested in talking with other attendees that person in charge had to politely tell us to come to dinner three times. Ken Liew, VP Networking, and Allie Xiong, Director Networking, were great organizers and made a point of introducing everyone.

 The choice of restaurant was also inspired.  The great Singaporean food at Prima Taste USA was inspired.  I would kill for the recipe for the baby squid appetizer and the ladyfingers. 

You can join SVC Wireless for free to get the newsletters and emails.  For only $50 you can become a full member and get in free to their events.  In Silicon Valley, this is a great deal and explains how they have 3800 members.

Technorati tags: Silicon Valley, SVC Wireless, wireless, networking, Prime Taste USA, Singapore food