Saïd Business School is slowly but surely positioning itself quite savvily in the Web 2.0 space. Last year’s inaugural “Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford” event was excellent (see a PDF report here) and featured speakers like Evan Williams from Odeo and seniors from various other state-side startups like Craigslist (although the lack of Wi-Fi in the lecture theatres was somewhat limiting, thankfully now addressed I gather).
This year the 19/20 Nov event is shaping up to be another great showcase of Silicon Valley talent, and features, among others, people like Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn.com), Om Malik (author of GigaOm and contributing editor to Business 2.0) and Alex Welch, CEO, Founder of Photobucket.
Here is a snip from the “Theme for 2006”:
In 2006 we will focus on the theme of “mass collaboration” – the profusion of new software and businesses aimed at college students and commercial businesses to enable people to work online together. Within this theme we will address:
* The importance of Open source software and web sites – from openoffice to wikipedia and firefox
* The rise of networked functionality, e.g. word processing on the internet with multiple authors on the same document or games such as Second Life
* The focus for the emerging mass collaboration software on college students initially as a proving ground before moving on to monetizing products in the commercial world.
As part of the event they are also running three “creative workshops” billed as the Garage Programme, (as in Hewlett Packard started-up in a garage etc).
Since places are limited to pre-registered attendees TCUK would normally say get pre-registering, but it looks like the event is full, which is a bit of a shame. Of course, TCUK would not at all advise turning up for the evening drinks in the main reception hall and button-holing a luminary, but no doubt some die-hards will be tempted to do just this… ;-)