On September 13, Mind the Bridge hosted a policy hackathon sponsored by Dell at the MTB Innovation Center in San Francisco. The Dell PolicyHack™ brought together entrepreneurs and U.S./EU policy experts to solve policy challenges. The goal is to productively brainstorm and to provide top-line thinking that can inspire and serve as basis to develop and implement full policies.
My team was formed by:
Sara R. Klucking (Section Chief, Innovation & Programs, Office of Science and Technology Cooperation, US Department of State) Bogdan Ceobanu (Policy Officer, Startups & Innovation, European Commission) David Hodgson (CEO, Hummingbird Labs) me The five teams had 75 minutes to come up with a policy solution to issue areas that impact entrepreneurs.
Tuesday September 13 was a day devoted to workshops, a policy hackathon, and a visit to Pinterest HQ.
As I have mentioned before, we have been fortunate to have a great group of mentors. In this case we enjoyed the following sessions in small groups:
Market growth with: the CEO of CorkBIC, a former Microsoft BizDev VP, and the co-Founder & Director of Blippar Funding with: the Chair of Global Venture Forum, a Director at Woodside Capital, and a Partner at Delta Partners Group M&A/IPO with: the Principal M&A Integration at Google, a Managing Partner at Woodside Capital, and a Partner at Penningtons Manches Communication/PR with: the President of ActiveMedia, and the Associate Director at Oxygen PR After that we had a policy hackathon competition (more about that in the next blog post).
Monday, September 12, was the European Innovation Day (EID) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Although the museum is not open on Mondays, we had access to a few of the exhibits, like the one about the IBM 1401, the awesome PDP-1 (Creating the Hacker Culture), and autonomous vehicles (and yes, of course, I go into a Google driverless car, and took a selfie).
But the reason why we went there was not (only) to see the museum but to participate in the EID event.
One of the things that strikes me the most in this trip is how many homeless there are in SF. The income inequality is so obvious and insulting, it hurts. I know this is not a “SF-only” problem, but here it is a lot more visible than in many other cities.
As I walk from Union Sq. to Tender Nob through Geary or O’Farrell streets, or as I go to work in SOMA, I see homeless and people in need all over the sidewalk.
On Tuesday August 9th, I was invited to talk about Personalised Medicine at Microsoft’s event “Empowering Health in a mobile first and cloud first world”, at Microsoft’s UK headquarters in Reading (UK).
There were very interesting sessions on Intelligent Cloud, Microsoft Research (with whom we are collaborating) work on radiology and genomics, Introduction to productivity in health, Revolutionising infection control, National Technology Officer’s Cloud Update, Transdermal Sensors in Paediatric Care, Introduction to personalised computing in health, Virtual care clinics in Sweden, Digital wellbeing, The venture programme for health, NHS…
I am interested in many things. One of the main ones is technology. And within technology, software development to view telemetry data in different ways, within the same application.
Answering NASA’s call to help contribute to the exploration of the solar system, I got access to their next-generation mission control framework being developed at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley being used for mission planning and operations in the lead up to the Resource Prospector mission, and at NASA`s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to view data from the Curiosity Rover.
After the trip to Boston I came down with the flu, of course on a weekend as usual. So Monday I had zero energy, but a week ahead with an usual large number of meetings around London, so I had to do “magic calendar tricks” to be able to make all of them and to also attend several events. The main “trick” is to concentrate meetings geographically, adding into the calendar the time it takes to go from point A to point B.
