Saturday, April 18, 2009
at the California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, California
Registration and Continental Breakfast:
8:00 a.m. Baxter Hall
Program:
9:00 a.m. to 11:20 a.m. at Baxter Lecture Hall
Networking:
11:20 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at Baxter Lecture Hall
Cost:
$40 on-line registration fee  $50 at-the-door.  $10 for students with full-time student ID (must show at door); free to Caltech students. Registration closes at 5:00 pm, Thursday, April 16, 2009. There are no refunds for no-shows.

Like remoras around whales such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, hundreds of thousands of smaller social networks flourish or struggle, based on diverse affinities of politics, hobbies, tastes, professions, and, of course, shared dislikes!

“Socnet” proliferation amplifies issues that increasingly worry users—“What access do friends of friends have? Is my content still mine? What about advertisers?” Along the way they become weary of repeated data entry, leery of ever-proliferating and incomprehensible “Terms of Service,” and angry when a site overreaches.

Meanwhile, smaller socnet sites want to exploit the behemoths’ reach while hoping for standards, the big guys seek to define the standard, and most all want maximal use if not control of user data.

Combining these concerns with blogs, Twitter, social shopping, and wikis yields today's rich but uncertain techno-brew. Against this background of interaction and tension, today's keynote, entrepreneurs and panelists will explore where we are going, including issues such as whether OpenSocial, data portability and other initiatives will succeed, how individual socnet sites survive and flourish, and the nature of infrastructural and other opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial Keynote

Scott Morrow
President & CEO
ThisNext

User Community Keynote

Doc Searls
Senior Editor, Linux Journal
Chair of ProjectVRM and Berkman Fellow at Harvard University
Recipient of Google/O’Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator
Co-Author, “Cluetrain Manifesto”.

Panelists

John Delacruz
Co-Founder
JournalFire, Inc
www.journalfire.org

Melissa Leonard
Founder & CEO, ExecuEdge
Co-Founder, eEnterpriseSolutions
VP, Strategy & Business Development, Integrated Virtual Networks

Andrew Shaindlin
Executive Director, Caltech Alumni Association
Noted blogger/commentator on social networking and alumni relations
Board Member, Higher Education Experts; Trustee, CASE

Mark Suster
Partner, GRP Partners
Formerly VP of Product Development, Salesforce.com
Founder & CEO, BuildOnline

Moderator and Producer

Michael Krieger, Ph.D., J.D.
Willenken Wilson Loh & Lieb LLP
www.willenken.com

Date

Saturday morning, April 18, 2009

$40 on-line registration fee.  $50 at-the-door.  $10 for students with full-time student ID (must show at door); free to Caltech students. Registrations are taken on-line up to 5:00 p.m., Thursday, April 16, 2009. There are no refunds for no-shows.

K&L Gates LLP

Founding Sponsors

	Caltech Industrial Relations Center
	Caltech Alumni Association
	MIT Alumni Association

Operating Sponsor

Caltech Office of Technology Transfer

The Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum is administered in conjunction with the
Caltech Office of Technology Transfer