We are proud to announce the 2011 edition of our Forum on Emerging Economies, in partnership with Santa Clara University’s International Business Network
Brazil, China, India and Russia are projected to become the largest economies by year 2050. Together these countries hold 40% of the world’s population with an increasing affluent middle-class that is driving the greatest social-economic transformation in history.
The four BRIC countries formed a federation and have been meeting regularly. Recently, they invited another nation to join the block: South Africa. Although its economy is substantially smaller, South Africa accounts for 40 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s economy.
Date: Saturday, May 21st, 12:30pm – 4:30pm
Location: Forbes Family Conference Room, Lucas Hall, Santa Clara University
Agenda:
12:30pm: Introductions & Announcements
12:45pm-2:45pm Innovation and Entrepreneuriship in Emerging Markets
Innovation in the 21st century has no borders and is taking place at a rapid-fire pace particularly in Brazil, China, India and Russia.
Regions that in the past were known as sources of cheap labor are now enjoying a new status as sources of high quality brainpower. Every year, India produces 60,000 people with higher degrees in engineering or computer science. In China that number jumps to 75,000. With that, new entrepreneur clusters have been formed around the world, changing the landscape for global competition, bringing both opportunities and new challenges for the U.S. industry.
Moderator: Mike Swift, San Jose Mercury News
Speakers:
Anna Dvornikova, CEO Entana Corp, Managing Director, TEC – The Entrepreneur’s CLub
Anu Shukla, serial entrepreneur, CEO & Founder, Koinz Media
Nirvikar Singh, Professor of Economics, UCSC, Director of the South Asian Studies Initiative
Pumela Salela, ICT Enabled Services, World Bank
Rodrigo Schmidt, Lead Software Engineer, Facebook
2:45pm-3:00pm Break
3:00pm – 4:45pm Cleantech in Emerging Markets
The global demand for energy is pushing for unprecedented investments in clean energy sources.
According the Pew Charitable Trusts, global clean energy finance and investment grew to $243 billion in 2010, a 30 percent increase from the previous year. Energy use is expected to increase 35 percent over the next 25 years, driven primarily by developing countries’ expanding electricity use and vehicle fleets.
Who are the key players in this dynamic and competitive industry?
Are emerging markets headed to a green revolution?
What are the trends in cleantech venture finance?
Moderator: Mike Swift, San Jose Mercury News
Speakers:
Dmitry Akhanov, President, RUSNANO USA
James T. Caldwell, President, E3 Regenesis Solutions, Inc, Director, UCGEC (US-China Green Energy Council)
Pumela Salela, ICT Enabled Services, World Bank
4-:45pm-5:30 Cocktail reception
Bios of Moderator & Speakers
Moderator:
Mike Swift has been a daily newspaper reporter for over 20 years, beginning his career with the Hartford Courant, where he was selected a Master Reporter in 2001 by the New England Association of Newspaper Editors. In 2005-06, Swift was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, following a course of study that included gender roles, spacecraft design and the role of development and environmental change in the spread of infectious disease. Swift joined the San Jose Mercury News in 2006, and currently covers Google, Facebook and general online trends, including search, online advertising, and social media. Over the course of his career, he has covered the business of major league sports, race and poverty, and politics. Before moving over to cover business news, Swift was the Mercury News’ lead demographics reporter; he also covered the Proposition 8 campaign on same-sex marriage in 2008. Swift has traveled to more than 30 countries by bicycle, and he and his wife Deborah Petersen bicycled 4,697 miles from Hartford to San Diego in 1996, co-writing a series of stories about the state of American community for The Courant.
Speakers:
Anna Dvornikova, CEO Entana Corp, Managing Director, TEC – The Entrepreneur’s CLub
Anna is an angel investor and Founder of Entana Corp. She serves on Advisory/Board of Directors of several technology startups, including eMazeU (acquired by Zoran), WikiMart, Manumatix, and OktoGo. She is the author of many articles on entrepreneurship, angel and venture financing. Anna is also a Managing Director of TEC (The Entrepreneurs’ Club, an international Russian-speaking network of several thousand high-tech entrepreneurs, executives and other professionals. TEC is headquartered in the Silicon Valley and holds regular meetings, seminars and events in Palo Alto, San Francisco, New York, Tel Aviv, and Moscow.
Previously, Anna served as the President of AmBAR where she organized a delegation of 20 prominent investors representing top Silicon Valley VC firms with more than $60 bln under management to Moscow in May 2010 to meet with Russian business, investment and government elite, including President Medvedev, to further ties between Silicon Valley and Russian high-tech community. She also was an organizer and a host of the Russian President in the Silicon Valley in June 2010.
Anu Shukla, a serial entrepreneur currently working on Koinz Media, her fourth venture. Prior to this, she was the Founder & CEO of Offerpal Media, a pioneer in the virtual currency markets providing monetization services to over 2000 social and casual games. Before Offerpal. Anu was the Founder & CEO of Mybuys Inc. and Founder & CEO of Rubric, Inc. Rubric was acquired in 2000 for $366 million. Prior to Rubric, Anu has held a variety of executive roles including the VP of Marketing and Product Strategy at Versata (VATA), and Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Product Management at Compuware/Uniface Corporation (CPWR). Anu has served on the Board of Directors of the International Museum of Women (imow.org), Forum for Women Executives and Entrepreneurs (FWE&E) and the Advisory Board for the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University. She was named to the Computer Industry “Dream Team” by Business 2.0 magazine in 2004, awarded the YSU Distinguished Alumni award in 2005, and the Entrepreneur of the Year by the Washington D.C. based Dialogue on Diversity organization in 2005. In 2007 Anu was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from her alma mater Youngstown State University in recognition of her business achievements.
Dmitry Akhanov is the President of RUSNANO USA, Inc. Previously, Mr. Akhanov was the Head of the Russian Federal Energy Agency, implementing government policy and managing Russian government assets in oil & gas, coal and electricity. As the Head of Strategy of RAO UES Mr. Akhanov took an active role in Russian electricity sector restructuring, managing multiple unbundlings and M&A’s, architecting new sector’s layout. He has an extensive experience in investor relations, strategy and corporate finance. (Click here for presentation).
James T. Caldwell, Ph.D., a Director of UCGEC, Chair of its Green Building Task Force, and Editor of the Conference Programs, is bilingual in Chinese and English. He is President of E3 Regenesis Solutions, Inc., where he specializes in building green energy alliances and energy systems integration for buildings and cities. He was Senior Marketing Representative for Tian Ma, at International Geosystems (H.K) Ltd. and a Tour Director in China for Lindblad Travel. He founded Pacific Rim Connections, Inc. (a multilingual prepress services company), He was the first Editor of the Unicode Standard (ISO10646), served on the Unicode Technical Committee and later served as VP for Multilingual Computing at DAE Interactive Marketing (Ion Global, US). He worked in China for three years and in Hong Kong (one year) during the 1980s. He often travels to China on business and worked in Beijing again in 2007-8. He has taught university courses on the Politics of Energy and the Environment, Comparative Politics and World History at SUNY Binghamton and Iona College, NY. He was post-doctoral Fellow at the U.C. Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies and Assistant Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University.
Nirvikar Singh, is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has served as Director of the Santa Cruz Center for International Economics, Co-Director of the Center for Global, International and Regional Studies, Director of the South Asian Studies Initiative, and Special Advisor to the Chancellor. He organized one of the first major US conferences on Indian economic reform. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BSc and MSc from the London School of Economics, where he was awarded the Allyn Young Prize, Gonner Prize and Ely Devons Prize. His current research topics include information technology and development, electronic commerce, business strategy, economic growth and the Indian economy. He has authored over 100 research papers and co-authored three books: Joint Ventures, International Investment and Technology Transfer; The Political Economy of Federalism in India; andWaiting to Connect: India IT Revolution Bypasses the Domestic Industry. He has also served as an advisor for several startups and knowledge services firms in Silicon Valley and in India.
Pumela Salela, is BPO/ITeS Consultant for the World Bank, based at their headquarters in Washington D.C. She is a Board member of the Global Sourcing Council and the African Ambassador for Sustainable and Socially Responsible Outsourcing. Before the appointment she was a Director: BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) and ICT Enabled Services at the Department of Trade and Industry (the dti) in the Industrial Development Division, South Africa. Her responsibility was to draft strategies and policies that would create and enabling environment of the BPO and ICT sectors in South Africa. Prior her promotion to the Director position she was Deputy Director for Investment Promotion at Trade and Investment South Africa. She was responsible for attracting Foreign Investors into South Africa.
Pumela has made presentations in various business seminars and government events in the United States, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe. Pumela has also been a lecturer and a BPO blog writer for the South African International Business Linkages (saibl) whose headquarters are in Washington DC. Having gone to study in England through the Nelson Mandela Scholarship, she is the Chairperson of the Nelson Mandela Scholarship Alumni Association and a Mentor to Graca Machel Scholars.(Innovation Presentation Cleantech Presentation)
Rodrigo Schmidt joined Facebook in 2008 and currently leads the team of engineers that develops Facebook’s chat and real time infrastructure. Before that, he was working on his own start-up in Switzerland to help Internet users communicate over their browsers. He holds a PhD in Distributed Computer Systems from EPFL, Switizerland, an M.S. degree in Computer Science from Unicamp, Brazil, and a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from FURG, Brazil.
