Today was another wonderful sunny day in San Francisco. We visited both netvibes and kiva.org along with a fabulous burger shop called Taylor's Automatic Refresher.
We strolled into NetVibes around 9am this morning and were welcomed by Chris. He introduced us to NetVibes and their products in their green Ikea-like conference room. Basically the company specializes in completely customizable personal dashboards for all of an individual's software accounts, programs and interests. These organizational dashboards run on real time and keep their user up to speed. This multinational firm offers this product to individual companies so that they can have a closed format. While NetVibes number one competitor is iGoogle, it has been recognized as the number one dashboard publishing platform. I loved this company's products and I think that it is a very effective organizational tool (really, check it out at netvibes.com). The company leverages the talent of it's user community to translate language, fix bugs and write widgets; all at no cost. In addition, the market is only continuing to grow and expansion into the mobile market and smart home connectivity seems very likely and extremely profitable. To me, NetVibes has promise.
A couple of hours later we were sitting down in a sunny outside patio in front of a burger joint called "Taylor's Automatic Refresher." While a number of individuals in our class claim that the famous "In and Out" burger joint burger cannot be beaten, I am in stark opposition. Taylor's Automatic Refresher's Western Bleu Cheese Bacon burger blows In and Out burger out of the water.
A lengthy bus ride later, we found ourselves walking toward the offices of kiva.org. Kiva is an online micro financing organization that connects people with money to underprivileged entrepreneurs over the Internet in order to encourage lending. At their website, a person can look at the profiles of various entrepreneurs and decide which particular individual they would like to provide a loan to at very low relative interest rates. We were greeted by a group of Kiva employees that almost out numbered our own class. All of these employees were very talented with one being a Stanford CS grad, another being a UC Berkley CS grad and another former Barclays Capital employee. Needless to say, this was a very intimidating room to speak in. However, it was apparent that these extremely talented individuals loved their jobs and took pride in their work. What a group to run a non-profit company. Kiva's business model was extraordinarily robust and something to be replicated if possible.
Two hours later, we found ourselves sitting comfortably in an expensive seafood restaurant. Initially we all thought that our dinner excursion would be a somber one as we all were dragging our feet to the restaurant, however we were wrong. We were sporadically bursting with laughter as a result of quality conversation laced with childish humor (please read http://megynsays.blogspot.com for more details, start at the bottom of the page at "mmmmmmmmmm..."), lobster never tasted so good! Something along these lines...
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and 
This satisfying meal was completed as we remembered our meal was part of our pre-trip fee, almost as good as free! There's some good old back slapping mental accounting for you!
signing off!
Adam
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