ValleyZen - At the Intersection of Zen and Technology

“If you want to be at the heart of the intellectual universe come to Stanford,” said Stanford Law School Dean, Larry Kramer, introducing Jonathan Zittrain to a pumped-up pro-Stanford audience at the Ritz Carlton, San Francisco. This book signing event was organized by Dean Kramer and Stanford Law School in an effort to recruit the Oxford professor and internationally-known cyberlaw scholar to come to Stanford.
“There is no place like Stanford Law School,” Zittrain agreed and began his talk centering on his latest book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Flanked by giant digital images from the book, Zittrain described the magic of the early Internet…

“This exhibition was carried around by Indian elephants,” said Peter Friess, President of The TECH Museum of Innovation, on a gala evening celebrating “100 Years of the Nobel Prize” and its installation at The TECH. Traveling through India, China, Egypt, and now Silicon Valley, the exhibit was conceived in the spirit of the Nobel Prize as an international project…

“Remember that 10 words is not a speech. It is a statement!” said East Bay Business Times Publisher Mike Consol. Over a thousand businesspeople had gathered in San Francisco Hilton’s grand ballroom for the presentation of the 2008 list of the 100 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area.

“You get 10 words…Or Less!” Consol prepped the winners in the audience for their moment on stage and urged them to start consolidating their ideas right away. Realizing that they had to create a “corporate haiku” on the spot, the audience…

On Tuesday April 22nd ValleyZen was invited to observe “The First Amendment in the Digital Age,” a Stanford seminar by Beth Noveck. She is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School. Noveck teaches in the areas of intellectual property and innovation law and policy, constitutional law, e-democracy and e-government. The topic for this week concerned the development and use of impenetrable anonymizing software which makes it impossible to identify the source of a posting on the Internet. The class discussed the effects on the constitutional rights of freedom of press and individuals’ right of privacy. The guest presenter was Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation Defender…

Dr. Peter Diamandis is the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, which awarded a $10 million prize for private spaceflight. Today when I met him and heard him speak about the importance of incentivizing risk (see video clip below), I thought of a Zen maxim from Hagakure, Book of the Samurai…

Check out this video conversation with ValleyZen co-bloggers Drue Kataoka and Bill Fenwick. The video takes place outside and inside the Fenwick & West headquarters. In the video Bill and Drue talk about why ZEN and the Valley go together so well. Highlights include:

• Bill on achieving Zen Calm
• Litigation, Zen & Peace
• Zen and the Valley
• About Bill’s old blog
• Bill’s goals for ValleyZen
• The Power of Zen Silence

The ValleyZen video is here or embedded below.
Checkout this ValleyZen Flickr photoset…

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Today ValleyZen was featured on ABC-TV’s View from the Bay.

Watch the View from the Bay segment.

View photos from today’s interview.

The executive producers asked Drue to talk about…

For Barack Obama’s campaign, the Zen surprise came out of the negative space. In the art of Sumi-e, the negative space (the white space between the brush strokes) is as important as the brush strokes themselves. This is what holds the painting together and makes it take shape and meaning. For the Obama campaign, the ebony-inked brush strokes are Obama himself. The negative space is the countless campaign contributors, supporters and activists who have found meaning and identity in his campaign. They are the ones that have created the surprise…

It’s been an exciting two months for ValleyZen.com. Since launch the blog has been:

• Featured on the home page of CNET News
• At the top of the Science & Technology page of leading Italian paper Corriere della Sera
• Covered by CBS Sci & Tech Correspondent Daniel Sieberg for a nationally syndicated radio segment
• Written up on the CBS TechTalk Blog.
• Feature article in CalLaw.com THE RECORDER.
• Invited as a guest on ABC KGO-TV’s View from the Bay…

Subtracting superfluous energy.


Removing excess light.


Entering the void.

Those ideas resonate with us at ValleyZen.

So, in harmony with millions of others in 25 cities around the world, at 8pm we’re shutting down—for one hour…