Archive for October, 2008

Prospective students at Haas hear a lot about how the school is highly student-driven, and that there are numerous opportunities to get involved even from day-one. I can now testify first-hand that this is absolutely true.

DMEC & >play
One of the most exciting clubs at Haas is the Digital Media and Entertainment club, which brings together people with passion for technology and specifically its impact on the consumer world through digital media, such as TV & cinema, computer games, web applications, the living room and even your car.

The club organizes the >play conference, which brings together industry experts from all the areas mentioned above and more, to create an unforgettable annual event. The event provides a unique opportunity to meet both the newest startups in the Media and Entertainment sphere, as well as the latest innovations from the well established players in this market. The main attractions of the event are traditionally its great keynote speakers, the expo that demonstrates the hottest new technologies and the panels who bring in industry leaders to hold fascinating discussions about the latest trends. This year, the >play conference takes place on November 15th.

Getting Involved
When I applied to Haas, I knew I wanted to take an active part in the DMEC activities, I just didn’t realize how fast this would happen. Even before arriving at haas, the >play committee published a message in the new admits Google group, inviting first year students to volunteer in helping organizing the event. Truth is, I assumed that we will get mainly administrative or logistical tasks. Nevertheless, I’ve expressed my interest in helping with the panels. Only a weeks after arriving to Haas, we had a first meeting with the second year student who is responsible for the panels, and he told us about opportunities of getting involved with existing panels. However, he strongly encouraged us to come up with ideas for new panels and suggested a few topics that we can follow up on.

Making it happen
One of the topics suggested was a Gaming Panel. I’ve long ago marked the gaming industry as one of the most exciting and innovative ones, and looked for ways to getting involved in it, and this was a great opportunity to do so while also helping >play becoming even better. I joined forces with several classmates, and with the help of many students from both years we gradually started forming the list of participants for our newborn panel.

New business models in gaming
The main theme of the >play conference this year is Disruption, so we examined several ideas for our panel that could fit this theme. We eventually came up with a list of companies who are redefining the ways in which games are delivered to customers - from live online game servers through episodic gaming to user-engagement games, the panel started to include an amazing list of people, and they were all extremely responsive and excited to take part in >play.

I proudly present the >play 2008 gaming panel:

Quite exciting, isn’t it?

Last week we had our Fall A finals (in Stats, Micro and OB). To celebrate the end of a sleepless week, Our group of close friends from the Village gathered together to an afternoon tour at Scharffen Berger chocolate factory here at Berkeley.

We started at the factory’s cafe with a great lunch and even better deserts.

We then moved to a very entertaining session about the factory’s history. Scharffen Berger’s history is not that long actually, as the factory is 11 years old. They specialize in dark chocolate on various percentage categories (less percent means more sugar!). We also learned about some of the internals of the chocolate making process, the machines, the different ways to grow it etc. We also learned that we prefer the cheap, unbranded milk chocolate over the expensive quality dark one.

The event concluded with an actual tour in the factory, which was a bit disappointing, as no chocolate was involved. No chocolate rivers, candy bar trees or even big bowls filled with steamy, thick cacao. Just many many iron machines. Nevertheless, it was still lots of fun, the company was great as usual, and it was exactly what we needed after final’s craziness.

One of the things that I was looking forward to is buying a car in America. Everyone told me how cheap cars are in the States, and how big the variety is - just select your preferred car and take it home at a surprisingly low price.

ahm…not really.

Apparently, the recent year have changed the Americans’ driving preferences quite a bit. Goodbye huge cars, Jeeps or SUVs - hello small, Japanese, gas-saving cars.

What this means in practice is that those lucky people who have bought:
1. Toyota Corolla
or
2. Honda Civic
Are sitting on gold mines. They can sell their cars within seconds while people who hold any other type of car are stuck with it for weeks.

How it works

• You start by defining your budget, target models, years and source (dealers are not very popular here, so you will most likely go to private owners). The best source of helping you making these decisions is Kelly Blue Book (http://www.kbb.com). This is an online price-list for cars that will calculate a market value for any car by model, year, milage, condition etc. It also contains user reviews for each of the car models.

• Once you define your target specturm of cars, you start searching for it. The search usually starts (and ends) at craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org). Everyone is selling and buying there now all over America. It’s quite amazing, but this site have become the de-facto standard of classifieds over the internet.

• If you find a car that seems relevant, first thing you do is that you ask for the VIN#. Each car here has a unique identification number by which you can track its complete history through websites like CarFax (http://www.carfax.com). You put in the car’s VIN and you get a full and detailed report of every accident the car has ever been through, number of previous owners, milage each owner did etc.

• An interesting term you should know is “salvaged title”. It basically means that this car was through a major accident, or that it was stolen and returned at some point. In reality, this actually translates into - “this is the car of the devil, do not touch it and if you do no one will buy it from you”.

• Once you do find a car and run it through the neccessary tests, the actual sale is done by the onwer simply handing you over an ownership title, which declares that you are now the owner of the car. You must then register it within 5 days in the DMV (Department of Motored Vehicles).

(Our car, in the middle of our street)

Our car
Our little community of friends have encountered some horror stories regarding cars - people who give you a VIN and then try to sell you a different car, people who “forget” to mention that the car is salvaged or people who sell their car for their brother who lived in Hong Kong, did not sign the title as required and doesn’t have a US Visa so he can’t sign it now as well.

We were extremely lucky to find a nice 2005 Hyundai Elantra with only 40,000 miles and another year of valid warranty. To find such a car it took over a month and a half of daily scanning of craigslist on all the areas that were near enough to reach without a car (the classic “I need a car to buy one” paradox). Keep your fingers crossed for us that it doesn’t get stolen!