The start of the school year is approaching, and along with new laptops, new backpacks, and new goals – the season is rife with new speakers generating fresh content for ECorner.

Celebrity highlights include a lecture by music industry heavy Quincy Jones III and rapper/entrepreneur Chamillionaire (November 4), who together will kick off the 2009 Global Innovation Tournament; a celebration of entrepreneurship education.

We’ll also feature numerous speakers from the field of venture capital, including those from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (sponsors of the lecture series). Other expertise ready to be shared will come from those involved with Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Solar City.

Be ready to be edified with our first speaker, Robin Li of Baidu, China’s answer to Google, scheduled for September 23.

For the latest information on the quarterly line-up, speaker biographies, and more, visit the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar website. And stay tuned to ECorner for the podcasts and video captures of the talks to follow.

ECorner prides itself on producing a steady stream of excellent videos and podcasts on the subject of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education. But what if your interests lie in other academic fields, such as law, philosophy, or biology?

If you enjoy our content, you’ll likely also enjoy the treasure trove that is AcademicEarth.org, a global archive of 1500 video lectures from Ivy League universities (including Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc.). ECorner.Stanford.edu is by far one of their largest contributors, streaming about a thousand videos to their catalog. The site launched in March, 2009, and they see about 400,000 visitors per month from every corner of the globe.

The ECorner videos have proved extremely popular, and comprise nearly all of the content on the site’s entrepreneurship channel. According to AcademicEarth’s figures, the most popular videos in this category include:

• How Do You Find Your Passion And How Do You Pursue It? (Randy Komisar)
• Entrepreneurial Skills Learned (Mark Zuckerberg)
• Experience Is Overrated (Guy Kawasaki)

As Facebook rounds the bend on 250 million users, this fantastic discussion between Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the company, and one of his early investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, offers an amazing time capsule in the social networking giant’s history.

This 2005 talk catches Zuckerberg shortly after the 18-month-old company’s party commemorating five million users. Many are still posting their cell phone numbers to their profile, are users are segregated by school. Zuckerberg speaks in depth about initial ideas in product development, team dynamics and company culture, and generating early revenue rounds, among other topics.

One audience member asks, “How does Facebook make money?”

One thing that’s changed little since Facebook’s early days is its amazing viral magnetism: From its inception, the website draws 93 percent of its users back at least once a month, yielding 5.5 billion page views. At the time of this recording, the website is adding 20,000 new users daily.

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In this remarkable video of three-time ETL speaker Jeff Hawkins recorded in 2002 – the age of the Treo and the very first iPod – Hawkins proves to be ahead of his time when it comes to acknowledging the proliferation and power of mobile computing.

He tells the Stanford audience, “You’re going to have a T1 line in your pocket, “ which literally sparks laughter in the crowd. Shortly thereafter he pulls his brick-thick mobile phone from his pocket to demonstrate the point.

Still, his soothsaying about the impact of handheld computing foretold the millions of iPhone’s and other handhelds experiencing broad market acceptance today. Speaking to his own Palm Pilot invention, he remarks that they made it an accessory to the PC but, he predicted, “I think this is going to be flipped around. In the future, the thing in your pocket is going to be the center of the universe. And the big screen and the keyboard will become an accessory to it.”

Hawkins also spoke at ETL in 2005 and again in 2009.

Every speaker in the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture Series is a celebrity, but the weekly class does not usually require the planning necessary to accommodate the crowd of 1700 – among them numerous press and Microsoft employees - expected for CEO Steve Ballmer this week.

Behind the scenes, STVP’s Program Coordinator Belen Torres-Gil has been meeting with numerous groups on campus and in the community to insure the event runs smoothly.

These include Stanford Events, Stanford University Department of Public Safety, and the management and crew of Memorial Auditorium, where the lecture will take place. BASES is also participating and acting as handlers for Ballmer, and Events and Labor Services will provide technical assistance. And of course, the ECorner video and audio team will be capturing the talk for the video archive.

Note that tickets are required for this event, but that it’s free and open to the public. Students can pick up their tickets for preferred seating online (for a $3 fee) or in White Plaza, 12pm-1pm, Monday through Wednesday. The community can get their tickets anytime through Stanford tickets.

Since she spoke to students at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture Series in January 2009, Teresa Briggs, Managing Partner at Deloitte Silicon Valley, has added a new task to her career roster, reports this press release. She is now a board member of San Jose, California’s Tech Museum of Innovation.

Briggs will retain her other board positions with the SV chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the 1stACT Catalyst Team, our own Stanford Technology Ventures Program advisory board, and the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management Board of Advisors.

“Teresa brings a wealth of leadership experience to The Tech Museum board,” said Peter Friess, museum president. “We fully expect to draw on her experience and vision as we move The Tech Museum forward in new and exciting ways.”

Suggested results are displayed as you type your query into the search box.

When browsing a site, say Amazon.com, you might know exactly what you’re looking for. For instance, you type the book title into the search box and as you’re typing, results start to appear below the search box “suggesting” results. You can then arrow down or click on the appropriate listing and you’re taken immediately to the page you wanted. That’s called predictive search. It works by comparing your search entry to a list of known results and does this *as you’re typing* to help you narrow your results.

Predictive search also works well if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for - by essentially making suggestions as you type. For instance, you might not know the spelling of a speaker’s name on ECorner, but by typing the first few letters, suggestions start to appear. You see the name in the list and click on it, or you don’t see the name and adjust what you’ve typed accordingly. Either way, it’s really helpful and very cool. I’m pleased to say that we now offer predictive search on ECorner. We’re still fine tuning the results a bit, so I encourage you to give it a try and let us know how it works for you.

It took a bit of doing, but we successfully launched the new version of eCorner that widens the page design and expands the video size from 320 to 500 pixels wide (see earlier post for details). This dedicates a larger portion of the screen to our core content - namely video. I haven’t received any angry email from users (so far), so I assume everyone is happy

@ECorner on Twitter

I’m also pleased to announce that we now offer a Twitter feed. I’m not yet sure how it will play out in the end, but part of our philosophy is to try out new technologies and keep what works. So far, so good, and we have over a hundred followers and users seem to ‘re-tweet” our content. I need to add the Twitter link to the site - any ideas on where I should include it?

The last twelve months have been rife with change for Carly Fiorina, an ETL speaker who last addressed Stanford students in 2007.

According to a recent story in the San Mateo Times, Fiorina, who left Hewlett-Packard in 2005, may give Barbara Boxer a challenge in the race for her senate seat next year.

Fiorina entered politics as an adviser to John McCain during the 2008 election. She was also recently elected Chair of the Board of the Washington, D.C.-based Technology Policy Institute. And in February 2009, she underwent surgery for breast cancer.

The Times quoted Fiorina as “seriously considering” embarking upon political next-steps, and it cites one poll that indicates half of voters would consider a new candidate in the seat.

The New York Times reports that longtime Silicon Valley investor Pierre Lamond will be joining Vinod Khosla at VC firm Khosla Ventures. Khosla’s firm frequently invests in clean tech, microfinance, and other IT start-ups. In this video from the ECorner archives, Khosla speaks more about his firm and its mission.

Lamond was considering retirement from his 27-year partnership with Sequoia Capital, but decided instead to pursue this opportunity, telling the Times, “I was really looking at phasing out, but an opportunity like this comes and I thought it was worthwhile.”