Women of Mass Influence - Cher Mi Wang

Cher Mi Wang is the dame behind the success of High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC). The daughter of one of the richest man in Taiwan, in 1997, she entered in a partnership with HT Cho and Peter Chou to form HTC.

She invested heavily in the company. The first success came in 2000 with orders from HP. HTC became the big hit in 2002, when the first Pocket PCs based on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile were developed. This attracted the attention of some big wireless providers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, O2, Vodafone and Orange. HTC began producing units for the various carriers mentioned above and brands like Qtek, Dopod (division of HTC), Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, i-mate and Sharp.

HTC has brought innovative ideas to the industry. The popular Touch series, models are attractive and employ the finger friendly TouchFLO interface. On top of that, HTC is the creator of the first Android OS phone, the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1). Today other major carriers are using HTC's smartphones.

Women of Mass Influence - Gina Bianchini

Gina Bianchini, Co-founder & CEO, Ning.

Bianchini's Ning is possibly the most exciting thing in social networking right now. Ning lets users create their own mini communities, complete with customizable layouts, profiles, blogs, videos, and ads, instead of simply encouraging people to join one ubernetwork such as Facebook, MySpace and the rest. It lets you build your own MySpace.

Just as blogs changed the Web by turning ordinary folks into pundits, Ning could do the same for community. The company estimates that, at this rate, by New Year's Eve 2010 it will host some 4 million social networks, with tens of millions of members, serving up billions of page views daily.

In terms of its influence on business, people are going to have a ton of experiments going on, and they should. Not every company is going to have their own social network. A lot of them will, though, and they can be used in all sorts of interesting ways, whether it's a large computer company we know of that is using [Ning] for an internal social network, or what ImSaturn is doing in having a direct two-way conversation with customers.

Do we have a Malaysian equivalent or better?

Read more in Fastcompany's Ning's Infinite Ambition.

Sexy Way to Build, Share Ideas

Sustainable entrepreneurship has evolved. There has been a wave of innovation that is providing new platforms and resources so that good ideas can be nurtured to fruition. Innovative resources that can provide support to this niche entrepreneur has become increasingly evident.

One such platform is Ideablob.com, an online community that allows entrepreneurs to share and grow their business ideas. In addition, each month a winning idea is awarded $10,000 based on votes from the rest of the rest of the ideablob.com community.

Women of Mass Influence - Irene Au

She's Google's User Experience Designer.

As Director of User Experience at Google, Irene Au is responsible for design and user research for Google’s software products worldwide. Her mission is to champion the strategic value of design at every level of the company.

Au is the former vice president of User Experience and Design at Yahoo!, and was an interaction designer at Netscape. She holds an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.

See also, Malaysia's own planet-roaming user experience designer and recent breed of world citizen of free agents, http://www.ringae.com/.

Women of Mass Influence - Aimee Mullins

“If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right. It’s much easier to stay in known mediocrity than blossom into unknown glory.” Aimee Mullins, athlete and artist.

Aimee Mullins’ legs were amputated at the age of one, yet with the help of advanced artificial limbs, she has set world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes and the long jump at the Paralympics. Off the field, Mullins has a multifaceted career as an artist, actress, model and public speaker.

“I want to challenge people’s ideas of beauty and the myth that disabled people are less capable,” Mullins says on chickspeak.com. “I want to expose people to disability as something that they can’t pity or fear or closet, but something that they accept and maybe want to emulate.”

Women of Mass Influence - Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg - The elder in Facebook.

Facebook, the social networking giant, founded in a dorm room at Harvard University, is mostly young male software engineers working in a freewheeling culture.

Facebook recently hired Sandberg, former Google executive, to provide some adult supervision and help Silicon Valley's hottest startup to grow up - and make oodles of moola. If anyone can figure out how to capitalize on Web 2.0, it's has to be her. At Google, as vice-president of global online sales and operations, she oversaw huge growth in its international operations and managed its lucrative advertising business. As COO of Facebook, Sandberg will be a big influence on the expanding world of new media users as she scales Facebook operations and build its business model.

Change Can Happen

The full speech from Election Night in Grant Park, re-edited with multiple camera angles and shots of the spectacular crowd of over 200,000 supporters.

View here on youtube.

Sexy Society of Givers

The massive amount of donation collected for Obama's campaign makes me wonder how we could develop a society of givers. While US is world's largest donor of aid to the rest of the world, but in terms of per capita giving, Sweden and Norway are tops.

I'm reminded of a taxi drivers who take a whole week off, to ferry people for free to fundraising event in Genting Highland. When it comes to education, certain communities make the sacrifices and give generously to the cause. Schools built on donor money are evident in these communities.

On a trip to Mukah, I chance on a gentleman from Ganu Kito and we spoke of community building. What he said will ring forever in my mind. He said, unlike some communities that have money to give and to help their people, the natives have software. He meant that natives have educated people who possess valuable information and knowledge that can be exploited to develop their community. Giving software aid as assistance for human resource development and community building is indeed a better form of giving than giving money or hardware aid.

On the other hand, we have communities that are always expecting to receive. And the government willingly give hand-outs.

All Things Are Possible

Sexy New Gadget

The Xperia from Sony Ericsson. See the demo here.