CoolTech Club with Jeff McKenna : Comparing RUP, XP, and Scrum: Mixing a Process Cocktail for Your Team

WHEN

November 18,2004

WHAT

This seminar is for anyone who is involved in software development. The author takes a pragmatic view of each of these processes, which is a change from the evangelical view one often gets.

CoolTech Club with Alexei Andreev : Venture Capital and Nanotechnologies

WHEN

October 26,2004

WHAT

The nanotechnology is widely believed to be the “next big thing”. In fact, it is an extremely broad term that covers converging area of biotechnology, material science, informatics and metrology. While many practical applications of nanotechnology are coming into our day-to-day life, the major breakthroughs are yet to come.

Nanotech start-ups are popping up but many of them will have hard time to bring their products to the market in the next 3-5 years. Metrological tools and bulk nanomaterials are the closest to the market, but they provide very limited upside for investor community and the founders

CoolTech Club with Gene Linetsky : How to make $1M in a year and pay only 15% in taxes

WHEN

September 29,2004

WHAT

Gene will present the concept of self-funded ABCs (Acquisition-Bound Companies) and the ways to research, develop and position competitive (software) product features with the goal of selling the technology within a year.
Gene Linetsky, Zone Labs’ Vice President of Research and Development, has extensive technology experience spanning secure real-time communication protocols, large-scale Web applications, cross-platform development environments, compilers, and sales automation systems. Mr. Linetsky co-founded two software startups, IMsecure Corp. (acquired by Zone Labs) and Ultris, Inc. (acquired by Saba Software). He has also held technology leadership positions at Saba Software, Mattel, and The Learning Company, shipping both enterprise-class solutions and consumer software titles. Previously, in his native Russia, Mr. Linetsky pioneered computer science curriculum for high schools, developed educational software for children, and co-authored a computer science textbook with over 3 million copies in print.

CoolTech Club with Steve Manning : Trends in Hacking and Protecting E-commerce Systems

WHEN

August 25,2004

WHAT

Steve Manning is Director of Product Management at Narus where he is responsible for developing carrier security solutions to detect and mitigate worm and denial of service attacks.  Prior to Narus, Mr. Manning worked as a product manager at VeriSign, where he designed and launched the company’s first payments fraud detection platform “Fraud Protection Services”.  The Fraud Protection Services platform secured over 1 Million transactions a day for over 100,000 online merchants.

CoolTech Club with Avery Kadison : Fighting Fraud on the World’s Largest P2P Platform

WHEN

July 28,2004

WHAT

Mr. Kadison’s presentation will focus on a high-level look at fraud detection and prevention within the PayPal platform.  Afterwards, he will discuss the various approaches that are being taken by the major industry players (including eBay and PayPal) to combat an increasingly organized and dangerous criminal threat to the Internet’s ultimate commercial promise: identity theft.

CoolTech Club with Ian McPherson : Untangling the mesh network - A practical examination

WHEN

July 28,2004

WHAT

From sensor and control networks to public safety systems, vendors are touting mesh networks as the next revolution in wireless communications.  We will discuss the different approaches to mesh networking, the challenges, as well as the market segments where this approach is gaining traction

CoolTech Club with Philip de Louraille : Worm Rising

WHEN

June 30,2004

WHAT

Worm activity is swamping IDS sensors. Smart, dedicated and focused hackers can use worm attacks to their advantage to mask and hide their activity. What's an Information Security team to do to keep an eye both on the storms of activities triggered by the worms and on the activities of a lone hacker who is not triggering that many bells?

CoolTech Club with Oleg Zabluda : Security and Cryptography. Relationship between the two (Part II)

WHEN

February 11, 2004

WHAT

  • Public key cryptography (RSA, PGP). Hybrid cryptosystems.
  • Real stream ciphers. Corresponding block cipher modes, OFB, CTR. RC4. Why 802.11b security is a joke.
  • Authentication. Man-in-the-middle attack. Interlock protocol.
  • Symmetric key authentication (MAC, CBC-MAC, HMAC, Kerberos).
  • Public key authentication (RSA/PGP digital signatures)
  • PKI. Why it sucks.
  • SSL.

CoolTech Club with Marianna Dizik : The Art and Science of Data Mining

WHEN

December 3, 2003

WHAT

The Art and Science of Data Mining

CoolTech Club with Oleg Zabluda : Security and Cryptography. Relationship between the two (Part I)

WHEN

November 12, 2003

WHAT

  • Symmetric key cryptography.
  • Ideal stream cipher. One time Pad. Traffic analysis. Multiple-key cryptography. Key splitting. Cascading ciphers.
  • Ideal hash functions. Cryptographically secure hash functions. Birthday attack. Meet-in-the-middle attack. CRC32, MD5, SHA. Make cosmetic changes to the document you sign. Length-extension attack. H(X,m). Partial message collision attack H(m,X). Fix the hash function. H(H(m),m)), H(H(m)).
  • Ideal block cipher.
  • Real block ciphers. Types of attack: ciphertext-only, chosen plaintext, chosen ciphertext, iterative chosen plaintext/ciphertext. Side-channel/out-of-band attacks (timing, power, RF, optical, malfunction). DES, 3DES, IDEA, AES. Whatever happenned to double-DES? Block cipher modes (ECB, CBC).

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What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart