Tech talk in Santa Clara

The 24th edition of TiEcon, the annual conference of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) in Silicon Valley, is currently underway at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in California. The two-day conference is expected to attract several thousand entrepreneurs, venture capitalists (VC), and software professionals.

The speaker list included Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, Diane Greene, co-founder and former CEO of VMware and currently senior vice-president of Google, and Bonny Simmi, three-time Olympian, commercial pilot, and head of JetBlue Technology Ventures, and Nobel Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi.

This year, TiEcon introduced VC Connect, a programme which introduces start-ups to VCs. A Mentor Connect programme connected start-up founders with mentors. Introduced in 2009, TiE 50 selects top 50 start-ups. This year 1,732 start-ups from 13 countries applied.

TiEcon also features an exhibition. Odisha and Andhra Pradesh are participating as exhibitors this year. The youngest entrepreneur at TiEcon is nine-year old Yash Semlani, working on his own lemonade franchise.

Human intuition cannot be replaced: Adobe CEO

"Robots can never be great at marketing," said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen (pictured). "Human intuition cannot be replaced."

"It is an absolutely phenomenal time in the Valley to be an entrepreneur," he said, delivering his keynote speech. Enterprises are seeing an experience wave, where customers are demanding consistent, compelling, personalised service, at every level of contact with companies. He calls it the third wave, saying the first wave of enterprise disruption was the back-office wave, with companies focusing on enterprise resource planning , and the next-wave was the front-office wave, with firms focusing on Salesforce and customer relationship management.

San Jose pins hope on Indo-American

The home of tech behemoths like Cisco, Adobe, eBay, and PayPal, San Jose is the heart of innovation in Silicon Valley. And, it relies on a young Indian American for innovation. Shireen Santosham, a Harvard graduate, took up the position of chief innovation officer and senior policy advisor for the City of San Jose, quitting her previous job as director, research & insights, connected society, GSMA. She is pushing ahead a smart city initiative, moving processes online, partnering with Facebook and crowd-sourcing applications.

Trump & Modi: politics of tech

Even as billionaire Donald Trump secures the Republican presidential nomination, the mood in liberal California seems to be against him. His Democrat opponent Hillary Clinton, who is also likely to get the nomination, also inspires scepticism. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, is a winner. Venktesh Shukla, general partner, Monta Vista Capital, is chairman of TiE Global, and president of TiE Silicon Valley. He had hosted Modi during a visit to Silicon Valley last year.

Multi-factor authentication

"We've been in the cross-hairs of some of the best hackers in the world," said Diane Greene (pictured), founder and former CEO of VMware, and senior vice president for Google's cloud business. The search giant employs 600 security engineers to make sure its cloud services are safe. "Use multi-factor authentication, no matter what," she said, smiling as she summed up her keynote at TiEcon.