Event Information
Do you want to start your own business? How about you have an idea or a product, and you’d like to hear how people have turned them into businesses? Asian Networking: Successful Startups and Technology is a panel discussion not about the nuts and bolts of starting a business but more about the development and maintenance of successful business ideas. Come hear the success stories of multiple startup businesses and please don’t forget to bring lots of questions for our panelists.
MODERATOR – Suresh Arya
Suresh Arya’s interest in entrepreneurship came early in life, when in engineering college he founded two businesses. Currently He is CEO of Inverters Unlimited Inc, company manufactures Solar PV inverters and also a provider of turnkey solar systems. He is director and founder of Simanor LLC a cross border business advisory company. Simanor provides M&A and other strategic advisory services to middle-market companies located in the US and India. As an entrepreneurial partner at Klick Capital LLC, Suresh provides consulting services for businesses, cross border Mergers and Acquisitions, and private financing.
PANELIST – Veronica Chan
Veronica Chan is the Director of Content at Gojee, a recipe recommendation site based on ingredients that curates exclusively from independent food and drink bloggers. Merging her food marketing background with technology, Veronica strives to showcase exceptional recipe contributors and inspire more people to cook through Gojee. She currently heads Gojee’s content strategy across both food and drink verticals and was instrumental in building and launching the site last July, which now has a growing membership of 350K users from all around the world.
PANELIST – Roger Wu
Roger Wu is co-founder of a new ecommerce experience, GiftFinder.com. Prior, Roger was the Founder and President of Klickable.tv, a platform that allowed users to click on items inside the video to learn more or buy. He was also an “intrapreneur” at Bloomberg LP where he was a pilot member of the Bloomberg Legal team and also had stints at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. In addition, he’s the winner of the Butterfinger Viral Video Contest, holds a Guinness World Record and owns three degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School, where he sometimes guest lectures. He currently teaches at FIT in New York, competes regularly in stair climbing competitions and the NYC Marathon and is a member of SAG and AFTRA.
PANELIST -Benjamin Sun
Benjamin Sun is an internet entrepreneur and angel investor. Mr. Sun is a co-founder and partner of LaunchTime LLC, an incubator focused on digital media and e-commerce. Previously, Mr. Sun’s was at Community Connect Inc. where he served as President & CEO for 12 years. Mr. Sun co-founded Community Connect Inc. in 1996 and grew the company to be a leading online publisher targeting various niche markets. Prior to helping launch Community Connect, Mr. Sun worked in Merrill Lynch’s Technology Investment Banking Group where he was involved in numerous corporate finance and merger and acquisition transactions in the technology industry.
WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
Tomorrow’s one-year anniversary of the earthquake/tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown in Fukushima gives us a lot to reflect on. Not only the status of the recovery/reconstruction efforts, but also domestic policies being updated based on lessons learned from the accident. In light of this, the New York Times has recently had some interesting articles addressing many of these issues.
The first set comes from Martin Fackler, who has been covering the aftermath of the disaster, particularly regulatory issues and changing Japanese attitudes toward nuclear power. In today’s article he addresses the pre-Fukushima collusion that existed between the nuclear industry and its regulators, and how it may have hindered prevention of what happened as well as the government’s current efforts to remedy this. In yesterday’s article, he discusses how all but two of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors have been shut down, and how the country is grappling trying to replace the much needed energy supply that they provided.
An article this morning from Hiroko Tabuchi focuses on economic developments in the disaster area. She highlights the pursuit of overseas investors, particularly from China. In an attempt to lure foreign business, the central government has designated “special disaster reconstruction zones” that offer incentives and tax breaks to new investors. However, the closing quote from a consultant at Accenture which just set up shop in Fukushima reveals true aspirations: “Investment from China is fine, but ultimately, we want to be more like Silicon Valley.”
Hi, my name is Xiaohong, and I teach Mandarin at Hills Learning. Here is an article about Hanzi, a topic that comes up quite frequently in my classes.
Have you ever noticed the tattoo that David Beckham has on his body? Do you know where it is from? If you guessed China, you’d be correct! Chinese characters have more than a 5000 year history. There are more than 90,000 Chinese characters in existence! But don’t worry… if you know about 1000 commonly used Chinese characters, they can cover about 92% of the reading materials. If you know 2000, you can understand more than 98% of what you read.
When Chinese people invented Chinese characters, the characters were written on the bone of animals or on turtle shells. They were originally referred to as the “Oracle bone script.”
There are four basic ways that Chinese characters were created. In the beginning, people just drew a picture to describe what they saw in their daily life. For example, the sun, the moon, the mountain, etc. Thus 日(sun)， 月(moon)，山(mountain), 木（tree）, 刀（knife） those kinds of characters were invented from images people saw in their daily lives. It’s not too hard to guess from the shape of these characters what they mean. We call these characters Pictograms.
However, a lot of ideas in people’s daily life that they want to convey were not easy to draw with a picture. It is almost impossible to draw simple pictures about abstract ideas. For example: the blade of a knife. So Chinese people created a second type of character, Ideograms. For the blade of a knife, they added a dot on the knife character to indicate this character means blade of a knife, thus it’s written like 刃.
The third type of character Chinese people invented are called Ideogrammic compounds that describe abstract ideas. For example, “take a rest”(休). The character combines a person and a tree together. It is actually a person leaning against a tree. It means that person needs to take a rest. People also combined three trees together to convey the idea of a forest（森）.
The most common type of Chinese character is a Phone-semantic compound. For example, 湖(hú) (lake). The left part is a water radical and the right part indicates the pronunciation. About 82% of the Chinese characters are Phone-semantic compounds.
You may think Chinese characters are the most difficult part for you to learn when learning Mandarin. Well, it is not easy of course. But trust me, once you discover the way people invented and created these characters and understand the meaning of them, you will find a lot of interesting ideas about Chinese culture and understand more about the Chinese way of thinking about the world.
WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
I am heading home after spending two glorious weeks in Japan enjoying delicious food, soaking in multiple onsens, meeting up with natsukashii friends and running two marathons! Needless to say I feel a bit sabishii about leaving, but I am already looking forward to my annual visit next year.
One thing I noticed more than before was an increase in advertising that utilizes the concept of “New York” to appeal to customers. In many cases this seemed to be a very loose correlation, but nonetheless effective. I first spotted the “Big America” burger being advertised at McDonalds. Pictured here, you can see that in katakana it says “Broadway Burger.” I’m not sure what qualifies it as such, but the size is definitely larger than your standard Japanese burger.
My next sighting was at Burger King, which is offering the NY Sundae (BK New York Style Sweets). This sundae, which comes in regular and raspberry, features crunchy French toast with ice cream on top. I don’t know what about this sundae makes it “New York Style” and didn’t have a chance to sample it, but I could see that being a delicious combination. I love how they put a mini Statue of Liberty in the middle of the product name to enhance its authenticity.
However, I will take Japanese style sweets over New York ones any day, and certainly enjoyed my share of wagashi on a daily basis during this trip. I am always sure to leave Japan with some of its various KitKat flavors, and this time I found both green tea and cherry blossom green tea (limited edition for sakura season) at the airport. I also searched for azuki which is one of my favorites, but didn’t have any luck. I saw wasabi but opted to pass on that one…
WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
Tomorrow I head to Kumamoto, my home for three years during JET, to participate in the inaugural Kumamoto Marathon which will be held next weekend. The following weekend I will go up to Tokyo to participate for the fifth time in their amazing marathon. I’m looking forward to not only the running, but catching up with natsukashii friends, eating oishii food and most of all onsen!!!
Speaking of oishii food, I recently enjoyed the Hawaiian version of wagashi at my favorite shop in Honolulu, Kansai Yamato. This small stall in the food court of the fantastic Ala Moana mall sells handmade mochi in funky flavors like Kona coffee, mango and Oreo as well as more traditional offerings like kinako mochi. I purchased the creative flavors of chocolate and peanut butter (aka Reeses) and Okinawan sweet potato mochi. The former was good but I prefer a larger amount of peanut butter, so I went back and got the peanut butter (crunchy) mochi which did the trick…
I also found a booth selling goods to benefit Tohoku’s recovery effort via 赤い羽根 (Akai Hane or Red Feather) fundraising. The kanji initially caught my eye, so I stopped by to see what was being offered. The deal was a tee and tote bag for $26, all of which would be donated to the fund. They had cool designs and a Hope for Japan trademarked logo, and though the booth was abandoned when I was there the saleswoman said that sales have been brisk. Glad to see that fundraising efforts have not lost steam as we approach the disaster’s one-year anniversary.
Event Information
This Asian Networking Event will have a special sponsoring organization, NAAAP (the National Association of Asian American Professionals): http://www.naaap.org/. NAAAP will be having a national conference coming up in the summer of 2012 (website), and they’re looking to recruit new help and membership for their organization.
Food and drinks will also be available as a cash bar at the event. So please come, learn a little bit more about NAAAP, and of course bring plenty of business cards for networking.
Attendance – Please RSVP to events@hillslearning.com
WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
Kudos to 22-year old tennis pro Kei Nishikori for being the first Japanese man in 80 years to reach the quarterfinals of the Australian Open! Unfortunately, once there he was vanquished in straight sets by Scot Andy Murray, but his impressive showing in his previous five-set win over France’s Jo-Wilfred Tsonga bumps his world ranking up to 20 from 26.
Nishikori, who currently lives and trains in Florida, is known as “Air Kei” for his leaping groundstrokes. I can attest to the fact that watching his play is thrilling. A few years ago I caught a match of his at the US Open that turned into a nail-biting five-setter, and was hooked. Here’s hoping he can build on this impressive showing in Australia and have further success in 2012
WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
It is HOPE… fused with, and fueled by, resolve.
Dogged determination.
It is a BOOK… a culinary tribute to Japan’s Tohoku.
Recipes and stories: to comfort, to share.
On the afternoon of March 11, 2011, triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident – assaulted Japan’s northeastern corridor, the Tohoku region, and to a lesser extent the Kanto Plains area that includes Tokyo and its environs. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed, the enormity of the toll became painfully clear. There was unprecedented loss of life, personal injury and property damage, entire communities and industries had been wiped out. Surreal.
Like many Tokyo residents who had been personally spared serious loss, I wondered what I could do. In the post-disaster barrage of media coverage, I found the plight of evacuees particularly poignant. Uprooted and transplanted to shelters far removed from their home, I wondered how traditional Tohoku culture could be preserved in the Diaspora.
I wanted to soothe survivors with comfort foods, help Tohoku residents prepare familiar dishes in unfamiliar places. By writing a book that celebrated the Tohoku’s culinary culture I thought to help preserve the region’s rich heritage while nourish the morale of displaced residents. By writing in English I could reach a wide, global readership enabling them to share in the pleasures of the Tohoku table while supporting recovery efforts through the purchase of KIBŌ. My publisher, Ten Speed Press, has pledged with me, to donate a portion of proceeds to Japan’s rebuilding and renewal efforts.
希望を持って、頑張ります
KIBŌ wo motte, gambarimasu
Brimming with hope, pushing forward…
WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
ちょっと遅くなりましたが、明けましておめでとうございます！ I hope that your 2012 has gotten off to a good start, and that the year of the dragon is a fortuitous one for everyone.
I’m down in DC with a new group of International Visitors invited by the State Department to study U.S. energy policy. In light of the Fukushima accident nuclear is obviously a big focus, but we are also looking at renewable energy options like solar and wind (as well as geothermal which will take us to a plant on the Big Island of Hawaii!). As part of our cultural activities outside of the professional program, the other night we attended Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center where a Japanese artist was featured.
Her name is Yoko K. and she hails from Nagano, and she is an electronic musician, producer, engineer and vocalist. I was not very familiar with that genre of music, but her performance kept me entertained throughout. She incorporates various tools in her sound creation, and you can see the basis of her classical training in piano from the age of 3. I particularly liked her bilingual and often humorous lyrics, especially from the song “Laptop on Top of Your Lap” (“I want to be a laptop on top of your lap”).
This song was from her 2nd album “Heaven’s Library”, which is available on iTunes and worth a listen if you are a fan of electronic music or looking to be introduced to it. We got to chat with Yoko after the concert, and she was super personable and eager to discuss her music. I look forward to following her continued success!
The three most important holidays in the Chinese calendar are the Lunar New Year, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Moon (Mid-Autumn) Festival. The Lantern Festival is the last day of the Lunar New Year holiday, which falls on the 15th day of the Chinese Lunar New Year.
The main theme of the holidays is for people to get together with family. The Chinese holidays are all based on the lunar calendar so they are on different dates as compared to the western calendar.
Lunar New Year
In the first day of the Lunar New Year, people in northern China eat dumplings, which symbolize prosperity. The dumplings symbolize prosperity because they are similar to sycee (元宝 yuanbao, used as a currency for centuries in China). Usually people in southern China eat sweet dumplings, which are filled with a sweet stuffing such as sesame, peanut, and red bean.
As most people know, the red envelope on the Chinese New Year is a very important custom. Usually parents give red envelopes to children, yet when children grow up and work they will give red envelopes to parents and grandparents.
In Chinese society, it is common that people believe in both Taoism and Buddhism. So on the Lunar New Year, the Chinese will attend Taoist or Buddhist temples to worship the
Bodhisattva and their family ancestors. Also people play mahjong with friends on the holiday.
Since Chinese people living in New York City and America have to follow the American calendar, it is rare that the Chinese here in New York get to the celebrate the holiday. But luckily in 2010, the Chinese Lunar New Year and New Year’s Eve fell on Saturday and Sunday, so most Chinese people seized the opportunity to get together with family and friends and enjoyed celebrating their most important traditional holiday.
Dragon Boat Festival
The Dragon Boat Festival is for commemorating the death of Qu Yuan, a famous Chinese Poet from the kingdom of Chu who lived during the Warring States period. He drowned himself in the Miluo river as a warning to his king. People threw packets of rice into the river to prevent the fish from eating his body. This was how the traditional food “zongzi” came about, which is made of glutinous rice stuffed with different fillings and wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves.
Moon (Mid-Autumn) Festival
Moon (Mid-Autumn) Festival is a popular lunar harvest festival. It became popular during the early Tang Dynasty. Other than symbolizing harvest, the Moon Festival has a legend and a historical/political story behind it. You may find the source on Wikipedia. The food for the festival is well known as a moon cake, which many people like.
For these traditional foods, you may find them in many Chinese societies. They are in Chinatown in Manhattan, Flushing and Elmhurst in Queens, and 8th Ave and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn.
Thanks for reading about the Chinese festivals. I hope you were able to learn more about them and most importantly more about the Chinese culture. Please continue to browse the Hills Learning website for more information on the Chinese culture and language.
