Friday, April 6, 2012

UC Irvine Attends Salesforce Cloudstock 2012



One of our goals as UC Irvine's ICS Student Council is to establish and foster a mutually beneficial relationship with corporations. Nestled far away from the tech bubble of Silicon Valley / SF with their targeted schools Stanford and Cal, the Bren School of ICS at UC Irvine is truly lucky to have caught the attention of Salesforce. Salesforce first became involved with our ICS School as Platinum Sponsors for ICS Day, a celebratory event of everything CS , and hosted a separate information session on cloud technology for a room full of students majoring from Computer Sceince Engineering (CSE) to Business Information Management (BIM). If I learned anything from my involvement with ICS Student Council thus far, it is the importance of reciprocating the value I receive. Salesforce provided the funding that made it possible for us to attend Salesforce Cloudstock 2012, and I am here to write about my experience at Cloudstock as a 3rd year college student majoring in BIM.

Coach Bus-ing from Irvine to SF

We left UC Irvine on Wednesday, March 14, 2012 around 1pm on our wifi-equipped bus (yay wifi!). Salesforce organized a hackathon "Created a Facebook application built on a Salesforce platform" for us to participate in during our trip. Although my laptop battery died within 5 minutes into the trip, some lucky students were able to participate in this hackathon. Even though the wifi malfunctioned and we were stuck with our iPods, phones, and kindles for the rest of the trip (#firstworldproblems), the bus ride still awesome and made for some great bonding time. (Special thanks to our bus driver Paul!) 

Scenery

Excited UC Irvine students unprepared for my ninja picture taking skills

Our Hotel & First Night in SF

For some of the students, this was their first time ever in Norcal and they were super lucky to be able to stay at the Parc 55 Wyndham SF Hotel, which was smack dab in the heart of Union Square.

Parc 55 Wyndham SF Hotel

 View from our room!

We had a spontaneous group dinner at Puccini & Pinetti across the street from us. I definitely felt sorry for the waiters when a group of 18 showed up 15 minutes before their closing time. In any case, dinner was delicious.


 Half of our gang
(From left: Audrey Auyang, Kevin Lee, Kelly Yin, Jay Tolentino, Me (Lillian Chiou), Daniel Garcia, Calvin Lee, Robert Rodriguez)

We were able to walk off our food babies around Union Square, SF, which was both a culture shock and a fun experience. Luckily, the rain decided spare us that night.




 Some of the dudes




We spent the rest of the night doing very productive things (walking around the hotel, attempting to get to the roof (attempt fail), riding the super fast elevator to the 31st floor, and loitering around the lobby) and ended up sleeping at 3:30am.

[3 hours later]

Salesforce Cloudstock 2012 Here We Come!

Having set 5 alarms each, my roomie and I woke up at 6am aiming to get our sleepyheads downstairs by 7am so we could get to Cloudstock early as the first 500 to receive free T-shirts! Despite the eye-bags, SF is undeniably gorgeous (and freezing) in the early morning.






After spending our first 2 minutes inside SF's Moscone Convention Center taking pictures of everything Salesforce.com related (as shown in the following pictures), we went through a very smooth and efficient registration headed by an equally efficient staff!



Me and SaaSy!


Students checking in to receive their free T-shirts

The Keynote 


After the check-in process, we headed towards the Cloudstock keynote presentations where notable speeches and videos were given and shown from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Kimberly-Clark's VP/CIO Ramon Baez (one of my favorite speakers of the day!), Burberry CTO Mark Hopwood, Activision CIO Robert Schmid, Living Social's VP Jennifer Trzepacz, Invisible Children's COO Chris Carver, Hewlett-Packard's EVP (former Boeing and Verizon CIO), Toyota's CEO Akio Toyota, and others. I especially loved the Activision Social Enterprise Demo w/ "gamer" Alan Wang, too funny!


It was truly a special treat for the UC Irvine group when we were able to meet and talk to some of the speakers, including Marc Benioff!


With Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff!


With Acitivision CIO Robert Schmid.


 With Invisible Children COO Chris Carver.


Trying to be like the Salesforce tech guys.

Break-Out Sessions / Mini-Hackathon


Afterwards, we broke off into sessions, conferences, and the Cloudstock convention. Although I spent a little too much time lounging about on the beanbags on the 2nd floor of the Moscone Center, I was able to semi-join the mini-hackathon (aka. watching my fellow brilliant council members Mathew Sprehn, Daniel Garcia, Phil Ma, and Patrick Do) and even attempted to make my own app on the cloud. I loved the way the convention was set up so that there were separate stations for each cloud service with representative from the companies always there to help and assist throughout the hack. I was also lucky enough to be a part of the Salesforce Cloudstock highlight video that will be used to promote next year's event!


Cloudstock also provided a great opportunity for BIM/MIS majors like myself to network with biztech consultant leaders such as Accenture and Deloitte. They provided me with a lot of great input from the business technical standpoint on how to implement Salesforce into my own career search. 






The arcade zone 


My favorite beanbags

#dreamjobs

Another great aspect of the convention was the #dreamjobs event. It was great seeing some familiar faces such as Christie McDonagh whom I met at the UC Irvine Engitech fair, and Nick Tran and Kavindra Patel who attended ICS Day last year and even hosted an information session for the students. I was also lucky enough to meet and have great conversations with Campus Recruiting Specialist Kelsey Platt, Campus Recruiter Jessica Iyer, and Director George Manning (who's also doing a Triathalon!). 


Having conversations with these individuals not only provide me with a broader scope of what I could do, but also of the vast opportunities out there that I was too narrow-minded to grasp. I really appreciated and got a lot out of the exchange of ideas I had with these Salesforce employees. 


Post-Cloudstock


We headed towards the little after-party at the Metreon rooftop, hosted by Marketo. The view was amazing as was the open bar :)





Thank you


Thank you Salesforce for providing UC Irvine ICS Students with such an amazing experience at Cloudstock. We really took a lot from this event, which not only taught us what we can do as students to implement this technology in our lives or future jobs, but also helped broaden our perspective of technology outside of what we learn in the classroom.



Until next time,
Lillian