Internship in Tech - meet the 2010s event

I know I don’t need to practice 40 cases, learn the finance lingo, or prepare for the milk-round. But what do I need to do to get an internship in industry, more specifically, technology??

Luckily, the Technology club organized a great '101 on Tech Internships' last Wednesday evening, better known as 'meet the MBA2010s in Tech'. A panel of interns from Amazon, BT, Google, Skype and Vodafone answered all the questions we have been dying to ask…

The biggest question "do you need a tech background for an internship?" was answered with a reassuring "no". Some affinity with the company and a curiosity towards technology are helpful. However, as some of the 2010s pointed out "they would not recruit MBAs if they were looking for an engineer".

The panel also shared some advice with us on how to be successful in getting an internship, including:

- Network! Except for BT, most tech companies don't have a formal MBA recruiting program. So your options are either to wait for a job posting (most of which come later) or find a job via networking. Many 'hidden needs' only become visible through networking.

- Do your research! Be well prepared for the interview; be up-to-date about the ins-and-outs of the industry and the company. Read industry reports from the library, and set up news feeds/alerts for the company of your choice

- Don't stress out! Apparently all the best jobs come last - it's fairly normal to get an internship only in May or even later.

So… get started and set up your news feeds, have coffee chats, and most of all…. relax!

The London Media Summit threw an interesting light on the role of technology in the media

The convergence of media, technology and telecoms was more than apparent at the Media Summit organised at the London Business School on Friday. Tech club members couldn't help but well up with pride to see our own President - Daniel Mazini - deliver the closing remarks as co-chair of the summit.

Other than Daniel they were many familiar faces from the technology club and all of the panels focused heavily on technology. It became apparent that technological advances had caused all of the media industries woes...and it's current success stories. One panelist told us that content is King...but distribution is Kong...and it is technology which has ripped up the old distribution platforms and added an almost infinite number of additional options.

The short answer seemed to be that media is now desperately looking to technology to come up with answers to help define it's future.

Our friends at the Guardian have a nice "Tech Media 100" list. It's UK focused but the accompanying articles are a good read for all you techies out there...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tech-media-invest-100

New 1st year committee members

The new Tech Club committee is selected. After some hard filtering of the amazing applications received we opened 9 new positions to support running the club. These will be the 1st year committee members:

Ben Blake
Marketing - External Relations

Ran Levitzky
Digital Marketing

Mounir Mouawad
Marketing - Internal Relations

Sumit Shah 
Cross Clubs Events

Naomi Smit
Events

Joshua Kronman
Social Events

Rachel Howard Davies
MBA2011 Rep

Sarah Yang
MBA2011 Rep

Pooya Nikooyeh
Careers

Kick-off Event!

Tech club had a great kick-off event last Tuesday 29th. Despite the loud competition from Industry Club's drinks on the hallway outside we were able to gather more than 70 Tech aficionados to hear a short presentation about the club's plans and a GREAT first speaker Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy from BT Design.

We received enthusiastic comments from students that really enjoyed the speech and classified it as: “truly refreshing”, “surprising” and “indeed a quality talk”.

We also announce Tech Club committee open positions. A list of the positions and its and responsibilities can be found below (submit your application to techclub@london.edu until Sunday Oct 4th):

VP Events:
Responsible for organising the club's calendar and managing the perfect execution of events. Responsible for creating new events or managing pipeline of events coming from programmes Reps, Club's contacts or career services

Programmes Reps (MIF, MiM, EMBA,etc):
Responsible for connecting your programmes to the club activities. The reps will make sure that meaningful events are scheduled to their programmes' audience: contacting companies, bringing events and promoting the club to their colleagues

VP Marketing:
Responsible for managing the identity of the club. The marketing person will define and maintain the club communication within the campus and externally. It will also be responsible for managing the club's digital strategy (website, blogs and twitter)

All positions can be performed by more than one person. Please send us your 5-10 line application until this Sunday.

Videogames on a rush

Nintendo announced a cut on the price of its Wii console. One of the best example of "blue ocean" thinking , the Wii needs some repositioning after the hardcore player's consoles made their recent moves - Nintendo cut the Xbox price last year and Sony launched the cheaper and slim version of its PS3 in July.

Nintendo still has the advantage of a wider potential market (basically everybody able to shake a remote in front of the TV) while Nintendo and Sony struggle to offer more family friend games. BUT Nintendo's new Project Natal and both Xbox and PS3 ability to become media centres, including Blue-ray, music and film downloads is something that might turn the fun Nintendo console into a less serious contender.

The Technology Club is very interested in discussing the directions of the Gaming market. We are organising a Gaming Panel to take place in November. More details to come but please send us a e-mail if you have some suggestions about themes and speakers techclub@london.edu

Tech Club Kick Off

The 2009/2010 Tech Club kick off will take place on September 29th.

At this event we will host a presentation and Q&A session with Martin Geddes, Strategy Director of BT Innovate & Design, a division of BT Group. Martin will present his vision (and BT’s) about the future of the Telecom industry. We will also introduce the Technology Club and describe our goals and events planned for the next year.

When: Tuesday, September 29th – 06:45pm to 08:00pm
Where: LT6

Please join us for this event. No sign-up is required.

Tech Club Committee

Tech Careers

Good news from Career Services:

• BT has advised that they intend to continue with its MBA Leadership Program and will be hiring up to 30 MBAs this autumn
• Samsung has asked for dates to present this autumn (first time presenting on-campus)

keep you posted..

Tech Club Committee 2009/2010

Dear Tech Club members,

Technology Club is happy to announce the new Executive committee for 2009/2010:

Co-Presidents: Daniel Mazini & Eve Ben Cheikh

Summit Chair: Guy De Rocquigny

VP of New Initiatives: Krish Sridhar

VP of Executive Programs: Serhii Konovalov

Treasurer: Vipul Swarup

Tech Summit 09: theme, panels and early bird tickets!

There is a lot of work going on behind the scenes to bring the Summit together.  In the last few weeks we have defined the theme, decided on the panels, started reaching out for speakers and moderators and have done a lot of other useful things (e.g. budgeting, drafting invitations, pricing the tickets, etc).

So, the theme of this year is going to be:

What’s next? Technology trends and opportunities in the immediate future

To explore this topic, we are inviting 3 keynotes and doing 4 panels on the following topics:

• Internet business models [How are businesses run on the web? What are some of the prominent ‘New Economy’ models? How are cloud computing and web applications changing the landscape? Is ‘privacy on the web’ a real issue or is it over hyped?]
  
• Mobile [Who is challenging the status quo? What is the future of mobile operation systems? What can we learn from mobile operators in emerging markets?]
  
• Finance [Financial aftermath from technology's perspective. How is the credit crunch affecting the financial services technology?]
  
• Home of tomorrow [Who will ‘own the box’ at the house? What are some of the future devices that will be used at home?]
  

We are also planning to do a 'Gadgets corner'. No promises yet, but we want to bring in some cool gadgets for the audience to play with.

And the tickets are on sale now! 

Early bird tickets cost £20 to the student (any student, not just LBS, and please, register with your university address), £50 for the LBS alums and £100 for the rest. Numbers are limited, so hurry up to secure yours: http://connext2009.eventbrite.com/

P.S. You can also get a free ticket for the event, if you are a speaker (or a speaker's guest), a journalist (or a popular blogger and you will promise to cover our event) or a volunteer helping with organisation.

BarCamp LBS?

Here at the LBS Technology Club we're always thinking about new ways in which to engage the school community with the technology world. Our flagship event is the Technology Summit which will be held on February 20th, 2009. Of course, as we started to put that event together, we felt that it might be interesting to host an "unconference" to go with it.

BarCamp seems to be a perfect fit! As a former, highly satisfied participant of BarCamp (and reponsible for new initiatives in the club), I'm thinking of organizing one at school in the summer timeframe. The idea is to get together geeks, VCs, business school students and others in the London area for a weekend of ad-hoc and unstructured learning, networking and of course, a lot of fun!

Keep watching this space for more information on this. Of course, our first priority is to make Tech Summit '09 a massive success.