With more than 750 people in attendance, TiECON East 2005 Conference held from April 28-30 at the Wakefield Sheraton, Wakefield, MA was a huge success. For the first time in its history, TiE Boston collaborated with TiE Chapters in the east coast to present one of the largest entrepreneurship conferences on the east coast.  “The theme 'Innovation in the Global Economy' reflects the intersection of the two most powerful forces shaping the global economy today – Innovation and Globalization,” said Jay Srinivasan who co-chaired the conference along with Nishith Acharya. The conference focused on presenting new opportunities that are being created worldwide as global consumers exercise their new found financial freedom.

The conference featured many interesting panels and was able to present a fresh perspective on innovation in the global economy. The conference team succeeded in putting together a program that featured many luminaries from the world of business and technology. The conference opened with a big bang on Thursday with a keynote by Eurekha Ranch’s CEO Doug Hall who energized the crowd with his keynote address titled “Jump Start Your Brain”. Michael Ruettgers (Chairman – EMC Corp.) and, Howard Charney (Senior VP – Cisco Systems) gave an excellent historical overview of the changing space of business and technology and talked about the formation and growth of EMC and CISCO.

In her keynote address Susan Hockfield (President, MIT) spoke about the role of Education in Technology while Jay Sidhu (Chairman, Sovereign Bank) emphasized the importance of  focusing on employees rather than shareholders.  Ashok Narisimhan, Founding President of Wipro Systems and CEO of July Systems presented the closing keynote.

The sessions were organized into three tracks, Technology, Business and Life Sciences. Members on the technology panels presented the ideas and predictions on trends in technology. The Business track focused on presenting challenges and solutions for businesses as they move into the global arena. The Life Science track included a “Lab to Market “session where successful life science companies spoke about how they brought their products to market.  The Life Sciences track included an interesting discussion on the future of stem cell research. In addition to the panels , there were several workshops including a very popular  one on Neuromarketing, where Allen Peterson, Partner, SalesBrain talked about using discoveries in neuroscience that help sales improve their sales figures.

“Wine Tasting” and “Casino Night” were unique social events that provided excellent networking opportunities while providing a good deal of entertainment. People were at “Casino Night” until nearly 2:00 am and some of them raked in up to $161,000! Many participated in the Golf tournament, sponsored by Leader Bank. 

“It was a very successful event thanks to the hard work put in by my fellow team members Nishith Acharya, Geeta Nellakantiah, Venkat Perumal, Altaf Sheikh and Jay Dwivedi,’ said Jay Srinivasan. "We raised nearly $200,000 for this conference and we hope that TIE can use the profits for hosting other interesting events.”

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