Rodger Desai's Summer Update

From: Rodger Desai Rave User
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2005 12:54 PM
Subject: Rodger's Summer Update

Hey everyone, it's been great to see so many of you this summer and to read your updates. I will not be returning to hbs this fall unfortunately, but I'll still be involved in some of the things the school is doing and hopefully do things with many of you. I'm technically on-leave and because I still want to teach in some capacity someday so I'll see what the future holds school-wise.

Work-wise we launch Rave Wireless this coming Saturday -- www.ravewireless.com and so things have been hectic all summer. But with companies like mySpace.com getting sold at 20 months old for $584M in cash to Murdoch - there has been a crazy amount of activity in the "open media"
space. The consumer-facing site will be at www.getRave.com and will be publicly available this Saturday to 14K users and generally available to the public in Oct. Rave is targeted at youth/colleges and you'll be able to subscribe to channels for things like course platform chgs, polls, reserve squash appts, post your location when you're out for buddy lists to see, and create after-parties on the fly.

Some of the channels are meaningful - like organizing real-time protests at a location - and some are considered trite and just help people have really big parties (hence, rave) at 3AM with tens of people. Users can create channels too like the student at Dartmouth that had an ice luge but nothing to pour at 2AM so he created the BarMaster channel where you can check to see which parties within a few block of you are a good match for whatever bottles you have left, so you can combine your festivities. I've discovered that I like trite things. I've also kicking around a political consulting service that will help the Spitzer campaign... We'll see if that goes.

My wife Susan finishes her residency/fellowship in neurology/MS this fall and has accepted a position as a faculty member/researcher at Brigham & Women's. She also finished her MPH at the school of Public Health this summer. Since I'm in NYC from Tues to Thurs every week, we haven't had a lot of time together but we've been able to do a few good trips the - a fav being Block Island.

On other fronts my mother is OK but not great so I see her once a week in NJ and it's been great to be able to be nearby for her. Oh ya, I'll be on hbs email for a while so you can use that or my rave address to reach me. I can't easily post to the listserv though - so thanks Sly. Looking forward to seeing everyone!

Rodger