(Welcome to the UCLA Anderson Blog’s coverage of TED Week. Our guest blogger for TED Week is Swati Desai, who will be tracking the various TED talks as we live stream them and also taking notes on various panels. For more information on the TED Week schedule, please click here.

Swati is a UCLA alum (Anderson, PhD, 1992 and Engineering, MS, 1984) and the link to her website is www.swatidesai.com.

What follow are Desai’s notes on the Wednesday afternoon session featuring TED speaker Amanda Palmer.)

How do you finance artists by using social media and by directly connecting with the fans?

Anderson’s Entertainment Management Association examined this question by exploring musician Amanda Palmer’s provocative presentation about the way she secured funding for her next music project. Amanda “kick-started” her campaign using “crowd funding” by asking her fan base to help her out. She raised 1.2 million dollars with contributions from 25,000 fans by connecting with them on social media, on her blogs, her tweets, and by simply asking for their help while touring.

Amanda has an exceptionally open personality and is willing to take social risks. This helps!

She says that the act of asking is connecting, unlike some other artists who think of asking as begging. She uses her tweets to inform her fans of her needs and gets help with all sorts of things such as food, accommodation, transportation, love, and appreciation!

Can every artist do crowd funding? Is this way of connecting now expected from them?
The Anderson panel seems to agree on the fact Amanda’s crowd funding is a very effective and new way of getting funding, but this may not work for everybody. It would depend on the artist’s personality, fan base, time they want to spend, where they are in their career trajectory. Student panelist Josh who is a musician himself points to the fact that connecting with the fans using social media is now expected from artists. He admires Amanda’s way of kick-starting the campaign but also would like to see crowd funding with any small donations fans can afford. Live Nation founder Chris Adelmann thinks that there is still a place for an intermediary person based on meritocracy who knows the business well. For an artist who would much rather spend time in the bedroom making music, they will need to use such a person to connect with the fan base. Faculty panelist Sanjay Sood believes that social media connections worked for Amanda for the crowd funding because she already had a fan base. It may not work for someone who is raw or has a different personality.

The next obviously relevant question is this. Can this model be used for small businesses to kick-start their funding campaign?

The answer is yes! The biggest take-home lesson for small businesses from Amanda’s story is the importance of directly connection with people, especially with the availability of social media. Sanjay Sood points to the fact that informing people of what they are making by connecting with them is even more essential for small businesses with a niche market. Josh believes that kick-starting offers a great way for small businesses to test the markets for their products. Chris Adelmann notes that frontline connecting to another person in a directly is the best type of customer service.

Ironically, the new way to connect with people is by using web-based social media, the very tool that is blamed on alienating people from each other

The post How do you finance artists by using social media and by directly connecting with the fans? A report from TED WEEK #UCLAAndersonTED appeared first on TED & UCLA ANDERSON 2013.

(Welcome to the UCLA Anderson Blog’s coverage of TED Week. Our guest blogger for TED Week is Swati Desai, who will be tracking the various TED talks as we live stream them and also taking notes on various panels. For more information on the TED Week schedule, please click here. 

Swati is a UCLA alum (Anderson, PhD, 1992 and Engineering, MS, 1984) and the link to her website is www.swatidesai.com. 

What follow are Desai’s notes on Thursday’s session with linguist John McWhorter and Ajit Narayanan, a visual grammar engine inventor.)

Text all you want, you may be becoming smarter!

Do you believe that texting represents the decline and fall of writing as we know it? Or do you get annoyed at such implications? Be cautious, the answer may give away your age! Do you know that as far back as 1871, the Harvard University president complained about “bad spellings” of young people? Complaining about the decline of good grammar seems to be the thing to do as you get older.

Columbia University Linguistics professor John McWhorter says not to worry about such complaints because all you are doing is really practicing a new language … call it fingered speech!

This ever evolving fingered speech has its own connotations, lol. Wait. I don’t mean Laugh Out Loud. That was in the olden days. Now “lol” means a marker of empathy. “Slash” is this all relevant to Andersonians? “Slash” is just another way of saying “that makes me think”. So by learning to text “properly” you may be becoming bilingual/bidialectal. Isn’t that supposed to increase cognition? Just don’t forget to retain your mother tongue!

Slash

~~~

Would you like to invest in developing a new universal language making Google search more effective?

This language also can turn your iPad into a communicator for the speech-impaired.

The rate of diagnosed cases of autism is increasing at an alarming rate. Autistic people have trouble processing and translating abstract ideas into spoken language. Ajit Narayanan has come up with a set of rules that convert pictorial representation of key terms into a sentence with words arranged in the right way. He calls this set of rules “free speech” which is underneath his iPad software used to help autistic kids to form complex sentences. He claims that this is a universal language because it uses pictorial representation as the building blocks. Since our brains process information using images of this type, learning a new language language for initiating Google search and by using “free speech” would be like learning your mother tongue. He has a start-up which makes the software to teach English to all types of kids.

Ajit speculates that using free speech would make Google search more efficient because then anyone can use Google search regardless of whether they understand English! Free speech would be used to initiate the Google search and also to translate the results back into the user’s language.

This is currently his speculation. Surely he is going to get to meet several interested parties at TED – the place where new ideas blossom.

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— UCLA ANDERSON (@uclaanderson) February 21, 2013

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By Kyle Holtan

Stuti Goswamy (’13) was among the students and faculty selected to present their own TED-style talks on ideas they are passionate about as part of UCLA Anderson’s partnership with TED Conferences, LLC. Goswamy believes the DREAM Act would allow more people to pursue the American Dream in the United States. The DREAM Act is a bill that has been before the United States congress in one form or another since 2001. It would grant conditional permanent residency to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as minors, which would allow them to qualify for federal grants and loans as they pursue higher education.

But Goswamy’s advocacy and passion don’t end with the DREAM Act, and she has come to UCLA Anderson to gain the skills she needs to take part in changing the face of education in America.

“My passion still lies with my students,” Goswamy said of why she believes so strongly in reforming education. As a high school English teacher for four years in South Los Angeles, she saw firsthand the hopelessness engendered in even high-achieving undocumented students.

“It was my 11th and 12th grade students just trying to apply to college,” she said. “Seeing their acceptance letters and then their choosing not to go because they couldn’t get money. It’s devastating for a student to end their education at high school.”

But federal aid for college is hardly the only problem facing America’s inner-city schools, and the journey that led Goswamy to experience those problems also led her to see herself as more than an advocate for any single solution.

Upon graduating from Stanford, she heeded the call of Teach for America, which places recent college graduates in the classrooms of low-income communities, and landed in South Los Angeles. “It seemed like the greatest impact I could make right away,” she said.

But as she grew in teaching experience, what started becoming clear to her was her place in finding the solutions.

“I thought I was going to be a teacher for life,” Goswamy recounted. But changes at the Los Angeles Unified School District forced her into a new job with a Green Dot charter school where, she says, “I was not as good a teacher. Discipline was more important in the role and that wasn’t my forte. And that is when I realized I wanted to go into management.”

It is in the management of schools where Goswamy sees the possibility of real change occurring in the education system. The Green Dot school “was created and run by businessmen, most of them former consultants. I liked how they looked at the problem … It was much more data-driven. It was a bigger emphasis on funding and finding money for solutions.”

“I would love to be in a charter school management position,” she said. But to do so effectively, “I need to get those skills, get that background, and then go back to education reform … which is why I’m doing my MBA, and why I’m going to consult for a couple years.”

And so? “Do I feel like I’m developing the skills I came for? Absolutely. Now when I think about running schools, I think about operations and finance and all of these other things I never really thought about.”

In addition to her studies, Goswamy stays on top of developments in her field, and shares and tests them in case competitions and student organizations. “Anderson does a great job of connecting you with people who are interested in the same things you are,” she explained. With the student organization Net Impact, she puts together education-focused Dinners for Eight “with COOs of LAUSD, of Green Dot, other organizations. I organized one with Education Pioneers.”

“I feel like Anderson does a good job of saying ‘You need to do this. It’s good for you,’” she said. “If I hadn’t been pushed to do this TED Talk, I would never have had the opportunity to share this story” of the DREAM Act.

When it came to choosing UCLA Anderson, in addition to the hardheaded, practical reasons for attending a world-class training ground of global leaders, Goswamy had another instance of bringing to bear her passion, of heeding the “emotional argument.” Her passion is located in Los Angeles. “This is where I want to stay in education for the long run,” she said. “This is where my students are, and I need to go to their graduations in June.”
Contact Information

Media Relations, (310) 206-7707, media.relations@anderson.ucla.edu

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Bono, the lead singer of U2, uses his celebrity to fight for social justice worldwide: to end hunger, poverty and disease, especially in Africa. His nonprofit ONE raises awareness via media, policy and calls to action.

Irreverent, funny, iconoclastic and relentless, Bono has proven himself stunningly effective in encouraging and cajoling the world’s most powerful leaders to take seriously the challenge of disease and hunger and seize the historic opportunity we now have to beat extreme poverty, especially in Africa, through technological innovation, smart aid, transparency and investments which put citizens in charge.

As lead singer of U2, Bono performed at Live Aid in 1985, which inspired him to travel to Ethiopia with his wife, Ali. There they spent several weeks helping with a famine relief project. The experience shocked him and ignited a determination to work for change. In Bono’s own words, “What are the blind spots of our age? It might be something as simple as our deep-down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth”. In 2005, the year of Make Poverty History, Bono became one of the inaugural winners of the TED Prize; he used his wish to raise awareness and inspire activism.

In 2002, he co-founded DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), which later became the advocacy and campaign organization, ONE. Today ONE has 3.2 million members who pressure politicians around the world to improve policies to empower the poorest. Thanks to these efforts, along with those of partners and grassroots leaders in Africa, these policies have delivered results. For example, eight million people are now on life preserving antiretoviral medications, malarial death rates have been halved in eight target countries, 50 million more children are in school and 5.4 million lives have been saved through vaccines.

In 2006, Bono and Bobby Shriver launched (RED) to engage the private sector in the fight against AIDS in Africa. (RED) Partners direct a portion of their profits from (RED)-branded products, services and events directly to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In just six years, (RED) has contributed more than $200 million – every penny of which goes directly to HIV/AIDS programs with the goal of eliminating mother-to-child transmission of HIV. To date, (RED) dollars have helped the lives of more than 14 million people in Africa through education, testing, counseling, and treatment programs. Bono also co-founded EDUN with his wife Ali. EDUN is a global fashion brand which does business in an number of countries in Africa and beyond, sourcing materials and manufacturing clothing. In Uganda, EDUN is supporting over 8,000 farmers in their move from subsistence to sustainable business practices.

Bono’s journey in activism spans a generation and where he is coming from, and above all where he is going, is something we should all pay close attention to. Watch this space….

“When I asked they campaign for debt cancellation, they did. When I asked for help in fighting corruption and promoting  transparency, they did. Bono and ONE systematically listen and learn from leaders and citizens in Africa in ways I wish others sometimes did. This kind of partnership is what we need much more of from our friends around the world.” -Ngozi Okonjo Iweala

“Bono always makes his visits [to Africa] substantive, using the accompanying media to educate the wider world about the plight of the poor in less developed countries.”

Philadelphia Inquirer

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