Today was another sponsor demo day at the lab. These are always quite entertaining, often absolutely intriguing, as i babble babble babble about SecureId and Social Network Fragments for two hours. This time, i spent my two hours with three different groups of sponsors – from IBM Research (formerly Lotus), AOL Time Warner, and the DoD. The IBM folks are fabulous – they are academics and researchers and so our conversations are completely in line with research; this time, we talked mostly about social networks and the role they can play in research. Fun Fun. The AOL guy was fabulous, and had intriguing insight on the way that AOLTW and corporations worked. His job is to seek out what are the up-and-coming technologies that can make & break AOLTW, where technology is going and what should be built. I desperately want his job. Finally, my conversation with the DoD guys was almost depressing. They didn’t understand what i was doing, why it was interesting, and they didn’t understand the basic technology that made anything work (like spring systems). Now, i wouldn’t have been so annoyed that they didn’t understand my work (maybe they were management types), but they were so egotistical and in my face “you’re-just-a-little-girl” that i found myself 1) not trusting them; 2) wondering why they were wasting either of our time. (And my negative and frustrated impressions were built before i knew that they were DoD… they succeeded in magnifying my stereotypes.. i hate it when that happens.)