It's called Cyberposium. Annually, hosted by Harvard Business School students, this forum brings together a collection of speakers from across the Internet-scape. This year's theme was "Innovation without borders" and brought together some big names as well as some highly-relevant topics. The one thing that it lacked was sufficient time to cover each of the topics in depth.

The key note addresses were delivered by:

• Ray Kurzweil - who presented an amazingly rapidly changing view of the world. The key take-out from his address was that growth is always exponential (unless it isn't!) and that entrepreneurs and venture-capitalists need to be aware of this
• Philip Rosedale - who did a bit of a sell of "Second Life", the world that he founded. Nevertheless, he also presented his view of the virtual worlds' futures and evolution trends. Once again, this was helped by Ray's previous address on exponential growth
• Walt Mossberg - who presented his current issues with the consumer, IT-world, today and identified those issues that inhibited immediate growth

All three speakers were quite compelling (not the normal "boring-techy" types!) and presented convincing arguments, even if you didn't necessarily agree with them.

There were also several panel discussions covering several areas. I only attended "My Free Media, Now!", "What good is social networking" and "Online games and Virtual Worlds: More than just entertainment?". There were plenty of panellists and I was quite impressed with several of them, including some I wasn't expecting to be - For example, the VP of Business Development at McGraw-Hill, Andrea Remyn, surprised me with some quite insightful commentary on advertising and customising for consumers... and this from a traditional print publisher!

So what does this show about Harvard Business School?
After all is said and done about Cyberposium, it does show the power of using Alumni, partners and networks to host these types of events and bring in considerable talent. Firstly, the whole event was fully sponsored by a collection of companies (BT, Google, Microsoft, Advanced Technology Ventures as well as Catchpole, Dell and Globespan Capital Partners). Funding an event, even as small as this requires considerable money and industry backing - which it received. This is definitely a positive for HBS.

Secondly, the speakers have been collected from Alumni and networks through Alumni. Several/Most speakers definitely came through some of these contacts:

• Ray Kurzweil's son is a second year student at HBS
• Philip Rosedale had a student from HBS working from him at Linden Labs
• Many panellists were HBS alumni themselves
  

I think this also counts volumes for Harvard's ability to keep alumni connected (and utilised!).

The forum, itself was coordinated by a group of current HBS students, which shows further the support that the school will provide student-run ventures.

Overall, Cyberposium speaks volumes for HBS, especially considering that HBS offers no real specialisation or electives in technology.