Yadin Kaufmann Featured in Article About Investing in Palestinian Start-Ups

Yadin Kaufmann was featured in a New York Times "Dealbook" article today about how his Veritas Venture Partners is investing in Palestinian start-up companies. The article says,

Mr. Kaufmann, a lawyer by training, has worked with international technology companies over his last 25 years as a venture capitalist. He has had a long-standing relationship with Cisco since the company acquired Class Data Systems, a Veritas investment.

Working with a Palestinian partner, Kaufmann has raised $28.7 million to invest in companies in Palestinian territories.

Amy Myers Jaffe to Speak at NY Times Energy Conference

Amy Myers Jaffe will be speaking at the New York Times's Energy for Tomorrow Conference: Fueling a New Global Economy. It will be held April 11 at the the Times Center at 242 W. 41st Street in New York. The event will bring together 400 leaders from the energy sector and related industries, as well as policy makers, to debate the principal challenges and opportunities in meeting the world’s energy needs. The all-day conference will include debates, panel discussions, keynote addresses, case studies and brainstorming sessions.

Jaffe will be on the closing panel discussion, on the topic of "Counting the Cost." Panelists will consider if there is a way to promote renewables that doesn’t require subsidies. Some countries have traditionally offered substantial subsidies to encourage the use of alternative energies, but this process may not be sustainable long term. What role should governments play in promoting renewable energy, and what is required of companies seeking to deliver renewable energy into the marketplace?

The conference program has this description of Jaffe:

Amy Myers Jaffe is the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies and director of the Energy Forum at the Baker Institute, as well as associate director of the Rice Energy Program. Jaffe’s research focuses on oil geopolitics, strategic energy policy including energy science policy and energy economics. Jaffe was formerly senior editor and Middle East analyst for Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. She is widely published and served as co-editor of “Energy in the Caspian Region: Present and Future” (Palgrave, 2002) and “Natural Gas and Geopolitics: From 1970 to 2040” (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and as co-author of “Oil, Dollars, Debt and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold” with Mahmoud A. El-Gamal (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Jaffe also contributed to Foreign Policy’s “21 Solutions to Save the World” (May/June 2007).

She served as a member of the reconstruction and economy working group of the Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study Group, as project director for the Baker Institute/Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on Strategic Energy Policy, and as a principal adviser to USAID’s project on “Options for Developing a Long Term Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry.”

She currently serves as a strategic adviser to the American Automobile Association (AAA) of the United States and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Jaffe was among the Key Women in Energy-Americas honorees in the Pathfinders/Trailblazers category (2004), the honoree for Esquire’s annual 100 Best and Brightest in the contribution to society category (2005), Elle magazine’s Women for the Environment (2006), and was named to Who’s Who in America (2008).

Jaffe is a Princeton University graduate with a degree in Arabic studies.

Florence Hudson Speaks at TEDxNJIT Event

Florence Hudson spoke on March 23 at the TEDxNJIT Conference at the New Jersey Institute of Technology campus in Newark. The theme of the event was Sustainability on a Smarter Planet. There were about 100 people in attendance, Mike Ehrlich *87 (Princeton PhD Economics 1987) was one of the organizers from NJIT, and the live stream on the Internet had people from 21 states and 14 countries watching live. The photo above shows Erhlich, Hudson and Tom Blum '80.

Here's what TED is:

TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 26 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. At TED, the world's leading thinkers and doers are asked to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Benoit Mandelbrot, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Two major TED events are held each year: The TED Conference takes place every spring in Long Beach, California (along with a parallel conference, TEDActive, in Palm Springs), and TEDGlobal is held each summer in Edinburgh, Scotland.