Ponheary was asked to speak at the Innovate4Good Microsoft Convention in April.  As part of the deal, PLF was awarded a $5,000 grant for “Innovation in bridging the digital divide.” Thanks to Microsoft for the grant and also to Ponheary for continuing to spread the word about our project. Here is Ponheary’s account of the event and a link to the full speech.

Post by Ponheary Ly

I was invited to the seminar : Innovate4Good at Microsoft Conference in Singapore for giving a speech and Farida was invited as an attendee in the event too. It was very interesting for Farida who just had her first flight, her first time abroad.

We both stayed 5 nights in Singapore, two nights in the Sangri- La Sentosa hotel during the event the 27th and 28^th April and 3 nights at Jae and Tami Cho’s comfortable house. We loved the food in Singapore from the first day, when dined at the South Cost Park in the sea food restaurant with Nicole Phua and Earnest Lee. It was so nice to see all our PLF supporters in Singapore.

The 27^th April, the first interesting day came. I was interviewed by two Journalists: Jamie Yap, from ZDNet Asia who has 5 years of journalism writing and editing experience. This interview took place at the Microsoft office. And also Jon Russel, Asian Editor for The New Web.  This interview was by skype in the Microsoft office too. During the interviews I had Clair Deevy, helping me to understand the questions.

The evening of the 27^th Microsoft people organized the seminar room and did the rehearsal there. We rearranged a little bit our speech because they liked the videos by our students Sen and Sothy so much and wanted to include them. I was happy for our students to get more and more people seeing their videos.

The 28^th April, during my speech people listened and were inspired by it. I was happy!

The 29^th the seminar took place at Microsoft Office. It was very interesting to see the new technology. We listened to the speech of Mr. Efren Geronimo Penaflorida from the Philippines, who is CNN Hero 2009. His work is the much the same as ours.

Another speaker was Heather Mansfield, who is a Social Media Technology trainer and public speaker from USA.

We got to understand about the Kinect Effect, Farida’s favorite session by far. We also learned about TakingITGlobal which can help NGO’s to build their website for free, Photosync and Windows 8.

During the seminar, all attendees had very interesting activities instructed by Microsoft team. Not any boring minute happened. Every minute was interesting and fun. Those activities gave a lot knowledge to us and we want to have these in our country also. We see the technology can change the world, can make the people talking equally by social media, can study equally through it.

I think this seminar was for the young smart people who are really interested in new technology and share the idea and experiences to each other and learn more from Microsoft.

This trip is very interesting for me and Farida because we can see the modern world and bring this experiences to our children, to show them some pictures and tell them how the people in Singapore live, travel to work : by plane when they work for international companies that make them flying to different countries for work, taking the public transportation to work in town, the markets, and how clean is Singapore!!! I wish to have Cambodia so clean and keep the environment good.

We also made a lot new friends from different countries in the world.

Ponheary’s 25 minute talk is below, in 3 parts.