September's Member of the Month is CSPA's stalwart newsletter /conference brochure editor Jim Mi. Being the Program Manager at Intel's Content Group, Jim is managing an industry forum of 70 hardware, software and distributor companies, and a compatibility test lab, to establish Intel architecture as the platform of choice for the arcade game industry. Previously he'd held engineering and management positions in Intel's CAD and Flash memory departments.
He's been combining technology and content creation for some time. As a middle school student in his hometown of Shanghai, he won China's first National Computer Competition in 1984--his project, a Chinese relational database management system on Apple II, took a whole summer to complete and was "exhausting but fun." Afterwards he was asked to write a book about his experiences as the foundation of programming tutorial for other middle school students; the result, "Follow Me To Learn BASIC," sold 200,000 copies, and brought its author fun and profit. "The book qualified me to be CSPA's newsletter editor", joked Jim.
After completing a four-year physics program at Shanghai's Fudan University in three years, Jim went to Princeton to study electrical engineering. By the summer of 1992, when he came to Intel as a summer student, he had completed an MSEE and passed the qualification exam for the Ph.D program. That summer, working in the flash memory R&D department, he discovered a way to accurately store two bits of information in one flash memory cell, instead of the traditional one bit. Impressed by the new-found ability to double memory density and halve costs, Intel decided to develop a product based on this technology, and Jim never quite got back to Princeton. Considered Intel a place as intellectually stimulating as Princeton, Jim has recieved 4 US patents and with three others pending since he joined Intel.
Jim says that he used to have spare time in which he enjoyed kayaking, skiing, roller hockey, and windsurfing, but nowadays considers himself lucky to get in the occasional game of tennis.
He first got involved with CSPA at a monthly meeting more than two years ago, and remembers Po Chi Wu discussing his experiences as a venture capitalist; he's attracted by CSPA's opportunity to "help members with entrepreneurial spirit get off the ground by being the conduit between industry veterans, venture capitalists, and the members."
He sees the organization's biggest challenge as maintaining its current momentum, and regards the newsletter as one of the components in that effort. Among his ideas are to expand the in-depth information in the newsletter with a "Technology Corner" column in which members could share their expertise on particular subjects, and "Private Company Watch," perhaps developed in conjunction with Red Herring or Upside, to analyze private companies and predict the next blockbuster IPO.