Ken Kao

<h3>Google </h3> I led a team of 4 other graduate and undergraduate student consultants from <a href="http://consulting.stanford.edu" target="_blank">Stanford Consulting</a> to work with 2 Google advisors on identifying the most promising future revenue models in the mobile applications space. We analyzed the mobile applications through research articles, gathering raw data from downloading the top applications on the iTunes Store and Android Market, as well as interview over 20 professional and student developers and businessmen in the mobile application space.

<h3>EnerNOC </h3> <a href="http://www.enernoc.com" target="_blank">EnerNOC</a> is a leading demand response and energy management company. Previously, EnerNOC had full-time analysts manually looking through energy usage charts and marking the anomalies. My team from <a href="http://consulting.stanford.edu" target="_blank">Stanford Consulting</a> wrote a software in Matlab and Java to identify the anomalies in energy usage in a fast and consistent manner. We helped save the analysts' times by taking away the quantitative part of the analysis and allowing them to focus on the analytical aspects.

<h3>Silicon Valley Community Foundation </h3> <a href="http://www.siliconvalleycf.org/" target="_blank">Silicon Valley Community Foundation</a> (SVCF) is a $1.7 Billion dollar foundation that helps individuals and organizations donate efficiently while focusing on their charitable passions. My team from <a href="http://consulting.stanford.edu" target="_blank">Stanford Consulting</a> came up with a market-entry strategy for SVCF to partner with small and medium-sized businesses. We concluded our project by presenting our findings and recommendation to board-room-level executives.

<h3>Coupa Cafe </h3> I worked with a team of 5 in <a href="http://www.stanfordmarketinggroup.com/" target="_blank">Stanford Marketing</a> to help market <a href="http://www.coupacafe.com" target="_blank">Coupa Cafe</a>'s opening at Stanford University's Campus between Green and Meyer libraries. We helped devise strategies to increase the popularity of Coupa Cafe on campus, as well as organized the Grand Opening on April 6, 2010, which included a live band, free coffees, and surprise secret coupons.

<h3>Palantir Technologies</h3> I worked on 3 projects as a <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-day-to-day-of-a-Forward-Deployed-Engineer-at-Palantir" target="_blank"> forward deployed engineer</a> at <a href="http://www.palantir.com" target="_blank">Palantir</a>. The first was on a specific deployment with a $150 billion asset manage firm who also publishes global equity indices. I integrated their data with the <a href="http://www.palantir.com/platforms/#metropolis" target="_blank">Palantir Metropolis</a> platform and built customized features for them. </br> </br> My second project was to design a demo with Palantir Metropolis for the home mortgages sector. I populated fake data, designed the demo, and presented to our external advisors in this space. </br> </br> For my last project, I coordinated 4 interns and 5 full-timers to create a visual web tool that empowered non-technical people to integrate client data with our platform. Once this is done, forward deployed engineers will have more time to work on more technically challenging problems.

<h3>Opower</h3> I worked on 2 projects at <a href="http://www.opower.com" target="_blank">Opower</a> in the summer of 2011. The first involved creating dynamically-generated FAQ sites for Opower's utility clients so that our front-end engineer didn't have to spend a few hours to copy and paste all the site content. My solution allowed a non-technical person to hit some buttons, fill out some forms for the content, and immediately create a website. You can see two of the examples <a href="https://dteenergy.opower.com/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://otp.opower.com/" target="_blank">here</a>. </br> </br> Besides the FAQ sites, I also participated in the bi-annual "Innovation Day", working on a project that involved short-url for users to sign up for our platform. I subsequently acted as the PM and engineer of the project, bringing in together 8 people from various functions to collaborate. The feature is currently in Opower's roadmap, and is scheduled to go live in late 2012.

<h3>Facebook</h3> At <a href="http://www.facebook.com" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, I worked as a hardware engineering intern on the server team's first energy-efficient server design in 2010. My day often consists of my manager dumping 10 servers for me in the morning and asking me to diagnose what went wrong in each of them (and fix them if I can). I also worked on testing memory, CPU energy usage, and various hardware components on the motherboard. This project eventually became the <a href="http://opencompute.org/" target="_blank">Open Compute Project</a>, with Facebook releasing the <a href="http://opencompute.org/specs/" target="_blank">specs and designs</a> of the server and datacenters. The new system reduced the power consumption by 38% and costs 24% less than the previous models.

<h3>Hewlett-Packard</h3> I joined the Workstation Global Business Unit's Taiwan Design Center (TDC) at <a href="http://www.hp.com" target="_blank">Hewlett-Packard</a> as a Research & Development intern in 2009. I worked on TDC's first project, the <a href="http://www.hp.com/sbso/busproducts-workstations.html" target="_blank">Workstation</a> Z200, and designed the <a href="http://www.energystar.gov/" target="_blank">Energy Star</a> 5.0 test plan - an international standard for energy efficient consumer products. I also identified and diagnosed an idle-state power-savings malfunction, which resulted a 10-Watt (20%) saving for each computer. We eventually obtained the Energy Star 5.0 certification (although I dare not take the credit since I wasn't the one designing the actual computer components!).