Topic: Business
In the early years of the Internet, many of the leading companies were startups. Now they employ thousands of people, but as they've grown, they've become less risky. With growing demands to meet expectations, companies must remain innovative. Two common strategies are: (a) buying a startup with innovative products and people; (b) establishing organizational structures that replicate the culture and attitudes of a technology startup. In this panel discussion, executives from AOL discuss their experiences keeping the startup spirit alive.
Broadband is still relatively cost-prohibitive, and New America Foundation's Sascha Meinrath has a solution. Rather than having carriers provide all bandwidth for customers, the online market is heading towards a model where apps and data are based on free delivery concepts with pre-loaded bandwidth paid for by the advertiser. Describing the hypothetical and, he says, probably inevitable future of apps, Meinrath discusses the possibilities of content providers paying for select bandwidth in order to ensure large-scale access.
The Grateful Dead's legendary performances, and the grassroots tape-trading network that grew around them, multiplied the band's fan base and generated a distributed archive that sustains their worldwide musical and cultural legacy. Nicholas Meriwether is head deadhead of the Grateful Dead Archive at U.C. Santa Cruz. He is devoted to using Web 2.0 user experience theory and practice to organize accessible collections of those memories.
In these segments, Moira first speaks with Vijay Vaitheeswaran, author of Need, Spped, and Greed, on how the new rules of innovation can transform businesses, propel Nations to greatness, and tame the world's most wicked problems. She then speaks with a delegation from the UK's Clean and Cool Mission.
Dr. Moira Gunn talks about the death of the five-year plan and performance indicators now being used to chart a course for successful businesses with John Hagel, Co-Director from the Deloitte Center for the Edge.
Paul Querna gives a quick summary of an ongoing open source project called Cast written in Node.js. It is a framework for deploying applications. Cast provides tools for system administrators and developers to create, deploy, maintain, and monitor distributed services written in any language. The internals are structured around building RESTful APIs for all operations, so all tasks can be scripted and more powerful tools built on top. Web locations are provided and collaborators encouraged to visit.
Speech technology expert and noted author Moshe Yudkowsky laments, " ...the models and information required by speech technology is simply too great for today's open source collaborations." Yudkowsky discusses the practical edge of speech technology, covering solutions for both large and small businesses.
Did you know California's entire research network of educational institutions, kindergarten through college, now empties directly into Amazon's cloud storage system? From data generated by thousands of Web 2.0 companies every second to terabytes of data generated by government at every level; this may be the golden age of data set collection. In this presentation Werner Vogels defines Big Data, examines the challenges that big data creates, and invites everyone to consider the types of innovation necessary to handle them.
John Resig, Dean of open source and head of JavaScript development at Khan Academy, looks at how performance is treated in jQuery projects. He explains the need to consider the varied components that make up a project and ensure that they are balanced to provide the most effective outcome for users of different browsers. He calls this a holistic approach and emphasizes the need for quality control as well as team member support to produce the best product and cleanest code.
Leading a panel of several investing experts, James Enck points out several challenges the telecommunications value chain faces after the recent recession. Several problems might mirror the dot-com bubble, but investors and entrepreneurs also have new obstacles, including the increasing importance of online businesses and infrastructure, the varying need for capital and smaller profit margins, and the continued instability of the credit market.
