Topic: Business
On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, learn about how the Atacama Path Finder Experiment is providing a better picture of the universe, how new digital projectors are making it easier and cheaper for Hollywood to release movies in 3D, and how trojan horse attacks indicate hackers are no longer content with just disrupting systems: they want to make money too.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with UC Business School professor Peter Navarro in the second of a two-part interview on China. This week - the surprising blood scandal which spread HIV and the culture of counterfeit.
In our increasingly virtual world individuals are creating value through their every online action, but who benefits from this value? Sometimes the value is explicit - such as the information about yourself you submit to social networking or ecommerce sites. More often the value is implicit - generated through the choices you make (or don't make) in directing your attention, or the ratings you assign to other users or content. This panel discusses the issues faced by both business and consumers in generating, maintaining, understanding and benefiting from this value.
Much has been done to strengthen the three major pillars of open source: licensing, business models and governance. Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps looks at the measures needed to ensure the Zen of Free is protected as we move into the next era of software. Along with the "freedom to tinker", the community must defend the "freedom to participate" without undue controls, and the "freedom to leave", an open-standards based assurance that users can move their data easily between interoperable platforms and services.
When the traffic to your website increases, it becomes all the more important to scale, ensure service availability and survive outages without any impact to customers. Planning for uptime is known as business continuity. Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon.com describes how Amazon guarantees 100% uptime for its platform to its customers, safeguarding them against the perils of unpredictable disaster, and freeing them from the legwork of maintaining an enormous infrastructure.
The wireless customer is ready to have all manner of devices constantly connected to the wireless network anytime, anywhere, with consistent quality service in every location. But are the current wireless carriers and service providers ready to deliver? The panelists note that while innovation abounds many of the key challenges that plague customer service still remain. Both business and consumer customers are still looking for the wireless technology and service package that serves all their needs.
Hardware vendors need to stand up and support open source software solutions that meet the needs of their customers. Christine Martino, VP of the Open Source and Linux Organization at Hewlett-Packard, speaks at the 2006 MySQL User's Conference about HP's commitment to Linux and the open source community. Learn about how HP is helping their enterprise customers leverage the power of open source software.
Alex Martelli, the Uber Technical Lead at Google, debunks some common management myths, and shares a wealth of immediately useful advice for anyone involved in technical software projects. Software developers operate with their own particular mindset, culture and reward system. To inspire a top programming team, the ideal manager is a technical peer who can jump into the code and solve thorny problems. Technical involvement smooths the way, and helps the manager build credibilty and trust.
Lawrence Catchpole, Chief Strategy Officer of M1 Global Solutions and Vernon Irvin, Executive Vice President and General Manager of VeriSign Communications Services, discuss the implications and opportunities resulting from the convergence of voice and data communications. Mr. Catchpole focuses on the still unfullfilled need of the enterprise customer to achieve the true strategic value of voice as data. Mr. Irvin concentrates on the opportunities available for service providers to offer new tools to drive convergence and eliminate friction.
While many software evangelists preach that it matters to establish a culture where we talk about and accept mistakes, few go ahead and talk about their own. Leading heads of Adaptive Path reveal what they did wrong and what they learned from it. Mistakes in project management and especially in communication may lead to months of work wasted.
