Topic: Business
As more household appliances can be controlled remotely, major companies are developing new ways for consumers to use their products. Jonathan Thompson discusses how General Electric uses the Nucleus Energy Manager to monitor and control power usage and cost. In addition to describing the Smart Energy Profile standard, he reviews how appliance and electricity usage is monitored, as well as how privacy issues in particular are controlled and considered in the manager.
We are sharing more than ever. We're sharing so much that we're struggling to understand what to do with the data. We've become data rich, but information poor. It is estimated that we're sharing more than five exabytes of data every two days; roughly the same amount of online data that the world generated until 2003. In this keynote address Hilary Mason introduces some of the challenges of the new age of the exabyte. She offers what she sees as the opportunity to make the world a better place, by converting data into information.
Eric Ries, serial entrepreneur and author of "The Lean Startup", achieved failure before achieving success. Seeing conventional management practices as incapable of guiding high-uncertainty projects, Eric reframes the startup as an ongoing scientific experiment, and provides a glimpse of the management strategies he uses to distinguish between impending insolvency and the brink of breakthrough.
Dean Bubley exposes the obstacles and politics surrounding development of the 3GPP LTE effort for optimizing radio access architecture. LTE is being held hostage by the telephony industry and the mobile world is being overlooked, but this must change. Several possible solutions exist, such as IMS voice and Circuit Switch Fallback, but they pose excessive call setup times and compatibility issues. The best resolution is a collaborative effort by carriers and third party VOIP vendors to produce a test vehicle.
Dr. Moira Gunn talks with author and Internet policy specialist, Rebecca MacKinnon about her mantra on cyber rights, outlined in her new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.
We have all heard that technology is changing, and that the world is changing alongside it. RJ Auburn, CTO at Voxeo, presents several ways his company keeps this idea in mind by changing their customer service and products in reaction to and anticipation of present and future technological trends. He also explains how technology is changing the ways in which people hear, communicate, and use communication tools altogether.
According to the Supermechanical website, "Twine is a wireless module tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. The module has WiFi, on-board temperature and vibration sensors, and an expansion connector for other sensors." Developer John Kestner describes the device and its development. He reviews how it works, what decisions were made in its design, and how It allows you to connect things to the Internet. He also discusses the community that is working to make the product better.
It is hard to imagine getting advice on the future of publishing from the Cheezburger Network. Then again, questioning the status quo, and delivering what people really want, is exactly what Ben Huh has done. By using unconventional practices, he has built a group of very popular websites. So maybe it isn't such a surprise that they have published several hit books. In this keynote Huh discusses how they they engineered their books to be best-sellers.
Linking information technology management to popular public technology and physics, Cfengine's Mark Burgess describes the fluidity and diversity necessary to keep up with changes in information technology. Rather than the standardization and bureaucracy that globalization tends to bring, Burgess advocates cultural diversity and human input in IT management but with a universal focus on speed and predictability.
In discussing the economic value of Google, Hal Varian focuses on the impact of Google Search in terms of time saved, and advertisements on Google in terms of profit, publicity, and communication. Presenting gains and losses with mathematical equations, social norms, and increasing use of technology, Google's Chief Economist presents Google's impact on the world at large and for specific demographics.
