Topic: The Internet and the World Wide Web
Web developers will need an ample supply of RUM to ensure their applications are performing to users' satisfaction. Patrick Lightbody, Director, Product Development, Neustar Web Performance, advises developers that beyond nav timings the core things users care about are performance, availability, and functionality. In this talk Patrick describes the tools developers can use to evaluate critical web metrics, and how to produce a meaningful score card from the data they produce.
Dr Peter Hartwell discusses Hewlett-Packard's project to form a new information ecosystem called the Central Nervous System for the Earth, or CeNSE. The system will include a planetary system of a trillion nano-scale sensors and actuators embedded in the environment and connected via an array of wireless networks with computing systems, software and services to exchange real-time information among analysis engines, storage systems and end users. Applications include food safety, energy use and factory operations.
The very standards and conditions that made the Web a permissive, open environment have come under an attack from an onslaught of legal regulations and the monopolistic aspirations of bandwidth and software providers. Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, takes us on a journey of why the Web has proved successful for us, what made it interesting and open, how the very conditions that helped the Web flourish are under a threat, and what we can do about them.
"Since the 10th of November 2010, Amazon has not used a single physical web server. Everything is hosted on EC2 hosts," announces a proud Jon Jenkins, the Director of Platform Analysis at Amazon. Until now, the Velocity conference has laid the focus of their spotlight on Web velocity, i.e. Web performance. Jenkins moves the spotlight in the direction of "Web operations." He argues that optimizations in operations too can lead to greater business profits.
In the last decade, social media has changed the way we live our lives. We have all become high producers and consumers of social data. The data we generate is not just data, though. It tells our story. It is biographical. However, access to social data so far has been governed by APIs, and any API with a terms-of-service is restrictive. What if we could provide you a one-stop shop, an unrestricted, seamless, single point of access for all your social data; and you owned it all? Jeremie Miller, jabber/XMPP creator, has "Singly" to provide this.
Technology is increasingly being used to support sustainable development, and Google is on the leading edge of that trend. In this university podcast, Google's chief technology advocate, Michael Jones, addresses an audience of international government ministers from developing countries as well as technology and NGO professionals convened by the US State Department and the Stanford Graduate School of Business on the topic. He spoke at the USRio+2.0 Conference, hosted by Stanford.
If the delivery of pizza, flowers and books can be free, why not the delivery of bytes over the Web? Even landline telephone providers have a "1-800" model that delivers signal for zero cost to the carrier and the consumer. Thomas Sachson, founding member of of Box Top Solutions, proposes a market-driven model that can provide free or subsidized bandwidth and still pay for itself.
Amazon has a virtual supercomputer you can rent by the hour, and it is cheap too. Alyssa Henry from Amazon discusses the company's Elastic MapReduce web service for businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It uses a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)that can be quickly switched on and off. Hear how over 560 billion objects are tracked worldwide.
Mike McCue, a serial web entrepreneur, compares his latest venture, Flipboard, to the 1957 Jaguar XKSS. Flipboard, a "social magazine" for the tablet, brings the best of print production values and sprinkles in social aspects in a web interface that is out to make a new premium web category. Mike describes his perspective, with online examples, of how art fits into his business model.
You want to know what's actually happening on your website? Google Analytics is a powerful tool that enables the following of website traffic. Susan Wojcicki, a senior vice president at Google, presents different features of Google Analytics, including innovations like dynamic diagrams, possibility of sorting data by many different criteria, custom variables, premium version for businesses that want SLA or more custom functionality, and a new feature that enables real time monitoring of web site traffic.
