Topic: The Internet and the World Wide Web
Imagine what it would be like to find out that your best friend had cancer; what would you do? In this keynote presentation about social media and social action, Jennifer Lynn Aaker shares a touching story of what a small group of people did when they found out that their friends were dying, and how that changed the fate of leukemia patients from South Asia. Jennifer explains how the group achieved incredible results in a short time and shares the four keys to creating infectious action.
Dr. Moira Gunn talks with sociologist and network science pioneer Duncan Watts about his new book, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer, where he suggests that common sense and history can mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do.
How much does a 1-second transaction cost you? This is exactly what Aladdin Nassar, one of three performance engineers for Windows Live Hotmail, is trying to find out. Hear how they measure and track 1.3 billion accounts at Microsoft, to improve the performance of Windows Live Hotmail, end to end.
Careful study of Amazon.com reveals design treasures of surprising value. Jared Spool has studied Amazon for years and developed insights into which design elements create more sales, and why. But he cautions designers not to copy Amazon blindly. Some features only work for the dominant on-line retailer. Some don't even work for Amazon, whose site is peppered with "dead soldiers," the remnants of abandoned experiments. Along the way, Jared points out funny effects of Amazon's automation at scale. Even those show Amazon has much teach us.
Welcome back to the first episode of the new Stack Exchange Podcast redux - picking up right where we left off with the Stack Overflow Podcast! Come jump right back in with us to get caught up on everything we've been doing to build the brand new Stack Exchange community.
Commerce enters a new phase which brings back "local and personal", Google's Osama Bedier explains. But the innovation won't come without its challenges. These trends require payments to become completely digital, inventories to move to the cloud and platforms that determine user identity to become interoperable. After hurdling these barriers, technology can bring commerce back to the intimacy of 50 years ago. Sellers hope to see the return of traditional consumer loyalty as well.
While much open source software suffers from poor design and usability, Firefox shines. What makes the Mozilla community different? With great branding, usability backed up by research but tempered by realism, and a powerful extension architecture, the Firefox web browser claims 400 million users. On the eve of the release of Firefox 4, Mozilla designer Alex Faaborg covers the unique challenge of coordinating user experience design in an open source community, important features of past versions, and the future of the Firefox interface.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon speeding down the motorway, filled with magnetic tapes full of data. Those tapes hold a large amount of data, but the station wagon is hardly traveling at the speed of light; and adding more station wagons isn't going to make them go any faster. This quick talk by Philip Tellis describes how to measure latency and what to do about it.
Dr. Moira Gunn talks about cybercrime with Wired editor and author, Kevin Poulsen, about his new book Kingpin, How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground.
John Heilemann talks with FCC chair Julius Genachowski about the FCC's policy-making positions and challenges for the 21st century; including spectrum reapportionment, net neutrality, keeping up with the spectrum requirements of mobile broadband, global competitiveness, and "keeping the pipes open for innovators and consumer choice."
