IT Conversations

Adam Jacob, Jesse Robbins - Automated Infrastructure

Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

In his recent presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Adam Jacob talked about why a start-up needs an automated infrastructure. He covered the components necessary for any automated infrastructure to be successful and also presented use-cases. Along with Jesse Robbins, Adam joins Phil and Scott to talk about the automated infrastructure process.

Charles Perrow - IEEE Spectrum Radio: Reducing Disaster Vulnerability

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

According to Yale University Professor Charles Perrow, it is time to start learning from recent natural disasters in the United States like Hurricane Katrina. On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, Perrow asserts that instead of simply responding to natural disasters, we should be reducing our vulnerability to them.

James Greiner - A Look at MapQuest's Users

Sat, 10 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

MapQuest is one of the four leading map publishers on the Web. As part of its market research, the company conducted a customer survey on the Geo community with the aim of finding out what users truly want, as opposed to what they get. James Greiner, the company's Vice President and General Manager, summarizes the results of his survey into five simple principles whose usefulness cannot be exaggerated.

Lucas Gonze - Discovering, Sharing, and Experiencing Music

Fri, 9 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Lucas Gonze founded the playlist-sharing site webjay.org, and currently leads the development of the Yahoo! Media Player. He's also an amateur guitarist who records and performs 19th-century parlour music. In this wide-ranging conversation on Interviews with Innovators with Jon Udell, Gonze reflects on the ways we discover, share, and experience music in the digital age.

Changing Biotech - Bio-IT World Panel Session

Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Dr. Moira Gunn and David Ewing Duncan host a panel at the seventh annual Bio-IT World Conference on Changing Biotech.

Mitchell Kapor - Open Source: The End is Not in Sight!

Wed, 7 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

The first generation of Open Source has been a wild ride unimaginable at the time it began. But Mitch Kapor, President of the Open Source Applications Foundation and chair of the Mozilla Foundation, thinks the end is not in sight and that we can influence the future of Open Source by our actions and contributions. Open Source has some great virtues that deserve to be spread through all of society, not just the computing industry.

Ben Galbraith, Scott Lemon - Conference Travels

Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Phil, Ben, and Scott discuss recent technology conferences. Phil talks about his visit to China for WWW2008, while Scott reports on the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The group also has time to review other topics, including Wii remote programming using Java, using a cellphone to control realtime, multiplayer games, as well as Scott's video blog on QIK.

RJ Auburn - Creating Communication 2.0 Applications

Mon, 5 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

In contrast to the simplicity and ubiquity of the Web, developing telephony applications is complicated. RJ Auburn of Voxeo tells how their network interconnection stack will make it easier for developers to create new and creative telecommunications applications and gives a demo of how simple it is.

Bill Janeway, Peter Bloom - Web 2.0 and Wall Street

Sat, 3 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Many of the current attributes of Web 2.0 were first exposed in work done on Wall Street. Bill Janeway and Peter Blook, two Wall Street veterans, discuss some of the changes that have taken place over the last three decades in the investment banking and trading industries, like the shift from sales to use of proprietary information, the reduction of latency, and collaboration of ideas. The ideas in this discussion should give insight to anyone looking to the future of Web 2.0.

Janis Dickinson - Gathering Bird Observations Throughout the Western Hemisphere

Fri, 2 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Janis Dickinson directs the citizen science program at Cornell's Laboratory of Ornithology. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators with Jon Udell she discusses the lab's various projects. One of them, eBird, is an online system that gathers bird observations from recreational and professional birdwatchers the world. Their efforts are helping scientists answer questions about the diversity and abundance of birds.

Michio Kaku - Physics of the Impossible

Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist and author of "Physics of the Impossible" about the improbable, and the very likely in the near future: phasers, force fields and time travel.

Tim O'Reilly - Publishing in a Web 2.0 World

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Tim O'Reilly is known and respected in the technology community as a successful prognosticator of future trends. In 2004 he began referring to a variety of converging Internet trends as Web 2.0. While the phrase quickly became a lightening rod for attention and criticism, many believe that it accurately reflects a new wave of Internet innovation. In this presentation from the 2007 O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, O'Reilly turns his attention to how Web 2.0 trends are creating new challenges for the publishing industry.

Christian Gray, Craig Honick - Enterprise Social Software

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Enterprise social software is a term describing social software used in businesses and other enterprises. It includes such tools as blogging, people search, social network analysis, tagging, wiki, and collaboration/groupware. Christian Gray and Craig Honick join Phil and Scott to discuss their research. They define how ESS is different from traditional business models and why it is useful to study. They also discuss their initial findings and talk about how others can get involved.

Eben Moglen - Licensing in the Web 2.0 Era

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

In this philosophical discussion of principle and policy, Eben Moglen talks about the essence of GPLv3 and argues we've wasted the last ten years talking about open source without talking enough about freedom. There's a lot of work to be done on the distortion of the software market, prevention of monopolies, licensing and patents, and the correction of public policy to prevent the misuse of freedom.

Raymond Yee - Working with Data Sources

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Raymond Yee is a lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Information and the author of "Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services." On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Yee about teaching students how to work with existing data sources, and on ways to expand the supply of available sources.

Mary Roach - Science and Human Sexuality

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Mary Roach, author of "Bonk," and asks her how it is science and scientists go about the subject of human sexuality.

Herbert Hauptman - Identifying Molecular Structures

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Herbert Hauptman, Nobel Laureate and mathematician, and asks how he and Dr. Jerome Karle opened a new era in research using data from crystallized material research.

Jeff Hawkins - Why Can't a Computer Be More Like a Brain?

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

Despite amazing strides, computers are still relatively poor at performing high level activities that come naturally to the human brain. Co-founder of Palm, Inc., Jeff Hawkins, describes recent breakthroughs in the modeling of brain functions based on the theory of Hierarchical Temporal Memory. New insights into how the neocortex supports cognition, inference and prediction can be applied to a variety of problems using Hawkins' Numenta computing platform.

Matt Asay - The Ten Commandments of Open Source

Thu, 7 Feb 2008 00:00:00 CST

Ubuntu users and developers are passionate about it, almost on a religious level. Matt Asay describes the ten commandments of open source and how they relate to Ubuntu. He presents his points with examples from both the open source community in general and Ubuntu in particular. Matt's overview of these principles illustrate how Ubuntu can thrive on its past to change the future of IT.

James Reinders, Dirk Hohndel - Exploiting Parallelism with Multi-core Technologies

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 CDT

There has been a lot of talk about the difficulties of parallel programming, but Intel has decided to do something about it. Intel representatives announce the open sourcing of Threading Building Blocks, a product used to simplify parallel development. TBB has been around for several years as a proprietary tool, and Intel hopes that by opening it up, it will reach a broader audience and be adapted to more situations.