Mitch Kapor (Kapor Capital), Philip Bronner and Robert Hutter, moderated by Betsy Corcoran started by framing the problem with current education. Each of the speakers showed shocking graphs of educational attainment, inequity and the job market. Philip Bronner immediately lost my intellectual respect when he started talking about how Novak Biddle invested in Blackboard around … Continue reading Classroom 2020: VCs and the Education Revolution
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Create More Value Than You Capture
Tim O'Reilly was interviewed by Andrew McAfee (writer of Rage against the Machine). It is worthwile to fully quote the introduction to the session: One of the great failures of any company - for that matter of a capitalist economy - is ecosystem failure. Great companies build great ecosystems, one in which value is … Continue reading Create More Value Than You Capture
Invention & Inspiration: Building a Better World
Dean Kamen, founder of DEKA Research and Development and inventor of the Segway, iBot, an insulin pump and a portable dialysis machine, started by thanking the IEEE as the place in the background that makes sure that things keep on working and told us that ADD is one of his greatest assets. He talked about … Continue reading Invention & Inspiration: Building a Better World
Street-Level Genius: An African Maker Safari
Anita Pyke (Petproject.mobi) moderated a panel with Juliana Rotich (Ushahidi and Afrigadget), Steve Daniels (Makeshift Magazine and writer of Making Do) and John Kidendafor a discussion that was billed as follows: From bicycle-powered mobile phone chargers to a helicopter built from an old Honda Civic and the remains of a crashed 747, Africa has been … Continue reading Street-Level Genius: An African Maker Safari
Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface
Amber Case is a founder of Geoloqi and a cyborg anthropologist. Some of the themes that interest her are "ambient intimacy", "the automatic production of space" (you can put stuff in your computer, but it doesn't get heavier), "the digital dark age", "persistent paleontology", "information jetlag", her dislike for skeuomorphs and "cellphones as providing temporarily … Continue reading Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface