e-Marketing: Sep 23, 2010

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Five Answers From Tim Brown, IDEO

Five Answers From Tim Brown, IDEO

Posted by: Helen Walters on December 18, 2008

Tim Brown from IDEO came into see us here at BusinessWeek in New York earlier this week, and graciously answered five reader questions. Thanks to all for some really smart submissions — it was really hard to whittle it down to just five. Here’s the video:

Clay Shirky y su nuevo libro “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age”

Professor Says Michael Arrington Lives In An Ivory Tower (TCTV)

Last night, hundreds of UC Berkeley students like myself sat in a packed auditorium to hear Michael Arrington speak with visiting Berkeley scholar, entrepreneur, and TechCrunch contributor, Professor Vivek Wadhwa. What was expected to be a mild discussion turned into a heated debate. Wadhwa firmly disagreed with Arrington on key topics on the agenda for the night such as the worth of a college education and, you guessed it, women in tech.

Arrington started off the talk saying what a room full of professors and college students dreaded to hear—that a college education can hinder instead of help the path of a brilliant entrepreneur. While he thought that for most of us college is a necessary stage for maturing, he half-joked that for the Zuckerbergs out there “The best thing in the world is to go to Harvard for a year and drop out. Everyone knows you were smart enough to get in”.

For Arrington, great entrepreneurs are fearless daredevils who should be willing to take a risk as big as dropping out of college if they’re passionate about their cause. Wadhwa cited the valid example of small-time entrepreneurs who need a college education in order to survive, with Arrington rebutting that “if you think small, you end up small”.

The normally mild-mannered Wadhwa became visibly impassioned about the dearth of women in technology. Wadhwa argued that Arrington lived in an “ivory tower”, oblivious to the ugly prejudice that Wadhwa has himself faced as an immigrant entrepreneur in North Carolina. Arrington admitted that as a white male, he could not speak about gender or race discrimination firsthand. Yet Arrington did point to his TC colleagues (and boss) as well as women in the audience who are living examples of the success and support women in tech are able to achieve.

As expected, Arrington riled up the crowd with more bold statements and colorful analogies. You’ll have to watch to understand why he thinks “entrepreneurs are like pirates” or why he feels pressured to get a sex change.

Chilean Minister of Commerce Juan Andres Fontaine attended the event and had some news after the debate. He announced a $40,000 grant the government is offering to qualified international entrepreneurs to start companies in Chile. Chile’s impressive pro-business, pro-immigration policy left many students in the audience thinking about packing their bags for South America and Arrington concerned about the potential loss of bright American minds to other countries with greater entrepreneurial opportunities.

The arguing did make for great TV, but the most interesting part of the lecture were the undeniable words of wisdom Arrington and Wadhwa had for their young audience. A piece of advice both panelists agreed on was to never forget the importance of ethics. As Arrington said, “Never hurt anyone to benefit yourself…but do something amazing, however you define it, and change the world”. That advice also serves as an important tip for young entrepreneurs hoping to gain exposure on TechCrunch: aim to change the world, because as Michael said “I’m not interested in the people who aren’t”.

Thanks to CalTV and camerapersons Matt Grobar and Tiffany Hsu for providing the video.

Yandex is a Russian internet technologies company and the largest Russian and seventh-largest world internet search engine.

Yandex

Yandex is a Russian internet technologies company and the largest Russian and seventh-largest world internet search engine.

As of May 2010, Yandex had approximately 64.0% of the Russian search market, compared to Google’s 22,1% (www.liveinternet.ru).

Yandex provides its users in Russia and the CIS with highly targeted sophisticated web search and information retrieval services based on world-class technologies like proprietary machine-learning method MatrixNet.

In addition to localized search results, Yandex users have an option of limiting their searches only to websites outside the domestic internet.

The company also offers a portal providing a range of free online services and extensive local, national and international information including maps, traffic information, image, news or blog search, spam-free email and many others.

In 2009, Yandex’s revenue totaled to $278m. Contextual ads accounted for 86% of the company’s revenues. Display ads comprised 11%.

“Yandex” is an acronym for the phrase “Yet Another Indexer.”

SwiftKey comes out of public beta to rock your Android keyboard

If you haven’t heard of SwiftKey by TouchType and you have an Android phone, you’re either suffering with the native keyboard or trying out some of the other popular alternatives, such as Swype for instance. The release of the bigger and better SwiftKey for Android wouldn’t be big news, if it wasn’t for the fact that it is. I’ve been using the keyboard for about two months now and despite some hiccups, it is already a lifesaver. The new version is slick, not to mention faster.

Their public beta version has already generated 250,000 downloads, making it the most downloaded keyboard in the Android Market, says the London, UK-based company. What’s the big deal? SwiftKey’s technology works on AI, learning from the user’s writing style and predicting as he/she types. SwiftKey claims that a third of the words can be predicted even before you tap the first letter and the majority just with one or two clicks. According to the company, that’s an increase of up to 50% in your typing efficiency.

SwiftKey runs on their TouchType’s FluencyTM prediction engine. In a nutshell, what it does in the background is analyze text to see how you combine and order words both as you write, as well as by reviewing prior content stored on your phone. Basically, it’s not predicting just across the board for everyone as a whole, but it’s personalizing the predictions to based on your own typing behavior.

Another really useful feature of SwiftKey is the simultaneous multilingual prediction. If you’re anything like me and have to communicate in two to three languages, you either type freely without suggestions or you switch languages, right? SwiftKey solves this problem with simultaneous prediction for two languages. You just type and it recognizes the language and gets better at predicting over time.

This Official Samsung Galaxy Tab Video Demo Is A Nine Minute, Must-Watch Snooze Fest

The video is boring. I’m not exaggerating. However, it happens to be the most complete demo of a polished Android tablet without any marketing bull. It’s just some dude running through the major apps. That’s it. It actually does a fine job of prove Android as a practical tablet OS. It shows the mobile operating system as responsive, well suited for the tablet format, and overall usable — all items that cannot be said about the HP Slate after watching its video demo from earlier today.

Of course the demo is probably highly scripted and not likely to show any downsides to to the product. But that’s fine. This video at least shows that Samsung knows that it must show off the Tab’s raw capabilities. That’s what’s going to sell tablets.