Saturday, 24 February 2007
Sunday, 18 February 2007
Saturday, 17 February 2007
Thursday, 15 February 2007
Monday, 15 January 2007
Saturday, 13 January 2007
A closer look at iPhone
Apple Inc's Phil Schiller shows John Blackstone the many features of the iPhone. Apple's latest product will go on sale this June.
Creating a Flex application using the TurboGears framework
In this screen capture video tutorial, Bruce Eckel and James Ward pair up to create an Adobe Flex application using the TurboGears framework (see Figure 1). Follow along as these experts show you how to put it all together.
Wednesday, 10 January 2007
Monday, 8 January 2007
2007 International CES Keynote
Watch the 2007 International CES keynote as Bill Gates and Robbie Bach introduce new products and discuss the Connected Experience.
Sunday, 7 January 2007
A Hardware-Based CIL-Machine
Video
Maxim Shuralev, Niznhiy Norogorod State University, Russian Federation
SSCLI RFP II Capstone Workshop
10 Rules for Strategic Innovators
Video"It’s a chronic dilemma: investors demand growth—yet the older a company gets, the harder it is to deliver the kind of innovations that younger startups are known for. Most companies are full of creative people with imaginative ideas for new businesses, but ideas only get you so far. The real challenge is executing innovation.
So how can companies that have been shaped for excellence in an old business, build a new one with different rules for success? It requires a near-impossible balancing act—but it’s one that many accomplished companies see as a necessity. Examples include General Motors, which launched the cutting edge OnStar in-vehicle communication system; Procter & Gamble, currently reaching out to the coveted teen market with word-of-mouth marketing service Tremor; and the Walt Disney Company, which recently introduced MovieBeam to break into the lucrative in-home video rental market.
Large established companies don’t have to be the underdog when it comes to innovation. But how to start? How can executives manage new high-growth-potential businesses inside established organizations? 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators includes instructive, real-world stories of innovation in action. Case studies include Corning’s behind-the-scenes entry into the high-risk biotechnology industry, Hasbro’s aggressive pursuit of interactive video games—and the hurdles it faced in getting there, and the contentious rise of New York Times Digital. "
Educating Engineers for 2020 and Beyond
Original Website
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
Though two years departed from the MIT President’s office, Charles Vest has lost none of his zeal for issues of education and training. Says Vest, "I envy the next generation of engineering students. This is without question the most exciting period of human history in science, technology and engineering."
He cites exponential advances in knowledge, instrumentation, communication and computational capabilities, which have "created mind-boggling possibilities," cutting across traditional boundaries and blurring distinctions between science and engineering. At the same time, globalization is changing how engineers train and work, as well as how nation's resources are directed. "The entire nature of the innovation ecosystem and business enterprise is changing dramatically in ways we do not yet fully understand," says Vest. These dizzying changes require an accelerated commitment to engineering research and education, and compel research institutions simultaneously to advance the frontiers of fundamental science and technology, and to address the most important problems that face the world.
Vest perceives two key frontiers of engineering: the intersection of physical, life and information sciences -- so-called bio, nano, info-- "which offers stunning, unexplored possibilities;" and the macro world of energy, food, manufacturing, communications, which presents "daunting challenges of the future."
The kind of students Vest hopes will explore these new frontiers should reflect a diverse society, write and communicate well, think about ethics and social responsibility, conceive and operate systems of great complexity within a framework of sustainable development and be prepared to live and work as global citizens. It's a "tall order," admits Vest, but "there are men and women every day here who seem to be able to do all these things and more."
To prepare this new generation, engineering schools should focus on creating an environment that provides inspiration. In the long run, offering "exciting, creative adventures, rigorous, demanding and empowering milieus is more important than specifying details of the curriculum," says Vest. Students are "driven by passion, curiosity, engagement and dreams." Give them opportunities to discover and do – to participate in research teams, perform challenging work in industry, gain professional experience in other countries. Vest says, "We must ensure the best and brightest become engineers of 2020 and beyond. We can't afford to fail."
Why Large Companies Should Out-Innovate Small Ones
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
"Given the choice, Dan Hesse would opt for working in a big company rather than a small one, especially when it comes to innovating. He backs up this preference with years of experience, from his days running a start up (“It was really hard work”) to leading some of AT&T’s pioneer telecom ventures.
Hesse first describes some of his formative projects for AT&T, including the “all you can eat” long distance WATTS line and AT&T’s first internet and wireless divisions. What he learned was how to “sit down with the guys in the labs,” and also with customers, applying market research to generate new inventions. He came to appreciate AT&T’s very deep pockets for R&D, which made it possible for “the large guy to completely change the game” and “make it almost impossible for smaller guys to compete.”
His new enterprise, Embarq, (an offshoot of Sprint Nextel) is the nation’s 4th largest local telephone company, present in 18 states with $6.5 billion in revenues. Hesse is determined to fight the slow but relentless loss of market share to wireless and cable companies. His plan involves changing the image of the firm “to get customers to embrace innovation” and try Embarq’s new products, which include: One Voicemail, a service that provides a single voicemail messaging system for home and wireless phones; Smart Connect, which enables an Embarq phone user to switch transparently from mobile frequencies to Wi-Fi as the phone moves from outside to inside; Media Safe, 25gb of internet storage for Embarq’s DSL subscribers to stow their videos and tunes; and the Offer, a company promise not to raise the DSL subscription price – ever.
He offers general advice on innovating, especially aimed at large firms that “typically don’t innovate because they’re too comfortable.” He suggests integrating across platforms to make life simpler for customers; cultivating a competitive corporate culture, in which delegation, teamwork and employee recognition play important roles; studying the market; incubating new projects while maintaining steady revenues in the old business; figuring out a business model that “gets things down to single-user economics;” and “shamelessly stealing good ideas.” Most important, when it comes to creating the next new thing, nothing beats leveraging the assets of a large company. When customers trust the company and the brand, marketing new ideas is easier, concludes Hesse."
Video
A Scalable, Component-driven OS
"Windows runs on a variety of hardware and with a wide range of applications. In this talk, Rob Short of Microsoft presents an overview of the challenges, tradeoffs, and technical solutions used to design and build the operating system to serve this range of masters. He discusses the details on componentization of the system, scalability, and improvements to the quality and reliability of Windows."
Video
Saturday, 6 January 2007
Software Visualization and Model Generation
"Models are often viewed as something you create during design time and use to generate code. What if we turn the approach upside-down and generate models from code? Humans are very good at recognizing patterns in images, making visualizations a valuable tool to, for example, recognize dependencies or data flow. This is particularly true for dynamic, loosely coupled systems that are often less explicit and evolve over time. Once you have generated a model you can take things a step further and run checks and validations against it. Visualizations can also be used to plot out source code metrics over various dimensions to detect potential “hot spots” in the application that may require special attention."
Software Visualization and Model Generation
Friday, 5 January 2007
Building Reliable and High Performance Messaging Applications with POJOs and Apache ActiveMQ
"The use of messaging and SEDA are excellent tools for building reliable distributed, loosely coupled applications for high performance computing. This session will give a brief overview of the concepts involved in messaging then show how to to use JMS and POJOs to build distributed applications which scale to meet your requirements.We will then go through some advanced topics using ActiveMQ, the open source message broker, such as load balancing, clustering & high availability, pooling, XA and how to use clients in both Java, C# and Ruby."
