This is an interesting list I found of companies that make the most of the "fan" account they have on facebook. Another interesting crossroad between our economy and technology.
In this course we will view western civilization through the lens of the digital revolution, learning both what the past has to say about how we produce and share knowledge, and what our experiences with modern technology lead us to discover about the past.
Students will become fluent with the concepts and tools needed to be lifelong learners and active participants in a world where technological innovations change rapidly.
Very interesting talk on the growth of computers and computing power - its evolution - and how it will help us to evolve.
All in all a great site to learn about our digital culture!!!!
These guys provide the cell phones in Kenya. Am I the only one who thinks the proliferation of technology in a third-world country is amazingly bizarre?
I have this obsession with Russia and its authors, so this is something that I was quite excited to listen to as I worked around my apartment today. I love Chekhov, especially his letters to his family while he was traveling around Siberia. It doesn't have a lot to do with Technology and Modern Inventions, but it has to do with expanding our learning in general.
My last blog was a lot about beauty. This, I think, is another example of how we can use technology to better record it. The guy puts his camera on a track and takes a bunch of pictures and he put them all together in After Effects
Alan Turing made both changes in technology and mathematics along with changes in societal norms. In this article it talks a little of his influence on the gender issue.
The lone genius, beavering away in the seclusion of his lab is how most of us imagine the great moments of innovation have come into being. But is this really the whole story?
"[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment.
"And so much of that is because it's wonderfully set up for other people to build on top of other people's ideas. In many cases without asking for permission.
"One of the lessons I've learned is that so many of these great innovators, Darwin is a great example of this, one shared characteristic they all seem to have is a lot of hobbies."
So what should companies be doing to foster innovation in their workforces?
"I think there's this abiding belief that markets drive innovation, corporations drive innovation, entrepreneurs driven by financial reward drive innovation, and while that's certainly true in many cases there's also this very rich long history of important world-changing ideas coming out of the more or less intellectual commons of the universities.
"Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent."
Only last week Google splashed out on Writely, a web-based word processor that requires no downloads or installation and just runs in a browser window.
Maybe Web 2.0 is a transitional phase, and once we get used to interacting with online tools in a more natural way and dispense with static web, we will move to a world of true distributed computing.
We'll need to make sure that the successful Web 2.0 companies don't just sit on progress because it doesn't serve their business plans, like so many other computing companies have done in the past and continue to do today.
If Web 2.0 is the first stage in a revolution, we need to make sure it's a permanent revolution.
An attractive, simple entry point for using Web 2.0 tools in teaching and learning -- at least for the Georgetown University community. It's too bad that theirs is a closed system, but the tools they are promoting and displaying do show a good range of various technologies and tools that can be adopted in higher education.
The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.
Text messaging, or S.M.S. (short message service), turns out to be a particularly cost-effective way to connect with otherwise unreachable people privately and across great distances. Public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.
A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship
For this reason, the cellphone has become a darling of the microfinance movement
companies like Wizzit, in South Africa, and GCash, in the Philippines, have started programs that allow customers to use their phones to store cash credits transferred from another phone or p
urchased through a post office, phone-kiosk operator or other licensed operator
Interestingly, the recent post-election violence in Kenya provided a remarkable case study for the cellphone as an instrument of both war and peace.
Carrying a full-featured cellphone lessens your needs for other things, including a watch, an alarm clock, a camera, video camera, home stereo, television, computer or, for that matter, a newspaper. With the advent of mobile banking, cellphones have begun to replace wallets as well.