Customized Exec Ed

Virginia Business Magazine profiles several specialized executive education programs at Virginia universities. Programs include the LandAmerica Leadership Academy at the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business, and the AES Corp. that has worked with the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business since 2004.

VA Tech to Transfer More Tech

According to the Roanoke Times, Virginia Tech is significantly expanding their tech transfer capacity, in anticipation of increasing the number of inventions that Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties (VTIP) licenses and doubling revenue in the next few years.

John Fraser, past president of the Association of University Technology Managers, is quoted as saying that "perhaps 12 of the more than 200 technology transfer offices in the U.S. are self-sufficient", a near-term goal for VTIP. Virginia Tech is a member of ALCOVe, the Academic Licensing Community of Virginia.

Sharing Educational Material

This is a good time to take a look at Rice University's Connexions project, also supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It is described as "a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute."

At present, Connexions has more than 4,000 modules available, in nearly 250 collections. One example is The Emergence of Modern Biotechnology in China, a module developed by Dr. Shaheen Lakhan, Director of the California-based Global Neuroscience Initiative Foundation.

CC Learning

Yesterday, Creative Commons launched a new education division, CC Learn.

Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

With legal barriers, we advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. We also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.
With technical barriers, we promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse.
With social barriers, we encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other’s contributions.

ccLearn will be in transition over the remainder of the summer, 2007, reaching full operation this Fall. ccLearn is generously supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Snippet from CC website.

Online Video Arrives

Judging by the new Pew/Internet report, online video is now mainstream. Red Herring blog writer Alexandra says that

A study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests that Internet video is on the way to becoming a dominant way that Americans consume media --- but it may not be the typical YouTube video that most people want to watch.

For entrepreneurs, STIRR, the Silicon valley entrepreneur network, reinvented its monthly mixer in July to showcase something called Founder Hacks, where several local entrepreneurs shared stories from their start-up expriences. Highlights from that event are available as a video from the San Jose Mercury News. The MIT Technology Review has a series of short videos available, including Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web and Bruce Sterling on Design. The most recent is by Jeff Han on A Better Interface. Finally, Crave, posted a report on the recent LA screening of new machinima, with links to some of the best.

Entrepreneurs Speak Out

The Churchill Club of Silicon Valley now makes some of their talks available as podcasts from iTunes or ZDNet. Guy Kawasaki's recent program on startups, No Plan, No Capital, No Model: No Problem, is available as an hour and a half video.

The iinovate blog [Patience - this blog opens slowly] continues to produce fascinating podcast interviews with successful entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, as well as the writers and bloggers who work with them. In May, they spoke with Chip Heath, Stanford professor and co-author of Made to Stick.

Closer to home, The Andy Forbes Files include interviews with entrepreneurs in the northern Virginia area.

Theory and Practice Online

According to Francesca Di Meglio of Business Week, researchers and academics are looking at virtual worlds to better understand real world economic questions. A recent SL conference was put on by the Cornell Business School professor Robert Bloomfield, whose real-world specialty is using lab experiments and mathematical models to study the effects of financial market regulation on investor welfare and how psychological forces affect financial market. Bloomfield points out that today's virtual economies are very much like the U.S. economy about 100 years ago, when there was no regulation whatsoever. Snippets from Business Week

Probably the best place to follow academic discussions about the business and legal issues of virtual worlds is Terra Nova. Their next State of Play conference is scheduled for August in Singapore. The original sponsor for this annual event was the New York Law School; current sponsors include the Berkman Center (Harvard), Yale Law School, Trinity University and Nanyang University. Speakers include John Seely Brown (University of Southern California), Cory Ondrejka (Linden Lab), Guntram Graef (co-founder of Anshe Chung Studios)and Judge Unggi Yoon of the Suwon District Court (Korea).

Marketing in SL

Now Wired has joined the ranks of those assessing failures of corporate marketing efforts in SL. Last March, Eric Kintz of HP gave ten reasons for his skepticism about marketing in SL.

Interview with Irving

eWeek has a two part interview with IBM's retiring visionary, Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

In Part I, on being asked how he came by his visionary capacity, Wladawsky-Berger said: "Find where the smart people are and hang out with them."

In Part II, he observes that:

The two [big things in computing] that I'm most excited about personally right now is this whole issue of bringing together technology and business more, and applying more systems and engineering principles to the world of business. And then the continuing evolution of the Internet into a platform that's much more collaborative, intelligent and visual.

Wladawsky-Berger also discusses on the long cultural war, an issue he has discussed at length on his blog. In his most recent post, entitled "Think, Play, Do: Technology, Innovation, and Organization", he seems to share the perspective of Richmond's Play, a consulting company specializing in using play to stimulate innovation.

Collaboration tools

Mashable, the social networking news site, just posted a list of 60 online collaboration tools. Toolmakers range from 37Signals to Google. There are 4 tool categories: Business Productivity, Creative Collaboration, Family and Social Collaboration, and Mindmapping. Comments include reviews, and identification of additional online tools.

Also on Mashable, today's launch of NewsGator's new iPhone application was reviewed, and a list of 50 Torrent tools for legal uses was posted.

Open Source Presentations

The O'Reilly Open Source 2007 Convention has a nice piece on Eric Pugh, of Open Source Connections in Charlottesville.
He will be speaking this week about using and writing Rails plugins. Pugh notes that Open Source Connections will also be hosting a Birds of a Feather session on Scrum War Stories Wednesday, July 25.

Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, will speak on Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties. Keynote speakers at the convention include Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Radar, Philip Rosedale of Linden Labs, Phillip Torrone of MAKE magazine, and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia.

UPDATE: Here's the first OSCON report from Wired. The list of blogs and bloggers covering OSCON this year is available at the O'Reilly Wiki.

Medical Patents and Innovation

According to Law.com, lawsuits over patented medical procedures and devices rise as medical patents surge.

The medical community is weary of the trend, noting that threats of patent infringement litigation could interfere with effective patient care. ... Aaron Kesselheim [a patent attorney and doctor from Boston] noted that a 1996 federal law prohibits method infringement lawsuits against doctors. But medical device makers can be sued for inducing infringement of a method by a doctor. And universities and companies are increasingly trying to impose restrictions on the use of their intellectual property. Snippet from Tresa Baldas of the National Law Journal

Mike Masnick of TechDirt writes Wish I Could Save Your Life, But That Kind Of Surgery Is Patented... Last year, IP Democracy had this to say about telemedicine and the broadband policy debate. Meanwhile, according to CNN, medical images are being sent on iPhones with OsiriX, which was "designed by radiologists for radiologists".

Google Maps: SF Rentals and World Tours

CraigStatsSF uses Google Maps to display San Francisco apartments advertised in Craigslist. This project was born out of boredom, according to the creator, grad student Ethan Garner.



Thanks to BoingBoing for the picture of the heat map showing a citywide view of rental costs for one bedroom apartments over the last year.

To tour the world as seen from above, try GoogleSightseeing for unusual satellite images. Here's the supersonic fighter aircraft, parked in a mall parking lot, and the rooftop test track of Fiat's famous Lingotto building.

Y-Combinator Funding

Paul Graham's Y-Combinator has just opened applications for funding in the San Francisco Bay area. The deadline is October 11 for companies seeking startup funding and mentoring. Reddit is one of the companies launched through this program.

Graham's March essay, "Why to Not Not Start a Startup", derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA, reviews some of the lessons learned from Y-Combinator's first years of operations. He comments that So about half the founders from that first summer, less than two years ago, are now rich, at least by their standards. His piece on The Equity Equation is an interesting perspective on whether to seek or accept startup funding.

Periodic Table of the Internet

The full Periodic Table of the Internet can be found at Miscellanea.


Thanks to Infosthetics for pointing to this and other data visualizations.

Startup Reviews

Sponsored by Sierra Ventures, Startup Review profiles interesting new tech companies. The Startup Review index includes 30 of the most important new companies. Their Reddit review from April is a good example.

Launched early this year, Killer Startups provides quite different startup reviews, daily coverage of unusual new companies like the free publishing site Lulu, and the search engine for obscure sites, TagTooga. Their nomination form requires registration, but makes it easy to propose a startup for review.
We [Killer Startups] deeply believe in the power of crowds, and we want to put it to good use by detecting in an early stage what’s going to be big.

Seeking Mobile Startups

Under the Radar is looking for 32 great mobile startups for presentations at their November conference.

With modest grants from Hewlett Packard and Verizon, Diane Wolff, an associate professor of information systems technology at Virginia Western Community College, will launch their associate degree in mobile programming this fall. Snippet from the Roanoke Times.

Virginia Western's Information Technology presentation on their new program is terrific.

2006 AUM

Interesting note on Infectious Greed about the growth of assets under management.

Up 16.9% year-over-year, the 300 largest firms collectively added roughly three-quarters of a million dollars in assets every working second last year.

The five largest firms alone are responsible for more than $7 trillion. Lots more detail at The Institutional Investor. The Mid-Atlantic Venture Association (MAVA) provides statistics on the Mid-Atlantic investment market.

Libraries in a Crowded Universe

Peter Brantley's post at O'Reilly Radar, If Libraries had Shareholders is a summary of Jerry McDonough's recent talk We Are Not Alone: The Role of the Research Library in a Suddenly Crowded Information Universe.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the University of Virginia Fisher Library have built a simple web interface to the main ARL statistics.

Guy asks What Were They Thinking?

Guy Kawasaki interviews Jeffrey Pfeffer about his new book, What Were They Thinking?. Snippets from Pfeffer's answer to why companies do stupid things, and on keys to global competitiveness:

First, they ignore feedback effects. There has recently been a lot of interest, and apparent surprise, that programmers in India now cost a lot and their wages have been rising rapidly. Did people forget supply and demand? ... Second, companies often ignore the interdependence or connections between actions in one part and those in another. So, even as some departments are trying to cut the costs of benefits, others are worried about recruiting and retaining enough qualified people... Third, many companies presume that incentives are the answer to everything, and have a very mechanistic model of human behavior.
The data on [global competitiveness] are clear — companies choose to locate their R & D facilities on the basis of the availability of talent. This is more important than tax abatements and certainly much more important than rates of pay. If location was determined by cost, Silicon Valley would be empty.

Pfeffer's advice on incentives: Be careful what you pay for — you might just get it.

Last year, Katherine Meyer's WSJ article of the same name detailed some astounding web inventions. "The Internet spawned so many weird gizmos and bad business ideas that mocking dot-com duds became something of a sport in the post-bubble era. But some ideas still stand out for pure silliness. These are products and services that attracted lots of publicity -- and, in some cases, millions of dollars in funding -- before folding."

Real Business in SL

PA Consulting and The Sunday Times are hosting an online seminar “Getting real about business in Second Life” on July 24 at 2pm UK time. According to the The Sunday Times, corporations like IBM, CISCO and Reuters all have a presence on Second Life but SL commercial life is dominated by virtual small business owners, some of whom are making real money. In June, 132 residents earned more than $5,000 a month in SL, up from 97 in January. A further 1,340 earned $500-$4,999 a month, up from 837 in January.

However, The LA Times opines that "a three-dimensional online society where publicity is cheap and the demographic is edgy and certainly computer-savvy — should be a marketer's paradise. Four years after Second Life debuted, some marketers are second-guessing the money and time they've put into it."
According to The Escapist, A main difficulty for advertisers is the fantasyland nature of Second Life, with no need for food, clothing or other mundane staples of real life.

Maybe the question isn't whether brands are bored with SL, but whether Second Lifers are bored with brands... from Tech Digest.

MIT TR on SL

Second Earth, the long MIT Technology Review story (registration required) opens with the weather map created by Jeffrey Corbin of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Denver. "The map I am standing on belongs to NOAA, and it covers a 12-by-20-meter square of lawn on a large virtual island in Second Life." In the end, author Wade Roush says

In the course of my research for this story, I bought land in Second Life, built a house, filled it with furniture, bought and razed the adjoining land, lifted my house a hundred meters into the sky to get it out of the way, and began work on a bigger house. I was also befriended by dozens of Second Life residents, several of whom I now know better than my real neighbors. Most were delighted to hear about my story, to tell me how they're spending their second lives, and to show me their own creations, including a hot-dog-shaped airplane and an animated Tibetan prayer wheel.

Yesterday's TR interview with Peter Norvig, Google's Director of Research, on the Future of Search, also points to how people interact with Google and interact with each other on the Web.

Even if you are not especially interested in Second Life, the article is a great example of using the full capacity of the web to convey information. While the print version of the article is certainly available online for registered users, the web version is rich with related videos, SLURLs, SL images, comments and links to dozens of institutions, projects and individuals.

The SIIA Top 10 in Ten

SIIA unveiled their Top Ten Most Significant eCommerce Developments of the Last 10 Years, marking the 10th anniversary of the White House eCommerce Framework in July. These developments in eCommerce were ranked by policy and industry experts from a wider list of developments chosen by SIIA staff.

1. Google (Sept. 1998): Google did more to fundamentally change the way we use the Internet than any other event in the last 10 years.
2. Broadband Penetration of US Internet Users Reaches 50% (June 2004): This milestone signaled a dramatic change in how commerce gets done online, how consumers use and share content, and how the world communicates.
3. eBay Auctions (Launched Sept. 1997): eBay showed us that the Internet could be used to reach massive ... markets better and faster than ever before. Individuals could also compete directly with each other in ways unimaginable in a physical market.
4. Amazon.com (IPO May 1997): Amazon showed the world what an online store would look like... Amazon’s public offering told the world that online commerce is legitimate and ... signaled the increasingly important role that e- commerce would play in the American economy.
5. Google Ad Words (2000) Key word advertising has become the biggest online advertising vehicle, representing 40 percent of that market and $6.8 billion in revenue.
6. Open Standards (HTML 4.0 released - 1997): The standards for the web embodied in HTML are overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium, which is not controlled by any company or government. The formats are open, well documented and designed to work with different software and hardware. It has probably been the most influential and important data standard in the history of publishing.
7. Wi-Fi (802.11 launched - 1997): The development of Wi-Fi removed the limitations of desktops and cables and shifted focus toward mobile solutions.
8. User-Generated Content (YouTube 2005): Right now it is impossible to say what the full ramifications of the “citizen journalist” era will be – but ... YouTube is now the embodiment of Web 2.0. It is a must-be-seen place for presidential candidates, a battleground in the copyright wars, a vital distribution point for major media – and most of all, a place where anyone...can deliver a message to the world.
9. iTunes (2001): Today, more than US$2 billion worth of music was sold online or through mobile phones in 2006 (trade revenues), almost doubling the market in the last year...and accounting for around 10% of the music market
10. BlackBerry (1999): The BlackBerry makes communication instantaneous, and mobile. A comprehensive communications device creates a new mobile business culture.

VA is for Business

For the second year in a row, Forbes.com has ranked Virginia the best state in the country "for business." Forbes also rated the state tops in regulatory environment, No. 5 in labor pool, No. 6 in quality of life and No. 8 in growth prospects. Its worst rating: No. 17 in business costs. Snippet from the Pilot Online.

Meetings in SL

Technology Review has a new article on the design of meeting spaces in Second Life. Drew Harry, of the MIT Media Lab designs spaces to take advantage of the unique features of virtual worlds. Nick Yee's research on virtual worlds includes work on how self-representations, such as avatars, change behavior. In recent studies, he explored the hypothesis that an individual’s behavior conforms to their self-representation independent of how others perceive them - a process he terms the Proteus Effect. The paper, The Proteus Effect(pdf file) paper is in publication.

Business Communicators of Second Life has a detailed description of the Crowne Plaza launch of their SL meeting spaces. Art Fossett of ArtsPlace SL generously described his own mistakes in designing meeting facilitation tools.
Since most meetings are followed by records or minutes, the Space CoLab blog is a good place to follow the meeting summaries of a well-organized SL group, the community of space scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs.

Pollock's Term - 14 Years

Nate Anderson of Ars Technica summarizes a recent paper on copyright length as follows:

It's easy enough to find out how long copyrights last, but much harder to decide how long they should last—but that didn't stop Cambridge University's Rufus Pollock from using economics formulas to answer the question. In a newly-released paper, Pollock pegs the "optimal level for copyright" at only 14 years.

Rufus Pollock, a Cambridge doctoral candidate, has applied economics
tools (factoring in decline of production and reproduction costs) to
calculate optimal copyright term.
The Value of the Public Domain is available at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Pollock's work was presented at the 2007 Society for Economic Research on Copyright Issues (SERCI) Congress this week.

Technorati Changes

Changes at Technorati are outlined at their weblog.

Tantek Celik and Adam Hertz are moving out, and onto the Technorati Adisory Board and becoming a Technorati Fellow, respectively. Liz Dunn, who said "So my blog is being linked to from Valleywag, and TechCrunch, and Wired..." is going over to Laugh or Die. Dorion Carroll will be moving into a VP role, and Technorati is hiring.

Apart from noting changes at Technorati, which we use daily, these moves are great examples of individual professionals and their company maintaining communication on the web. They all made it easy to follow what is going on in Technorati, and to discover new initiatives (the Technorati Fellows program) and interesting new companies (Laugh or Die). Congratulations and best wishes to all concerned.

Kawasaki on USTREAM.TV

Guy Kawasaki's interview on USTREAM.TV will be live at 11:00 AM Eastern Time today. The Kawasaki interview opens the "Black Book" series, in which the folks interviewed recommend the next subject. The goal is to create a chain of live interview events featuring the Valley's biggest personalities. Their older shows, dating back to March, are available here. Their blog covers the launch of this new endeavor designed for users to create their own live coverage of events, including weddings.

USTREAM.TV also provided live coverage (now archived) of the July Startup Weekend in Colorado.

iinovate has another approach to interviews with Silicon Valley personalities, podcasts on a simple Blogger blog.

Mackey and the Wild Oats

According to both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, has been posting as Rahodeb on the Yahoo financial bulletin board about his rival, Wild Oats Market, for seven years. Mr. Mackey’s alias surfaced in a footnote in a 40-page court document filed on June 6 by lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission. Rahodeb cheered Whole Foods' financial results, trumpeted his gains on the stock and bashed Wild Oats. Snippets from the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Whole Foods announced in February that it planned to acquire Wild Oats for $565 million. In early June the FTC said that it would file a complaint today to block the proposed merger between Whole Foods and Wild Oats, arguing that the merger would lead to higher prices for natural and organic products in markets where the two chains compete. Snippet from the Wall Street Journal.

Mackey has his say on his blog.

Young Entrepreneurs - Matt Inglot

Matt Inglot is an entrepreneur (Tilted Pixel), recent graduate in both business and computer science from Wilfrid Laurier University, and blogger. He recently posted a nice review of free mind-mapping software. Matt has this to say on finding ones own path through entrepreneurship:

I was exposed there [entrepreneurship] to a strange freedom that was offered nowhere else. I read some extremely positive literature from people that seemed . . . happy.

Here's what he had to say last year about the main reasons to be an entrepreneur. His final reason: Success is in your hands - a whole new kind of job security.

Modeling Light

There is new work in bringing ancient architectural features to life through sophisticated modeling of light. "We use it for product design and medical visualization and lots of other things - it's just that archaeology is a particularly challenging application, which is why we've focused on it." said Alan Chalmers, professor of visualization at the Warwick University Digital Laboratory. Snippet from the BBC.

For different perspectives on modeling light, NOAA has experimental images of light pollution in the continental U.S. based on the 1990 Census population concentrations.
And among Wolfram's 1,500 demonstration projects is one for modeling light curves. According to Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, the Wolfram Demonstrations Project introduces a new paradigm for exploring ideas. The power to easily create interactive visualizations, once in the domain of computing experts alone, is now in the hands of every Mathematica user.

The Lifespan of Corporate Names

The WSJ Startup Journal has a new piece by Joann S. Lubin on company names no longer owned by the persons of that name.

Executive-pay adviser Pearl Meyer spent 11 years building her name into a well-known brand before selling Pearl Meyer & Partners in 2000. Ms. Meyer planned to stay at the firm, and [agreed] that she wouldn't use Pearl, Meyer or her initials at another business. "The prospect of my leaving never occurred to me," she explains.
Founders and their descendants employ a variety of naming tactics when they go into business against their own name. British ad pioneers Maurice Saatchi and his brother, Charles, had to win a court battle to use their name at a new agency after being forced out of Saatchi & Saatchi, once the world's biggest agency.
The conundrum is surprisingly common at service firms, from finance to advertising and consulting. Founders often name companies after themselves...Often, though, the entrepreneurial bug strikes again. Snippets from WSJ "Names Liveth Forever..."

Execs and Web 2.0

McKinsey reports that

Top corporate executives are ramping up their investments in web 2.0... A survey of 2,847 executives around the world found that if they had the chance to do it over again, 42 percent of respondents said they would have invested more in web 2.0 services over the past five years and 24 percent would have invested sooner.

The survey also found that 46 percent of “early adopter” companies and 44 percent of “fast follower” companies reported that their web spending paid off faster and/or beyond expectations. Snippet from Red Herring's Execs Heart Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 and Static/Live Web

From Bruce Sterling at Wired's Beyond the Beyond points to a new Global Neighborhoods interview with Doc Searles, who says

Anyway, I'm a voice in the Web 2.0/social media wilderness about the Live/Static Web distinction, but I'll keep yelling.... What you find on Blogsearch and Technorati is literally "too new for Google." Meaning: too current, too *live*.

In the original website version of Cluetrain, Chris Locke wrote, "we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.

Virginia is for Broadband

The Richmond TimesDispatch recently published two terrific stories on Virginia's Broadband initiatives by Jeffrey Kelley (July 9 and June 14). Om Malik picked this up in his new piece on Virginia's effort to ensure broadband access for all business by 2010.

AjaxLife with SL

Wagner James Au of New World Notes, posted a new "Second Life screen shot that changes everything. It's a new, open source[-based] version of the SL viewer...Firefox and Safari running a version of SL through Ajax."

The creator of AjaxLife - Katharine Berry.

5 Outsourcing Trends

From c|net news comes a report on 5 outsourcing trends to watch, compiled by Natasha Lomas for Silicon.com:

Consolidation; Globalisation; Person-to-person Offshoring; Greensourcing; and Virtual Worlds.

Also according to Silicon.com, Sweden-based Entropia Universe has been chosen to create a cash-based virtual economy for China in collaboration with Chinese online entertainment company Cyber Recreation Development (CRD). CRD predicts it will generate more than $1bn annually, and estimates the creation of 10,000 jobs in China, with staff working from home inside the Entropia Universe.

USAVETBIZ Launches

USAVETBIZ was launched recently by the United States Association of Veterans in Business, which was founded in Virginia in 2006. The members of the Board of Directors are all military veterans with decades of national and international experience in the business, government, academia, media relations, public policy and community advocacy.

USAVETBIZ membership is open to any business entity owned and operated by a military veteran, a member of the Armed Forces, National Guard or Military Reserves of the United States of America. FAQs are available at board member William Osgood's BuzGate.

According to organization founder, Richard Ramirez, the non-profit trade association was formed to raise greater public awareness and patronage of veterans in business and to lobby on national and state levels on behalf of veterans in business. Snippet from INC.COM.

Live Earth Online

Today's LiveEarth event will be available online real time. The event brings together more than 150 of the world’s top musicians for 24-hours of music from 7 concerts across all 7 continents.

"Users can create their own program from all the show assets from around the world," said Kevin Wall, Live Earth founder and CEO of Control Room which is producing the shows. Snippet from c|net news.

College Rankings Questioned

The Annapolis Group, a consortium of more than 120 private liberal arts schools, is questioning the validity of annual "best colleges" rankings compiled by U.S. News & World Report.
The Annapolis Group includes six Virginia schools that are featured in the magazine's 2007 rankings of the nation's top liberal arts colleges: Washington and Lee University, Sweet Briar College, Randolph College, Hampden-Sydney College, Hollins University and Randolph-Macon College. All six schools said yesterday they will continue to provide academic information that is considered in rankings, but either have stopped or are likely to stop participating in U.S. News' reputational survey. Snippet from the Richmond TimesDispatch

Greater Washington Entrepreneurs of the Year

Ernst and Young recently announced the winners of the Greater Washington Area regional Entrepreneur of the Year awards.

Matthew Ernst, CEO, Amentra, Inc. of Richmond won in the Technology section. Other regional winners from Virginian include Matthew O’Connell (Communications), President & CEO, GeoEye of Dulles, Philip Nolan (Government Services), Chairman, President & CEO, Stanley, Inc. of Arlington, Stanislas Vilgrain (Hospitality), CEO, Cuisine Solutions of Alexandria, David Vos (Services), Founder & CEO, Athena Technologies, Inc. of Warrenton, and Peter Harrison (Emerging), CEO, GlobalLogic, Inc. of Vienna.

VA Business CFO of 2007

Virginia Business Magazine recently announced the five category winners of the 2007 CFO of the year. Three central Virginia companies were among the winners, including the Large Private Company category winner, Ted Hanson of Apex Systems, Inc. of Glen Allen. Among the Small Nonprofits, Roy Peters of the Central Virginia Food Bank, is the winner. Douglas E. Blum, of the Capital Region Airport Commission won in the Large Nonprofit category.

In the Small Private Company category, the winner is an architect, Nicholas Vlattas of Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas & Co, an architectural firm based in Norfolk. In the Public Company category, the winner was Victor Sellier of Argon ST of Fairfax.

Irving and the Monsters of the Id

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has a fascinating piece on Dealing with the (Virtual) World in our Minds, introducing his reflections on the recent IBM - MIT Media Lab Conference on Virtual Worlds with the Monsters of the Id and the movie, Forbidden Planet.

He concludes

Some may find it ironic that an all day conference on virtual worlds is taking place with flesh and blood people at the Media Lab auditorium in Cambridge. But in the end, it is all about balance and harmony. We all live in two worlds - the physical world and the world in our minds. Perhaps what we are now seeing is the emergence of a hybrid world that attempts to close the gap and make it easier for us humans to deal with these two very different worlds, helping us better integrate them into our lives and into our work. Needless to say, each has its pros and cons. Creating such appealing, powerful and simple hybrid worlds may very well be one of the most important aspects of the Knowledge Age on which we are embarking.

iPhone Magic from Marco Tempest

Marco Tempest created the iPhone magic video as the first one went on sale.

Early Tech Magic by Thacker

Charles Cooper of c|net news recently interviewed Chuck Thacker, who recently won the IEEE John von Neumann medal for his role in the creation of the modern computer industry, especially as the co-inventor of the Ethernet local area network, along with Bob Metcalf. More recently, Thacker had a major hand in the design of Microsoft's Tablet PC.

Princeton University in SL

Princeton University opens this fall in SL, according to Electric Sheep. The island build is being overseen by Persis Trilling, who heads up the Princeton in-house IT education support services, and is something of an expert on the History of Architecture. Although the island is not yet open, it apparently will be an architectural display of the real life campus, with some uniquely SL buildings, for classroom sessions and writing seminars for the Schools of Architecture and Visual Arts.

University of New Orleans in SL

Erin Jennings reports on EduGeek that

The University of New Orleans recently joined the ranks of higher education institutions that have established virtual campuses in Second Life. Unlike most participating universities, which primarily use their Second Life islands to recruit new students, promote their school, and experiment with virtual worlds, UNO's purpose is more essential: to maintain classes in the event of another Hurricane Katrina-like disaster. If students, faculty, and administrators are forced to evacuate during a storm, they can reconnect with each other through Second Life.

Apple Design and the iPhone

With the attention on the iPhone, it's a good time to look back at the evolution of the Apple form factors since 1976, shared by designer Edwin Tofslie. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for this pointer. The 2007 Apple Design Award winners included Papers 1.0 for organizing scientists' research libraries and access to PubMed.

Entrepreneurs already have iPhone related products available online. 37 Signals has the Ta-da List for the iPhone up, with a dedicated version for iPhone use. These pieces are nicely paired with Jason's comments on Ben Frankin's The Way to Wealth. The web-based phone service, Jajah has tailored their site to the iPhone, claiming a 90% reduction in international phone rates for iPhone users. The iPhone2die4 site aggregates iPhone news from more than 300 web sources. Here is the iPhone news blog, for the recent history and new accessories. Finally, two videos of happy new iPhone owners in Virginia from Uncut Video.

The Social Side of Design

Joshua Porter of Bokardo has an interesting piece, You Can't Be Social By Yourself on designing the user experience and social design. He points to Connecting Through Technology, not With It, Crysta Metcalf's recent piece on social design. Gong Szeto commented that perhaps technology enabled communication is neither synchronous nor asynchronous, but in-between, more like bas-relief.

Earlier, Porter initiated a lively discussion about design and art. Here's the original article, 5 Principles to Design By, an update focused on the relationship between art and design, and his summary of the most interesting quotes.