Interviews With Innovators
by Jon Udell

There's growing awareness of the need to publish data online, and to support programmatic access to that data. In this conversation, host Jon Udell talks with Steven Willmott about how his company, 3Scale, helps businesses create and manage application programming interfaces to their data.

At PatientsLikeMe.com, people share data about their illnesses, the drugs they're taking, and the effects (and side effects) of their treatments. In this conversation, co-founder Jamie Heywood tells host Jon Udell that selling this data to drug companies is more than a good business. It aims to put patients into more direct contact with those companies, and help ensure that drug discovery and development meets their needs.

Stamen Design's data visualization projects bring a Tuftean sensibility to the realm of fast-moving realtime online information. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, founder Eric Rodenbeck talks about how his studio creates interactive experiences that enable people to ask, and answer, unforeseen questions.

For Linden Lab's founder and chairman Philip Rosedale, the open-ended social experiment that is Second Life doesn't end at the borders of the virtual world he envisioned and brought to life. The company itself is an evolving social and organizational experiment. In this conversation, Philip Rosedale tells host Jon Udell how mechanisms like the Love Machine and the Rewarder have succeeded -- or sometimes failed. And he discusses the ways in which Second Life supports the decentralized work style of Linden Lab.

In this conversation with Joan Peckham, host Jon Udell continues a discussion about computational thinking that began in an earlier episode with Jeannette Wing, who now heads the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Joan Peckham, who is on leave from teaching computer science at the University of Rhode Island, is working with the NSF to define and promote computational thinking as an intellectual style that everyone can usefully learn and apply.

When the economy turns sour, websites for job seekers and career changers become more popular then ever. At Path101.com, the tagline is community-powered career discovery. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, Path101's CEO Charlie O'Donnell and Scientist/Data Wizard Hilary Mason discuss how the site's users contribute data about themselves, learn about one another's career trajectories, and connect with recruiters.

When a crime occurs in cyberspace, how do you cordon off the scene and process the evidence? Erin Kenneally is a lawyer who helps law enforcement agencies think about forensics in a connected world. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, she discusses how existing practices do -- and don't -- translate to the online digital realm.

Seth Grimes is a business intelligence expert with a special interest in text analytics. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, he discusses how a new breed of tools is enabling companies to build "voice of the customer" applications that extract useful signals from the noisy chatter that's erupting everywhere online.

Andrew Rasiej is a social entrepreneur who believes that the abundant connectivity we're creating and experiencing can transform education, politics, and society as a whole. In this conversation with host Jon Udell he discusses several of the projects he has founded, including MOUSE, an educational non-profit that helps students computerize and network their schools, as well as the Personal Democracy Forum, a way to allow technologists and politicians to explore connected information and communication systems that can help us reboot America.

This week host Jon Udell interviews IT Conversations executive producer Phil Windley. His new company, Kynetx, provides structured, contextualized browsing experiences. In this interview Phil explains how Information Cards, jQuery, a universal browser extension, and a cloud-based ruleset work together to connect otherwise isolated web episodes.