Topic: Personal Technology
Dr. Moira Gunn talks with Stanford professor, Cliff Nauss about his journey into the female response to the personal technology boom in his new book, The Man who Lied to His Laptop.
In a recent WIRED article introducing Chrome Frame, it's mentioned that IE7, issued in 2006, is the only approved browser at Morgan Stanley. Ben Fried, CIO at Google, says it's time for the rearguard of IT to step up the pace. Cloud computing and personal technologies are pulling at enterprise IT from both ends. Security remains the most critical issue for IT. But the opportunities are better than ever if IT can adapt.
Dr. Moira Gunn learns more about changes in knowledge transfer following the internet explosion from Berkman Center for Internet & Society researcher, David Weinberger.
What's the key facial feature of your design? That one element that grabs people on an irrational level, reflects the big concept, and becomes the icon for your product or service. Gretchen Anderson points to BMW cars' split grill, Tivo's big, bright "pause" button, and the Flip camera's flip-out USB plug as examples of successful facial features. Yes, strive for usability, but the most usable designs can be boring. Your design needs personality, too!
Linking information technology management to popular public technology and physics, Cfengine's Mark Burgess describes the fluidity and diversity necessary to keep up with changes in information technology. Rather than the standardization and bureaucracy that globalization tends to bring, Burgess advocates cultural diversity and human input in IT management but with a universal focus on speed and predictability.
Vik Chaudhary, VP of Product Management & Corporate Development at Keynote Systems, Inc., talks about the increasing popularity of apps on a variety of smartphones and the corresponding importance of testing those apps for optimal efficiency. Presenting both the challenges and goals of testing mobile apps, as well as demonstrating remote testing of apps, Chaudhary emphasizes testing and data collection as key to mobile app creation.
Agilent's lead technologist offers predictions for 3GPP LTE cellular technology. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is not a done deal, he explains, because its performance advantage is not yet proven. It has to be economically viable. The future of wireless is bright, but it has to be based on low-cost, low complexity technology. In the end, Rumney says, watch out for WiFi, because it is delivering where cellular isn't.
Imagine the earliest days of society where oral communication served as the foundation of describing, preserving, and sharing human experience. Johanna Kollmann, User Experience Manager at Vodafone, studies how technology serves essentially the same function today as then, helping move the interaction of people from communication, to conversation, then to collaboration.
Foursquare is a social networking website that has learned how to "make every check-in count for the user." It uses the social graph to build relationships between users, locations, and the people they meet. Crowley and Scoble talk about Foursquare, its new API, what it is and isn't, where it's going, and how it's different from other location-aware services such as Color or Facebook Places or Events.
Web forms suck, but they can be delightful, if designers will adopt a new mindset and use the latest tools. Luke Wroblewski has studied rich interactions in Javascript to find the best improvements over plain old web forms. He suggests novel ways to use data collected where people already live, in email, IM, and web services, so no forms are needed. And he delights in new kinds of interaction possible on mobile devices, with their sensors, soft keyboards, and advanced displays. Today, web forms can be wonderful.
