Topic: Software Development
In the first episode hosted by the IT Conversations, Joel and Jeff discuss Joel's keynote address at the recent Rails conference, the attitudes of some of those who don't use Macs, and Clay Shirky's recent book, "Here Comes Everybody".
As the Geospatial Web evolves from two dimensions to 3-D we are seeing a host of rich new applications and uses appear. Six leaders in the field talk about the Geospatial web and 3-D applications, and how their individual organizations fit into the 3-D puzzle. Ranging from Tele-Atlas' creation of mapping data for GPS units through Microsoft's Virtual Earth on to Second-Life-like applications, this panel reports on developments at companies harnessing the explosive growth in available 3-D information.
Software concurrency is hard to get right, and the main tools programmers have to deal with it are over 30 years old. Simon Peyton-Jones of Microsoft Research discusses a new technique called Transactional Memory that is simple to program and removes many of the possibilities for error inherent in traditional concurrent programming. Look for Transactional Memory to be more important as multi-core programming becomes standard.
In his recent presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Adam Jacob talked about why a start-up needs an automated infrastructure. He covered the components necessary for any automated infrastructure to be successful and also presented use-cases. Along with Jesse Robbins, Adam joins Phil and Scott to talk about the automated infrastructure process.
In contrast to the simplicity and ubiquity of the Web, developing telephony applications is complicated. RJ Auburn of Voxeo tells how their network interconnection stack will make it easier for developers to create new and creative telecommunications applications and gives a demo of how simple it is.
Raymond Yee is a lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Information and the author of "Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services." On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Yee about teaching students how to work with existing data sources, and on ways to expand the supply of available sources.
Despite amazing strides, computers are still relatively poor at performing high level activities that come naturally to the human brain. Co-founder of Palm, Inc., Jeff Hawkins, describes recent breakthroughs in the modeling of brain functions based on the theory of Hierarchical Temporal Memory. New insights into how the neocortex supports cognition, inference and prediction can be applied to a variety of problems using Hawkins' Numenta computing platform.
There has been a lot of talk about the difficulties of parallel programming, but Intel has decided to do something about it. Intel representatives announce the open sourcing of Threading Building Blocks, a product used to simplify parallel development. TBB has been around for several years as a proprietary tool, and Intel hopes that by opening it up, it will reach a broader audience and be adapted to more situations.
Developers are increasingly using Amazon, not only as a source of technical books, but also as a web services platform to build robust and scalable infrastructure. Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, reveals how to make the most of the popular S3 service and uncovers some of the features underpinning the new EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) service. As a bonus for Conversations Network listeners, there's even a cameo appearance from our own Doug Kaye, who explains how Gigavox Media is exploiting the web services functionality Vogel describes.
Phil Libin was the CEO of CoreStreet when he appeared as the first guest on Interviews with Innovators. Now he's back as CEO of EverNote, a company that aims to build the memex, or personal outboard memory, that Vannevar Bush famously imagined in his 1945 article "As We May Think."
