Innovation at Google
Innovation for its own sake is useless. Period. And no one knows this better than the company who redefined the rules of information search. In this interesting 50 minute presentation, Google CIO Douglas Merrill tells us about innovation at Google. He highlights the importance of speed, the user experience, machine translation, defining innovation, relevance and more.
About Douglas Merrill:
Co-founders Larry Page, president of Products, and Sergey Brin, president of Technology, brought Google to life in September 1998. Since then, the company has grown to more than 10,000 employees worldwide, with a management team that represents some of the most experienced technology professionals in the industry. Dr. Eric Schmidt joined Google as chairman and chief executive officer in 2001.
Formerly a senior vice president at Charles Schwab; worked at Price Waterhouse and the RAND Corp.; ran a small consulting company in Southwest Asia; taught at Northwestern; has a doctorate in psychology at Princeton.
Tags: Business, Charles Schwab, Consulting Company, Design, Eric Schmidt, Google, Innovation, Innovation, Larry Page, Management, Merrill Co, Page President, Price Waterhouse, Rand Corp, Senior Vice President, Sergey Brin, Technology, Technology ProfessionalsRedefining the Dictionary
Is the beloved paper dictionary doomed to extinction? When does a made-up word become real? And could you use “synecdochical” in a sentence, please? In this infectiously exuberant talk, leading lexicographer Erin McKean looks at the many ways in which today’s print dictionary is poised for transformation in this internet era.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2808438767379416581
About Erin McKean:
Much to Erin McKean’s delight, her job as editor in chief of the Oxford American Dictionary involves living in a constant state of research. McKean searches high and low — from books to blogs, newspapers to cocktail parties, The New Scientist to Entertainment Weekly — for new words, new meanings for old words, or signs that once-favored terms have fallen out of use. (“Information Superhighway,” anyone?) And it’s clear that she relishes the hunt.
McKean is also the editor of the language quarterly Verbatim (“language and linguistics for the layperson since 1974″) as well as the author of multiple books, including That’s Amore and the entire Weird and Wonderful Words series. All that, and she maintains multiple blogs, too: Erin is the keen observationalist behind A Dress a Day and Dictionary Evangelist.
Tags: Business, Dictionary, Erin McKean, Evangelist, Information Superhighway, Keen, Language And Linguistics, lexicographer, Multiple Books, Newspapers, observationalist, Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford Dictionary, Paper Dictionary, Transformation, Weird And Wonderful WordsWay-New Collaboration
Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6264721433787275785
About Howard Rheingold:
As Howard Rheingold himself puts it, “I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net.” A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.
His 2002 book Smart Mobs, which presaged Web 2.0 in predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online. An early and active member of the Well (he wrote about it in The Virtual Community), he went on to cofound HotWired and Electric Minds, two groundbreaking web communities, in the mid-1990s. Now active in Second Life, he teaches, writes and consults on social networking. His latest passion: teaching and workshopping participatory media literacy, to make sure we all know how to read and make the new media that we’re all creating together.
Tags: Business, Collaboration, Collaboration, Collective Action, Community, Creative Thinkers, First Wave, Groundbreaking Web, Howard Rheingold, Mastodons, Media Literacy, Natural Human Instinct, Second Life, Smart Mobs, Social Networking, Technology, Typewriter, Virtual Community, Web Communities, Wikipedia
