Jeff Skoll made his fortune as the first full-time employee and president of eBay. Now, as a philanthropist, he uses his eponymous foundation to back people tackling problems like education inequality and disease. A few weeks ago I attended the Skoll Foundation’s tenth annual World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. The three-day event takes place at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, where in 2003 Skoll endowed a center devoted to social entrepreneurship. More
Tag Index / Showing 1 - 10 of 22 results for “big data”
Warrior: We’re Only 1 Percent Done Connecting the World
With more than 1.4 million Twitter followers, Cisco Systems' chief technology and strategy officer Padmasree Warrior might seem as connected as you can get. But she says the world is only 1 percent of the way toward total connectivity. More
Big Data Era Creates Demand for New Breed of Scientist
With mountains of Big Data piling up, it's no surprise that the need for Big Data scientists is also increasing, and that universities are responding to the need with new training programs. The University of Washington, which offers a Big Data Ph.D., is one of several programs featured in a story today by New York Times tech reporter Claire Cain Miller. More
Ted Leonsis: Top 13 Trends for 2013
The Great Wayne Gretzky once said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.” He was talking about hockey, but in reality it’s relevant in almost all facets of life. 2012 was an eventful year full of ups and downs. The domestic housing market took an upward turn, but international events and budget issues in D.C. pulled us back as we entered 2013. Looking at my crystal ball, there are a number of trends I see happening for the rest of the year. I predict the economy will show signs of improvement with investors eager to deploy capital, but this may be the Year of Fallen Angels—overfunded, overvalued, overhyped companies are going to struggle to raise the additional capital they need. More
The Industrial Internet Will Rewrite the Rules of Business
The world is on the threshold of the next frontier of innovation with the rise of the Industrial Internet. Brilliant machines are converging with the power of advanced analytics, low-cost sensing and new levels of Internet connectivity. The next decade will bring a software and services-driven movement that will be nothing short of breathtaking: analytics that learn from experience and constantly improve machine intelligence that blends digital output and human insight to deliver better outcomes. It will help eliminate waste across every major industry. More
Why Memorize Shakespeare’s Sonnets When You Can Encode Them on a Speck of DNA?
Technology has enabled us to collect and analyze unprecedented amounts of data. As Ray Kurzweil commented at the Techonomy 2012 conference, "The kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more intelligently searchable information than the President of the United States did 15 years ago." But how do we go about storing all of this data? Hard drives and the Cloud require an electricity supply, while other storage devices such as disks or magnetic tape deteriorate over time. The answer to this archiving conundrum may lie in our DNA. As reported on NPR, scientists at the European Bioinformatics Institute have successfully stored all of Shakespeare's sonnets on tiny particles of DNA. More
E-Commerce Media & Marketing Techonomy 2012
Shopping Outside the Box (Highlights)
Mobile, responsive, and proactive—how will data and new ways to spend money transform commerce and retail? PayPal’s James Barrese, Dan Schulman of American Express, Walmart’s Gibu Thomas, and Erick Schonfeld of DEMO gather at Techonomy 2012 in Tucson, Ariz., to discuss. More
The Forest for the Trees: The Meanings of Data (Highlights)
This session at Techonomy 2012 looks at how technology allows for rapid insights into huge swaths of data, and what this means for business and society. The speakers are Qliktech’s Lars Björk, Factual’s Gil Elbaz, Vivek Ranadivé of TIBCO Software Inc., and Rick Smolan of Against All Odds Productions. Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review moderates. More
Techonomy 2012: Rick Smolan on the Human Face of Big Data
Rick Smolan, a former Time, Life, and National Geographic photographer, is best known as the co-creator of the “Day in the Life” book series. Today Smolan is the CEO of Against All Odds Productions, which orchestrates global photography projects that combine creative storytelling with state-of-the-art technology. In this talk at Techonomy 2012, he shares some of the real-time visualizations of data collected by satellites and by billions of sensors, RFID tags, and GPS-enabled cameras and smartphones around the world, which he believes enable humanity to sense, measure, understand, and affect aspects of existence in ways our ancestors could never have imagined. More
