Just wanted to pass along this invitation to the Wall Street Journal Tech Café. I've never been, but it seems like a good place for tech hobnobbing. Details below:

The Wall Street Journal Tech Café is a hub for the entrepreneur and tech communities to share ideas and debate how technology and business coexist.
Refuel. Coffee, tea and pastries on us!
Recharge. Charging stations will keep your devices running.
Reconnect. Learn from renowned business leaders, technology experts, the startup community, investors and WSJ editors about what your existing or future business needs to succeed.

12PM - 1PM: Digital Privacy in a Social Media Age
Are we sharing too much information at the expense of our privacy? In this social-media age, when we can easily share our thoughts, photos and whereabouts with one tap or click, the line is blurring between privacy and profits. Executive from social-networking site Facebook joins privacy researchers from Microsoft and the Center of Democracy & Technology to debate the consequences of sharing personal data.

Coursera MOOC Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application was suspended yesterday due to technical and organizational challenges (e.g. using Google Docs for a class with 40k students). I won't belabor the point, but you can read the details here. There's also a good discussion of the issue on the blog of someone enrolled in the course.

A friend of mine sent me this New York Times piece which does a beautiful job of integrating multimedia. The movies and slides feel like part of the experience rather than additional content. Check it out on an HTML 5 supported browser.

I came across an interesting revision of the MVC framework, breaking the Contoller into Operations and Events (MOVE). It seems logical enough, but I wonder what you developers think. Is the Controller becoming too unwieldy for good object-oriented design?

Greetings from smokey Denver!

Zhou and I have been preparing for our talk tomorrow as well as gathering a list of the talks that we are interested in attending. I've copied some of them below. Feel free to look through the presentation list and suggest any others you might like us to report about.

Using Data Visualization Tools to Support Online Discussion Facilitation
ID: 36212
Type: Best Practices Session Topic: Improving Classroom Teaching
Room: 3
Tue, Jun. 26 2:45 PM-3:05 PM

Authors:
Bridget Arend, University of Denver, United States
Abstract:
Online asynchronous discussions can serve as an effective medium for reflection and critical thinking in online, hybrid and on-campus courses. However, text-heavy discussions can become cumbersome and facilitating online discussions can be a time consuming and arduous task for even the most conscientious instructor. Data visualization tools are available to support the instructor’s facilitative role and allow quick and easy snapshots of student participation as well as discussion themes and paths. This paper will describe lessons learned from the use of open source data visualization tools over eight iterations of a professional development course for online faculty.

As I was reading Group Genius, I was reminded of a short op-ed that I think might be a nice supplement to our discussion. It revolves around the physical and cultural environment that fostered the breakthroughs that came out of Bell Labs, the most innovative place on the planet this side of the Manhattan Project (and perhaps even the other side if you consider the breadth of Bell Labs' work). With inventions ranging from the transistor and the laser to Unix and C, the ideas and devices that came out of there have completely transformed the way we work, play, and fight.

There are a number of values shared by both the EdLab and Bell Labs - bringing together different disciplines as the best way to solve complex problems and the importance of physical proximity to name a few. I think there's a lot we can learn from them (though from what I've read, they often had problems with humility, so they don't quite have the EdLab/Fred philosophy).

New York City has now trumped Boston as the number 2 birthplace for tech companies in the US. It's unclear exactly how much was organic growth due to synergies with the financial, fashion, and media industries which are based in NYC and how much can be attributed to Bloomberg's push. While there are some great programs that came out of the Economic Development Corporation during Bloomberg's reign, I'm inclined to give more weight to the former. Foursquare, for example, was able to race in front of Gowalla largely because it was based in New York instead of Austin, allowing them to form some key partnerships with big media players like Bravo. The report is really interesting; you can read it here.

Either way, the results make the case for LaunchPad even stronger.

I'm happy to announce that a paper Zhou and I submitted to the 2012 EdMedia conference, "Understanding Usage Patterns of Video-driven Discussion Using Singular Value and Semi-discrete Decomposition", was accepted. A big thanks to Danny, Duncan, Oumar, George and Fred for their hard work on the transcriptions, Demetri, Janet, and Lu for being our relevancy measure-ers, and Pranav, Megha, Hui Soo, and Gary for their help and advice on the paper.

On the heels of Cisco predicting there would be more mobile devices than humans in 2012, Nielsen released interesting data on smartphone penetration today. Smartphone penetration is >50% for almost every income level for 18-34 year olds, reaching as high as 80% for rich 25-34 year olds.

80% of people aged 18-24 and 25-34 who bought a phone in the last 3 months chose a smartphone, something we need to keep in mind for everything we develop. What would be neat to see is how many people use smartphones as their primary internet-connected device.