Columbia Venture Community demo night

Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Thu, 03/10/2011 - 10:51pm.
Ankit Ranka's picture

I attended CVC demo night on Wednesday and there were some really good tools being developed by the Columbia grads. The highlight for me was these three tools-

1. Readfa.st - Readfa.st is a web-based educational platform for teaching people to read faster. They integrate a simple and effective speed-reading curriculum into your daily reading, and keep you engaged through social and gaming elements

2. Grovo (www.grovo.com) - Grovo is an online educational and training platform that helps people use the best websites quickly and intelligently

3. WuzTasty (www.wuztasty.com) - WuzTasty is an iPhone application that helps people decide what to order at a restaurant by allowing users to view and share reviews for menu items as either "thumbs up" or "thumbs down"

I requested an invite code for Readfa.st, let me know if anyone wants to test it out.

Posted in Public | login or register to post comments »

 

Personalized adaptation to accommodate diverse human needs

Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Wed, 03/02/2011 - 1:00pm.
Ankit Ranka's picture

I am at a colloquium at Columbia University's Computer Science department. Leah Findlater from University of Washington is presenting.

Posted in Public | 1 comment »

 

TED announces TED-ED

Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Tue, 03/01/2011 - 11:53pm.
Ankit Ranka's picture

An archive of remarkable education videos.

Posted in Public | login or register to post comments »

 

NYC EdTech February meetup

Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Tue, 02/22/2011 - 12:18pm.
Ankit Ranka's picture

I will be attending this meetup today. Still 10 spots available. It should be fun!

Posted in Public | login or register to post comments »

 

Khan Academy rolls out new profiles

Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Sat, 02/12/2011 - 3:44pm.
Ankit Ranka's picture

Khan Academy recently rolled out new profiles for the learners. Here is an interesting blog post from the lead designer. Here is a software demo on youtube. It looks really good and will immensely help self paced learners.

Posted in Public | 1 comment »

 

Real Life Social Network

Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Fri, 12/24/2010 - 8:13pm.
Ankit Ranka's picture

I recently came across this presentation from a googler in a user experience team. It highlights important set of features, concerns and proposes different models of online social networks that replicate real world social networks. He suggests designing social networking features for multiple groups of people (family, friends, classmates, acquaintances), different relationships (weak ties, strong ties and temporary ties). I think addressing such questions while designing social networking features of EdFluences/TLN will really make the tool much more usable and will enhance user experience.

The Real Life Social Network v2Posted in Public | login or register to post comments | read more »

 

What They Know

Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Mon, 12/20/2010 - 3:20pm.
Ankit Ranka's picture

Did you know that the apps you use on your smart phones communicate your information to marketing companies? Here is an interesting visualization listing major apps sharing data like username, password, location, contacts, phone id without user consent.

Posted in Public | login or register to post comments »

 

You are better off with a kick-ass half than half-assed whole

Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Fri, 12/17/2010 - 2:31am.
Ankit Ranka's picture

I am currently reading book titled "Rework" from 37signals. One of the interesting points they make is how bunch of ideas turn into crappy products by trying to do them all at once. They note that it's difficult to do ten things well at the same time. Some examples they provided were of directors cutting good scenes and writers eliminating good pages to make great books. They emphasize that software should follow the same pattern. Many times we have great ideas about features that can take months to implement but while developing those awesome features, we lose all that time period where we would have released a basic version of the product that fulfills the vision and would have received valuable user feedback.

It's necessary to ingrain the idea of releasing early and often and receiving real user feedback. One argument against this is that what if we end up putting a crappy product out there. No one knows that before releasing a product. It might occur that users don't like the features that you think are awesome.

Posted in Public | login or register to post comments | read more »

 

socio-technical implications of software development

Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Thu, 12/02/2010 - 12:10pm.
Ankit Ranka's picture

I am at a lecture at the Computer Science department at Columbia Universiy by professor Giuseppe (Peppo) Valetto from Drexel University.

Posted in Public | 7 comments »

 

TCR Topics

Submitted by Ankit Ranka on Tue, 11/23/2010 - 1:36am.
Ankit Ranka's picture

Here is another post to add to the flavor to the recent posts on TCR.

Last week I attended NY tech meet on probabilistic topic model, given by David Blei. He and his team extracted topics from past 100 years of papers in science journals. Following is the image of topics (e.g. laser and relativity) traced over time -

From topic models

Here is how different topics were linked over time -

From topic models

Posted in Public | 1 comment | read more »

 
XML feed