1-14-2014
David Pogue has become a household name in tech criticism from his “State of the Art” column in New York Timesalong with multi-media contributions to PBS and CBS among others. Last week, Pogue launched Yahoo Tech at CES in Las Vegas to much fanfare. The new digital magazine is quite sophisticated in its fit and finish, and it remains as such no matter the device with which it is accessed. Its innovative article tiles allow readers to read articles while all other articles remain on the same page. As Pogue explains below, this should make the site stickier and more psychologically satisfying.
When I last spoke with Pogue in mid-2013, he was firmly planted at the New York Times and referred to his post as “the greatest job in the world.” I wondered what had changed in the ensuing six months and what else he had planned for Yahoo Tech.
Peter High: David, congratulations on your new role as VP of Editorial at Yahoo Tech. When we last spoke in July of 2013, you described your role at theNew York Times you seemed very happy. What lured you away from your dream job to Yahoo?
David Pogue: Honestly, I never expected to leave the Times. I truly thought it was the greatest job. I thought for sure that I would be there until I died or until they asked me to leave. Yahoo approached me last summer, and indicated that they were going to make some sweeping changes to the company, and they wanted me to join them.
When I asked them what they saw my involvement entailing, they responded by saying, “we want this to be your playground.” I asked if it would involve a new website; they said, “yes.” I asked if it would involve apps; they said, “yes.” Conferences? Check. Staff? Check. When I listed my dream team of collaborators, the Yahoo executives indicated that they would hire them. Everything that I asked was provided. It really did feel like a playground was being built for me. It seemed like there were limitless possibilities. In fact, the site that we just launched is exactly what I had in mind. It is exactly the writers that I dreamed of and it has the tone, the slant, and the humor that most readers identify with me.
This is not the story of my leaving “old media.” It is the story of my jumping at a new, remarkable opportunity. It meant a much bigger audience. Yahoo attracts 800 million people per month. The company wants to develop a variety of digital magazines, and Tech is one of the first two along with Food.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
01-13-2014
I recently interviewed Google’s CIO Ben Fried at the company’s mega-office in New York. Covering an entire New York City block, employees zip around on Razor scooters that are parked at intermittent intervals like Citi Bikes around Manhattan. The creative energy is palpable from the interesting chalk drawings, the elaborate LEGO models, and creative meeting and huddle spaces around the building. For instance, my video interview below was conducted in a movie inspired conference room, with old film reels, theater curtains, and the like. At times, some of what Fried and I discussed seemed to be out of a futuristic science fiction movie.[Please click here to watch the video interview]
Fried says that Google’s technology is a reflection of the company culture. The company is innovative to the core, and is constantly pushing the envelope on what technology can do. Prominent examples abound, such as those emerging from Google X like Google Glass and the driverless car. This pushes Fried to operate from the point of flexibility.
It turns out that flexibility is a cultural hallmark at Google. Fried explains that if you let people use the technology that they are most comfortable with, they will be at peak productivity and creativity. Many of his CIO peers at other companies focus on setting technology standards in order to reduce the complexity of what they must manage and reduce costs at the same time. Fried understands this rationale, but wonders whether this is not an example of a focus on bottom line savings at the expense of potential top-line gains.
Another area where Fried and Google cut against the grain of common thinking for CIOs is infrastructure derived innovation. Many CIOs try to find ways to distance themselves from infrastructure, outsourcing it in many cases. Google is a notable exception since so much of what makes them powerful is creative use of infrastructure. The fact that they have developed a Google Cloud offering highlights just how strategic this is.
Fried is in the enviable position of being surrounded by many engineers and technology leaders who have invented the technologies that his team uses and manipulates. The ability to innovate with that sort of horsepower is boundless.
To watch the interview video, please click here.
To explore the recent Beyond CIO Series articles, please click here.
To explore the recent CIO-plus Series articles, please click here.
A British MOOC Start Up With A 44 Year Old Parent
Much time and attention has been given to the MOOCs started in the US, but as I have mentioned in my interview with Mike Feerick of ALISON, the phenomenon actually first emerged in Europe. Another more recent entry to the MOOC field out of the United Kingdom is FutureLearn. Unlike other prominent MOOCs like Udacity, Coursera, and edX that feature university content, FutureLearn is not led by a former academic. Simon Nelson is a businessman, but he was a logical choice to head FutureLearn given his experience working in a variety of media fields that have been threatened and transformed by technology. As a result, Nelson has been programmed to see opportunity in the chaos.
FutureLearn also has the advantage of a 44 year old pre-cursor to the MOOCs: Open University. The university has many things in common with the MOOCs — it has an open entry policy, and the majority of courses are taken off-campus anywhere in the world. As such, Nelson has been able to work with Open University Vice Chancellor Martin Bean to learn from the decades of experiences and experiments forged, and many of them have translated well to the new format. Therefore, while FutureLearn is a new entrant to this marketplace, it stands to become a formidable one.
Peter High: FutureLearn recently offered its first course online. What course was chosen to be the first offering, and how it was chosen?
Simon Nelson:The first course was “The Secret Power of Brands.” It was a ten-week course delivered by University of East Anglia. We chose it because it is both powerful but also accessible. We used our early MOOCs to test a range of course durations – ten, eight, six, and two weeks – to gain insight into what worked best for learners.
A second run of the course has been scheduled for February this year, along with a number of other courses that originally featured in 2013. The second run of “The Secret Power of Brands” has been re-versioned to run over six weeks.
To explore other Education Technology Innovation Series articles, please click here.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Simon, click here.
1-07-2014
Much has been written about the “Internet of Things”, and the promise of smart devices making our lives better and more efficient. One of the places most logical for this reality to transform our daily lives is in the home. There are a number of entrepreneurs who have devoted considerable time and attention to the possibility, like Nest CEO Tony Fadell who has been dubbed “a father of the iPod” dating back to his days at Apple, and who is now focused on home automation, designing and manufacturing sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-enabled, self-learning, programmable thermostats and smoke detectors.
Another entrepreneur devoted to smart home technology is Ion Cuervas-Mons, CEO of Think Big Factory, a Madrid-based product and strategic design consultancy that creates opportunities at the intersection between digital and physical realities. Think Big Factory is part of a group of companies called Barrabes Smart Cluster. I recently caught up with Cuervas-Mons in Hong Kong, and I had a chance to get his perspectives on the smart house technology, to glean examples from his company and others who are thought leaders in this space, and to understand the differences in forms that smart technology might take in places like China and India versus the West.
Peter High: What are the barriers to this new reality? What will determine the pace of development of smart houses?
Ion Cuervas-Mons: The development of a dedicated network will be one of the keys: it will mean that there is a standard network. I don’t think that individual networks like ZigBee (smartthings) will work in the future; it is more complicated to make it compatible with every device. And 3G or Wi-Fi networks for example are too expensive in terms of the hardware and waste too much battery.
How long do you think will it be until some meaningful percentage of us live our lives this way?
The Most Influential Person In Education Technology
01-06-2014
I have had the a good fortune of speaking with good number of the leaders in education technology today. Since so many of these players have emerged from academe, the competition between companies is fierce certainly, but there is also a collegial willingness to acknowledge the successes of other companies. In the case of non-profits like edX, CEO Anant Agarawal says, the more companies that enter this space, the merrier. (Stay tuned for my interview with Agarwal on January 20th.) Several of these leaders acknowledge that the most influential person to the MOOC landscape has been Salman Khan. As Agarwal lists the genesis of the MOOCs, he lists Khan and his Khan Academy first among the major players. Sebastian Thrun acknowledged in my interview with him that “I stumbled into this after listening to a gentleman named Sal Khan of Khan Academy. In his speech he noted that he had tens of millions of students in his classes. I was teaching at Stanford at the time and had tens of dozens of students in my classes, and I felt I should try something different and see if we could do what I do and scale it to many people.” In fact, in my podcast interview with Thrun, as he listed those who had been most influential to him over the course of his career, he listed Khan on the short list.
With this in mind, I looked forward to meeting this education guru. I met him in his office, and had a chance to see the microphone he uses for the tutorials that he delivers. He was informal, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and the microphone that I used to record our podcast interview was perched on a log that stood in between us. He was affable, bright, and the leadership skills that enabled him to be class president of his senior class at MIT and of his class at Harvard Business School before becoming a serial entrepreneur was quite clear. What followed as a fascinating conversation about the genesis of Khan Academy, his thoughts on the future of education, and his beliefs about the balance between technology enabled learning versus classroom learning.
Peter High: Sal, there is the famous story of your cousin, Nadia, who needed some help with her math class in seventh grade as the genesis of the idea that has become Khan Academy. What insights in the early days helped you understand the scale of the need that you hoped to fill?
Salman Khan: I grew up with plenty of smart people. They would beat me at chess, they could solve brain teasers before I could, but then they would struggle in algebra. These were incredibly smart people who simply did not have the foundation in math that I had. I saw the same thing with my cousin, Nadia. She had actually gotten “A”s and “B”s in every math class. Despite that, she had some serious gaps in her knowledge that became more significant as the content became more difficult. This really hit me as a real opportunity.
My background is in software, and I have always had these romantic notions of starting writing software that could help people learn, so I started writing a little tool that would give Nadia and her brothers and the other people I was working with practice problems. I didn’t trust them when they said how long it took them or whatever else. I put a database behind it and that became a useful tutorial tool because I could see where they had gaps, I could intervene appropriately, and I could give them as much practice as they needed…
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Sal, click here.
12-31-2013
2013 was a great year for information technology generally. Several technology stalwarts went public, most prominent among them being Twitter. Though less glamorous in the mind of the average person, business-to-business technology companies like WorkDay and Tableau Software continued to shake up older adversaries, as well. There was plenty of great coverage of information technology in 2013, as well. I have assembled my personal favorite pieces both in written form and in video. They are divided into executive profiles,company profiles, and general topics. As the year draws to a close, and the promise of a new one is before us, I hope you’ll enjoy these selections.
Lessons From The CEO OF The First Ever MOOC
There has been much press for the massive open online courses or MOOCs, including in my series of interviews to date with Sebastian Thrun and Daphne Koller, CEOs of Udacity and Coursera respectively. If one is new to these companies, one might be under the impression that the MOOC phenomenon is less than two years old. That is not the case. The company that many credit as being the first ever MOOC is Advance Learning Interactive Systems ONline, better known as ALISON. Irish-American entrepreneur, Mike Feerick founded that company in 2007, and whereas many other companies in this industry are still trying to determine the business models, Feerick has nearly seven years of testing, experimenting, and succeeding behind him. In this interview, Feerick talks about the genesis of the idea, his rationale for focusing on vocational training, and his vision for the future of the company.
(To listen to an extended audio version of this interview, please visit Forum on World Class IT. This is the fourth in the education technology series. To read the prior interviews, please follow this link. To read future interviews with the CEOs of Khan Academy, edX, and FutureLearn among other companies, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Mike, as a MOOC pioneer, what was the inspiration behind ALISON?
ALISON started with seven computer literacy courses because it was a very practical field of focus. Prior to launching ALISON we charged for the service, however when we changed our model to free, a curious thing happened: our paying clients wanted to continue to pay as they did not believe that something free could also be of sufficient value! We have changed a lot of minds on that score, and in that sense ALISON has helped open up the market for free education for other MOOCS to follow.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Mike, click here.
12-30-2013
With the high profile issues plaguing the technical implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the gulf between those who understand healthcare and those who understand technology has been quite stark. There are precious few CIOs who have a practitioner’s perspective when it comes to healthcare. The stereotype between doctors and nurses and IT executives highlight very different qualities. The former are noted for their interpersonal skills, their ability to listen, while being generally technophobes in practice. The latter have historically been introverted problem solvers who often operated more as order takers rather than as proactive advisors. Each should take attempt to draw from the strengths of the others to become more well-rounded.
An executive who exhibits the strong qualities of each is Linda Reed because she is each. Reed is a registered nurse whose earliest experience was in that field. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she saw the transformative power of technology early on and embraced it, and then became deeply involved in it. As a result, she rose to become the CIO of Atlantic Health System. She did not leave her credentials as an RN at the door, however, drawing strength from her earlier experience. In fact, she became a CIO-plus when she added responsibilities to become the Vice President of Integrated and Behavioral Medicine & CIO of Atlantic Health System.
As Reed explains in this video interview that I conducted with her, the advantages of having experience as a healthcare practitioner and as a technology executive offers her an almost unique ability to see opportunities and threats in the business and address them in equal measure with technology solutions. If only there were more people like her assisting the President of the United States at the moment.
To see the full interview video, please visit Forbes.com
To explore other CIO-plus Series articles, please click here.
For the World’s Largest MOOC, Broader is Better
12-16-2013
Last week, I kicked off a series on education technology with an interview with Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity. Daphne Koller who co-founded and is the co-CEO of Coursera, by some measures the largest of the for-profit educational technology companies offering massive open online courses or MOOCs with over five million students across most countries, has much in common with Thrun. They both were foreign-born Stanford professors with backgrounds in artificial intelligence when they started the companies they currently lead. Each has also taken a leave of absence from Stanford in order to pursue their current opportunities.
Though their companies compete, they have chosen very different areas of focus. Udacity, like several other companies that provide MOOCs has chosen to focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. Coursera has chosen a much broader offering, including many disciplines in the humanities. This breadth of offering has been a strength of the company in building a broad student-base, and it has signed up over 60 universities as partners. That said, it has required particularly creative approaches both process and technology-wise in order to facilitate learning, collaboration, and grading.
Koller admits that some of the data surrounding MOOCs might suggest that students are not learning as much as they could, as drop-out rates are substantial, but she argues that new metrics are needed in order to determine success or failure.
(To hear an extended audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the third in the series of Education Technology articles to be featured this month and next. To read the past articles in the series, please follow this link. To receive updates on interviews with the CEOs of Khan Academy, edX, FutureLearn, and ALISON among others, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Daphne, Coursera is still in its relative infancy. What was the inspiration for starting the company?
Daphne Koller: I have been working in the States for about five years, and the pace of change in education innovation has been dramatic. In the Fall of 2011, we put three Stanford courses up on the platform we had developed, and we were pleased to find that enrollment for these courses was 100,000 students or more. I think when we saw that the impact and the opportunities that this open platform had provided in education for this many people at a lower cost, then that caused us to say we really have to live up to that opportunity.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Sebastian, click here.
Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun On The Future Of Education
12-09-2013
There are few entrepreneurs who can compete with Sebastian Thrun in terms of creativity and breadth of innovation. He led the development of Stanley, a robotic vehicle on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. He was a founder of the Google X Lab, and parlayed his earlier success with Stanley into the Google driverless car system. He also was among the leaders who developed Google Glass. All the while he was a professor first at Carnegie Mellon and then at Stanford.
In early 2012, based on inspiration from Salman Khan of Khan Academy, he co-founded Udacity, a for-profit education company offering massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Thrun’s Stanford course “CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car” was among the first couple of courses offered through Udacity, and it attracted 160,000 students in 190 countries. The youngest was ten and the oldest was 70. Moreover, none of the top-400 students were Stanford students. He was so excited about what he learned, that he gave up his post at Stanford to focus on Udacity full-time.
(To hear an extended audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read interviews with other education technology leaders such as the CEOs of Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, and FutureLearn, please click the “Follow” link above. To read about Thrun’s thoughts on what immigrating to America has meant to him, please read this article.)
Peter High: You have been an entrepreneur in a variety of fields. You have taught and applied artificial intelligence. You helped spawn Google Glass. Now you are the CEO of a prominent education company offering MOOCs. What are the common denominators among the opportunities you have pursued?
Sebastian Thrun: Well there are two things to it, one is I love to pick problems that are really big and important. In education, we seek to address the problem of how to democratize and bring education everywhere. The second thing that drives me is I love to learn, and I love to do things I haven’t done before. And I enjoy the intellectual exercise of doing something new. Ideas like Google Glass emerged from such exploration.
