Description: Marissa Mayer joined Google at the age of 24, and now she is the VP of Local, Maps and Localization Services
Source: can .com
Date: April 3, 2012
Questions for discussion:
Description: An Orthodox Jewish girls school in New York orders students to cancel Facebook accounts or be expelled
Source: cnn .com
Date: March 30, 2012
Questions for discussion:
Description: Last week Amazon, the online retailer, announced it was buying a robot maker called Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash. Before you get excited that Amazon may offer a robot that can tuck you into bed at night and read Kindle books to you, this isn’t that kind of robot company. Instead, Kiva Systems’ orange robots are designed to move around warehouses and stock shelves.
Source: NyTimes .com
Date: March 25, 2012
In each instance, humans are still needed to control the robots. The two engineers believe Amazon’s new robots will do the same thing: helping speed things up in the warehouses.
Robots have been in factories for decades. But increasingly we will see them out in the open. Already little ones — toys, really — sweep floors. But they are getting better at doing what we do. Soon, if Google’s efforts to create driverless cars are successful, cab drivers, cross-country truckers and even ambulance drivers could be out of a job, replaced by a computer in the driver’s seat.
We are starting to see robots on the battlefield. We could eventually have robot police officers and firefighters, robotic guides, robot doctors, maybe even robotic journalists. Read Rest of Story
Questions for discussion:
1. Do you see robots replacing humans in business or just aids to make humans more productive? Why?
Description: Can government be run like the Internet, permissionless and open? Coder and activist Jennifer Pahlka believes it can — and that apps, built quickly and cheaply, are a powerful new way to connect citizens to their governments — and their neighbors.
Source: Ted .com
Date: March 25, 2012
Questions for discussion:
1. Could government be improved if we treated it like we do the Internet> Why or Why Not?
Description: At a cocktail party on the second floor of the expensive Bowery Hotel in Manhattan on Thursday night, as trays of stuffed mushrooms and thinly sliced filet mignon circulated, Charles Forman was marveling at how quickly things can change.
Source: NYTimes .com
Date: March 25, 2012
Draw Something transformed Omgpop from a little-known, nearly broke start-up into a must-have for an industry giant. The Zynga deal shows how companies are moving at Internet speed to stay on top of online trends, generating quick reversals of fortune.
“They bought a property that went from 0 to 60 in four seconds,” said Lewis Ward, a research analyst at IDC who focuses on the game industry.
Draw Something, a twist on Pictionary, involves making quick sketches that illustrate words and phrases like “swimming pool” and “starfish” for a friend to guess. It has been downloaded more than 35 million times since its release on Feb. 6, and players have generated more than a billion drawings, according to Zynga. Read Rest of Story
Questions for discussion:
1. Why are companies having to move so fast in their marketspaces?
2. Why is “Draw Something” so successful? Is it something that can be copied easily?
Description: With the backing of Gates and Google, Khan Academy and its free online educational videos are moving into the classroom and across the world. Their goal: to revolutionize how we teach and learn.
Source: CBS .com
Date: March 21, 2012
Questions:
1 Is Khan Academy the online silver bullet for on-line education?
2. What do you feel is the competitive advantage Khan Academy has over other competitors?
Description: Stand-up comedians of a certain era knew they had arrived when Johnny Carson invited them to a desk-side seat on “The Tonight Show.” A generation later, the gold standard was getting a solo comedy special on HBO. But in the Internet era, the yardstick for success has been redefined.
Source: NYTimes .com
Date: March 20, 2012
A handful of top-tier performers have begun producing stand-up specials on their own, posting them online and selling them directly through their personal Web sites, eliminating the editorial control of broadcasters and the perceived taint of corporate endorsements.
While this straight-to-the-Internet strategy is far from ubiquitous in stand-up, it is already having a profound impact on the comedy landscape, enabling online content providers and individual artists to take more turf from television networks and empowering comedians to be as candid (and as explicit) as they want in their material. Read Rest of Story
Questions for discussion:
1. Is this an example of marketing disintermediation? Why? or Why Not?
2. What are the pitfalls to leaving the existing distribution channels of this particular content?
Description: In the fourth quarter of 2011, Apple sold 15.4 million iPads—more than the number of PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the world’s No. 1 maker of Wintel PCs.
Source: businessweek .com
Date: March 21, 2012
Apple’s dominance of the tablet space certainly represents a blow to the collective egos of PC manufacturers. But the iPad, by combining technical ingenuity with mass-market appeal, is doing more than simply eroding the profits of some of the world’s most successful computer companies.
The idea of tablet computing has been around for decades. Microsoft (MSFT) made a big push in 2000. Pre-iPad, the things didn’t work terribly well, and no one was really sure whether a mass audience would use them. The iPad has shown that there is in fact a gigantic, succulent market for these devices. Yet the finest computing minds outside Cupertino have failed to come up with a true rival. What’s so hard about tablets? Read Rest of Story
Questions for discussion:
1. Do you fell the ipad will dominate the PC market into the future? Why? or Why Not?
2. Why does apple not have any real completion in the tablet market as far as market share goes?
Description: Thanks to fast, always-on Internet connections and vast server farms run by the likes of Amazon and Google, we’re able to offload more and more of our digital lives onto remote servers.
Source: GlobeandMail .com
Date: March 22, 2012
A cloud robot requires far less computing power because it can offload most of that heavy-duty number-crunching and data storage to an off-site computer.
“For the vast majority of processing, you can do that anywhere,” says Mr. Field. “It doesn’t need to be local to the robot. If you have a fast wireless connection then you can send images, 3D data, control… all the processing can be done in the cloud.” Read Rest of Story
Questions for discussion:
1. Why robot brains could be the killer app of cloud computing ?
2. What are some possible advantages of using cloud computing for AI?
Description: It’s often said that women are under-represented in high-tech careers because they’re not studying computer science in school. And that’s true!
Source: forbes .com
Date: March 15, 2012
Angie Schiavoni didn’t know what computer science was as a kid. “Pursuing a career in computer science never crossed my mind,” she admits. “No one ever said, ‘Hey, you’re good at math. Maybe you should try this.’” She eventually learned to code as an adult and co-founded Code Ed, a national program to teach web design to middle school girls in underserved communities. Schiavoni says she wants today’s young women to get the head start she never had. “Girls have to know what computer science is before they can consider it as one of their options.” Read Rest of Story
Obviously, not every girl is left in the dark about computer science, but many are. In a national survey conducted by the WGBH Educational Foundation in 2008, college-bound teens were asked to describe how good a choice a career in computer science would be for “someone like you.” The results found that 67% of boys described a career in computer science as very good or good, whereas only 26% of girls felt the same.
Questions for discussion:
- Why don’t many girls not really know what computer science is?
- What are some possible solutions to educate young people about the field?
Introduction to Information Systems, 3rd Canadian Binder Ready Version Update Edition
R. Kelly Rainer, Casey G. Cegielski, Ingrid Splettstoesser-Hogeterp, Cristobal Sanchez-Rodriguez
ISBN: 978-1-119-13385-8
August 2015, © 2016
CDN $98.95; CDN $114.95