June 3rd, 2007 by mdSeveral students in Creating Infectious Action (MSE288) at Stanford came up with a very cool way to explain design thinking to others by executing, and documenting by video, a rapid design process. The four students, Mada, Ana, Dot, and Mannan are masters students in the class which I co-teach. They captured a totally authentic look […]
May 29th, 2007 by mdMy good friend and former colleague Jeff Jordan just was named CEO of OpenTable, the online reservation agent for dining out. This is a huge coup for OpenTable and the beginning of a great new adventure for Jeff. I was very lucky to work with Jeff both at Disney back in the mid-1990s and then […]
May 23rd, 2007 by mdRecently we had a good discussion of an interesting topic in Creating Infectious Action — a course I co-teach at Stanford. The conversation was about widgets and the unbundling of cool content from the url where it originated. Widgets — small, portable units that are essentially mini-windows onto an application or pieces of content — […]
May 23rd, 2007 by mdI am not sure if I feel proud, sad, nervous, or what. I just hope they don’t take it out on the nice ladies in the dumpling factory that I wrote about.
April 26th, 2007 by mdA group of students in the Creating Infectious Action class I am co-teaching came up with a clever concept. They observed that Firefox penetration among non-geeks, non-technical folks depends heavily on the appeal of extensions and customization of the browser. Fortunately, there’s a ton of great extensions for Firefox. The students cleverly realized that the […]
April 24th, 2007 by mdI am involved in teaching two courses this quarter at Stanford. One is titled Creating Infectious Action which I co-teach with a wonderful group of faculty from academia and industry. It’s essentially a project-based class focused on why ideas or behaviors “spread” in the Gladwell-ian sense, and “stick” in the Heath-ian sense. We are holding […]
March 24th, 2007 by mdThis is one of the coolest things I have seen in a while. A friend recently told me about this as a way to gather feedback quickly and economically from real people.
Mechanical turk.
This platform allows a researcher (say a company, a product designer, an academic, even a computer etc.) to post a question or task […]
March 15th, 2007 by mdA very interesting thing developing in the intersection of data, web, and developer community: Metaweb announced the alpha of a product called Freebase – an open, free database of the world’s knowledge. It’s cool because it takes the open stance of a wiki, but in a structured way that allows contributors to put data in, […]
March 15th, 2007 by mdCheck out this very cool marketplace for independent music downloads — amiestreet.com. Founded by a trio of talented guys who just graduated from Brown, it’s perfect for self-repping artists: dynamically priced songs start at zero and climb in price as the number of downloads increase (cap at 98-cents); liberal (i.e. no) DRM; a large and […]
February 11th, 2007 by mdThis is certainly worth reading. It’s a piece in today’s NYT by G. Pascal Zachary who teaches Journalism at Stanford. In it he addresses the question of why so much innovative company- and tech-building happens here in Silicon Valley.
Read the article here.
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