A recent report by the National Literacy Trust in the United Kingdom surveyed 35,000 kids, whose ages ranged from 8-16. It stated that 39% of children and young people read on electronic

devices every day, whereas only 28% read printed materials

daily. The number of children reading ebooks has doubled in the last two years from 6% to 12%.

If this trend continues, imagine the impact on:

• Design of Books
• Material for books
• Delivery options from owning to loaning
• Interaction design with books not just by readers (see what Kindoma is doing)
• Book distribution
• Libraries (virtual libraries, personal libraries)

 Highlights of TiEcon 2013

• Over 3,000 registered attendees from over 30 countries are expected to attend the event.
• The conference features over 220 speakers that include renowned CEOs, Entrepreneurs, VCs, and other CXOs of leading companies.
• Expo Hall: The TiEcon Expo showcases leading edge products and services from startups and large technology companies. The Expo features over 140 exhibitors from countries as far away as Belgium, Brazil, India, Japan and Hong Kong.
• TiE50 Awards: TiE50 has selected the Top100 global finalists and now the competition is on to pick the prestigious TiE50 Winners. Not only will it inspire entrepreneurs but will showcase many opportunities for investors. Presentations will be held in Room 201 all day Friday and are open to all attendees.
• Lightning Round Winners: Our content advisory teams have selected 18 of the hottest startups in Big Data, Mobility and SDI. Be sure to check their presentations right after track keynotes on Friday

Networking at TiEcon 2013

TiEconnect: TiEcon offers many opportunities for networking and connecting with various attendees, co-founders and mentors. There are many informal networking opportunities at TiEcon but here is a list of the more formal networking events:

§  MentorConnect: An opportunity to spend quality time with successful entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists and other movers and shakers. Entrance only open to attendees who pre-registered for MentorConnect. MentorConnect will be held in Rooms G & H on May 17^th and 18^th at lunch time.

§  FounderConnect: An opportunity to find co-founder for your startup. Pre registration is recommended. FounderConnect will be held in Room 209 on May 17^th and 18^th at lunch time.

A lot more coming up over the next couple of days.

The best way to collect the right information is to use progressive

profiling. Progressive profiling allows you to control which questions

appear on a form based on what you already know about a lead. That

way, each time a lead fills out a form, you are collecting valuable new

information about them while keeping your forms short and easy to fill

Teach. Setup a lunch and learn. Try to answer questions you hear people have on places like Stack Exchange. Start a blog! Share open examples of something you’ve learned: code, spreadsheets, emails, anything. It might take awhile to build an audience, but you’ll quickly reap rewards from the clarity teaching brings you.

I resonate fully with the sentiment in this blog post. Every time I taught, I learned it better.

• Math in high school and college
• Machine language programming and architecture
• Bits of Python
• Entrepreneurship
• Ideas on marketing

My teaching is more of seminars and sometimes through blog posts. But teaching helps you understand the subject a lot better, focuses your thinking  and provides a strong motivation for deep diving into subjects.

Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.

Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We’re producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many other things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves — anything, that is, except the work we do “to make a living.”

From the book Cooked.

The Need/Problem

A clearly articulated value proposition

An assessment of Market Opportunity

They have pretty good traction, so far:

As I mentioned in a previous post, they created two research prototypes to learn family behavior before coming up with this product.

create a simple plan for how data, analytics, frontline tools, and people come together to create business value. The power of a plan is that it provides a common language allowing senior executives, technology professionals, data scientists, and managers to discuss where the greatest returns will come from and, more important, to select the two or three places to get started.

The plan, according to this article contains three elements – Data, Analytics and Tools.

Plans may highlight a need for the massive reorganization of data architectures over time: sifting through tangled repositories (separating transactions from analytical reports), creating unambiguous golden-source data,² and implementing data-governance standards that systematically maintain accuracy…

Integrating data alone does not generate value. Advanced analytic models are needed – A plan must identify where models will create additional business value, who will need to use them…

Intuitive tools that integrate data into day-to-day processes and translate modeling outputs into tangible business actions

This article gives a sense of several fine grained opportunities in the Big Data Area.

The paint editor now uses vector graphics meaning they scale without losing detail. There’s a Backpack feature that allows you to move your graphical assets between projects, webcam interaction is now a standard feature, and you can create your very own Scratch blocks, meaning you can setup some predefined behavior and wrap it up in a block to use anywhere.

What’s new with Scratch?

Almost two decades ago, in 1995, Hart & Risley published the results of a landmark study [1] that linked success in school at age nine to the amount of talk they hear from birth to age three.  The actual difference in the amount of words children hear is astonishing; successful children heard on average 8 million more words per year than their struggling peers, leading to what was termed the “30 million word gap” by the time they turn four.

I was just lucky to chance upon an SVForum Event in Santa Clara. A friend who runs the Digital SIG invited me. The talk was given by the founder of Kindoma. It was fascinating to listen to his journey.  Here are some highlights:

• Kindoma is made up of two words German words-  Kind and Oma. Kind in German means “the kid” and Oma stands for grandma. Kindoma’s mission is to connects kids and their grandparents to benefit both.
• One stat Tico (the founder of Kindoma) showed was that grand parents spend over 16B dollars for their grand kids.
• Kindoma was a research project in Nokia and later became an independent company.
• Tico explained how they went through research prototypes (two of them) and how they learned the behavior of families – kids, parents, grandparents and how they used their knowledge to build their products.
• In US on an average grand parents are more than 200 miles away from their grand kids (and several thousands for many immigrant families).
• The current mode of connection is phone or skype. Tico showed videos of actual interactions using each mode and discussed the issues with each one of them

Other Related Posts

Kindoma – a few slides

1. The ODROID-U2: Smallest, ultra-compact 1.7GHz Quad Core development board

   ODROID-U2 on the left… Hardkernel’s corporate card on the right? (via Hardkernel) Hardkernel Co, the open-source hardware company from Korea, has achieved quite a bit of success over the years with the release of several of the world’s first Android, ARM-powered development boards. Their latest release, the ODROID-U2, is …

2. Electromagnetic Harvester charges AA battery by exploiting radiant EM fields

   Dennis Deigel’s EM Harvester can capture radiant energy from electromagnetic fields to charge a AA battery (via http://dennissiegel.de/electromagnetic-harvester/) As part of a scientific venture into the global movement for sustainable energy harvesting – Dennis Siegel has constructed a palm-sized energy harvesting device capable of capturing radiant energy from the …

3. RunKeeper gains Pebble smartwatch integration

   RunKeeper, the popular mobile fitness and GPS tracking app, received an update Tuesday which allows for some interesting Pebble smartwatch features. Thanks to deep integration with the Bluetooth Smart-enabled E-paper wrist device, RunKeeper users can keep track of their workout stats on their Pebble. This includes the stuff like displaying …

4. News & Updates

   Qualcomm Life acquired HealthyCircles, a care coordination SaaS provider, to integrate Qualcomm’s 2net™ Platform and Hub with the HealthyCircles enterprise platform. The integration enables providers to collect, monitor and manage near real-time actionable data that is readily accessible and shareable with a patient’s care team. Honeywell HomMed unveiled a line …

5. SoundOfMotion Launches Campaign to Start Production of New VeloComputer Bluetooth Smart Sensor RIDER

   SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 7, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — SoundOfMotion Technologies Inc. launches a campaign on crowd funding sites Indiegogo.com and Kickstarter.com pledging to the cyclists’ community for a help accelerating the manufacturing of its new VeloComputer™ 1-Degree Precision…

6. Nike FuelBand 2: Heart Rate Monitor & Android Support Rumored

   Nike FuelBand 2: Heart Rate Monitor & Android Support Rumored is a post by Josh Smith from Gotta Be Mobile.The Nike FuelBand 2 is reportedly in the works, and may come with a heart rate monitor and Android support. Nike FuelBand is currently one of the most popular app enabled …

7. Automatic Pairs Your Car & iPhone with OnStar-like Features

   Regret not ponying up for that OnStar subscription for your last car? A startup called Automatic promises to provide most of those features (and a few extra) with an iPhone app and a hardware dongle that plugs into your car’s data port. The device performs diagnostics, lets you turn off …

8. Flex: Fitbit’s New Wristband Health Tracker

   Fitbit’s new Flex health tracker wristband is out, and it offers several of the features found in the Fitbit One, including Bluetooth iPhone and computer sync support. The wristband sensor tracks steps, distance, calories burned, and sleep patterns, includes a silent alarm, plus it’s water resistant so you can wear …

With Deep Learning, Ng says, you just give the system a lot of data “so it can discover by itself what some of the concepts in the world are.” Last year, one of his algorithms taught itself torecognize cats after scanning millions of images on the internet. The algorithm didn’t know the word “cat” — Ng had to supply that — but over time, it learned to identify the furry creatures we know as cats, all on its own.

This approach is inspired by how scientists believe that humans learn. As babies, we watch our environments and start to understand the structure of objects we encounter, but until a parent tells us what it is, we can’t put a name to it.

AMON stands for Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network. Its mission is to form a network of high-energy observatories across the globe that will search for previously unseen astrophysical signals and send alerts to more traditional telescopes in order to corroborate the possible celestial events.

Until the early 20th Century, astronomers relied almost exclusively on visible light to view the sky. Their telescopes, though steadily increasing inpower, were no different in this respect from the ones used by Galileo in 1610. Today we see much more of the universe by observing light from all across the electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma-ray-, x-ray-, infrared-, and radio-astronomy have revolutionized astronomical observation, as have the advent of space-based telescopes to complement those on the ground.

the past 50 years have seen tremendous progress in the sensitivity of instruments to detect cosmic rays—high-energy charged particles from outer space, such as protons and charged nuclei. Particle accelerators have enabled physicists to create, detect, and analyze other sub-atomic particles, such as neutrinos. These alternative messengers—particles that survive across vast distances in space—presented whole new avenues of exploration.

Computing infrastructure

The Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure (RCC) unit of Information Technology Services enable scholars to do large-scale computations through linked services, including hardware, software, and personnel.

The High Performance Computing (HPC) system within RCC is a shared resource among dozens of researchers in a host of departmental and interdisciplinary units at Penn State that meets the dual data challenges presented by the AMON project. First, there is the need to continuously receive data from the triggering instruments. This requires computing systems with robust and consistently high “up-time.” The HPC has sub-systems rated at Tier III, with 99.999 percent up-time (less than five minutes of downtime annually).

Probabilistic Databases

“We are experimenting with a ‘probabilistic’ database that can collect disparate data, say, on neutrinos and gamma rays, and quickly determine the probability that both have come from the same source. This is cutting edge database work.”

Meta:

It is fascinating to read about how computers and new scientific software and databases help advanced research.  Part of my random reading. Some of the most interesting Science Research articles come from tracking NSF (National Science Foundation) site.

One of the best ways to look at advances in Science and Technology is to track funded research.

Ontologies are human-intelligible and machine-interpretable representations of some portions and aspects of a domain. Since an ontology contains terms and their definitions, it enables the standardization of a terminology across a community or enterprise; thus, ontologies can be used as a type of glossary. Since ontologies can capture key concepts and their relationships in a machine-interpretable form, they are similar to domain models in system and software engineering. And since ontologies can be populated with or linked to instance data to create knowledge bases, and deployed as parts of information systems for query answering, ontologies resemble databases from an operational perspective.

You need a common vocabulary for a community to share knowledge. Ontologies are meant to provide that vocabulary.

Currently, there is no agreed on methodology for development of ontologies, and there is no consensus on how ontologies should be evaluated. Consequently, evaluation techniques and tools are not widely utilized in the development of ontologies. This can lead to ontologies of poor quality and is an obstacle to the successful deployment of ontologies as a technology.

This document focuses on the evaluation of five aspects of the quality of ontologies: intelligibility, fidelity, craftsmanship, fitness, and deployability.

To determine the quality of an ontology, we need to evaluate the ontology as a domain model for human consumption, the ontology as a domain model for machine consumption, and the ontology as deployed software that is part of a larger system. In this document, we focus on five high-level characteristics:[1]

1. Can humans understand the ontology correctly? (Intelligibility)

2. Does the ontology accurately represent its domain? (Fidelity)

3. Is the ontology well-built and are design decisions followed consistently? (Craftsmanship)

4. Does the representation of the domain fit the requirements for its intended use? (Fitness)

5. Does the deployed ontology meet the requirements of the information system of which it is part? (Deployability)

• Planet Django – A python web framework
• Planet MariaDB
• Planet MySQL
• Planet PHP
• Planet Postgres
• Planet Python
• Planet RDF – An aggregator for information about the Semantic Web
• Planet Ruby
• Planet Ruby On Rails

Meta:

I typically add  some of these planets’  RSS feeds to TopicMinder so that we can constantly gather information. This information gets stored in a Solr database which can be queried. This is how we built ourselves a subset of the techweb which we can query.

More and more projects seem to be switching to this database.

Wikipedia Switches to MariaDB

For some time now, Wikipedia has been using a variant of MySQL 5.1, with patches contributed by engineers at Facebook. But Wikipedia has been eyeing MariaDB for two main reasons: The host of technical improvements being rolled into MariaDB, and the preference Wikipedia has for “[software] projects without bifurcated code bases between differently licensed free and enterprise editions.”

SkySQL Merges with MariaDB

SkySQL, a provider of open source database solutions, is merging with Monty Program Ab, the creators of MariaDB, an open source database technology that is used by Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and other services.

Meta:

You can track more news on Open Source Databases using:

• MariaDB Planet – a news aggregator of MariaDB news

• RSS Feed  Open Source Databases on TopicMinder.

by and large, students aren’t provided with the tools to customize their learning to their needs: Lectures are one-sided with no interactivity, as are courseware and other materials. Feedback from quizzes and exams can take weeks. And, if a student is stuck on a problem at 11pm? Good luck finding help unless he can find the answer on Google.

textbooks — remain fundamentally unchanged. Books, designed for a paper-based medium, are static, bloated, expensive, and increasingly irrelevant in a Web-enabled world, where students consume information using different media and devices. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons MOOCs have high dropout rates – you cannot combine new ways of teaching with old style learning material and expect transformative changes.

Infusing digital material with interactive animation/simulation can make a lot of difference. Let us take the example of showing how an automobile engine works:

1. You start by showing the picture of an engine on a touch enabled device (like a tablet)
2. The student can pinch, zoom this image and turn it around and look at it from various angles.
3. They can tap on it to get it working – pistons move in and out, valves open and close, fuel flows, spark plug ignites the fuel etc. It is a simulation and the student can examine any portion in detail or from any angle.
4. They should be able to point to a part and receive text or audio (in their language) on what it is and how it works.
5. A lesson like this can be made exploratory with deeper dives as students gain more knowledge (how do the combination of fuel and sparks result in thrust? What are other similar examples).
6. We can even include interactive tours through the simulation to guide as starting points
7. We can include a search (Google body used to do this). Typing a term would zoom into that particular part and highlight it (or animate it alone).

Can we simplify the tools for building these learning objects? Can we have a framework for assembling a collection of these objects in some coherent way and create special books? How can we make them really simple for teachers to create, innovate and share?

Lots of things to think about and lots of opportunities for content creation.

Mobile gaming is a huge worldwide opportunity at the moment, having clocked in at $9 billion in 2012, and it is poised to grow further in the coming years. With the world’s 1 billion smartphones scheduled to almost double in number by 2015 and games responsible for a whopping 66 percent of all app revenue, it’s easy for anyone to do the math and see where this is going.

Game development continues to have a bright future, but only for those who can develop profitable titles.

Bookmarks and Social Bookmarking tools

I have been using them for a while but since I keep switching browsers, I keep losing a bunch of them. I started using delicious but over a period of time, its browser plugins are all broken. I still do have a lot of stuff in my delicious account.

The problem with bookmarks as well as delicious is that you need to be explicit. There is a chance to build something that is a bit smarter in several ways. More on that in a different post.

Evernote

Evernote is one of my current favorites. The advantage is that it works pretty well on Windows, Android and iPad. You can sync your stuff on multiple devices. The disadvantage (at least for me) is that it is not easy to link across notes or notebooks.

Google Docs

I don’t particularly like Google docs to do anything personal. I use it for shared lists and some other stuff but I have this uneasy feeling about having everything in Google.

Wikipad

For a long time this was my personal KB. But occasionally it gets corrupted. It does not have some of the capabilities of Evernote (formatting, synchronization etc.) but very simple to use and is great for cross linking notes.

Twiter

This is another one of my current favorites. It has a few problems but may end up working well in the long run. I use a private Twitter account to save links with some context and found an open source python program to download tweets (mine and others as well).

Blogs

My blogs (both public and private) are probably the most effective. The public blogs are a bit skewed since I also tend to think about my readers. Some times I fiddle with them months or even years after I write them. I don’t delete outdated blog posts even though some times I feel that I should.

I tried many others  – email, OneNote, Word docs etc. None of them worked to my satisfaction.

What about you? What works for you?

Meta:

Though not directly related to the post here are some links you may enjoy:

• Personal Productivity Tools
• Personal Workspaces
• Blogs as backup brain

The school district in Auburn, Maine assigned 16 iPads to a classroom of 16 kindergartens over a 9-week period. A total of 236 students were given literacy test before the 9-week testing period for the iPad began. Over the 9 week period, 129 students were taught using an iPad, while 137 students were taught the old fashion way. The school district found that students using an iPad out-performed students not using an iPad in every literacy test by a significant margin.

Our simple experiments in a public school with 7th graders in Chennai, India showed us a few things about tablet usage by students. We took a mixture of both iPads and Android tablets:

1. It improved engagement – Students were more likely to work in groups with tablets for longer periods of time
2. It improved interaction with the instructors – Students were more likely to ask questions, listen to answers and apply what they heard
3. It let them explore more – Touch interfaces lower the barriers to explorations. Students quickly figured out how to swipe, click and engage with apps

I think engagement, interaction and exploration are some of the attributes for more effective learning.

We are planning to experiment with some simple educational apps over the next year.

Meta

More about our Social Causes Initiatives:

A morning with Seventh Graders