Gartner identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012
Analysts Examine Latest Industry Trends During Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Excerpt:

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 include:

  • Media Tablets and Beyond.
  • Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces.
  • Contextual and Social User Experience.
  • Internet of Things. The key elements of the IoT include:
    Embedded sensors, Image Recognition, Near Field Communication (NFC) payments
  • App Stores and Marketplaces.
  • Next-Generation Analytics.
  • Big Data.
  • In-Memory Computing.
  • Extreme Low-Energy Servers.
  • Cloud Computing.

 

Future of Storytelling Expert Series: CloudKid’s Founder on Interactive Storytelling for Children — from Latitude Research° by Kim Gaskins

Excerpt:

Recently, Latitude (in collaboration with Itizen) launched an innovation study on The Future of Storytelling. Why? So we can uncover the questions, challenges, and aspirations of tomorrow’s storytellers and identify how they can better align with audience’s changing expectations. Every week for the next several weeks, Latitude will share its conversation with a different influential individual. We’ll follow the series with a summary of best practices and insights for content creators and businesses from Latitude’s SVP, Neela Sakaria.

Also see:

 

About CloudKid

With our heads fully in the clouds (where else would you want your head to be?), CloudKid transforms daydreams, fantasies, and flights of imagination into characters and stories that live, breathe, laugh, run, shout and fly.

CloudKid combines story and animation philosophies with mobile/web technologies to create eye-popping programs for children—we take children’s media to places it’s never been before. From film/animation production to story/character development, CloudKid develops intellectual property and technologies that will truly change the way kids and families interact with entertainment.

 

Addendum later on 10/18/11:

 

Pearson and Google jump into learning management with a new, free system — from The Chronicle by Josh Fischman

Excerpt:

One of the world’s biggest education publishers has joined with one of the most dominant and iconic software companies on the planet to bring colleges a new—and free—learning-management system with the hopes of upending services that affect just about every instructor, student, and college in the country.

Today Pearson, the publishing and learning technology group, has teamed up with the software giant Google to launch OpenClass, a free LMS that combines standard course-management tools with advanced social networking and community-building, and an open architecture that allows instructors to import whatever material they want, from e-books to YouTube videos. The program will launch through Google Apps for Education, a very popular e-mail, calendar, and document-sharing service that has more than 1,000 higher-education customers, and it will be hosted by Pearson with the intent of freeing institutions from the burden of providing resources to run it. It enters a market that has been dominated by costly institution-anchored services like Blackboard, and open-source but labor-intensive systems like Moodle.

Why cloud computing is expanding the powers of Big Data analysis — from wired.co.uk by Dan Smith
 

 

Excerpt:

According to Werner Vogels, Amazon.com’s chief technology officer, data analysis — specifically “Big Data” analysis — is the backbone of modern business. Without it, your survival chances are limited and, with the growth of cloud computing it’s becoming easier than ever for startups and SMEs. “There’s a shift going on,” Vogels says. “Five or ten years ago, when thinking about data analysis, you would think about the biggest companies in the world. Today, there’s not a new business not thinking about data analysis.”

 
Also see:

 

Apple University will train executives to think like Steve Jobs — from good.is by Liz Dwyer

Excerpt:

If you want to honor Steve Jobs’ life by following in his entrepreneurial footsteps, forget heading to business school. The Los Angeles Times reports that an Apple team has been working on a top-secret project to create an executive training program called Apple University. The goal? To train people to think like Steve Jobs.

Apple refused to comment on the existence of Apple University, but the Times says that in 2008, Jobs “personally recruited” Joel Podolny, the dean of Yale Business School, to “help Apple internalize the thoughts of its visionary founder to prepare for the day when he’s not around anymore.” Apple analyst Tim Bajarin told the Times that, “it became pretty clear that Apple needed a set of educational materials so that Apple employees could learn to think and make decisions as if they were Steve Jobs.” Though the curriculum is still under wraps, Jobs himself oversaw the creation of the “university-caliber courses.” (emphasis DSC)

 Also see:

 

Steve Jobs’ virtual DNA to be fostered in Apple University:  To survive its late founder, Apple and Steve Jobs planned a training program in which company executives will be taught to think like him, in “a forum to impart that DNA to future generations.” Key to this effort is Joel Podolny, former Yale Business School dean.
Photo: Steve Jobs helped plan Apple University — an executive training program to help Apple carry on without him. Credit: Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times

Steve Jobs helped plan Apple University — an executive training program to help
Apple carry on without him. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times / October 6, 2011)

From DSC:
If Apple were to choose to disrupt higher education, several other pieces of the puzzle have already been built and/or continue to be enhanced:

  • Siri — a serious start towards the use of intelligent agents / intelligent tutoring
  • An infrastructure to support 24x7x365 access and synchronization of content/assignments/files to a student’s various devices — via iCloud (available today via iTunes 10.5)
  • iTunes U already has millions of downloads and contains content from some of the world’s top universities
  • The internal expertise and teams to create incredibly-rich, interactive, multimedia-based, personalized, customized educational content
  • Students — like employees in the workplace — are looking for information/training/learning on demand — when they need it and on whatever device they need it
  • Apple — or other 3rd parties — could assist publishers in creating cloud-based apps (formerly called textbooks) to download to students’/professors’ devices as well as to the Chalkboards of the Future
  • The iPad continues to be implemented in a variety of education settings, allowing for some seriously interactive, mobile-based learning

 

 

 

 

At the least, I might be losing a bit more sleep if I were heading up an MBA program or a business school…

 

The Cloud & HTML5 — Smart TV’s Dynamic Duo — from itvt.com by Edgar Villalpando

Excerpt:

Why is HTML5 so awesome for smart TV?

  • HTML5 standards are managed by a non-corporate entity (the W3C), and are non-proprietary.
  • HTML5 utilizes the existing skill sets and tools of an enormous, established development community.
  • HTML5 is one of the few technologies that receives nearly ubiquitous support from the big players in technology and media alike. Apple, Google, and even Adobe have endorsed it.
  • HTML5 allows developers to create one application that will run on many different devices, including TVs, STBs, PCs, tablets and mobile devices.

For the smart TV space, HTML5 will speed app development cycles, reduce development costs, provide a much larger reach, and make integration of apps with the Web, and Web-connected devices, much smoother.

We’re about to exit the Walled Garden era of smart TV, and enter the Smart TV Everywhere era.

From DSC: Expectations, today, are getting hard to beat

Since Apple’s event yesterday, I’ve heard some conversations on the radio and reviewed several blog postings and articles about Apple’s announcements…many with a sense of let down (and some with the usual critical viewpoints by the backseat drivers out there who have never tried to invent anything, but who sure like to find fault with everyone else’s inventions and innovations).

It made me reflect on how high our expectations are becoming these days!  It wasn’t enough that iCloud is coming on 10/12 (and who knows the directions that will take society in). It wasn’t enough to introduce some serious software-based innovations such as Siri (which bring some significant advancements in the world of artificial intelligence) or AirPlay for the iPhone.  It wasn’t enough to enter into the multi-billion dollar card industry with their new Cards app for the iPhone.  Wow…tough crowd.

What might these announcements — and expectations — mean for education? 
Well…I can see intelligent tutoring, intelligent agents, machine-to-machine communications, the continued growth of mobile learning, learning from the living room, the initiation of programs/events caused by changes in one’s location, continued convergence of the television/computer/telephone, continued use of videoconferencing on handheld devices, cloud-based textbooks/apps, and more.


 

Siri on the iPhone 4S -- October 4, 2011

 

 

 

Some items from Apple today:

 

 

Presentations from the Digital Book 2011 Conference — from idpf.org with a special thanks going out to Mr. Steven Chevalia — who had pointed me to a great presentation by Liisa McCloy-Kelley:

Learning to Juggle and Picking the Right Balls
(AKA adapting organizations for the future of digital publishing)

Liisa McCloy-Kelley

Liisa McCloy-Kelley
VP, Director of eBook Production Strategy & Operations, Random House, Inc

Liisa McCloy-Kelley is VP, Director of eBook Production Strategy & Operations at Random House, Inc. where she has been an eyewitness to an evolution in the way that books are produced, marketed and sold for more than 20 years. She currently leads the team responsible for eBook development and production and keeps Random House on a focused strategic path for digital product development. She has spoken at a variety of conferences and has taught at Wellesley, NYU and Yale. As a digital book evangelist, she has given up reading in print form to become an expert in the variety of digital reading systems and the ways they can present content.

Example slide:


Who will win the cloud war? Apple vs. Google vs. Microsoft — from TechNewsDaily.com by Dan Howley, LAPTOP Staff Writer

Excerpt:

Defining the Cloud
Although the cloud and the various services it supports have been around for quite some time, tech companies have done a fairly poor job of explaining exactly what the cloud is. “When you say cloud services, it’s pretty broad,” explained Michael Gartenberg, research director with the technology research firm Gartner. “Are you talking about digital lockers? Are you talking about cloud-based applications? Streaming music services? Cloud sort of becomes one of those catch-all phrases that becomes hard to define.”

In truth, the cloud is a nebulous term to describe the Internet and the various ways it can be leveraged by users.

For example, cloud storage allows users to upload and access their data via the web, much like an Internet-connected hard drive. When you upload a document or photo to Dropbox, you are storing it on the company’s servers, which allows you to access your files from any computer. Playing a game on Facebook? That also uses the cloud as a backbone.

Cloud-based applications, such as Google’s Docs productivity suite and online music services such as Grooveshark and Pandora, give users access to programs that they previously would have had to install on their PC. Such services save precious resources on users’ computers. However, most of these cloud apps require an active Internet connection. If you’re offline, for the most part you’re out of luck.

Ixonos Showcases an Interactive Multichannel TV Experience at Intel Developer Forum 2011 — from marketwatch.com

Excerpt:

“More and more television viewers have begun using a computer or a smartphone while watching TV”, says Sami Paihonen from Ixonos’ User Experience Design Centre.  “Consumers across age brackets are going online to look up additional information on editorial and commercial content and wanting to share their thoughts and ideas with friends.”  To address this, Ixonos has designed a solution that offers a seamless transition between broadcasted content and other online content. For TV viewers, this means a consistent and engaging user experience regardless of which device they use.

“We discovered that TV viewers are constantly looking to enrich their viewing experience by multitasking, and we believe the constant flow of information can be harnessed better for the benefit of TV viewers as well as companies promoting their content.  We designed the TV Compass user experience framework to address this need for sharing information”, Sami says.

Cooperation among competing bodies appears possible as TV mulls future direction at IBC2011 —  from broadcastengineering.com

IBC Showcases Television’s Future — tvtechnology.com

To cloud the future of television is — from flixya.com

 

 

5 reasons smart TV isn’t even born yet — from the Digital Living Room blog

  1. A Smart TV knows who you are.
  2. A Smart TV doesn’t make you hop from App to App looking for content.
  3. A Smart TV fully utilizes its most valuable asset.
  4. A Smart TV doesn’t over-utilize screen space.
  5. A Smart TV has an intelligent input device.

 

Also from the Digital Living Room site:

 

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