Topic: Business
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with David Zimmerman, CEO of Kalexsyn. Zimmerman discusses Kalamazoo, Michigan, a typical Midwest American town - until all the plants closed. The answer was Biotech.
Harnessing legal music on the web is primarily hampered by a lack of data. Traditional record labels are unsure of the true nature of this emerging industry and have little idea how to turn a profit. John Heilemann leads Jeffrey Mallett and Mickey Hart in a discussion of the evolving landscape of online music distribution and how current solutions, like Apple's iTunes, need to change and improve. Mallet, as chairman of SNOCAP, explains how his company's business model will alter the concept of music distribution from an artist's perspective.
Jeff Bezos has seen it all in his decade-long quest to build Amazon into the biggest internet retailer in the universe. During the Web 1.0 era he was Time magazine's Man of the Year, but many on Wall Street wrote his company off during the bust. Now Bezos is back, and his plan to turn Amazon into a web platform for both consumers and partners has paid off handsomely. So what's next?
The networked economy is transforming the way we capitalize business and culture. Yochai Benkler, one of the top thinkers on commons-based approaches to managing resources, weaves together several fascinating threads to argue that decentralization and collaboration are shifting the balance of power to the people in the production of knowledge, goods and services; creating an economy where resources are not owned and outputs are shared.
Outsourcing work to other countries presents challenges along with the obvious benefits. Companies must overcome time, cultural, and language differences to compete effectively. In this session of the Software 2006 conference David DeWalt, President of the EMC Software Group, talks about how his company has adapted to changing global business needs and what has gone into integrating traditional software business practices with open source software platforms such as Linux, PHP and MySQL.
AOL is one of a handful of truly global web brands. Chairman and CEO Jonathan F. Miller talks to John Batelle about AOL's future needs and its transition to the Web 2.0 mindset at the 2005 Web 2.0 conference. Miller stresses the need for AOL to focus on balancing traditional and user-generated content, while maintaining its key position and web brand. This approach is made more difficult because, although AOL seeks to expand beyond its current technological and geopolitical boundaries, it continues to be faithful to its origins as an ISP.
Although blogs originally grew from the concept of the personal journal, Scoble and Israel believe that they can also be an important way for businesses to be represented to the public. Corporations can get their messages out the public quickly and receive immediate feedback. They can also be a source of employee innovation and satisfaction.
A diverse panel of players in the current and cutting edge of entertainment discuss the future of entertainment at this panel discussion from Web 2.0. Mark Cuban, Michael Powell, Evan Williams, and Reed Hastings share insights about the effect of the increased availability of broadband on entertainment delivery and discuss the conflict between the forces of control and the forces of freedom. They also discuss the future of content delivery, the inherent differences between audio and video, and the trade-off between convenience and quality.
The US Patent System no longer functions in the way that it was intended. Obvious and trival patents have been granted, even in some cases where there is an existing product and the idea is not new. Beth Noveck has more modern ideas that leverage powerful existing technologies like collaborative filtering to reinvent this overwhelmed system. Using a peer-to-peer system of experts in a given field, the US Patent Office could elminate many of the road-blocks holding up the current system and also grant fewer specious or duplicate patents.
The European Union's Lisbon Agenda laid out a ten year plan to produce the world's leading knowledge economy by 2010, but all the while the US continues to dominate the software sector. Case in point, open source software innovations that begin in Europe often end up migrating their talents and profits to the US. In this presentation, Paul Everitt makes a compelling case that economic goals of Open Source entrepreneurs and the political goals of the EU planners have much to offer each other.
