DesignCon 2007 just wrapped up in California. This conference focuses upon electronic design, and the three keynote speeches are available via free webcast:

• Steve Plolzin – Senior Fellow & Chief Architect, AMD
  • Focus of talk: The shift to multi-core processors
• Willem Roelandts – President & CEO, Xilinx
  • Focus of talk: Product cycles in electronic design ("S" demand curves)
• Leah Jamieson – Dean of Engineering, Purdue and President IEEE 2007
  • Focus of talk: The future of engineering education

I like the webcast format. Thumbnail slides of the presentations are available that allows one to skip forward to any given point in a talk. The overview slides from each presentation are given below. The CuriousCat Engineering Blog alerted me to DesignCon.
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No problem … attend via the web! In my case, I watched five CEO’s including Bill Gates and Chad Hurley (YouTube) speak on the topic of The Impact of Web 2.0 and How It Will Affect Your Future. However you can attend most sessions via an archived webcast:

• World Economic Forum – Webcasts, Podcasts & Vodcasts

Although there is not a webcast available for this session, its worth checking out "A First Life Perspective of Avatars and the Virtual World" There are links to online conversations and a forum on this topic.

Following up on my earlier posting from today on the topic of Wikinomics and online collaboration, via Professor Andrew McAfee’s blog, I’ve learned that Harvard Business School has now published a case study on Wikipedia, and it’s freely available online:

• Wikipedia Case Study

Harvard (Professor’s McAfee and Lakhani) would love feedback.

Everyone should download and listen to the Optimize magazine’s podcast interview with the author of Wikinomics, Don Tapscott. This new business book, Wikinomics, explains how "smart companies" are using the value of Web 2.0, and social networking software to increase online design collaboration, and thus increase the speed of VPD (velocity product development).

Perhaps what makes this book different from many others is you, the reader, can help author the final chapter. The book, Wikinomics, comes with a wiki! The idea is to practice what you preach. The wiki is from SocialText … an open source build upon Mediawiki. Finally, this book espouses how to use Web 2.0 collaborative tools in the corporate environment … not just to author / create content for the open source community. Here are some important links:

• Wikinomics
  • Blog
  • Chapter #1
  • SocialText – Ross Mayfield
  • Wiki
  • Root Site
• Wikipedia
  • Harvard Case Study
  • Professor Andrew McAfee

This morning, like most Monday mornings, I listened to the 60 Minutes podcast while driving to work. Today’s episode was: Get Me The Geeks! Since I’m a nerd, I was intrigued. The basic theme of the story is we folks who really understand software and hardware have become what was the "valued" automotive repairman of yesteryear. How many of you maintain systems for friends, family, etc.?

• Get Me The Geeks Podcast – 60 Minutes Archive

Quite frankly, if you’re not time shifting using RSS feeds, you don’t quality as one of the geeks! I also time shift by hooking my computer up to my HDTV’s SVGA input and then watching network programming via the web. This is how I watch 60 Minutes video. RSS feeds free me from the task of tracking what new content has become available.