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The O'Reilly Design Podcast explores how experience design -- and experience designers -- are shaping business, the Internet of Things, and other domains.

O'Reilly Design Podcast

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It’s well understood that bitcoin can be used to buy and sell things/services, and the ecosystem of people accepting the cryptocurrency as payment is expanding. But what else can we use the underlying protocol for? How can we expand the same system that enables bitcoin-the-currency to flow and transactions to be recorded? This discussion (from the a16z Academic Roundtable 2014) examines that question, and answers why the currency is just the beginning of the story when it comes to this technology. You can watch video of the entire discussion here: http://a16z.com/2014/10/24/the-bitcoin-network-effect/

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a16z Podcast: Beyond Bitcoin -- The Blockchain

In this week’s Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Joel Marsh, designer and author of UX for Beginners. We talk about design as a scientific way of thinking, what happens when you try to cash a check in Sweden, combining behavioral economics and design, and why learning design is like learning to play the piano.

Joel Marsh on the Science of Design

Intel's Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP) combines open source components to make data analytics and data applications easier to manage. O'Reilly's Rachel Roumeliotis and Intel's Chuck Freedman talk about TAP's functionality.

A data platform for data scientists, DevOps, and developers

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Mikio Braun, delivery lead and data scientist at Zalando. After spending previous years in academia, Braun recently made the decision to switch to industry. He shared some observations about building large-scale systems, particularly deploying data applications in production systems. Given his longstanding background as a machine learning researcher and practitioner, I wanted to get his take on topics like deep learning, hybrid systems, feature engineering, and AI applications.

Practical Machine Learning Techniques for Building Intelligent Applications

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Mike Tung, founder and CEO of Diffbot - a company dedicated to building large-scale knowledge databases. Diffbot is at the heart of many web applications, and it’s starting to power a wide array of intelligent applications. We talked about the challenges of building a web-scale platform for doing highly accurate, semi-supervised, structured data extraction. We also took a tour through the AI landscape, and the early days of self-driving cars.

Using AI to Build a Comprehensive Database of Knowledge

This week, I sit down with Travis Lowdermilk senior UX designer at Microsoft, and Jessica Rich, UX researcher at Microsoft; Lowdermilk and Rich are also co-authors of the "Customer Driven Playbook." We talk about why failing fast is not always a good approach, sensemaking, and never losing track of the customer’s voice.

Travis Lowdermilk and Jessica Rich on Building a Customer-Driven Culture at Microsoft

This week, I sit down with Cynthia Savard Saucier, director of design at Shopify and author of Tragic Design. Saucier also is keynoting at Velocity in New York, October 1-4, 2017. We talk about moving from working in design to leading designers, the real and sometimes negative impact that design decisions can have on users, and how design is organized at Shopify.

Cynthia Savard Saucier on Design at Shopify

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Cheryl Platz, senior designer at Microsoft for the Azure Portal and Marketplaces. We talk about the challenges of working on a top-secret design project, the research behind Amazon's Echo Look, the skills you need to start designing for voice, and how studying improv can make you a better designer.

Cheryl Platz on Designing the Amazon Echo Look

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with John Whalen, chief experience officer at 10 Pearls, a digital development company focused on mobile and web apps, enterprise solutions, cyber security, big data, IoT,  and cloud and dev ops. We talk about the “six minds” that underlie each human experience, why it’s important for designers to understand brain science, and what people really look for in a voice assistant.

John Whalen on Using Brain Science in Design

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Julie Stanford, founder and principal of user experience agency Sliced Bread Design. We talk about how to get in the rapid experimentation mindset, the design thinking process, and how to get started with rapid experimentation at your company. Hint: start small.

Julie Stanford on Vetting Designs Through Rapid Experimentation

Jon Bruner and Mike Loukides talk about the classical music publishing industry and how it's being disrupted by projects like the Petrucci Music Library (http://imslp.org/) that make public-domain scores available online.

The future of classical music

Jim Stogdill, Edd Dumbill and Roger Magoulas have a conversation about in-memory databases and the impact on real time analysis. Leave questions and comments for us at http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/05/talking-about-in-memory.html

Talking about in-memory

Jon Bruner, Mike Loukides and Jim Stogdill from O'Reilly Radar muse on the return of software to the physical world.

Software and the physical world

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about anthropology in big data, advances in JavaScript, searching for ancient civilizations, the importance of context, and good sites for checking the weather.

Related blog post: http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/radar-podcast-anthropology-big-data-and-the-importance-of-context.html

Anthropology, big data, and the importance of context

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about what's been on their minds this week: the NSA's surveillance programs, what defense contractors will do with their technology as defense budgets dry up, and a Californian who isn't doing what you think he's doing with hydroponics.

For more on these topics, and links to the things we talked about, see http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/radar-podcast-the-internet-of-things-prism-and-defense-technology-that-goes-civilian.html.

The Internet of Things, PRISM, and defense technology that goes civilian

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.