software

Top 50: Technology

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Jay Trimble, mission operations manager, ground data system manager, and resource prospector for the Lunar Rover Mission at NASA. We talk about applying Agile, adopting design thinking and user-centered design, and what he and his team rely on to design and build software for mission control.

Jay Trimble on User-Centered Design, Agile, and Design Thinking at NASA

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Ben Yoskovitz, investor, entrepreneur, and former VP of product at VarageSale and at GoInstant. We talk about using metrics in product development and why anyone building anything new needs to have both hubris and intellectual honesty. Yoskovitz is co-author of Lean Analytics, and is teaching a two-day course on product strategy as part of the upcoming O'Reilly Design Conference.

Ben Yoskovitz on Lean Product Development Using Metrics to Build Successful Products and Companies

This week, I sit down with Matt LeMay, product coach and consultant, and author of "Product Management in Practice." We talk about the four guiding principles of product management, what he has learned about himself as a product manager, and how to conduct meaningful research.

Matt LeMay on the Four Principles of Product Management

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with Ken Kousen, an author, instructor, and consultant who is presenting the live online training courses Functional Programming in Java 8 and Getting Started with Spring Boot in September and October. He is also the author of the newly published O’Reilly book Modern Java Recipes: Simple Solutions to Difficult Problems in Java 8 and 9.

Ken Kousen on Java, Spring, and Groovy

with Martin Casado (@martin_casado), Michel Feaster (@michelfeaster) and Sonal Chokshi (@smc90)

The purpose of category creation, argue the guests in this episode of the podcast, isn't just about making a dent in the way companies work and changing what people do every day... it's about setting the price. And with that, comes creating the concept in people's heads, defining the value, and setting the rules of the game. But when you're going for a big change, you have to play by the current rules of the game, too.

And to make things even more complicated, theories about how "IT is dead" -- or the conviction that companies and departments beyond IT will become empowered through software -- are still very much in transition. Somehow we don't talk about that enough. That means startups need to do everything in two phases: for the now, and for the later and towards two constituencies: both direct lines of businesses and IT. So what does that mean for startups trying to navigate a complex enterprise, including internal debates around build vs. buy? How do you move beyond a few internal champions only? And just how long can a company cash out on founder charisma? In fact, all of these things can give entrepreneurs very confusing, mixed signals about whether or not they have product-market fit yet. So what patterns reveal that it's working?

In this episode of the a16z Podcast, general partner Martin Casado -- who helped create the category of "software-defined networking" in the enterprise through Nicira and then VMware (and has also written about the mixed messages involved in going to market when no market exists) -- and Michel Feaster, CEO and co-founder of Usermind, and who previously (as VP of products at Apptio) also defined the category and discipline of "technology business management" -- share their insights, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi. It's a long game, but if you can tease apart the signals, and nail some key moves early... you can win.

a16z Podcast: Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning

with Kristen Fortney (@kpfortney), Jeff Kaditz (@jeffkaditz), David Sinclair (@davidasinclair), and Hanne Tidnam (@omnivorousread)

Even without a mythical fountain of youth, scientific advances have already dramatically increased how long humans live. But those advances to date have also largely been due to lower mortality rates, less infectious disease, and better nutrition. So when will modern medicine increase not just our healthspan, but our lifespan -- slowing down and possibly even reversing aging? What tools will it take? And what else, beyond the biology and technology involved, would change -- in our healthcare system and society as a whole?

In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- recorded at a16z's November 2017 Summit -- Kristen Fortney, CEO and cofounder of BioAge Labs; Jeff Kaditz, CEO and cofounder of Q.Bio; David Sinclair, Co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School; and Michael Snyder, Professor and Department Chair of Genetics at Stanford University (as well as co-founder of and advisor to Q.Bio), in conversation with Hanne Tidnam, break down the science from the science fiction around the topics of longevity, health, and aging.

image credit: Garry Knight/ Flickr

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a16z Podcast: How to Live Longer and Better

Focusing only on the technical, "crunchy, wonky stuff" behind policies or products sometimes misses the humanity at the center of why we're doing the thing in the first place. Because systems -- whether algorithms and artificial intelligence, or capitalism and other such "operating systems" -- need to work for people, not the other way around. Or so observes economist and author Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) -- a public policy think tank focused on free enterprise (and where he recently announced he will be passing on the baton after a decade of leadership).

So how does this philosophy of human dignity and human potential apply to automation and jobs, to education, to entrepreneurship? And not just in the "conventional" entrepreneurial sense of building companies and products -- but in changing one's life? The answer, argues Brooks in this quick, hallway-style episode of the a16z Podcast with Sonal Chokshi (recorded in one of our earlier Washington, D.C. roadshows) -- has to be rooted in the philosophy of human meaning. And that involves truly needing each other... so no one is left behind given technological progress and innovation.

image credit: Maria Eklind/ Flickr

a16z Podcast: On Morals and Meaning in Products, Business, and Life

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with Rebecca Parsons, chief technology officer at ThoughtWorks. She will be leading the workshop Building Evolutionary Architectures Hands-On at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), July 16-19, 2018, in Portland, Oregon. Parsons also is co-author (with Neal Ford and Patrick Kua) of the book Building Evolutionary Architectures.

Rebecca Parsons on Evolutionary Architecture

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.

Rebecca Parsons on Evolutionary Architecture

O'Reilly Radar