Team Member: Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Humanity has been playing games such as chess, Mahjong, dominoes, and various card games, in some cases for thousands of years. These games are fundamentally social and tactile and have stood the test of time. David Merrill, President and Co-founder of Sifteo, proposes a new chapter in social games that he believes maintains human community while making full use of cutting-edge technology.

Through the extended metaphor of the current 'Slow Food' movement, Stefan Agamanolis presents Distance Lab's ideas for the future of telecommunications. He discusses future and more personalized methods of communication, including immersion tank 'isophones,' platforms to simultaneously watch movies and interact with the audience, and music players that allow listeners to broadcast, share, and interact, just to name a few.

Last year the internet ran out of 32-bit IP addresses. Sharing IP addresses, as in the standard IPv4, has its problems, but who would volunteer to be the first to switch to the 128-bit standard, IPv6? Thus, June 8, 2011 became World IPv6 Day, in which thousands of big sites switched to IPv6, with a dual stack fall-back to IPv4. In this talk, Ian Flint, Architect at Yahoo!, tells the story of how Yahoo geared up and tested for the switch, and what they learned.

An 'app-in-store' model is a dramatic shift from the bulky but comfortable advantages of a big corporate website, where large, constant refreshing or redeployment of the site's entire content happens up to 30 times everyday. Dion Almaer, Ben Galbraith expound on how Android technology is influencing big retail, including Wal-mart.

No infrastructure, no electricity. No electricity, no cable lines. No cable lines, no coaxial Internet connection. No coaxial Internet connection, no problem, because this is how, on the continent of Africa, Android and cell phones become the solution, according to Claire Hunsaker. Her mission is to cultivate consumer market within poverty-stricken areas of Kenya by focusing on access to practical data, developing payment systems, and efficient networking utilizing Google's Android operating system.

Introducing his topic as broadband's ubiquitousness as it applies to telephony, Martin Taylor explores the telephony landscape in the future, as well as the differences between fixed and mobile broadband. He also presents several fundamental elements of phone service, including phone numbers, network applications, and the relationship between the provider and the user; Taylor then explains how these key factors will what providers will successfully grow in the upcoming years.

Can a phone function as a satellite? This is the thoughtfully revolutionary question expounded upon by Will Marshall. Cell phone technology seems to have everything necessary to function successfully in earth orbit but what are the drawbacks, and vulnerabilities? Will Marshall, Staff Scientist at USRA/NASA, talks about them.

Broadband is still relatively cost-prohibitive, and New America Foundation's Sascha Meinrath has a solution. Rather than having carriers provide all bandwidth for customers, the online market is heading towards a model where apps and data are based on free delivery concepts with pre-loaded bandwidth paid for by the advertiser. Describing the hypothetical and, he says, probably inevitable future of apps, Meinrath discusses the possibilities of content providers paying for select bandwidth in order to ensure large-scale access.

Presenting ten key features of the Android in less than ten minutes, Square Inc.'s Bob Lee discusses key innovations that Android has had since the beginning. With themes from individual multi-tasking to global corporate use, as well as some background into the creation of the platform, Bob Lee quickly and clearly summarizes the best of what Android has to offer.

The number of calling minutes in the world is growing since it was created in 2003, but their shift towards Skype is growing faster. Sten Tamkivi, chief spokesperson for Skype, looks behind this trend, sharing what Skype has learned about simultaneously serving both the most and less developed markets in the world and why this is important. Skype handles one-third of all call minutes, is the only quality video conversation provider with a global footprint and sees increased growth due to video cameras on mobile phones and notebook computers.