1) The student (and his/her parents) is increasingly going to take control of his/her education including choice of schools, teachers, classes, and even curriculum. That's what the web does. It transfers control from institutions to individuals and its going to do that to education too.

2) Alternative forms of education (home schooling, charter schools, online learning, adult education/lifelong learning) are on the rise and we are just at the start of that trend.

3) Students will increasingly find themselves teaching as well. Peer production will move from just producing content to producing learning as well.

4) Look for technologies and approaches that reduce the marginal cost of an incremental student. Imagine that it will go to zero at some point and get on that curve.

5) The education system we currently have was built to train the industrial worker. As we move to an information driven society it is high time to question everything about the process by which we educate our society. That process and the systems that underlie it will look very different by the time our children's children are in school.

6) Investment opportunities that work around our current institutions will be more attractive but we cannot ignore disruptive approaches that will work inside the existing system. Open courseware, lesson sharing, social networks, and lightweight/public publishing tools are examples of disruptive approaches that will work inside the existing system.

7) Teachers are more important than ever but they will have to adapt and many will have to learn to work outside the system. It was suggested at hacking education that teachers are like bank tellers in the 1970s. I don't agree but I do think they are like newspaper reporters in the 1990s.

8) Credentialing and accreditation in the traditional sense (diplomas) will become less important as the student's work product becomes more available to be sampled and measured online.

9) Testing and assessment will play more of a role in adapting the teaching process. A good example of this is how video games constantly adapt to the skill level of the player to create the perfect amount of creative tenstion. Adaptive learning systems will soon be able to do the same for students.

10) Spaces for learning (schools and libraries) will be re-evaluated. It was suggested that Starbucks is the new library. I don't think that will be the case but the value of dedicated physical spaces for learning will decline. It has already happened in the world of professional education.

11) Learning is bottom up and education is top down. We'll have more learning and less education in the future

• Web is only 10-20% of the traffic, the rest is through API services


• Web servers are still 50% of the cluster.


• Regular incoming traffic peaks are around 80 tweets per second. I expected this to be a lot more.


• before the upgrades their web servers shipped only 3.32 requests per second!


• For each tweet, message gets inserted for each user which follows a tweet. In average, a user has 120 followers so this comes to about 9600 messages/s at peak times


• Message servers run on three nodes. They decided to write their own messaging software in order to make the protocol memcached-like, and did not evaluate other available solutions.


• During Obama’s inauguration, they peaked at about 350 tweets per second for around five minutes.


• They had a ton of problems with garbage collection but strangelly haven’t looked into JRockit RT or something similar that has predictable GC. Twitter JVM middleware runs on the SUN JVM

Visual Communication Made Easy

ScreenSteps Desktop helps you help other people.

Teachers can teach, Bloggers can demonstrate, Tech Support can communicate, Developers can document, Trainers can instruct.

Like you, I probably have about a thousand different ideas and streams of thought during the course of a day. Unlike you, I don't write any of them down.

I do this because there is no way I'd get anything done if I didn't. I don't mind forgetting some key insight, because if it was important or relevant enough, it'll translate into sometime I will write down when the time is right. If not, it's probably something that I shouldn't bother wasting my time with. (That's not to suggest it isn't valuable).

You only have so many hours in the day to work on so many things. People like us need to ignore our own brain 80% of the time to be productive. It's a curse really.

We treat notes as a stream and you categorize notes using hashcodes.

We have an iPhone and Android client so you can easily include pictures in your notes.

We aren't live yet, but will be in a few weeks. =)

If you want me to contact you when we are live sign up below,

https://3banana.com/doLogon.action?s=hn

</blatant self promotion :P>

We are building something even simpler, a personal syslog synced across phone/web/command line.

Fundamentally we view notes as a stream like a log file or Twitter.

You will have one place to easily and quickly dump everything, then be able to grep out the relevant information, and then late bind the decision on what to do with that information.

I can't say enough good about this program. i use it everywhere (mac, web, macbook, iphone). it's certainly not perfect (auto indent?, the ability to copy check boxes) but it is certainly good. I use a moleskine too, but for searching and loading up data, and keeping task lists, with pictures! Evernote has made me very happy.

this question was asked awhile back on HN and that is how I found out about. I've tried various things in the past, but evernote has worked great for me. evernote.com.

Evernote is to my memos what dropbox is to my work in progress files.

For task lists, I tried a bunch of things at one point, and only one that stuck was Taskpaper (http://hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper). It's so simple that I actually use it. I've been using it for about a year now on a sustained basis. It has simple emacs keybindings, like other OS X text editors, so that's nice for me too.

For ideas best expressed by complicated freehand drawings, I use pen and paper. I always carry an unruled (no lines) notebook for this purpose.

For a while I was using a small drawing tablet and Curio (http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/) for drawings, but it didn't stick. The GUI was a little too slow, and plugging in the tablet was too much of an extra step. A tablet Mac would solve this. (Yeah, yeah I could get a PC, but I'd rather avoid it if I can.)

When I take notes at a meeting or a talk, I use TextEdit (again, w/ simple emacs keybindings), and depend on spotlight to help me relocate things. I prepend all filenames with the date in <2 digit year><2 digit month><2 digit day> format, so by default things sort by date across filesystems etc. This is surprisingly useful.

On the go? Moleskine

We are live, you can check us out at the link below:

http://www.ubernote.com

Started with the lovely and simple Notepad textfiles, but after a bit they are too simple and too hard to maintain, thus not good.

Then I used Google Notebook for a long time, was easy to add stuff, but not so easy to find it later. Plus it's still too simple for my liking, can't categorize ideas too well.

I switched recently to Evernote, which seems to be an improvement over Google Notebook, but for some reason I still don't feel comfortable with it. The fact that I can type offline and sync with different computers or read my ideas online is really welcome and handy, though.

Everytime I fall back to my paper notebook, which is also too simple and not search friendly, but I like handwriting and for some strange reason, ideas flow much better than when I write rather than type them. The real only grudge I have with it is that there is no backspace key and no "insert a new line in the middle of the text" either :(

Freemind is a good open source mindmap editor for the desktop.

Or you could try my online, browser-based mindmap app. http://thoughtmuse.com ;)

Xmind Mind Mapping: I paid like 120 bucks for it, now they decided to open source it (that I did not like much, but now you can get it for free!) Their software is amazing.
http://www.xmind.net/

MacJournal: Quick notes, texts, transcripts, voice notes, video notes, etc I have in there. They have full screen writing which is amazing.
http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=85

First stage UIs: Balsamiq.
http://www.balsamiq.com/

Final UIs and documentation: Axure Pro (Windows only :( ) (VMWare anyone :) )
http://www.axure.com/

Creating manuals, customer support and FAQ: ScreenSteps. (I cannot recommend this software enough! AMAZING)
http://www.bluemangolearning.com/screensteps/

Project Management: Merlin. Fantastic software.
http://www.projectwizards.net/en/

Sales and CRM: Daylite. Just started using it. Very powerful, but the learning curve is steep.
http://marketcircle.com/

Remote team work: Basecamp and Campfire.
www.37signals.com

If everything else fails: a pen and paper :)

Hope this helps

I’ve been using OneNote for a little while now for tracking daily status for stand-ups, and it’s pretty much what I need - good WYSIWYG editor, search, groups, etc.

Picking the right tool up-front seems pretty key, cause once you have a few months of notes written, it’s tough to switch.

Good post.

I am the sole note-taker in the group which means that I get asked the questions about what we did and when. I use Evernote (non-synced) and record daily activities. I also set up a personal wiki on my server so that other people can access notes that I have taken. I have to use a windows machine at work so I use screwturn wiki (it was tough to get that unblocked!)

Also, time tracking with Rachota is a breeze! I have turned 2 of my 3 co-workers on to it.

Or to be more specific: I'd rather spend my deduction and imagination time engaged with my peers on solving problems, than sitting in quiet contemplation of information that I do not have convenient access to.

We don't know which native applications will emerge as ones that combine these unique capabilities and new behaviors into true breakout services, but here are some categories that we find interesting along with some of the challenges that they face:

* Location-based social networking, such as Loopt, Brightkite and foursquare. The big question in this category is whether these new networks will gain enough scale that they can compete effectively with the mobile offerings of existing social networks, or if the mobile networks differentiation in value proposition will be insufficient to overcome the current gap in scale.

如何选人？选什么样的人？很多经理都会面临这样的问题。选对一个人，会大大提升团队的“战斗力”，而选错一个人，会给团队带来可能很严重的“伤害”。俞军说，在搜索引擎领域，我们在选人时，不会特别看重这个人的相关经验，所有人都是在一个起跑线上。至于今后的个人发展也和是否有相关工作经验无关，而是这个人是否投入到了这个领域，在认真的学习这个领域，是否具有潜力。俞军告诉我们，用有经验的人可能一时轻松，但如果他不能再跟着产品成长，将来你会更累；用有潜力的人，现在你可能要多付出一点来带他，可是将来他会加速成长，比你对产品的理解更深。

产品部门在选人这一点上，可以用四个字概括——以文取人。我们不看重简历上的背景，性别，血型，而是根据他写的产品分析看这个人对于产品和用户的感觉，这些感觉是从文字上可以感觉到的。而判断力是源于自己对于产品和用户的感觉积累，当你读过一千个或者更多的产品分析后，再读到一篇产品分析的时候就会一下子给这个分析打一个准确的分数。另外从产品分析里的方法运用上可以看出这个人发现问题和分析问题的逻辑能力。

俞军在总结选人经验时，特别强调了要选择和公司，团队的价值观一致的人，这样会大大提升工作的效率。更应该遵循“宁缺毋滥”的原则，宁可人少，每个人累一点或是少做一些事，也不要盲目扩充人力，种下不良的种子。

给他成功与犯错的机会——用人的关键在于授权

选对人之后就要考虑如何用好他（她），培养他（她），不能浪费人才资源，这也是本次讲座的重点和意义，引起了在场同学的广泛关注。俞军说首先的一个大原则就是要——充分授权，目标管理。充分授权能够提高人的主观能动性，而目标一定是协调后达成一致的目标。对于产品部门而言，和不同的产品团队合作，就会做出不同的东西，因此依赖于脑力劳动的工作，能动性是非常重要的。

另外就是要营造平等的工作氛围，有试错的心态，并能够不断总结。平等的氛围有助于发挥个人能动性。对于试错的心态，俞军分享自己带团队的经验，他说当自己和团队的成员出现意见不一致的时候，要尽量在把控关键点前提下将“试错”的机会留给团队成员。因为如果这个成员的想法此次被证明是错的，那他（她）就会从“错”中学到最多的经验，从而尽快成长。如果领导的意见被证明是错的，那团队成员将没有机会获得“错事经验值”。最后总结尤为重要，总结要有开放的心态，多总结不好的方面，下次可以得到更好的改善。之后再与团队成员互相分享，整体成长会很快。

俞军提到应该“助理比经理更懂，经理比总监更懂”，越专注细致的了解一件事情的人最有发言权。最差的方式就是向上分享，单线汇报。真正需要做的是和自己的团队商量，得出什么样的结论，基于事实本身推出结论。需要培养个人持续否定自我的精神，最终的结论是靠发现更多的不足找到，而不是推销观点，永远站在事实的一边，结论会越来越正确。

用人时一门学问，需要大处着眼，小处着手，就像下一盘棋。人才培养，是一个厚积薄发的过程，需要高瞻远瞩，也正如一盘棋局。培养人才，用好人才，才能赢得这盘棋，做好这个项目。

两个小时悄然滑过。抓住难得的与俞军可以交流的机会，大家也开始在人才选择培养之外踊跃提问有同学问：“你认为百度成功的原因是什么？”俞军说：“是在正确的时间做了正确的事情，那个时候，如果没有百度，也一定会有另一个中文搜索引擎兴起，而百度在这个最佳的时机选择了这个领域，且做得最好，所以这种成功可以说是天时地利的必然。

杨祉雄算了一笔账，要做一家拥有千万级收入的在线软件服务企业，必须得有10万以上的付费用户。那么涵盖的中国中小企业群体至少也要在200万家以上。

　　目前即便是在线用户最多的阿里软件也不过拥有30万的用户，这个数字距200万中小企业覆盖面也差得很远。而传统的企业管理软件厂商在之前20年间积累的用户总数还不及这个标准的一半，譬如用友花了22年积累了大约70万用户。