CMU Olympus Show and Tell

In honnor of Jia Ji I’m live blogging the CMU Olympis show and tell.

Lenore Blum kicked things off welcoming everyone, explaining Olympis events and outnumg the presentations.

Next is Randy Bryant dean of school of computer science at CMU. He is talking about cloud computing and referencing the google a lot. Google has secret machines that can deal with hardware failures and keep things moving (we already know that). Renting cloud computing space is a lot cheaper than owning hardware. Hadoop is a company writing software for cloud computing solutions. Yahoo has worked with CMU to do research and development on these types of Programs.

Next up is Jessica Hodges form Disney Pittsburgh. She is a proffersor of computer science and robotics at CMU. She is about to direct a lab of robotics at cmu – http:// www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhk/

Why Disney? Wants to really get into research with remote labs and individual labs. CMU wants to broaden the intillectual community and just look cool (just kidding).

Next is Jessica Trybus from Etcetera Entertainment http:/www.eteceteradutainment.com. She works at CMU in the ETC and is talking about video game design to learning and education. She is going to talk about the fireman simulator again I know it. VR simulators and other non traditional simulators from heath industries to PR to finances.

She wants to create games to solve problems in industry. How about a game that teaches gamers how to make games and shower. Companies and needed training games that force employees to go through the motions. Giving an Alcoa example. I wonder if safety statistics increased after emplyees played the game?

Matt Humphrey talking about silicon valley and where he is with his startup. Now doing consumer stuff at his company Kickball Labs.

Stuff he has been thinking about. Viral marketing – harnessing social networking for marketing and grabbing consumers. Making sense of data and knowing how to study it. Thinking about becoming the next Apple or Microsoft (I don’t recognize the photo he showed). Finally delivery needs to make sense and not loose user and make sense with your products.

Economy: it is going to be harder for newbs. Find your business model much earlier. Tons of products being launched each week but we’ll see things become more clear but the startup industry is relatively positive.

Pimping wegame.com social network for video games. Adroll.com – not sure what this is… And crunchyroll.com just check it out.

Giving tips on the success of new startups.

Suggesting PGH as a realistic place for startups because of cost of living.

Finally Rich Lunak of Innovation Works us speaking. This should be interesting because I’m sitting next to Maradeth. He is going to predict the future in 10 minutes, jk. IW is third most active investor in the country. Pimping Alpha Lab – get your app in by oct. 30th.

PGH venture investments have grown reasonably over the past few years. 24 seed companies raised over 1 million dollars. Going over local successes.

He just mentioned PodCamp as part of the future and part of how we are going to get there. Wants to support grassroots and startups as they will be the future.

Going to mingle this was a really informational event, thanks to CMU and everyone who worked to make it happen.

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