Technology & Innovation

Hooman Anvar is not only a User Experience (UX) design thought leader, but he’s also a good-hearted person. I met him because he was one of the winners of our Inventathon competition. Afterwards, he told me that he wanted to further deepen his design practice into building products and services to change and improve people’s lives. He’s an ideal person to work on that mission as his approach to UX is based on designing with empathy. In this interview, he’ll tell you what that means and how to apply it to you life.

Erik Birkeneder is not your stereotypical lawyer. He’s more like Marshall from “How I Met your Mother.” He’s a really nice guy, loves helping people, and from the midwest. But he’s also a smart and savvy IP lawyer. He specializes in patents related to medicine and bioengineering and is talking to us today about what people can do to protect themselves from getting sued for patent infringement and some common mistakes he sees people make in this area. This interview will be especially relevant for first-time entrepreneurs.

When I first moved to Los Angeles about 7 years ago, I missed the startup culture I left in the bay area. The LA startup scene was pretty small at the time. There were a few intimate meetup groups where people quickly got to know each other. That’s how I met Jose daVeiga. It was a Saturday afternoon while I was on the way to the beach, stopping into a meetup event to eat some pizza and drink some beer. My friend came over to me and told me I should meet a guy she just met as we had a lot in common. Jose has a love for science and startups. He’s worked on a number of startups and currently funded by Technicolor Ventures to build Into, a company that creates a social graph of people’s interest in products.

This week’s guest is Justin Long, a researcher and engineer at 3 Tier Logic. As you may have read in recent coverage on Justin’s Tinderbox project, he has figured out a way to automate dating apps like Tinder using image-recognition algorithms, saving time and, as we’ll hear about today, planting the seed for future work in image recognition outside of online dating.

Today we’re going to talk to Matei Zaharia. As of this March, he’ll be an Assistant Professor at MIT. He’s currently the CTO at a startup company called DataBricks that uses a rapidly growing piece of software (Spark) he created in the area of “big data analytics.” Spark is powerful and important, but runs behind the scenes for technology entrepreneurs and companies. It doesn’t have the sexiness like a new phone or wearable device that makes the world want to get one immediately. So how did he get it to take off?