Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

#ATD10 Kicks Off With Apple’s Tim Cook — Also Adding Online Education to Mix With Khan and Hennessy

The All Things Digital team is all set down in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., under sunny skies and with a lineup of tech and media speakers that are even more stunning than the spectacular view here.

We begin tonight with the first major interview that Apple CEO Tim Cook has given since he took over at the iconic tech powerhouse last year.

There will be lots to talk to him about in the session of more than an hour onstage in front of a long-sold-out crowd — from Apple’s next products to the situation in China to patent wars to his take on what it is like to run the world’s most valuable and influential tech company.

Before taking over from the late and very great Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Cook ran vast and critical swaths of the company already, so it will be interesting to hear about the state of the company under his leadership.

Along with Cook, other speakers over the three-day event include Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Zynga’s founder and CEO Mark Pincus, Kleiner Perkins Mary Meeker, Hollywood phenom Aaron Sorkin and many more. We also have many killer demos of new products.

Plus, we just added what Walt Mossberg and I consider a critical session on online education, with Stanford President John Hennessy and the Khan Academy’s founder and executive director Salman Khan.

In addition to running one of the most influential educational institutions around and a Silicon Valley powerhouse, Hennessy wrote the book on computer architecture design.

Literally. First as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford and later as an administrator, Hennessy has brought Silicon Valley and the university closer than ever. Even as president of Stanford, his research continues to push out the boundaries around the architecture of high performance computers.

“Each one, teach one” is a laudable goal, but it led Khan to tutor his young cousin in math, even though the two of them were not in the same town. So, he devised video tutorials that went viral on YouTube, and now Khan’s eponymous Khan Academy has each one teaching thousands every day.

Since launching three years ago, the Khan Academy has provided 150 million lessons over the Internet and is the most-used library of videos on the Web. According to its Web site, the lessons are open to all, even “a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology.”

We have one more big speaker to add for our primo second night slot, so watch this space.

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