Harvard and MIT Launch $60M Nonprofit Online EdX Platform

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today are launching a nonprofit, open source joint online learning venture called EdX, with the first courses to start in the fall of this year.
EdX President Anant Agarwal

The Five-Mile Rule

To simplify the search [for the next great companies], I suggest you look within a five-mile radius of Stanford.

– Stanford graduate Peter Thiel, in conversation with Reid Hoffman

Interviewing Tech’s Best Multitaskers: Sebastian Thrun and Jack Dorsey

Charlie Rose aired a pair of interviews this Wednesday with Sebastian Thrun and Jack Dorsey, two tech guys who have much in common.
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Cloud-Based Phone Software Start-Up Twilio Taps Former Jive Exec as Its CMO

Not clear on what Twilio is all about? Then someone has her job cut out for her.
lynda-smith

Glassmap and Highlight Take on the Next Frontier of Location Sharing: Doing It All the Time

New location-sharing apps promise to provide more value to users than ever — but they will surely teeter awfully close to the edge of creepy for many people.
Glassmap

Watch: Sebastian Thrun Leaves Stanford to Teach Online

Stanford and Google’s Sebastian Thrun announced on stage that he is giving up his tenured professorship to teach free online courses at a new start-up he’s founded, called Udacity.
SebastianThrunDLD

Voices

Larry Page Visits His Younger Self (Comic)

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site.
future

Treehouse Turns Learning to Build a Web Site Into a Game With Code Racer

Code Racer is an online game that pits newbie coders and designers against each other to demonstrate their basic skills — as fast as they can.
code_racer_screen

Happy 20th Anniversary to Silicon Valley’s First Web Site

On Dec. 12, 1991, Paul Kunz set up a Web interface based on a Web server to search a popular database of particle physics literature, and sent an email to Tim Berners-Lee about it.
SLAC SPIRES-feature

Lytro Comes Into Focus (AsiaD Demo)

After shrouding its digital camera in secrecy for the last many months, Lytro has made its big reveal, and showed up at AsiaD to give a hands-on demo.
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Lytro Light Field Camera Revealed