Silicon Valley ~ Epic PBS American Experience!

PBS American Experience spotlights Silicon Valley! Note, btw, how Silly Valley was really born as MIT-west with Francis Amasa Walker MIT President co-designing Palo Alto's Stanford University, Fred Terman MIT SB'24 creating Stanford Industrial Park, Bill Hewlett MIT SM'36 co-founding HP with first product based on his MIT Masters audio oscillator, William Shockley MIT PhD'36 co-inventor of transistors and co-founder of Shockley Semi, Bob Noyce MIT PhD'53 co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of both Fairchild Semi and Intel, Tom Perkins MIT SB'53 co-founder of Kleiner Perkins VC firm, Bob Metcalfe MIT SB'69 co-inventor of Ethernet and co-founder of 3Com, and dozens of other key MIT alumni figures playing early roles!

Transportation Trustbuster ~ WSJ on Uber Leader

WSJournal's Andy Kessler interviews Travis Kalanick, the Transportation Trustbuster and co-founder of Uber, the disruptive limo service that's sticking it to the taxi cartels by providing quality private driver transit experiences...

"Uber launched as an iPhone app in June 2010. The cars that iPhone users summon are typically town cars owned by a limousine company but not on a call. Instead of idly waiting for work, the nearest available driver answers the app call. Other cars are simply privately owned vehicles whose drivers have been vetted by Uber. The idea worked. How could Mr. Kalanick tell? Four months after the launch in San Francisco, Uber was served with a "cease and desist" order from the California Public Utility Commission and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. "Given my background," Mr. Kalanick says, alluding to being sued at Scour.com, "this was like homecoming." He verified with his lawyers that what Uber was doing was indeed legal, then the company took its case to the public through Twitter and email. [...] there's been so much corruption and so much cronyism in the taxi industry and so much regulatory capture that if you ask for permission upfront for something that's already legal, you'll never get it."

Read the rest. Fantastic!

Coney Island ~ Amusements Past and Present!

Check out Coney Island, home to amusement parks past and present! Fortune shares the latest numbers, including 11 million visitors to Coney Island last summer. Finally, some vintage footage of past boomtimes...

littleBits ~ Ayah Bdeir on Interactive Hardware

Excellent to have MIT Media Lab alumna entrepreneur Ayah Bdeir share her experiences in the Computing Culture group and most recently building littleBits -- both product and her startup! She's figuring out how electronics can enable creativity -- how can they be provocative, transparent, accessible. This means working towards object-oriented hardware, an idea paralleling object-oriented software with qualities like modularity, openness, big library, standard interfaces, and more. She gave some lovely examples of prior art, including Dieter Rams' Lectron. LittleBits modules just snap together with guiding magnets, simple interconnects, and lots of playful parts. The key is shifting from component-level view of the pieces to the interaction quality and experiences of the pieces -- i.e. not the LED but light, not the motor but the motion, not the capacitor but touch-sensing. So not object-oriented but interaction-oriented hardware. Check it out! She also shared the saga of developing and refining from 2008 to 2011 of all the elements, the color coda, magnetic interconnections, and overall business -- not easy! Ayah also showed some lovely videos of very young kids playing with littleBits -- baby engineers!-)

EXOdesk ~ Interactive Tabletop PC Experience

Thanks to UniqueDaily for spotting the EXOdesk...

Transformations ~ Joe Pine on Authentic Value...

MIT alum Joe Pine, pioneering author of Mass Customization and the Experience Economy, speaks on climbing the scale of economic value towards Transformations... And here at TED...

Extreme Sportsmen ~ Crazy Skillful Feats!

Z Holly spots Danny MacAskill... Lucinio Munoz and Nils Ansgar spot Wingsuiting... Elad Gil spots Dan Osman, Speed Climber... Miss Cellania spots Milky and Lil Demon... Ohad Folman spots Skydiving Sexy Freestyle... Joselin Mane spots Rubberlegs... Indian Pole Gymnastics... Indian Spiderman / Monkeyman... Bruce McHenry spots Insane Robot Dance... Russian dancers... Chinese pole dancers... 9 yo Chinese girl shuffling (later w/ Dad)...

Cirque Mechanics ~ Monetizing Performance Arts

The BBC's Philip Hampsheir reports that Cirque offshoot faces tough crowd in Dubai. This is a fascinating example of building a modern experience economy service offering. Plus it's beautiful!