SPARK's Sherife Abdel Messih on Egyptian Talent!

Tonight I hosted Sherife Abdel Messih, an Egyptian MIT student, co-founder of the MIT Egyptian Club, and founder of SPARK! on HighTechFever.tv where he shared his experience running a summer camp for talented high school students. This past summer Sherife organized a week-long experience for over a dozen high schoolers, connecting them with older recent university grads and special guest speakers all in an amazing Red Sea resort called El Gouna. Next summer the plan is to dial things up and support several dozen students from high schools throughout Egypt and over a dozen collegians in a sequence of longer camps. This SPARK! Camp is one part of Sherife's larger vision for developing a talent pipeline in Egypt of young innovators and entrepreneurs who will transform and build the country, and help craft an entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Justin Cook on Prospect Theory & Behavior!

I was pleased to host MIT Sloan alumnus Justin Cook on my show to speak about the vast and compelling domain of Prospect Theory, behavioral economics, and more! This is an area Justin is especially interested in since even before his time as a key player in both the MIT Innovation Club and MIT Marketing Club, the places I got to know him best. Justin put the best excerpt of our HighTechFever chat online...

Innovation Economy's Scott Kirsner, Author of Inventing The Movies

I interviewed Scott Kirsner on my HighTechFever.tv show today, mostly reviewing his new book, Inventing The Movies, a survey of the century-long saga of cinema and technology! Scott dates the beginnings to the Kinetoscope by none other than Thomas Edison as the birthpoint of modern movies. Edison made money renting viewings of movie snippets on a person-by-person basis. While inventive himself, Edison the businessman fiercely resisted and even sought to suppress the deployment of movie projection whereby people make money renting viewing seats to many people and allow them to see the same (increasingly longer) movie all at once. After this early example of entrenched player resistance to innovation, Scott goes on to example after example of disruptive battle-royales -- e.g. the shift to synchronized sound, to color, to widescreen, to more recent changes like all-digital editing and ultimately projection. His blog entry on Five Oscar-Winning Movies which transformed the industry is especially eye-opening! And the ferment continues! Read more in Inventing The Movies!