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"Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilize despots across the Middle East.

One development is a competition among prestige universities to open a branch campus in applied sciences in New York City. This is Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to create a locus of entrepreneurial education that would mate with venture capital to spawn new enterprises and enrich the city’s economy. Stanford, which has provided much of the info-tech Viagra for Silicon Valley, and Cornell, a biotechnology powerhouse, appear to be the main rivals.

But more interesting than the contest between Stanford and Cornell is the one between Stanford and Stanford.

The Stanford bid for a New York campus is a bet on the value of place. The premise is that Stanford can repeat the success it achieved by marrying itself to the Silicon Valley marketplace. The school’s proposal (unsubtly titled “Silicon Valley II”) envisions a bricks-and-mortar residential campus on an island in the East River, built around a community of 100 faculty members and 2,200 students and strategically situated to catalyze new businesses in the city.

Meanwhile, one of Stanford’s most inventive professors, Sebastian Thrun, is making an alternative claim on the future. Thrun, a German-born and largely self-taught expert in robotics, is famous for leading the team that built Google’s self-driving car. He is offering his “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course online and free of charge. His remote students will get the same lectures as students paying $50,000 a year, the same assignments, the same exams and, if they pass, a “statement of accomplishment” (though not Stanford credit). When The Times wrote about this last month, 58,000 students had signed up for the course. After the article, enrollment leapt to 130,000, from across the globe.""But Hennessy is a passionate advocate for an actual campus, especially in undergraduate education. There is nothing quite like the give and take of a live community to hone critical thinking, writing and public speaking skills, he says. And it’s not at all clear that online students learn the most important lesson of all: how to keep learning."

"I think the only way to remove this bad monopoly is to disrupt it from outside. I’m talking about a low-end disruption as defined by Clayton Christensen. Those kinds of disruptions are characterised by things that provide some of the benefits of the existing approach but at a dramatically lower cost and in a way that means the incumbents can’t compete without cannibalizing their existing revenue streams. We’ve just seen this play out in the music industry: online music started with a poorer experience (lower quality, hard to use, can’t display on your shelves) but was vastly cheaper (no physical distribution or stock costs) and the record companies resisted for years because to support it would mean cannibalizing their own physical music sales. The disruption is not over yet but I expect the outcome to be a massive diffusion of value away from the big 5 record companies out across the whole value network to new entrants resulting in a burst of new innovation."

"In the middle east, we've seen the power of the Internet in the Arab Spring. I believe we are in for a lot more of that sort of thing and that it will not be limited to repressive governments, but to all large institutions that seek to control people and their free will. This is the cultural revolution that I referred to in my talk with Erick at Disrupt.

I think investors should be aware of what is coming and seek to invest in it where it is investable. I'm curious what the AVC community thinks of this investment thesis and where we should be looking for opportunities that fit into this thesis."

"Introduced in 1975, the Chronosplit was the first digital wristwatch to combine a digital stopwatch function with a quartz digital timepiece. It was a tour de force of the day's technology, and I remember my dad being very proud of it."

"Introduced in 1975, the Chronosplit was the first digital wristwatch to combine a digital stopwatch function with a quartz digital timepiece. It was a tour de force of the day's technology, and I remember my dad being very proud of it."

When incremental change doesn't cut it. "It’s true that stupidity and malevolence do sometimes play a role in the disruption of industries. But in the first part of this essay I’ll argue that even smart and good organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change, and that there are common underlying structural reasons why that’s the case. That’s a much scarier story.""The problem is that your newspaper has an organizational architecture which is, to use the physicists’ phrase, a local optimum. Relatively small changes to that architecture - like firing your photographers - don’t make your situation better, they make it worse.""The only way to get from one organizational architecture to the other is to make drastic, painful changes."An early sign of impending disruption is when there’s a sudden flourishing of startup organizations serving an overlapping customer need...organizational architecture is radically different..."

"Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware business. Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. PC makers target early adopters with new, ultrapowerful features. Years later, those innovations spread to lower-end models. But Jepsen's design trickled up. In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn't want more out of a laptop—they wanted less.""In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen famously argued that true breakthroughs almost always come from upstarts, since profitable firms rarely want to upend their business models. ""...in the cloud, you know what your customers are doing—you can watch them in real time."

"t instant access to Stevens doesn't rob him of his place in a context; only forgetting him altogether could accomplish that.""In place of this digitized ease of access, Birkerts offers the middlebrow comforts of Bartlett's Quotations as somehow more contextualizing and enriching. But Bartlett's (which began its career as an act of piracy by Harvard's printer in the nineteenth century) is a famously troubled, context-negating device, a universal Cliff Notes, the last hope of the intellectually lame. Contrast its thin fare with YouTube, where you can listen to the poet himself read "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"—where you'll also find an animated photograph of Stevens performing "No Ideas But In Things" in the poet's own voice; John Ashbery discussing Stevens' impact on his work; or any number of unknown readers reciting Stevens' works in front of their computers."

"The problems with e-books are that they are not radical enough: they dispense with the best aspect of books (paper as a display medium) while simultaneously aiming to disable the best aspects of electronic data (sharability, copyability, searchability,