I speak on a wide variety of technology topics. Most recently I've been blending my experiences building Linden Lab and transforming EMI Music to help institutions understand how to adapt to Moore's Law and accelerating change. For speaking inquiries, contact me directly at cory.ondrejka@gmail.comThursday, February 25, 2010
Video from the talk I previously posted the slides to.
Cory Ondrejka Delivers Keynote Address to Gov20LA 2010 from Gov20LA on Vimeo.
Just delivered the opening keynote for the Government 2.0 LA conference. This talk was the most fun that I’ve had in a while, both because of the engaged and active audience who interrupted with lots of questions and because pulling the talk together required a bunch of research and exploration.
I first heard the story of Matthew Fontaine Maury from Professor Doctor Herbert Burket. The more I learned about Maury, the more I thought I could build a Government 2.0 discussion around his story of transforming navigation and the collection of global meteorological data.
What makes Maury’s story so interesting is in the mid-1800’s he was able to build a multinational, viral, crowdsourced, and meta-data system. His approaches and techniques are exactly the same as Google and other Web 2.0 companies from 150 years later. Even better, he did it all from within an institution — the United States Navy — not necessarily known for innovative and original thinking. His story also perfectly illustrates four tools that government has available to drive change: data, regulation, bully pulpit, and commercial excitement. Even better, Maury’s story connects the California gold rush, the Cape Horn Sweepstakes, and the amazing achievements of Eleanor Cressy and the Flying Cloud.
It all makes for a nice reminder that if history doesn’t repeat, it certain rhymes and there are lessons to be learned from the rhyming.
Cory Ondrejka Government 2.0 LA Opening Keynote
Tuesday, January 05, 2010Just gave the keynote for TARGUSinfo Kickoff 2010 event. What a great group, very reminiscent of Linden in 2005-ish. Work hard, play hard culture. High quality, charismatic leaders shining at all levels. Palpable hunger to win. Force of nature CEO open to ideas.
My peeps, in other words.
This talk is a blend of the NIST and iGate talks. Will be writing up the various ideas into independent posts over the next few months.
TARGUSinfo Cory Ondrejka 01-10
Saturday, December 19, 2009Yesterday I spoke at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Thanks to the first big winter storm, Dulles is down for the count, so I’m catching up on email and blogging. First, my talk from NIST:
I could have attempted to fly out Friday afternoon but would have meant passing up a tour of the NIST facility and I am too much of a geek to miss that. Huge thanks to the many NIST researchers who took time out to answer a ton of my enthusiastic but amateur questions about quantum computing and neutron research. Awesome flashbacks, as this was my first visit to a nuclear reactor since the Navy. The neutron imaging facility is simply amazing, using neutron interferometry to image the interior of operating hydrogen fuel cells — a striking collision of pure science and applied research.
For the fabrication geeks in the audience, the key to neutron interferometry is precision machining of neutron interferometers from silicon. Requiring micron and mico-radian accuracy, fewer than 10 useful interferometers have been successfully fabricated in the last 30 years.
On the quantum computing side, NIST is exploring quantum communication at broadband (> 2Mb/s) rates via the quantum communication testbed
On the opposite side from broadband testing — with the conventional approach of strongly attenuated photon source — NIST is also experimenting with single photon sources and detectors.
This single photon detector uses magnetic resonance cooling to reach 50 microkelvin and detects a single photon through the temperature change of the sensor. Traditional single photon counters generally can detect 0 or “more than 0” photons, a real problem with attenuation-based photon sources which probabilistically generate 0, 1, or more than 1 photons.
NIST is also exploring using correlated photons in single photon sources. A beautiful part of the experiment was being able to use the experiment display the expected phase curve in its own light. You can also see a movie of the result
All-in-all, the most geek fun I’ve had in a while. Well worth being stuck in this:
iGate’s Insight conference is in 3 cities this year, so I am doing something unusual for me — giving the same talk again after audience feedback. As a result, this version has about 10% new content and refined focus on the overall “agile or toast” focus.
