Scott Farquhar, the co-founder and CEO of Atlassian talks about his experience growing the company to $100 million with no sales team. Nothing short of a must-see for entrepreneurs, Scott presents 10 commandments for startups at the Business of Software event. A few of the commandments are ‘Use your own product’, ‘measure everything’, ‘think long term’, and ‘build somewhere that you want to work’. For a full writeup, check out Mark Littlewood’s notes.

Tom Wujec studies team dynamics and puts on workshops around team building and prepares groups to solve large and complex problems. During his workshops he gives teams The Marshmallow Challenge, an 18 minute challenge to build the tallest structure from a few items including spaghetti and marshmallows. Interestingly, kindergarteners produce some of the tallest structures. Tom chalks up their success to iterative prototyping and trying lots of ideas. On the contrary, business school students do the worst.

Don Norman, one of the fathers of user experience (now 75 years old), gives an excellent talk at Business of Software 2009 on the ten rules for successful products. Throughout the talk, Don stresses the importance of creating positive experiences with many anecdotes and provides many tips along the way. For example, make sure to have a strong beginning and strong ending to an experience, because that is what people remember. By placing the undesirable or painful parts in the middle, even if that requires creating a false beginning or ending, people will come away with a more positive memory of the experience. And it is that memory that they will share with others and remember long after the actual experience.

The 10 Rules:
1. It is all about the experience
2. Design systems
3. Everything is a service
4. Everything is a product
5. Don’t be too logical
6. Memory is more important than actuality
7. Complexity is okay
8. Design for the real world
9. Design for people
10. It is all about the experience

Kathy Sierra, famous for curating the website Creating Passionate Users, talks at Business of Software 2009. In the past companies have been able to out-spend each other to gain new customers. In today’s social media culture, Kathy is seeking to reveal a more algorithmic approach for gaining product adoption (‘Step 2: magic happens’ isn’t appealing to her). To do so, Kathy says to stop focusing on selling users upgrades and features, but rather focus on making users better in the overarching area your products exist within. Ultimately it is about getting users to say “I’m Awesome”. It is at that point, users will upgrade, and non-users will desire to be like the ‘Awesome Users’ and sell themselves on purchasing the product.

Johanna Blakley studies the impact of the fashion industry’s lack of copyright and imparts many lesson on how other creative industries could flourish with a similar regard for copyright. Johanna discusses how the fashion industry is forced to constantly innovate to keep ahead of trends, obsolescence, and build brands. The fashion industry is only one of many industries who’s work is not copyright eligible. Other industries include food, furniture, magic, jokes, cars, databases, etc… The talk is thought provoking to say the least and will provide some fodder for your next discussion on issues of copyright.

ABC’s Nightline goes behind the scenes at Zappos to see why they have become the leading example in customer satisfaction and expose the company’s enviable corporate culture. By making investments in company moral, and customer satisfaction, their long-term vision has returned huge dividends. Zappos offers newly trained workers $2000 to quit and gives customers 365 days to return purchases with free shipping both ways. CEO Tony Hsieh has kept the call centers based in the US and says their number one focus is building the company’s culture. Whether they teach the practice in business schools or not, the proof is in the pudding. Also check out Zappos’ 10 Core Values.

At GDC 2009 in San Francisco, OnLive founder Steve Perlman and COO Mike McGarvey publicly introduced their company and the technology they have been working on the past many years. Taking cloud computing to a new level, their video compression technology has enabled them to compress video at speeds imperceptible to even the most hard-core video game enthusiasts. The compression speeds have allowed them to create a new delivery model for video games which now marks the advent of the seamless cloud computing experience.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat, speaks at MIT. Friedman discusses his experience of being inspired to write the original book, the fundamental ideas mentioned in his later edition The World is Flat 3.0, and how shares how that has lead to his latest book Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

Alex Lee, president of OXO, speaks at Gel 2008 on the company’s commitment to good design. Alex stresses how good ideas can come from anywhere and shares several stories of designs which have come from outside inventors.

In a well executed short, Jonathan Jarvis explains today’s credit crisis through excellent visuals and a poignant narrative. At a time when so many are learning for the first time how various aspects of the economy work, Jonathan’s video is a welcome surprise. Jonathan Jarvis is a Masters of Fine Arts Candidate at Art Center.

In “Deep Dive”, a now legendary episode, ABC’s Nightline goes inside IDEO and follows their design methodology while having them design a shopping cart from the ground up. Filmed in 1998, the video is still shown in design and business schools around the world. Although the IDEO Shopping Cart was never built as is, stores such as Whole Foods now utilize aspects of the design in their own modular mini-carts.

On a mission to put a pair of shoes on everyone’s feet, TOMS Shoes is giving away one pair of shoes for every pair purchased. Since December 1st 2008, TOMS has given over 115,000 pairs of shoes to children in need worldwide.

Jason Salfi, co-founder of Comet Skateboards, talks about how the company is using eco-friendly materials to create their fully biodegradable skateboards. The company has found a way to use soy-based resins, non-volatile paints, and a biocomposite wood substitute from e2e Materials to make the boards all in a location local to the raw materials.

Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, has been showing their vision for the future where nearly every surface will be an interactive display. With the looming battle between companies over patented gestures as mentioned in Dan Saffer’s talk, it is now an arms race to see which company will infiltrate homes and office with gestural and touch based systems. Regardless, it is great to see some of the concepts explored in the video.

Lachlan Cash from Microsoft demonstrates using touch technologies for business applications. Moving beyond rotating and resizing photos, Microsoft Dynamics has adapted Microsoft Surface for use as a wearhouse management tool. And while Surface in it’s table top form may not make it into offices very quickly, with Windows 7 supporting multi-touch, there is a great chance that other form factors will.

Mark Slee, lead product manager at Facebook, shares with Robert Scoble some of the design philosophy behind the latest Facebook UI design. Above all it is attention to details and loyalty to the users that lead the way.

Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University, shares Pixar’s appraoch to hiring.  Pixar looks for people who have mastered a skill, are interested in lots of things, can communicate in many different mediums and can amplify the output of other’s work.

Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, talks about his persuit of cost effective solar energy. Using new technology and applying genetic algorithms, Bill’s team has re-used old inventions to fit modern applications.

The Nike Airforce 1 has become legendary over the past 25 years. After its initial run was ended three Baltimore stores petitioned to bring the shoe back. With its famous new shoe design every month, fans were quickly born and so started the legend.  The Airfoce 1 has become an icon within the basketball and hip-hop communities, enjoys center stage in many wardrobes, and has secured its place in history. Enjoy the Documentary parts 1 and 2 as well as many others.

Munjal Shah, CEO of Riya, talks with Robert Scoble about how his company which heavily focused on developing face recognition software and is now developing the worlds best visual search engine Like.com. Munjal explains how Contextual Recognition works and why they decided to redirect the attention of their large pool of PhD employees to online shopping.