Update on the Yahoo/Berkeley Partnership
Following up on CalStuff’s previous announcement of the partnership between Yahoo and UC Berkeley there is a lengthy article about the Professor who will be running the lab:
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Professor Marc Davis has dedicated years of his life to studying how the Internet is changing people from passive Web surfers to active content creators who post their own text, video and audio online…
Davis, a media professor at the University of California-Berkeley, has been given the keys to perhaps the biggest real-world lab in the world - Yahoo’s vast network of Web sites and the hundreds of millions of people who use them.
As head of Yahoo’s new social media research lab in Berkeley, just a brisk walk from the UC-Berkeley campus, Davis has been tasked with helping Yahoo chart a course through the rapidly evolving world of “social media” - from blogs and social networking services to interactive mobile devices.
Partnerships like this raise some concern about who owns the intellectual property rights to anything that is discovered. Seeing as how enthusiastic the Berkeley professor is about the deal, it leaves me confident that this is a good deal for the school. Not to mention that it appears they will be working on some cutting edge research, a nd this could provide lots of opportunities to the students interested in this field.
[Full disclosure: I’m an enthusiastic user of Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo]
this is excellent. sounds similar in tone to mit media lab.
Comment by Bhanu Singh — December 29, 2005 @ 1:05 pm
I’m a SIMS grad. Davis is the sort of guy you want running something like this, but he’s like that about everything.
It should be interesting to see what comes of it, but I’d say it’s a good acquisition.
-kat
Comment by katster — December 29, 2005 @ 8:24 pm