Lowering Barriers to Participation
Wednesday, August 16, 2:00-2:45 PM
by Bradley Horowitz
Traditionally participation in community sites has fallen into three distinct roles: creators, synthesizers and consumers - with each category representing an order of magnitude more participants than the preceding one. I'll discuss this phenomenon and its implications. I'll also discuss techniques for lowering barriers to participation, and how to derive "implicit" value from users who may not be contributing in a "lean forward" fashion. We'll bring some real life examples from Yahoo products such as Flickr and Yahoo! Answers.
About Bradley Horowitz
Bradley Horowitz, vice president of Yahoo!'s product strategy group, leads Yahoo!'s efforts in building innovative products and technologies across the company. Horowitz is driving innovation and leveraging Yahoo!'s platform to deliver compelling Yahoo! products and services to a community of 500 million users. In addition, he is responsible for the company's initiative to open up its platform which includes overseeing the Yahoo! Developer Network (Y!DN). Previously, he managed a portfolio of products for Yahoo! including media search, desktop search and the Yahoo! Toolbar.
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Horowitz served as both the chief technical officer and the vice president of engineering for the Virage division of Autonomy, where he was responsible for the technical delivery of five major product lines. Prior to Autonomy, he founded Virage, the company widely recognized as the market creator and leader for advanced media indexing and analysis. Horowitz helped grow the company from "a garage startup" through its NASDAQ IPO.
Horowitz was a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. While at the Media Lab, he worked on a number of topics related to computer vision, graphics and image processing, which resulted in a patented new technique for the recovery of structure, motion and camera parameters from video sequences.
Horowitz holds an MS in Media Science from MIT and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.