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How do you start an avalanche? Suppose you start by simply throwing rocks off a 1,000 foot mountain; the rocks would break apart into pebbles, and together they would gather momentum until ... In the end, each pebble is disparate, but uniquely useful; together, they create an unstoppable force. The new book, The Pebble and the Avalanche -- How Taking Things Apart Creates Revolutions, examines how this phenomenon plays out in business. Author Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky begins with this question: Why do certain kinds of innovations, like, say, the personal computer and the Internet, start avalanches in business and technology, and what do these inventions fundamentally have in common? Sometimes, he offers, breaking things apart unleashes incredible power.

And Dr. Yudkowsky is no stranger to that power. One of those rare individuals you're lucky to meet once in your lifetime, he is an expert on speech technologies and even holds three patents in this area. While at AT&T Bell Labs, he led a team to design and to develop AT&T's automated operator. He also worked for Dialogic as a senior system architect, and in 2002, he founded Disaggregate, a speech technology consulting firm.

What makes some innovations into revolutions, says Yudkowsky, is that they break things apart to create even greater energy. For example, Ebay.com began solely as an online auction site. But by breaking its infrastructure apart, Ebay remained an auction site, but also created a service tier, enabling anyone to set up their own storefronts to sell whatever they wanted. In other words, they made it possible for you to integrate your computer system with EBay's and go into business. Now, half of Ebay's business comes from these storefronts. Dr. Yudkowsky calls this process disaggregation because the pieces of the technology that were formerly stuck together are pried apart, but not destroyed.

Resources

The Pebble and the Avalanche Blog

Disaggregate.com

Midwest Speech Technology Association

Bio

Moshe Yudkowsky is a Ph.D. physicist who became an expert on speech recognition technologies for Intel, AT&T Bell Labs, and Dialogic, a premier manufacturer of equipment for the telecommunications industry. In 2002, he founded Disaggregate, a speech technology consulting firm. His background includes the following areas: implications of new technologies for business and society, speech technology (speech recognition, text-to-speech, voice biometrics), telecommunications, Internet telephony/voice over Internet telecommunications, and new trends in technology. Dr. Yudkowsky holds three patents, all involving speech recognition. For 10 years he chaired the Automatic Speech Recognition Task Force of the Enterprise Computer Telephony Association, an international standards organization. In 2002, he founded the Midwest Speech Technology Association and currently serves as its chair. He recently wrote the book The Pebble and the Avalanche: How Taking Things Apart Creates Revolutions (Berrett-Koehler). Dr. Yudkowsky offers predictions about technology, cheers innovations, and razes corporate blunders through his daily blog at www.pebbleandavalanche.com/weblog.

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Producer
Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development Manager
Scott Ebner, Web Developer