A big part of this is the timing of the release; video game systems are always big sellers before the holidays. Anyways, the difference in price as well as function makes this a pointless comparison.
Facebook succeeded because it's timing was perfect. It was released right about the time when internet officially went mainstream. Drops in high speed internet prices combined with a crop of Web 2.0 applications promising a more dynamic web caused people to digitize a lot of their lives.
Facebook was able to ride this wave by marketing itself as an exclusive club. It was you and your friends home away from home. It beat out MySpace because of its focus on "networks", allowing entire schools of students to quickly have contact with each other.
I think a Facebook killer is unlikely, unless there is another wave of increased internet activity (which I don't see happening any time soon). However, niche social websites are on the grow and are gaining with popularity. Perhaps if enough of these are created, it'll engulf Facebook in popularity. But then Facebook could simply revert back to its "school" niche that it used to focus on three years ago.
On top of that, most pages with a functioning search get recognized by Chrome, so for example if I type "e" and hit tab, Chrome lets me search "en.wikipedia.org".
Why Abu Dhabi? If you're really going for an "international" school, why wouldn't you pick somewhere a bit more stable? If neutrality is key, then I'd choose someplace like Geneva.
As starkfist mentioned, Abu Dhabi is picking up the tab. The other reason would be the level of freedom that NYU is being given in designing the curriculum. Places like Geneva have strict guidelines on curriculum. While I'm sure the Emirates have curriculum guidelines as well, I see them being much more open to trying something new.
It's a university administrator's dream.
Also, U of Waterloo now has an Engineering campus in Dubai. http://www.uae.uwaterloo.ca/ It caused quite the discussion when I was in school at the time.
It's strong economy is based on a limited resource that much of the world is shifting away from. And its social policies remain incompatible with many of the major countries of today.
Also, the surrounding area is torn apart by a never-ending war.
It's strong economy is based on a limited resource that much of the world is shifting away from.
Unlike most other gulf states, Abu Dhabi has actually been diversifying it's economy for years. According to Wikipeda, _non oil and gas GDP now constitutes 64% of the UAE’s total GDP_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Dhabi#Economy
its social policies remain incompatible with many of the major countries of today
Perhaps, but it's certainly more liberal than most of it's neighbors. I would have thought an international university could act as a factor to improve that as well.
the surrounding area is torn apart by a never-ending war
It's about 600km from Iraq. That's very roughly the same distance Los Angles is from the Mexican drug wars - where more people are being killed than Iraq at the moment.
I think even more surprising than that was the hackish way that they put together the telestrator system. Instead of digging into a native iPad application they loaded on a VNC client and connected it to preexisting software.
I respect and admire their ability to see the simplest way to do things and do it, but I'm also worried that my World Cup viewing experience is held together by duct tape.
You are right, I did not make myself clear. I was trying to keep my description as general as possible as to not make it entirely self centered.
By "diverse" I mean going beyond software engineering and touching on graphics, AI, simulation, AR/VR, hardware architecture, and so on. My main worry is ending up in cookie cutter classes for four years. Then again, my idea of what college is truly like may be skewed due to the romantic idea of higher education that is sold to us in high school.
As elblanco said, any program worth its salt will have most of those as requirements or electives, even tiny ones like Georgetown. You should be able to check the school's CS department's website and see what their curriculum looks like (example: http://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/undergrad/ProgramSheets.shtml). My email is my profile - if you want me to take a look at any specific school I'd be happy to.
More generally, I think the anti-education sentiment you mentioned is unfounded. I'm colored by my experiences, of course, but I don't think I'd be half the engineer I am today without the education I've had, and I'm not a stupid guy.
If your school doesn't offer graphics, AI and hardware architecture as either required coursework, or electives in the Junior and Senior years, it's probably not a good program.
A lot of this has been done with openFrameworks (http://openframeworks.cc/). It ties together a plethora of open source frameworks including OpenCV with easy to use bindings to indirectly create a somewhat simplified version of C++. If you YouTube openFrameworks, you'll get a lot of demos demonstrating this technology using free libs.
Maybe they will get money from developers of the APIs opting into their service. As in, give us $X a month, and we will handle all your embedding needs and get your content out there to a ton of different services.
Like, think if Embedly was used for some music recommendation application that pulled together results from Last.fm, Pandora, Grooveshark, and Mog. If I was a developer of an up and coming music playing/recommendation site, I would definitely pay some dough to get included in that group for the web application. It's a win-win, the developer of the mashup gets access to a greater variety of content, I, as the developer of the new music service site, get my website's name out there, and Embedly gets money in the process.
But if I, as a developer of a mashup, wanted to use this new music recommendation site and Embedly didn't offer it because that site didn't want to pay up, I could just circumvent Embedly and go against the site's API directly at little cost.
