Can you recall the frustration you last felt trying to navigate through a poorly designed IVR system? What if there were an automated web-based solution that would take you directly to the option you need and then sent the call to your phone? Well, that's exactly what Shai Berger, President and CEO of fonolo.com, presents during this session recorded at the eComm 2008 Emerging Communications Conference, where fonolo.com was voted "Best New Product."

If you think that Sun Microsystems is that Java company, then you've a lot of news to catch up on. Charles Nutter, co-lead on the JRuby project at Sun, gives a quick round-up of a plethora of initiatives that Sun is working on, for the individual open source developer and the little start-up guy, besides bringing Ruby to the enterprise.

Government corruption affects all aspects of society. At the 2008 O'Reilly ETech Conference, Lawrence Lessig discusses government corruption, especially in the United States Congress. What does government get right, wrong, and where does dependence compromise effective government? Also, Lessig announces a new project designed to signal congress' support for reform, called Change Congress.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Kris Kimmel, founder of the Idea Festival, and what's coming up at IF 2008.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Michael Meyer, author of "The Last Days of Old Beijing," about the transformation of a city.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Alan Sachs, about new medical treatments in development at Merck Pharmaceuticals based not on DNA, but RNA.

Joel and Jeff discuss deadlocks, logging philosophy, the value and risks of taking dependencies on your project, and why you want to work with people who don't always do what you ask them to. Really!

Attorney Daniel Solove discusses his book Understanding Privacy. He gives an overview of the difficulties involved in discussions of privacy, one of the most important concepts of our time. He talks about how scholars, activists, and policymakers have struggled to define privacy, with many conceding that the task is virtually impossible.

Wouldn't it be amazing if you could hold a "book" in your hands which had hyperlinks? Why would that be amazing, you ask? Well, what if the hyperlink triggered a process that makes a nearby computer, for example, play an MP3 of animal sounds that match the story? In this keynote presentation from the 2007 O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, Manolis Kelaidis introduces blueBook, his prototype that merges the analog and digital worlds of books.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." That is the goal of Wikipedia's creator, Jimmy Wales. He has set his sights on Google and the other corporate Search Engines with his new project "Wikia," a personal search engine-builder.

Joel Spolsky is a highly revered software pundit, an eminent author, the host of one of the most widely read blogs, the co-founder of New York based FogCreek Software, and a witty and intelligent person to listen to. He believes that the three key ingredients that make great software are: making users happy, obsessing over aesthetics, and observing culture code. In elaborating these ideas with plenty of examples, he doesn't spare his wonderful sense of humor.

People learning to read will soon be able to use a handheld device to practice their reading skills when trained teachers and the Internet are not available. Using inexpensive hardware, Literacy Bridge plans to provide Talking Book audio players/recorders in developing nations starting this fall, with a goal of selling them for $10 per device or less. Listen to Cliff Schmidt describe the Talking Book and the benefits it will bring to people in far-flung locations.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Pete Blackshaw, author of "Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends," about consumer megaphones -- the folks who get extremely displeased and upset with products or services.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. David Lacey, Senior Vice President of Research at Amgen, who talks about a new treatment for bone loss, no matter what the cause.

Joel and Jeff discuss scaling and social effects in Stack Overflow, how to handle growth and the launch in a controlled way, and answer listener questions about backups, database design, and maintenance programming.

Identi.ca is an open microblogging service. Users can post short messages about themselves to Identi.ca, which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web. The product's developer, Evan Prodromou, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the project, including its open source license.

David Recordon, Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, pitches the telephony community on grassroots efforts as a means for the development of open standards. Grassroots community groups can serve as the catalyst for addressing challenges that corporate groups have chosen to ignore, and begin to bridge gaps between existing web technologies and mobile service providers.

"Nine years to the Singularity, if we really, really, try," says Dr. Ben Goertzel, chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente. Is this really possible? Dr. Goertzel believes the path to the development of Artificial General Intelligence - a real thinking machine with human level intelligence and beyond - can be accelerated through the use of virtual worlds as incubators for nascent artificial intelligence systems.

On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, explore the fascinating energy technologies of the present and future. Listen to specials on "Wind Energy," "Vertical Wind Turbines," and "The Solar Challenge" where the ups and downs of Europe's wind energy are discussed and futuristic vertical-axis turbines that you could fit on your property become a possibility.

For MIT's Project SIMILE, David Huynh built an amazing series of web tools for exploring and organizing structured information. Two months into his new gig at Metaweb, he's done it again. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Huynh about his Parallax prototype, which creates a powerful new way for users to click their way through related sets of information in Freebase. In essence, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation.

In the eighteenth episode of Stack Overflow, we finally meet Michael Pryor, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software -- and discuss the progress of the Stack Overflow beta in some depth.