Stop SOPA & PIPA

To my congressman, Jason Chaffetz, representing Utah's Third District, I oppose SOPA and PIPA. Please do not support these misguided proposals for combating online piracy. I am a web developer and mobile app developer and businesses like the one I started will be severely threatened by SOPA and PIPA. This is not freedom and liberty, it is an unjust proposal to a web-related problem. This issue must be reassessed and readdressed with greater sensitivity to freedom of speech, due process of law, and business and technological innovation.

Kyle Clegg

Android Thoughts

Recently a friend decided to upgrade from an Android device to an iPhone 4s. I commented on her facebook post:

You're crossing to the dark side??

Kyle youll be back to the dark side iphone is taking over the world!!!! and i want to be on team apple when that happens.

Touche. can't argue. iphone is by far the best. Android is decent but given iOS and apple hardware as an alternative it's almost a no brainer. unless windows phone 8 makes a splash...

Someone else chimes in:

Almost a no-brainer... but not quite. Compared to budget Android devices, the iPhone is definitely superior. But there is literally no hardware spec on the iPhone that isn't matched or beaten by higher end Androids. If you favor features over price point, it comes down to preference, not superiority. The user experience on Android 4.0 is absolutely amazing, and the open source nature of Android puts it light years ahead of iOS in terms of development opportunities.

Again, it's about preference. iOS is clean, simple, and beautiful. Android is powerful, customizable, and versatile. It's all about what you're looking for in a phone. But let us be wary of granting to Apple some of these unearned superlatives.

My latest thoughts on Android:

I haven't used Android 4.0, but given the improvements between 2.2, 2.3, 3.0, and similarly positive and 'groundbreaking' reviews for 4.0, I can't imagine it being something I get too excited about. I switched from an iPhone 4 to Android (dual core Motorola Atrix) for many of the reasons listed but have ultimately been let down.

Google delivers power, customizability, and a sense of freedom on Android devices, however I find the power comes with some catches - weak battery life, unexpected FCs, laggy display (WHY?? the Atrix's processor should kill the iphone 4). The customization options are confusing and inconsistent across different hardware makers. Even having developed two Android apps, I haven't seen (or maybe just haven't utilized) any features that I feel are compelling. Lastly, the freedom I feel due to the open source nature of Android is refreshing, but honestly, I'd be fine giving up this flexibility for a superior WP7 or iOS device.

To me, bottom line is the Android ecosystem is discombobulated and inconsistent. It's a decent OS and beats any feature phone on the market, but having seen both Android and iOS up close and personal, I'm ready to switch back to iOS or try something new in WP7/WP8.

Candy Jar Estimator Launches

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Yesterday Bryce (my business partner) and I launched "Candy Jar Estimator" on the Android Market.  It's designed to help you win candy guessing competitions - it takes your candy, the jar type, any custom jar measurements, and computes the expected number of candies in the jar.  Basically it means automatic WIN if you use it the next time a candy estimating competition rolls around at work, church, holiday festivities, etc.  so... it's pretty awesome.

Anyway we've also entered our app in the BYU mobile app competition.  The competition runs through November 16 and there are several prizes that we could potentially take home, including $6000 grand prize, $3000 judge's prize, and a local company's choice: brand new iPads for all team members.  If you'd like to help our team out here a few things you could do.

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  1. If you have an Android phone, download the app (yes it costs a dollar), l eave a 5 star rating and a SUPER AWESOME comment.
  2. Tell your Android friends to download it and leave some awesome reviews for us.  Say "my brother is entering his android app into BUY's mobile app competition. check...it...OUT! http://bit.ly/tmlitR" (and then make sure they download it and not just look at it)
  3. Even if you don't have an Android, you can help us by +1-ing our app on the Android Market. go here (http://bit.ly/tmlitR) and click the +1 button on the top right of the screen.

The biggest help will probably be sharing, so if you want to tweet it, Facebook it, or blog it that would be very helpful.  Also - if you have friends that are big blogger's a little spotlight from their blog goes a LONG way.

Available in Android Market

Using LogCat in NetBeans

The best way to debug in Android is to use LogCat.  I've yet to figure out an easy way to do this though -- using NetBeans -- but it can be done.  LogCat should be installed with your Android SDK and AVD (android virtual device) kits, however the problem is that NetBeans doesn't display logcat in a "console"-like format.  I was looking at this tonight and figured out how you can still get your LogCat printout -- it just prints straight to a text file and not in a nice built-in display window like Eclipse has.
USING LOGCAT IN NETBEANS
1) First, you'll have to add the adb tools path the Windows global variable (if you're on a mac you'll have to google how to do this).  See http://www.shahz.net/android/adb-installation-and-how-to-logcat.html
2) Then, whenever you run your app and it crashes (or anytime you want to debug), open the command prompt and enter:
adb logcat -v time > logcat.txt
This will create a file in the current folder with the current LogCat logs.  You'll have a lot of stuff in there so it's important that you've used LogCat properly in your code so that you know what to look for.  Run "start logcat.txt" to take a look.
3) To to use LogCat in your code you'll first need to import the Log library:
import android.util.Log;
Then, down where you would normally print something out, you'll replace "System.out.println("HERE");" with:
Log.d("LOGCAT", "HERE");
4) Now, run the logcat command again, then open the text file with the start command:
adb logcat -v time > logcat.txt
start logcat.txt
5) Now, use CTRL-F "LOGCAT" to look through all your LOGCAT debugging statements.
Also - If your app is crashing try searching for "E/AndroidRuntime"... this will take you to the information on what caused the error.
I know it's a little complicated, but it works!  And it'll let you debug crash errors too.  The problem with using toasts for debugging is that the app may crash before you ever reach the toast.  Which... ends up not really helping you at all.  So if you can bear the pain of these steps for your debugging, it should help out a lot!   And if you find a better way to use LogCat in NetBeans please let me know.  It would be awesome if they let you view the LogCat logs directly in NetBeans.  Man that would be sweet.  Good luck!
Let me know if you find any mistakes with the info above.

PHP - What and Why

Who invented PHP? Rasmus Lerdorf, a guy who wrote it as CGI binaries in C in order to help manage his personal webpages (back in 1994). Lerdorf named it PHP for "Personal Home Page". Later it was renamed "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" by some of the colleagues Lerdorf teamed up with in order to improve on PHP and make it more standardized. Why use PHP?

  • Open source/FREE
  • Cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux)
  • Powerful, robust, scalable (it'll be able to handle the traffic growth)
  • Web development specific (unlike java, ruby on rails, c, and others)
  • Large developer community
Resources:

So excited I can't sleep

Seriously, I can't sleep.  I'm sitting here in Eclipse messing with these layouts and getting stoked for the BYU Mobile App Competition.  A partner and I are developing a super awesome Android app that is going to be a blast.  Too bad I can't say what it is yet.  But, in about three weeks we should be ready to push it out.  We're under way right now and will be working on it as much as possible to get it ready for the competition. Man, I feel like saying more but I guess I won't for now.  People could be out there snatching up our idea as we speak.  That sucks.  But believe me once it's out there I'll be all about spreading the news.  The cool thing is that this app has never been done before on Android, it's a fresh market!  There's one on the iOS app store, but it's lame.  Maybe we'll try xcode and iphone development if this goes well.

Here's how the BYU mobile app competition works:

  • Teams of 1 to 4, with at least one member a current BYU student
  • Build your app for Android, iOS, WP7, or Blackberry
  • Release it to the Market/App Store November 2-16
  • Cash prizes as follows:
  • Grand Prize: $6,000
  • Analytics 1st Place: $3,000
  • Judged 1st Place: $3,000
  • Analytics 2nd Place: $1,500
  • Judged 2nd Place: $1,500
  • Audience Choice: All team members will be awarded with an iPad 2 (or 3). This award will be based on audience input at the final event
Basically there's a grand prize, a first and second for most popular based off the analytics, and a first and second based off the judge's opinions.  Then there's iPad prizes for audience choice.  So there's a good chance of winning something if you have a good idea, successful implementation of that idea, and a killer marketing strategy.  Assuming we get the product we want we're going to spread the word like wildfire.  I'm talking BYU, UVU, Utah State booths, and spreading the word all across the map... up in Washington, back in Georgia, Michigan, out in Hawaii.   I'm pumped about the whole project.
In other exciting news, Mango's came out yesterday, the $250 Amazon tablet is being announced today, and iPhone 5 is set to come out in less than a week.  This is huge!  I want an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet (or whatever it's going to be called) already.

Building a Web Scraper

ISYS 403.  Business oriented programming.  Goal: Program a news aggregator. Project statement: Program a news aggregator that scrapes a news page and posts the top news stories.  The assignment gives a view into how search engines and other scrapes work online.

Many sources publish the news: local radio and TV stations, the Associated Press, national and international sources, and aggregators.  Aggregators like Google News don’t actually create news stories; instead, they parse the news stories created by other sources, discover like stories, and publish a combined view.

The problem is each site on the web publishes in HTML — a plain-text, free-flowing format.  You’ll have to code a technique called page scraping.  Page scraping is programatically going through a retrieved HTML source file and picking specific data pieces, such as news headlines and links, from the HTML.

Regular expressions are one of the best text parsing techniques available.  Beyond parsing HTML, they are useful for searching through all types of free-form text.

Completed project using businessweek.com/technology:

I thought this project was awesome!  I've been wanting to see how Java interfaces with the web and this was it.  My first time using java to hit the web and it really wasn't too bad.  Downloading the URL's HTML to a string was surprisingly simple.  My code looked something like this:

        String lineOfHTML = "";         String content = "";         //download home page         try {             URL url = new URL("http://www.businessweek.com/technology/");             BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));             while ((lineOfHTML = reader.readLine()) != null) {                 content += lineOfHTML;             }             reader.close();         }  catch (IOException e) {             e.printStackTrace();         }

As you can see the hard part really isn't that hard.  I used the URL library to grab the webpage and a buffered reader to read in all the HTML, then just stored it as a string.  The samples out there on bing made it really easy to.  Try searching "download webpage in java" on bing.  You'll get a lot of hit, trust me.

Parsing the HTML to find the new stories meant looking up businessweek's HTML source code, finding the tags surrounding news stories, and using regex to grab the information we wanted, which was the name, link, and description in our case. My regex expression ended up looking like this in order to get the top two stories: String regex = ".*?href=\"(.*?)\".*?>(.*?).*?

(.*?)

.*?href=\"(.*?)\".*?>(.*?).*?

(.*?)

";  Fun eh?

So that was it.  Put it together and you have the news parser as pictured above!

Why Can't I Alt-F4 the Command Prompt

On my Windows 7 machine I noticed that the Alt-F4 combination does not close a command prompt window.  I was wondering why this is and found this explanation: The command window uses special key combinations for various applications within the DOS emulating window. If Alt-F4 closed the window, it may be impossible to use certain utilities.  If you are looking for a keyboard-only fix just type exit to quit.

How to Install WAMP for Wordpress

I'm a web and mobile app developer and recently had a friend tell me all about MAMP. I've always used a PC and when I heard about WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP) I wanted to give it a shot. I was working on setup and found out how to get WAMP running, and get a virtual environment of Wordpress going using WAMP. I'm going to show you how in a couple easy steps. I'm running Windows 7 on a 32-bit machine. 1) Start by downloading the WAMP server software on your Windows machine. 2) After downloading, install it to the preferred directory, C:/wamp. 3) Download the latest Wordpress package. The file downloaded will be a .zip file. Extract this to the folder C:/wamp/www. All of the files will come in a folder called WordPress.  You can either leave the folder as is, or you can cut them from the wordpress folder and paste them directly into the www folder.  I left tham in the wordpress folder (helpful if you want to add more sites to the www directory later). 4) Open up the WAMP server by left-clicking the WAMP icon in your Windows icon tray and clicking Start All Services.  The icon should go green.  Now, click the icon again and select phpMyAdmin. Note: If you see an error page here, you'll need to turn off IIS (Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Turn Features on or off), since both IIS and apache use port 80 (you can also change WAMP config not to use port 80 but it can get messy). Selecting phpMyAdmin will open an new tab in your browser and there will be a field for creating a database. Put in any name you want name and hit create. 5) Now all you have to do is open a new tab in your browser and localhost/wordpress (if you didn't unzip it to the wordpress folder it will just be localhost/whatever folder you put it in). This will bring up a window that asks you for all of your information. Provide the database name you chose, your database username, which is root, and password, which you can leave blank (you can change these if you want). Now, connect, install, and you are up and running!

Let me know if you have any questions. If you haven't used WordPress before you're bound to run into a few problems.

New Changes

A couple new changes for me.  Things might get crazy.

First, as you can see, this blog now houses google adsense text ads. Your first response - jerk, sellout, shmuck. Right? Relax. This blog is my testing zone for wp junk so don't have a cow if I do something stupid.  Just consider it as having done the web a favor- one less rookie mistake for the next time around if I screw something up.  I think they look pretty good, actually.

The next new thing is that I am now running Android! Switched from iphone to Motorola Atrix and boy it is sweet. I feel empowered. Take that Jobs. This little guy is now my testing ground for my Cow Tipping app and anything else I get into this summer.

One last thing- posting this from Wordpress for Android. Android fo' lyfe.

How do I tell if my iPhone is 3G or 3GS?

Here's a couple quick tricks that'll tell you if your old iPhone is 3G or 3GS.

  • "iPhone" - On the back of the phone, look for the word "iPhone".  If it's chrome like the Apple logo, the phone is 3GS.  If it's in gray letters it's a 3G (sucks for you).
  • Compass - Looking at the apps, if you see a "Compass", click and hold to see if it has the "Voice Control" feature.  If yes, you have a 3GS (yay for reselling value).
  • Camera - Open the "Camera" app.  If the the camera has a square box in the middle for auto-focus, and if you see a video mode switch in the bottom right, it's a 3GS.  Otherwise, it's a 3G (sucks for you).

Set up your Facebook to Only Access via a HTTP Secure (HTTPS) Connection

So I found out today - from Mark himself - that Facebook has added the ability to access the site via a HTTP Secure (HTTPS) connection (like Twitter already does).  This will drastically increase security for Facebook users.

Basically, HTTPS provides a combination of the HTTP and SSL protocols, which enables encrypted communication between your computer and a web server (THIS IS GOOD).  Without it you’re exposed to significantly more security vulnerabilities, especially if you're using a public Wi-Fi to access Facebook.  If you're at Starbucks hanging out on their public Wi-Fi network, someone using Firesheep can easily get onto your Facebook account and steal your data.  HTTPS makes it a lot harder to do that.  On public Wi-Fi networks you should only enter private information (passwords, phone numbers, credit cards numbers) to sites accessible via HTTPS, if at all.

The feature is available as an option on the "Account Settings" page. Click "Account Security," then check the "Secure Browsing (https)" box.  If you have Twitter, do the same there.

Mark Zuckerberg Visits BYU - Technology Forum

This morning I had the pleasure of attending a technology forum at BYU, hosting special guests Senator Orrin Hatch and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The forum brought about 10,000 people out, being open to BYU students as well as the public. The forum was held in simple fashion with two chairs, a coffee table and a table ornament being the only furniture on-stage. Senator Hatch led the discussion, playing host to present Mark (he asked that we call him just Mark) with a series of questions previously submitted on the BYU Facebook page.

The event was awesome. I was very impressed with both Senator Hatch and Mark Zuckerberg. Mark looked much like depicted in the The Social Network and on Saturday Night Live, in his token jeans and hoodie. He had a low key demeanor and general quietness about him.  He was polite and eloquent and spoke confidently. I mean, he was no rhetorician, but at the same time he definitely didn't sound like your prototypical computer geek. He humbly let everyone know he was a bit nervous, since this was the first time that he had ever talked to a stadium full of people.

Senator Hatch then began to ask Mark Zuckerberg a number of questions previously submitted by on BYU’s Facebook page. Below are the questions and Mark’s answers. I can't type at lightning speed so I couldn't get it all, so some of the answers are verbatim, some are paraphrasing.  They're pretty awesome though. I learned SO much. In my opinion every business major, tech major, sociology major, geography major, art major, open major, don't care major, or facebook major should have taken the opportunity to be there.

Let's put it this way... skipping my CS class to be here might have been the best decision I made all semester.  If you missed it, at least you can read about it here :).  Note: BYU is also going to post some clips on the BYU Facebook page.

Senator Orrin Hatch - "I want to let you know the main reason I invited you here so that you'd finally accept my friend request." (Ha ha ha)

Sen Hatch - "Facebook is moving towards one billion users, all over the world.  It's changed the way we do business, changed the way we interact with one another, changed the way we look at political issues, and changed the ways we date (especially at BYU)."

1. How did Facebook get off the ground?

a. I built it when I was a sophomore at Harvard. Not to build a company, pretty certain that it would never be a company. I wanted the product at Harvard. Within 2-3 weeks 70% of Harvard signed up. Then other universities wanted in... b. At the end of sophomore year I moved to Silicon Valley with the intention to go back at the end of summer. When things were going well I decided to take a term off, then another term off, and eventually I realized I wasn't going back. c. You can build a company like this anywhere in the world. If I were doing it again I probably wouldn't choose Silicon Valley. d. Facebook apps are huge, over a million apps. The "We're Related" app was developed by Family Link here in Provo.

2. How do you handle management in the company?

a. People was the biggest predictor of success. b. The success of Facebook is all about the team we built. I think in any company that's true. c. One of the things we focused on in Facebook is keeping it small. Only 2000 employees. Make sure that every person that you add to your company is really great.

Sen Hatch - I'm impressed that you're so successful, worth 13.5 billion dollars.

3. What classes were of most benefit for you? For folks who want to get into the same area as you?

a. "I wasn't in school that long" (crowd applauses) b. Most people don’t know this, but I was a double major at Harvard: Computer science and Psychology. c. It's as much psychology and sociology as it is technology. d. CS Classes have 2 categories

i. Theoretical - very interesting ii. Practical - awesome. Operating systems and other hardware classes enabled me to build the early system.

4. What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?

a. "I think you have to really love and believe in what you're doing. I think that's the most important thing." b. If you don't, it actually becomes the rational thing to stop when it comes to challenges.

5. Mark to Sen. Hatch - "I started off as an Engineer, but one thing that is new to me is how the government sees technology. What can government do to promote budding engineers?"

a. Stay out of the way. (Applause.) It's my opinion that one reason we have so much technology and innovation is because of the freedom of companies and the internet that we have here in America.

6. Facebook sees third party developers as important. What is Facebook trying to do to help the developer environment?

a. We're trying to set it up so that we're not the only ones building innovative apps using the Facebook service. b. "A good independent entrepreneurial developer should always be able to do something on their own better than the entire company." (Find your niche!). "We want build a developer’s platform to enable entrepreneurs across the word to build something they want." Biggest industry thus far: gaming. c. "We don't want to build the apps, we want to enable independent entrepreneurs to do this."

7. The internet is powerful and a great utility. Some people think there could be a dark side out there as well. How do we maximize good?

a. Extremely robust privacy controls. People love sharing, but a lot of our job is to protect these people too. We're really focused on safety, particularly children. "We try to build a safe environment. I think that's going to be key."

Sen Hatch chimes in: "I'm crushed because we didn't win last night. But I am so proud of the basketball team. So proud of Jimmer Fredette".

8. What steps is facebook taking to help protect users from 'bad actors'?

a. Besides the normal privacy controls Facebook is one of the first products that allow people to completely go over https. b. Use your social connections to provide extra security.

i. Ask you questions only you would know ii. Show you pictures and ask you to identify friends

9. Using Facebook for education

a. My girlfriend graduated as a teacher, so we've talked about this a lot. b. Gift to Newark education system (100 million) c. Senator Hatch - "Remember BYU next time…" Mark: "Sure. Not sure how to answer that." Ha ha ha

Mark - "It really is humbling to be here, and to see such an audience". (Awww)

10. What do you see as the role of social technology in addressing global issues?

a. At Harvard, we always believed something like this would happen, but we never thought it would be us that built the company to do it. b. The bottom-up effect - It starts with giving people the ability to connect. You now have the ability to stay in touch with people in a much more passive way. c. The internet gives everyone a voice. People have a way to get things out there that just wasn't there 20 years ago. Check out peace.facebook.com - shows relationships between people and countries that were once troubled. In the long-term this will create more understanding between companies, more empathy.

Time winding down… Someone shouts "Ask about the church" Someone else shouts "Ask about Jimmer"

11. What does facebook look for in potential employees, what do byu students need to do to get on Facebook's radar?

a. We look for people that are passionate about something. In a way, it doesn't matter what you're compassionate about. b. If you're an engineer, did you just go through classes or do you build tools on the side? c. If you're into management, what types of management opportunities have you created for yourself? d. We don't want people to join facebook for what it already is. We want people to join facebook because they think it's so broken they want to improve it and help get it somewhere better. People that take initiative to do something, whatever it is they're passionate about.

12. Last question: Are you worried that advertisements take away from Facebook's coolness?

a. Well, everyone wants Facebook for free b. At the least, ad are a way that let you use the service for free c. No information is sold - ads are targeted by Facebook based off of the advertiser’s description, not by you giving your information before-hand. d. On good days, we hope ads are creating valuable, relevant content.

Thank yous… Gift from the students: One sweatshirt for each university in Utah (Weber State, Snow College, UVU, BYU, U of U, USU, etc… there’s like ten). My guess is he won’t wear them because they don't have a zip…

What is Adaptive Release?

Adaptive Release of Content provides controls to release content to users based on a set of rules provided by the course author.  The rules may be related to availability, date and time, individual users and user groups (such as course Groups), scores or attempts on any Gradebook item, or review status of another item in the course.  To give an analogy, adaptive release is like those old Goosebumps books where the outcome changes depending on the reader's decisions along the way. BrainHoney, in their latest release (Dec 2010), has added support for adaptive release.  Teachers now have the ability to:

  • Allow students to view a particular unit or resource only after they have attained a minimum score on a quiz.
  • Share different materials and resources with students in different sections of the same course.
  • Restrict students from taking a test until they have reviewed relevant course materials.
  • Make the next assignment available only to those who have read specific material.

Woohoo!  Go BrainHoney!

Mac OS not gaining steam?

The Mac OS isn't growing like crazy, despite the increased number of classmates, professors and coworkers working from their Macs.  I'm surprised.  It's been about even over the last year.  Maybe part of this can be explained by the emergence of iOS on iPads and Android on other tablets.  Windows has been steadily declining and now occupies about 89% of the market share.  Linux is on the decline too.

Optimize your site for SEO

Been learning about increasing SEO for your website lately.  Couple tricks: Meta tags in your HTML files.  Put the following code in your header, aka in between the < head > and < /head > tags.  For example on my site my SEO code looks like this:

<!-- SEO CODE --> <meta name="description" content="The professional blog and portfolio of Kyle Clegg" /> <meta name="keywords" content="kyle clegg, who is kyle clegg, kyle mitchell clegg, kyle clegg byu" /> <link rel="canonical" href="http://kyleclegg.com/" /> <!-- /CLOSING SEO -->

Now, apply this to your site: <!-- SEO CODE --> <meta name="description" content="Company website for eLearning Interactive." /> <meta name="keywords" content="elearning, online learning, online training, hazcom training modules" /> <link rel="canonical" href="http://elearninteractive.net/" /> <!-- /CLOSING SEO -->

This will help optimize your site or blog.  I guess the best thing to up your site though is to get lots of other sites to link to it.  Then google indexing/web crawlers will think it's really popular.  So get your blog or your company published by some online newspaper or on del.icio.us!   That's the key... no more tricking Google by creating pages that say "elearning" ten thousands times to try and get your site to the top of the SERP.  Stop living in 2004.  They're too smart now.

 

Useful articles:

 

I'm new to SEO... any suggestions?  Let me know.

Mark Zuckerberg at BYU

BYU News Release: Mark Zuckerberg to give forum address at BYU on March 25, 2011.

This is really exciting for the school and all persons interested in business, technology, creativity or improving the world.  I'm super stoked.

Mark Zuckerberg, Orrin Hatch to talk technology, policy at BYU March 25 Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will be featured in a technology forum discussion Friday, March 25, at Brigham Young University. U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch will also participate in the event, which will be held at 11 a.m. in the Marriott Center.

“In a world where technology and communications are changing at an ever-increasing rate, it is important that today’s students have the opportunity to hear and learn from those who are transforming electronic and social media,” said Kelly Flanagan, BYU’s Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Information Technology.

“We are grateful to Senator Hatch for inviting Mr. Zuckerberg to speak at BYU,” Flanagan said. “As chair of the U.S. Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force, Senator Hatch had the chance to meet with Mr. Zuckerberg and candidly discuss the opportunities and challenges that face our particular digital age. We look forward to hearing from Mr. Zuckerberg who, without question, is influencing how we communicate on a world-wide scale.”

In 2004, while a student at Harvard University, Zuckerberg founded Facebook, the world’s largest social network. Named as TIME magazine’s Person of the Year for 2010, the magazine noted, “Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life; nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but 70 percent of Facebook users live outside the U.S.”

Zuckerberg studied computer science at Harvard before moving his company to Palo Alto, Calif. He is now responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company.

The technology forum will follow a question-and-answer format. Questions will need to be submitted in advance (by Tuesday, March 22) through the BYU Facebook Page (Facebook.com/BYU).

The university will not broadcast or rebroadcast the address to any other locations on or off campus or the BYU Broadcasting network. Video of the technology forum will be posted later on the BYU Facebook Page and the BYUTV Facebook Page.