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Three trailblazing figures in educational technology are showcasing the future of learning at our upcoming annual conference, Disrupt San Francisco. Former New York education Chancellor, Joel Klein, will get into more of the details about the recently announced Amplify project, News Corp’s ambitious venture to create tailored, digital learning for the American education system. Bill Gates’ “favorite teacher”, Sal Khan, who founded the Youtube-based Khan Academy, will speak about his pioneering work in the “flipped classroom” and launch a new feature to his site. And Google fellow and CEO of Udacity, Sebastian Thrun, will discuss how he opened the walled garden of American higher education free of charge to students around the world. These education leaders will join an all-star lineup at Disrupt SF Sept 8-12, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Marc Benioff, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Matt Cohler, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Vinod Khosla and many others. Come be a part of this ...

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More Arda Kara and Alexander Blessing are from two pretty different places — Turkey and Germany, respectively — but as students pursuing master’s degrees in computer science at Stanford, they both faced very similar problems when it came to communicating with their family and old friends. Because of the massive time zone differences between California and Europe, it was pretty much impossible to schedule a time to talk daily on the phone or via Skype. Texts and emails were a bit too cold. Video messages through mobile apps such asSocialCam and Viddy were just a bit too high...

Eric Eldon is the Co-Editor of TechCrunch. He was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps. Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee. While Inside Network sold... ? Learn More Mobile usage is upending web empires, as Silicon Valley has come to realize over the last few years. And we’ll have two companies smack in the middle of the shift present at our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp this Friday in Redwood City, Calif., sharing how they’re surviving in this new world. Get your CrunchUp tickets here. Zynga, the dominant social game developer on Facebook, has been both building and buying its way into mobile gaming to adapt for this change. It’s had a few wins, like the growth of its “With Friends” franchise, and some losses, like the decline of Draw Something’s traff...

Everyone knows they have unique fingerprints, but what about a unique footprint? Research has shown everyone has a personalized way of walking — pressure of step, length of stride — and a new lab is working to turn those individual foot features into a security measure. The lab is developing biometric shoe insoles to monitor the characteristics of a person’s feet. Sensors will record the patterns and a computer will compare the measurements to a person’s master file. If it’s a match, it will grant the person access to secured areas and the insoles will turn off. If not, it sounds an alarm. “Within the third step, it knows it’s you, and it goes back to sleep,” Todd Gray, the company’s president, said to The Washington Post . “If I put on yours, it would know almost instantly that I’m not you.” Gray says his inspiration for the revolutionary security gear came from seeing his daughter in maternity ward decorated with baby feet. SEE ALSO: Department of Homeland Security Testing Molecular...