If you were as mystified as I was by the Reactive Programming course on Coursera and all those talks and blogs on how Reactive Programming is going to change the world, you might find this talk by Roland Kuhn is a more accessible way into the whole Reactive thing:
Reactive Streams: Handling Data-Flows the Reactive Way
It looks at ongoing work to create a common standard for reactive streaming on different platforms such as
Java 8, Scala's Akka library, and others.