Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #21

The very best

At an Internet Of Things conference this year I gave a speech on why traditional business models will be disrupted by IOT and Open Data. One such example I used was the car insurance industry, and how I believed that telematics was already dead. I was immediately pounced on during [...]

This is not a problem to solve, but a matter to understand

Benevolent dictators

Geek culture is a subculture of enthusiasts that is traditionally associated with obscure media (Japanese animation, science fiction, video games, etc.). However, geek culture is becoming increasingly mainstream; for example, in the past year alone, Dragon*Con, a major Geek convention in Atlanta, Georgia, attracted an attendance of over 57,000 members. The present article uses an individual differences approach to examine three theoretical accounts of geek culture. Seven studies (N = 2354) develop the Geek Culture Engagement Scale (GCES) to quantify geek engagement and assess its relationships to theoretically relevant personality and individual differences variables. These studies present evidence that individuals may engage in geek culture in order to maintain narcissistic self-views (the great fantasy migration hypothesis), to fulfill belongingness needs (the belongingness hypothesis), and to satisfy needs for creative expression (the need for engagement hypothesis). Geek engagement is found to be associated with elevated grandiose narcissism, extraversion, openness to experience, depression, and subjective well-being across multiple samples. These data lay the groundwork for further exploration of geek culture as well as provide a foundation for examining other forms of subculture participation.

Causeit helps innovative ideas become real by empowering innovation teams. We provide coaching, open innovation and thought leadership support to organizations out to make a difference in the world.

China's parliament passed a controversial new anti-terrorism law on Sunday that requires technology firms to hand over sensitive information such as encryption keys to the government and allows the military to venture overseas on counter-terror operations.

China, once known more for manufacturing stuff for the rest of the world and copying everyone else's IP, is becoming a hotbed of innovation.

Now we know what Russia wants in 2016. Not a bigger piece of Ukraine. Not the right to prop up the regime in Syria. Not …

British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle said, “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available... a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” It was 1948. It took twenty years to get there. But what we saw was much more than the incontrovertible fact that the world is not flat. What we saw was ourselves reflected back to us. Apollo 8 went to the moon in 1968. They didn't land, but they did circle the moon. The astronauts had a camera with them, and at some point one of them said they were going to turn it around and show audiences the earth, which he did. That was likely the very first image of a planet hanging in space many saw. Author Frank White wrote The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution in 1987. In the book, he described how this is...

What's in a name ? Well, it seems everything when it comes to trying to name the next generation that follows the Millennials. In March this year, MTV ran a survey across 1,000 children who were born after December 2000 to find the name they most associate with. Of the 544 names [...]

The defining political achievements of the past decade have favored tolerance and empathy - and online discussion has fuelled them all, argues Steven Johnson

@EzraMoGee

How Jeff Bezos aims to conquer the next “trillion-dollar market.” The inside story of Amazon invading India.

Innovation

BY JON WESTENBERG

Recently I was in Istanbul presenting to a conference of business leaders on STEM education. I’m sure this is not an iso…

If your company has   decided to set up an innovation outpost (see our last post  on how to make that decision), how do you actually do it? How do you staff it? What should the team in the outpost be doing day-to-day? In what order?

By making more products available to a larger audience, technologies such as the Internet are making it possible for organizations to fulfill the “long tail” of demand, disrupting incumbents that rely on high-volume sales of relatively few items.

Take risks. Leap into unknown and unexplored areas. Express yourself in new ways. Do these things to locate, validate, and capitalize on new areas of growth for your business. There are formal methods and processes for unlocking potential and manifesting new realities. We always tell clients to...

Future of work

If you spend a significant amount of time online you will experience a combination of FOMO, envy, and everything else in…

Our overscheduled lives leave little time for contemplation and reflection. How do we enable each other to pause and reflect together and ask how our hearts are doing?

Brazilian entrepreneur Gustavo Tanaka listed eight reasons why he believes that the world as we know it is changing -- and that it is a good thing. His blog has been widely shared, so clearly his message has resonated with many.

Internet Culture

High-tech giants are becoming more like the radical right as they launch populist crusade to block government regulation – and they have the technology to recruit believers

Om Malik writes about the failure of Richard Branson’s ride-sharing venture, Sidecar.

This note is in response to Kamil Stanuch’s article, linked above, about a case of plagiarism on Medium.

Long live the other technology laws (you’ve never heard of most of them)

The Commons Strategies Group (Michel Bauwens, Silke Helfrich and David Bollier) 

From the Atlantic and Pacific Centuries to the Era of Global Remix

Technology and software is becoming integrated into every aspect of our personal and business lives and every year this integration gets deeper and deeper.

Gazing intensely into their respective crystal balls, Gartner, IDC, and Forrester have come up with predictions for 2016 and beyond, highlighting digital transformation and its impact on businesses and consumers worldwide. According to Forrester, only 27% of today’s businesses have a coherent digital strategy that sets out how the firm will create customer value as…

Different rules apply for citizens and politicians

FinTech

Without a doubt, 2015 has been an eventful year for blockchain technology. What for years has firmly been the domain of …

The generously funded startup Chain became the first company to complete and document a private securities transaction using blockchain technology on Nasdaq,

An early tech adopter uses biometrics and wearable technology to streamline checkout and track his spending habits

Banks are making big bets on blockchain and will invest an estimated $400 million into the technology—the digital public ledger that enables the usage of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin—by 2019, according to new estimates from financial services research firm Aite Group. Financial institutions spent an estimate $75 million on the technology this year. https://atlas.qz.com/charts/Vy6mu6sHl Most financial institutions argue that they're not...

By the CEO of Fidor Bank

By Rick Huckstep 2015 was the year that InsurTech emerged from the shadow of Fintech. This story has been told through my last 40 research notes published on DailyFintech.com over the past 8 months. Including 28 interviews with the CEOs and Founders of InsurTechs, this story spans the globe from the USA to China, from…

AI, Robots, Algorythms

Should autonomous vehicles be programmed to choose who they kill when they crash? And who gets access to the code that determines those decisions?

Google’s Project Tango allows mobile devices to gain awareness of the space around us. Could the technology be as game-changing as the iPhone, or is it just another shot at the moon?

One cognitive scientist thinks the leading approach to machine learning can be improved by ideas gleaned from studying children.

This question originally appeared on Quora: To what extent might Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk be right about the dangers of artificial intelligence? What are your thoughts? Answer by Suzanne Sadedin, evolutionary biologist. Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are right: AI is dangerous. But they are dangerously wrong about why. I see two fairly likely futures: Future one: AI destroys itself, humanity,...

The Internet is devolving from a free forum of ideas to a series of walled gardens where algorithms and a small cadre of elites decide what is acceptable speech online

 

How can we stop superintelligent computers from taking over the world? Feed them a digital dose of LSD, suggests this mind-bending book

Post Capitalism

About the Illusion of Control in Financial Markets

@hangingnoodles

Other

Happy New Year! As we welcome in 2016, here are a handful of Media Lab highlights from 2015.

Two years after launching, Google's longevity lab remains shrouded in mystery.

The yearly question from Edge.org