Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #25

The very best

"People don't trust you without getting to know you and watching you work and seeing you make good on your word."

It’s been 20 years — 20 years!? — since John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” as a r…

Very powerful 2016 wishes from Laurent Ledoux, highlighting what real freedom meets

Fritjof Capra is one of the world’s leading thinkers in systems theory, and the author of many influential books, including his latest book, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. In addition to the book, he has also recently launched Capra Course, a new online course based on the book. I recently discussed with Fritjof the importance to global brands of developing their own systems view of life, and what guidance and inspiration change agents working with brands can learn.

The Life-crushing Magic of Hierarchy Humans are inherently messy creatures. We accumulate history and the entanglements of human relationships and emotions. As a manager this human mess can interfere...

Data and Society

Just over a year after Michael Brown’s death became a focal point for a national debate about policing and race, Ferguson and nearby St. Louis suburbs have returned to what looks, from the outside,...

Zeitgeist

Interesting piece by Jessica Lessin in The Information today: The End of Tech Startups:

Note: back in 2006, I interviewed Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation for Pantopicon’s blog “a thousand tomorrows”. By …

Innovation

I worked at The New York Times from 2013 to 2015. My job there was to lead a team in the creation, launch and developmen…

The Economist: More creative destruction would seem to imply that firms are being created and destroyed at a greater rate. But the odds of a company dropping out of the S&P 500 index of big firms in any given year are about one in 20—as they have been, on average, for 50 years. About half…

Future of work

Adam Grant, a best-selling author and the youngest tenured professor at Wharton, is back with a new book that hits both real and virtual bookshelves today:..

There always has been more to human collectivities than the collectivity itself. — Thierry de Baillon

Curt Carlson

In my recent review of James Watt's book Business for Punks I mentioned that I needed to write an additional article on whether or not the book was suitable for people working in large organisations. Business for Punks is at one and the same time the story of how BrewDog was born from a desire…

Disruption is a bad thing, right? Well, it depends. Are you the disruptor or the disrupted? In startups, disruptors reap…

Internet Culture

I’ve spent many years studying, writing about, building, and funding companies (such as Bottlenose, Klout, and The Daily Dot) in Twitter’s ecosystem.

The history of open source and a glimpse at its future

I’m attending IBM Connect 2016 in Orlando as an IBM-selected Futurist, which is a first of a sort. While I have long bee…

A swirl of modern tastes, consumer expectations and the Internet is producing an ever-increasing number of “boutique therapies.”

FinTech

If you don’t use Ethereum, you have to defend that decision.

What do Rollaboard luggage, Amazon Prime membership, and Olympian Dick Fosbury share? Each represents a key but unconventional approach to a longstanding challenge. Banker Chris Nichols thinks banks will benefit by adopting subscription-style pricing like Amazon.

The 1000+ Startups Unbundling European Finance

It seems Bank of America is trying to monopolize the Blockсhain by getting 100% of the patents covering Blockсhain technology. And this path was shown a year ago by Coinbase too.

From early-stage companies to heavyweights like SoFi and Avant, startups are reshaping the consumer banking experience.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

As Google's head of artificial intelligence takes charge of search, deep learning is already changing the way Googling works.

Behind Google’s achievement is a tale of long-standing conflicts in the AI field

Virtual assistants allow brands to connect with customers in a more personal way, but there are barriers to overcome

Contrary to hype, hopes and dreams, big data visualization is generally not helping humans make novel discoveries. Data visualization has two primary purposes: exploration and storytelling. Hype. Imagine, for a moment, a beautiful, big ass graph – all four walls...

Alphabet, née Google, woke up this morning as the most valuable company in the world. As a known Google fan — and minor …

Post Capitalism

Since the beginning of the year, the world economy has faced a new bout of severe financial market volatility, marked by sharply falling prices for equities and other risky assets. A variety of factors are at work – and will remain so throughout 2016 and beyond.

The RSA’s recent report explores the emergence of a new kind of monopoly power in the sharing economy, and considers how we might challenge increasing economic concentrations of power through rethinking our approach to governance and regulation.

Is technological progress dependent on extreme inequality?

Art related

From vibrant set design to mesmerizing costumes and a promenade exhibition

Other

Greg Satell on the discovery of useless things, engineering innovation, and making good on the connected age.