Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #27

The very best

Excellent report documenting the backlash to the corporate “sharing economy” and a counter-movement to to develop “platform cooperativism.”

Great post about Amazon's Alexa. "Seem "perfectly normal to children"

Challenges classic theories of change: what about the unknown unknowns?

"What if, instead of being driven solely by commercial returns, we could focus the Fourth Industrial Revolution more directly on the big problems our world faces? What if we could prioritize technological advances that have the most beneficial impact to society?"

"Optimizing around customer acquisition rather than equity returns leads to a new set of metrics."

"About a “unified stack” of content, services, products and channels. Technology and media are converging (technology needs content and vice versa) and it’s starting to form a coherent picture"

Data and Society

You might have read the Apple CEO’s open response to the US government earlier today. They are demanding access to an iP…

Futurist and Keynote Speaker Gerd Leonhard is blogging about the future. Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in all of recent human history

Zeitgeist

About gun-culture, tough man culture, a manly man culture

This article was updated at 6pm in Hong Kong with additional analysis of what the new rules may mean. In the latest sign that China's long-touted "opening up" is reversing into a "closing down," a Chinese ministry has issued new rules that ban any foreign-invested company from publishing anything online in China, effective next month....

Facebook board member Marc Andreessen is under fire for raising the issue of colonialism after India shut down its Free Basics Internet service for violating Net neutrality. We break down the idea of colonialism and the Internet.

23/ Ironically, one of the major bandwagons of today, the blockchain, mirrors this dynamic in its very architecture, with competing chains of "blocks" being transaction verification bandwagons.

Many unicorns, start-ups with billion-dollar valuations, have a shiny veneer of revenue growth but lack a competitive advantage for long-term value.

In 2016, the celebrated and reviled conference doubled down on its TED-ness

Innovation

New models for the company of the 21st Century

What we learned this year while building our list of the best and brightest.

Innovation was the buzzword of the World Economic Forum. Not only was it used by political and business leaders alike. But, also pivotal leaders in the development sector as well. In Geneva, ou...

Future of work

"The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists."

Tomorrow's workers may pay the price for today's leaders' lack of foresight.

Teamily is a Web-based tool that assigns a different personality type to each member of a team, based on their responses to a short questionnaire

Internet Culture

For a number of reasons, millennials appear to be a generation hard-wired for minimalism. I hope the trend continues.

Are you still waiting for those millions to join your movement? Still working nights and weekends and wonder why people …

This article originally appeared in Italian on Wired Italy as La profezia avverata di Umberto Eco on Jan. 7, 2015. It has been translated here for Quartz to mark the influential Italian semiotician's death at 84 yesterday, Feb. 19. Like the hikers who found Otzi half-buried in ice years ago, the other day I was wandering peacefully through the web when I...

FinTech

By Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance

US Blockchain Banking Race between Citibank, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. The major banks want to use blockchain to reduce costs.

Venmo just hit an important milestone: the company today announced it crossed $1B worth of transfers in a single month for the first time in January 2016.

Over the past year, the fintech industry has transformed from a hypothetical hotspot to an actual one.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

When you hear the word "drone," you probably think of something either very useful or very scary. But could they have aesthetic value? Autonomous systems expert Raffaello D'Andrea develops flying machines, and his latest projects are pushing the boundaries of autonomous flight -- from a flying wing that can hover and recover from disturbance to an eight-propeller craft that's ambivalent to orientation ... to a swarm of tiny coordinated micro-quadcopters. Prepare to be dazzled by a dreamy, swirling array of flying machines as they dance like fireflies above the TED stage.

A new milestone in the maturation of the Internet of Things has been reached: two contending organizations — the Open Interconnect Consortium

Amazon is betting big on Alexa. That much was evident Thursday night inside the company's newest skyscraper in Seattle, where more than 300 people gathered

Futurist and Keynote Speaker Gerd Leonhard is blogging about the future. Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in all of recent human history

Post Capitalism

2 diagrams that map the big picture of the emerging post-capitalist paradigm, underpinned by peer-to-peer and collaborative dimensions.

Mainstream neoconservative integral theory predicts a next state of civilisation which is hyper-individualist and is a reaction against collectivist excesses 

Art related

Icelandic Ólafur Arnalds at Sydney Opera House into performance with audio and video landscapes

Other