Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #37

The very best

Great inspiration on team behaviour and maturity based on jazz jam metaphor: Keynote from Mind the Product, San Francisco, May 2016

Happyplaces Stories

Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, has proposed a new business-led initiative for framing global e-commerce rules. Announcing it at the Boao Forum for Asia, he said: “Let busi

Welcome to the new world of artificial intelligence. Soon, we won't program computers. We'll train them. Like dolphins. Or dogs. Or humans.

Traditionally, creative thinking has been seen as the province of artists and other ‘creatives’. Yet, we are all born with minds-bodies-souls capable of enormous creativity. As the Sri Lankan art historian Ananda Coomaraswami noted, ‘An artist is not a special kind of person but every person is a special kind of artist.’ Each of us…

... according to some Notre Dame computer scientists and zebra mussels.

Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus has been quietly working on a much-anticipated voice assistant powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and..

Twenty-five years after the introduction of the World Wide Web, the Information Age is coming to an end. Thanks to mobile screens and Internet everywhere,..

Org chart for the Loomio cooperative in April 2016

India recently liberalized its FDI rules for B2C ecommerce. The new policy allows for 100% investment in online marketplaces by foreign investors. However this policy does not extend to inventory based companies. It would be interesting to see how the rivalry between Alibaba and Rakuten plays off in India and how it impacts the likes of Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm.

Uber wants to be everywhere, and that includes in your online world.

Artificial intelligence, risks and regulation in financial markets

Limits of digital transformation: 7 theories

I’ve been talking about this a lot privately lately.

a large company that’s also an invention machine

Is going rogue the new normal?

Algorithms have so far analyzed human identity merely for economic reasons. The result is dangerously far removed from our reality.

Uber's deal with Alipay is more than just a win for riders of black cars. The deal moves Alipay further toward its goal of becoming a "global lifestyle super

CoinDesk’s Q1 2016 State of Blockchain report summarizes key trends, data and events from the first quarter of 2016. You'll be able to read analysis of the key…

Data and Society

Governmental control is nothing compared to what Google is up to: the company is creating an unprecedented form of surveillance capitalism.

But we’re better off believing in it anyway.

They got us hooked on data. Advertisers want more data. Direct marketers want more data. Who saw it? Who clicked? What percentage? What's trending? What's yielding? But there's one group that doesn't need more data... Anyone who's making a long-term...

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.

It would probably be a bit much to suggest that a piece of European legislation can be ‘sexy’, but it would be fair to s…

It all began, innocently enough, with a DOCTOR.

A data-sharing agreement obtained by New Scientist shows that Google DeepMind's collaboration with the NHS goes far beyond what it has publicly announced

Zeitgeist

In His First Letter To Employees As Google CEO Sundar Pichai Predicts End Of Computer As A Device | indiatimes.com

Google is widely considered to have some of the most advanced artificial intelligence technology. And with digital platforms like the Android mobile operating system and the Chrome browser, it has ways to reach billions of people. But can the

The US Senate is concerned about political bias at Facebook. Specifically, it wants to know how the company chooses news stories that appear in its "trending topics" section. The Senate is right to be concerned. Media owners have long held sway over the political process. William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers commanded 20 million readers a day (paywall) at their peak in the 1930s, nearly a fifth...

Exclusive: Leaked internal guidelines show human intervention at almost every stage of its news operation, akin to a traditional media organization

Innovation

The 2 year tipping point for innovation

In innovation, the path of least resistance leads to mediocrity. A form of Darwinism drives organizations as they decide which ideas to launch. But instead of

The New York Times R&D Lab, a groundbreaking department of applied creative technology that helped one of the great inst…

These fundamental guidelines, drawn from experience, can help you reshape your organization to fit your business strategy.

The only reason Huawei would use Apple's star-shaped security screw is because it's what Apple uses, and Huawei wants its phone to look like an iPhone.

Future of work

Only highly performing teams can win consistently. There is little slack and waste. Work is focused and extremely productive. Here is how.

An exclusive sneak peak at the book "Disrupted" by Dan Lyons on his time at startup Hubspot.

Long-term teams over task forces

The best way to understand the future of work is to go talk to people outside our comfort zone and become an adventurer …

The legal profession could soon be disrupted by algorithms, too.

Rick Wartzman

Start-ups wanting to create “beautiful organizations” (as so many founders claim these days) should visit 59-year old Sw…

Internet Culture

"'The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history and to try and catch on to his coattails as he marches past'. How inevitable is technology, and how much is luck and great leadership?

Chatbots: the shaky, first steps of a revolution in our relationship with organizations and their products and services.

Let’s face it. Some tech conferences have lost their way. While TechCrunch Disrupt remains a firmly curated, media-driven, event, with hundreds of..

Opting Out of Email. For Well and Good.

FinTech

. Read more at straitstimes.com.

The banking industry has been and is a massive machine providing comprehensive financial services. Any bank nowadays can serve any financial need for the eligib

SigFig, a San Francisco-based robo advisor, partnered with UBS Wealth Management to create and customize digital tools for WMA’s 7,000 advisors, it was announced

Disruptive robo-advisor movement is dying as Betterment & Wealthfront growth rates crash, & robo technology is adopted by financial advisors & platforms.

Built using the blockchain platform Ethereum, The DAO is touted as a new form of decentralized financial organization.

Return of the FinServ Jedi

Making money off blockchain is no longer just about bitcoin or even financial applications. One group of leaders spent today debating that future.

Have investors in fintech startup companies been drinking way too much Kool-Aid? Mark, Tluszcz, CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners, detects a sour after-t...

Source There are 1700 APIs (rounded) shared on the Financial Category of the Programmable Web directory, plus 1200 in payments. Government has 1150, e-commerce 2500, and mobile 2450. Xignite launched last September the #FintechRevolution API ecosystem, which is a consortium of 21 companies supporting and connecting developers with best-of-breed financial APIs. The focus is on non-traditional workflow, data…

Japanese financial conglomerate SBI Holdings has set its stall out as a central player in the fintech ecosystem, promising to aggressively adopt new tec...

We take a look at the landscape of blockchain companies in the financial services industry.

Banks bad; fintech, good. For several years now we have been beaten over the head with this message. Traditional lenders, weighed down by ancient IT and tough new capital requirements, were going nowhere. Smart start-ups that used online platforms

Take that, Apple. Samsung Pay may not be available in the United Kingdom yet, but it's rapidly expanding its reach in China in a March deal with UnionPay,

The Millennial generation represents an "immense opportunity for banks," according to a new report by Oracle Financial Services and Wharton Fintech.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

Today, we tap and swipe to interact with our devices. But Google envisions a Minority Report-like future where people can control their phones, watches, and homes without touching them. On the final day (May 20) of its I/O developer conference, Google showed off improvements to Soli, a radar-based technology that makes it possible to interact...

Smarter artificial intelligence is one of 21st century’s most dire threats, writes Yuval Noah Harari in follow-up to Sapiens

If you encountered a robot on the street, you would want it to give you the right of way instead of just rolling over your foot, right? Making room for ...

Google’s artificial intelligence company hits back in row over data-sharing agreement for medical records

By Robert Scoble May 5, 2016 What a month it's been since I wrote to you last. I’ve been on a world tour, doing my homework, meeting influencers at

The next time someone throws you shade for pulling out a steamy romance novel on the train or bus, just tell them that it's okay, because Google's doing it, too. For the past few months, Google has...

Post Capitalism

Rana Foroohar’s deeply reported new book takes direct aim at the financial industry and calls for a new compact between …

Author Douglas Rushkoff on a Sustainable Economy

In his new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, noted media theorist and a…

Paolo Siciliani. Peer-to-peer lending platforms (P2P platforms) emerged after the financial crisis by catering for pent-up demand for unsecured borrowing from individuals and small businesses.  Ten years after the conception of P2P platforms, the question is whether they may soon start to penetrate more mainstream lending markets and thereby challenge high street lenders.  For example,…

Further Future is the tech-centric, unapologetically luxurious alternative to Burning Man, complete with personal assistants, spa treatments and fine dining

Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president. He might even become president of the US. It is hard to exaggerate the significance and danger of this development. The US was the bastion of democracy and freedom in the 20th century. If

Adam Gopnik on the Republican Party’s acceptance of Donald Trump as the Presidential nominee.

New research from a pair of Italian economists documents an extraordinary fact: The wealthiest families in Florence today are descended from the wealthiest families of Florence nearly 600 years ago.

Art related

Will the young curators of the British pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale transform our ideas of what we expect from a house?

Google’s new Nexus 6P “Live Case” makes Jeff Koons as a service.

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