Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #38

The very best

A new paradigm of economic cooperation is underway -- a digital democratization of business. It’s not crowdfunding a product, an artwork, or a new..

Silicon Valley has sold us on a cashless, cardless, walletless, supposedly frictionless future — but as I learned living in it for a month,...

The hot new journal, Evonomics just ran my appraisal of how Advertising is failing the Internet.  I explore how a real Web economy might replace the maelstrom of ads. Could simple micro-payments work, paying pennies for what you use? I’ve been working on this analysis for 3 years. A two-parter with major implications for your future online.

Why organizations need to shift from a scalable efficiency model to a scalable learning model … and what happens when they don’t! The future favors leaders w...

The “sharing economy” of Silicon Valley parlance makes an Orwellian mockery of the word “sharing”; if you are sharing something with other…

If you work in traditional retail you had a very bad week of headlines on reported earnings, reset guidance, and public …

Almost startup eventually needs to decide if it should partner with a large company to accelerate growth. We discuss the right and wrong reasons to do so.

Data and Society

Institutional review boards have long governed research ethics, but do they need to evolve in the digital age?

Zeitgeist

The Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society publishes a comprehensive white paper

Printing genomes on demand could mean custom-built organisms, difficult ethical questions, and profits for a handful of companies.

Innovation

The best ideas are often the simplest ones, but their inception is mysterious and complex. Courtney Martin on serendipity and community, rather than process, as the crucial elements of creativity.

This is an outdated summary of the How Innovators Think project. Find the current version here.

Internet Culture

Advertising Cannot Maintain the Internet. Here’s the “Secret Sauce” Solution

Magic Leap is apparently working on a virtual reality technology that's so revolutionary it justifies valuing the company at $4.5 billion, even though almost no one has seen this mysterious tech, or knows exactly what it will do. But according to a lawsuit filed by Magic Leap on May 26 and first uncovered by MIT Technology Review, the company...

FinTech

It looks like an R3CEV-Ripple partnership is in the works. This development could be a sign of the bundling of distributed ledgers and alliances between

The dependence on mining and infrastructure puts any blockchain product in the custody of whoever manages to attract large-scale capital.

In the beginning the Prophet Satoshi brought us Bitcoin. And the cryptogeeks and libertarians looked upon it, and said lo, we smile upon this, for it is good,..

The accountant has done a deep dive on the online lending industry, and its conclusions are devastating reading for anyone connected to the sector.

Calls for fintech/bank partnerships are misguided. What's happened to date don't even qualify as partnerships. Banks need platforms, not partnerships.

There are a few things going on behind the scenes most Snapchat users may not have paid attention to in recent months.

"There are downsides to flying — people die every now and then. Do you want to stop all air flights?"

In this article, Let’s Talk Payments talks about the biggest crowdfunding project in the history – The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).

AI, Robots, Algorythms

Let's say I'm counseling a technology company, and I help them write an end user license agreement that basically says, "If you're online for anything... and you don't own a copyright ... and all these other good things... you don't have a choice but to click agree or not use this device. By the way, if there is any dispute, it has to go to arbitration, binding arbitration, and we have control of that process." It's the lawyer's job to help the client, avoid liability, and get an eager user to sign off on all these things. Do you think that is an appropriate way to accept risk for consumers?

Body hacking is here, and it's subtle.

Post Capitalism

Mark Zuckerberg could get caught in the crossfire in the war between Gawker Media and Peter Thiel. Thiel, a Facebook board member, PayPal founder and billionaire, told the New York Times that he had been quietly funding legal cases against Gawker Media, because it had outed the venture capitalist as gay nine years ago. Cases backed...

Art related

To write is to bare your soul to a critical world. A writer reflects on the bravery to reject shame and pursue the creative crafts.

At the 2016 AIA convention, the legendary architect gave the profession an honest appraisal of its failures.

Other

Tech companies talk about the free flow of information but their owners use their wealth to block any intrusion into their personal lives