Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #40

The very best

About the new CEO of Nest and the monetization of the smart home space. Very interesting long read.

A biopic about Van Gogh’s tumultuous life and mysterious death entitled “Loving Vincent“ is currently in the works, and the film will be made entirely of animated paintings in the swirling style of van Gogh’s canvases. The trailer shows a taste of the stunning intensity of paint brought to life.

Tyler Cowen on how increasingly sophisticated and anthropomorphized chat bots may change our relationships to products, and to each other.

Designers will play a crucial role in shaping our post-human future. Our lives may depend on it.

The spirit of innovation gets replaced by the religion of innovation. Gone is reflection. Gone is the process of discovery. Gone is the ownership that comes with birthing new insights. In it's place? Simulation. Imitation. And, all too often, the blind following of pre-packaged solutions.

This parody is a thought leader in the field of TED Talk parodies.

For centuries, scientists studied light to comprehend the visible world. Why are things colored? What is a rainbow? How do our eyes…

Investors have poured $168 million into a democratic, machine-based, blockchain-enabled venture capital firm. But democracy is tough to manage.

Vitalik Buterin has set the next Ethereum’s milestones for 2017 and 2018.

we believe that a third web is coming

Bryan Thompson was hard at work on an industry-disrupting car project when he was told to get to San Francisco to show it to Steve Jobs

With Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk, the Google co-founder looks to the skies.

An excerpt from Ben Hoguet’s book Narration Reinvented - a guide to creating, designing, producing & distributing interactive narratives & transmedia works.

Data and Society

Let’s just say it: In the future, successful data companies will not own any data. The data economy is the engine of growth for all digital businesses. However, the landscape is changing. We are heading for a data crunch. Data has huge economic value but it is becoming businesses’ biggest liability. As a consequence, in the...

The challenge is to take a balkanized world of data, made up of disparate islands and integrate it into a single, unified environment in which we can work effectively.

Curbs on free speech are growing tighter. It is time to speak out

Multitasking is an essential skill in the era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter. But, argues neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin, it’s actually making us less efficient

Zeitgeist

The team behind Viv hopes to change how we interact with just about everything — and build a new economic model for the Internet along the…

For when Davos isn’t exclusive enough, there is Bilderberg. The Bilderberg Meeting is an annual gathering of world leaders, executives, and assorted grandees, established in 1954 and named for the Dutch hotel where the secretive group first gathered. Amid heavy security, around 130 people—including three prime ministers and 30 CEOs—will hold talks on the world’s...

Your phone is full of apps, and you're done downloading new ones — unless they're Snapchat or Uber.

Bond guru Bill Gross believes the growing global move toward negative yields will have dire consequences.

London Business School professor Lynda Gratton believes living longer requires individuals and corporations to change their approach to careers, life transitions, and retirement.

Innovation

Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design process ever implemented. With the company verging on becoming the world’s first $1 trillion business organization – there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve Jobs’ time at the company it would have been near impossible to find out about the internal workings of the business. This isn’t surprising when a business...

Scaling Atomic Design for the Enterprise

Incumbents needn’t be victims of disruption if they recognize the crucial thresholds in their life cycle, and act in time.

Future of work

71% of Millennials Are Either Not Engaged or Actively Disengaged at Work

Jobs are finite, specified and something we 'get'. Doing a job makes us defensive, it limits our thinking. The goal is to do just enough, not get in trouble, meet spec. When in doubt, seek deniability. Projects are open-ended, chosen...

This was just a fun way of framing the way the world of work is moving within a very established framework - Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Each element in the hierarchy kind of speaks for itself but here are a few lines of elaboration for each. Creativity and Innovation I see this as the pinnacle…

Internet Culture

The Little Black Book of Billionaire Secrets These DARPA Darlings Just Raised $20M To Build A Super-Powered Google For The Internet Of Things

Uber has today announced the public launch of its UberRUSH API, letting any developer offer delivery of their products through Uber. UberRush launched back..

Hoagy Cunningham and Misha Wagner created timeglobe in order to give history a powerful interactive tool that presents expanded global context.

FinTech

A ledger technology, a means for recording transactions, needs to be fit for purpose. It needs to be cost-effective, convenient…

A mid-year review of the status of the 2016 retail banking trends and predictions.

Music companies want to work with tech startups, not sue or squeeze them for all they’re worth. But will they still be left in the hands of big guns such as Apple and Google?

Facebook is expanding its focus on payments with a new trial in Southeast Asia that allows users to pay for products listed on Facebook Pages with just a few..

Check out the most definite list of London FinTech startups and get inspired now.

What's hot in fintech?

  If my thesis on the growing importance of Corporate Venture Capital, b2b business models and finserv (banking or insurance) Incumbents as strategic

AI, Robots, Algorythms

Yesterday I wrote about what I viewed as the most likely scenario for Nest under its new CEO, Marwan Fawaz, which is to focus on shipping some of the products u

Inside the economy of on-demand crowd-workers displacing professionals, for cheap

Apple's virtual assistant was the first of its kind. But now it's playing catch-up.

“ [The focus shifts] from assets and products to services and outcomes, because all of [a] sudden, you're no longer thinking in terms of producing a best-in-class machine and selling it to a customer and then the customer will do whatever they want. You're focusing on the idea that, thanks to these technologies, what you're really selling to your customers are outcomes, services, solutions. It's really a shift to everything as a service.”

In a world in which a phone or computer is rarely more than arm’s length away, are we eliminating introspection?

Post Capitalism

Want to Kill Your Economy? Have MBA Programs Churn out Takers Not Makers.

Doctrine Is Wrong. Here’s How to Rethink the Corporation

Art related

Van Gogh may now be widely recognized as one of the most influential and creative artists of all time, but he died alone and penniless. Why? Because 100 years ago his canvas’ were seen as the hallucinatory original works of a […]

Other

High above London, Tokyo and Cairo, the language of the cockpit is technical, obscure, geeky – and irresistibly romantic