Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #70

The very best

About "Better for Less" in Government (and enterprise) IT anno 2017. In early 2009, I met Liam Maxwell. That name might not mean much to you unless you work in Government but he has been an influential figure in government technology throughout the world, a strong…

About the falling apart of the token liquidity craze in ICOs.

About the decentralized web as a way to limit large, corporate-controlled mega-platforms to intermediate speech online

About a 3,700-year-old clay tablet proving Babylonians developed trigonometry 1,500 years before the Greeks and were using a sophisticated method of mathematics which could change how we calculate today.

About Richard Florida's mea culpa of his gospel of the creative class.

About the future of capitalism being customer-centric, not shareholder-value or founder-centricity

About Estonia offering "Estcoins" to e-resisidents. This radical question is at the heart of an ambitious new proposal that, if implemented, has the potential to benefit both the country and its fast growing community of e-residents. ‘Estcoins’ could…

He’s the opposite of Trump in nearly every dimension.

When Writing is More than Writing As a professor who also happens to opine publicly about productivity, I'm often invited to stop by dissertation bootcamps

Apple never releases a product into market before its competitors. If you didn’t know any better, you would think this is a deliberate strategy. And you’d be correct. Because it is. And it’s not a…

Data and Society

oices that can be heard directly, consciously and personally, rather than mere data flows observed by machines. That direct influence will be far more helpful than anything they’re learning now just by following

In the wake of Charlottesville and a resurgence of white supremacy, tech companies’ complex political positioning is getting harder to maintain.

Personal data is to the tech world what oil is to the fossil fuel industry. That’s why companies like Amazon and Facebook plan to dig deeper than we ever imagined

Zeitgeist

There has never before been a U.S. president who trivialized the violence and racism of neo-Nazis. For many Republicans, Donald Trump has now gone too far. The populist leader has become more isolated than ever before -- in the world and inside his own party.

Innovation

Do More! What Amazon Teaches Us About Robots and the “Jobless Future”

Future of work

Courage Camp. Tales from a 2-day retreat in Rhode Island, exploring what it takes to become a courageous leader.

Frequent job hopping has become the norm across the tech industry. We examine average employee tenure rates among the top companies in tech.

Barclays, a leading British bank, has decided to trim costs by tracking how often employees are at their desks. The bank has installed monitors under desks to keep tabs of comings and goings, according to Bloomberg. The idea is to have a better idea of how much office space the bank needs, in an effort...

On a regular day, you would never dream of spending 6 hours turning an avocado into a piece of art, or covering an entire page of your notebook with mind

Internet Culture

Drones. Shared refrigerators. Hydroponic garages. And never setting foot in a grocery store again.

The companies are working together to keep pace in the race for online shoppers. They hope a transition to voice technology will help.

The retail giant is taking a characteristically algorithmic approach to fashion.

Unless Google can get its serverless act together, it may end up winning the container battle but losing the cloud war

FinTech

The old banks are getting away with terrible service, while new banks are regularly regenerating their systems and apps. Story by Chris Skinner.

I went to the 2017 Blockstack Summit to try and get a feel for the current state of the cryptocurrency technology and market. Many of the people I follow in the cryptocurrency space were either…

Deloitte has published a report on emerging Fintech Hubs around the world that analyses 44 different cities. Entitled "Connecting Global FinTech: Interim H

Blockchain is a technology that requires collaboration to be effective, which is why companies—both allies and competitors—have begun working together in consortia. But creating a successful blockchain consortium requires planning, investment, and commitment.​

Ripple is cranking up its assault on Swift by signing up big names Ben Bernanke and Tim Berners-Lee for a conference next month, which will take place a...

Crypto 2.0 Musings - A Question Of Trust

AI, Robots, Algorythms

Leaders in the fields of AI and robotics, including Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman, have signed a letter calling on the United Nations to ban lethal autonomous weapons, otherwise...

"World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation" - Marshall McLuhan I've got an audacious panel proposal for SxSW 2018. Please check it out and VOTE if you think surviving the Cyber...

Somewhere between the 14th and 15th floors in a concrete stairwell, Bryan Salesky pauses, searching for the right words to explain his mission for the foreseeable future. He wants to give cars the...

The tech giant was going to build its own self-driving car. Now it is sticking to the underlying technology and testing it in an employee shuttle service.

Voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant can make your home smarter and your life crazier.

Bill Schmarzo, the 'Dean of Big Data,' delves into what self-driving cars guided by artificial intelligence could mean for the future of robotics.

Twitter reduces us to a world of statement

Shelf-carrying machines waltz along effortlessly in a new logistical dance

Forget the Turing test. Computing pioneer Alan Turing's most pertinent thoughts on machine intelligence come from a neglected paragraph of the same paper that first proposed his famous test for whether a computer could be ...

Post Capitalism

A fully featured infographic describing the necessity for and evolution of the Platform Cooperativism movement.

Art related

Barry Joseph interviews Kathryn Box of the Tate Gallery in London about the museum's exciting digital learning initiatives.

The latest stadium for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar has been unveiled and has a diamond-patterned exterior based on the cap traditionally worn by Arab men.

Handmade out of organic materials, Blossom is a creative new take on social home robots

Chiangmai Life Architects and Construction modelled the segmented roof of this bamboo sports hall at a school in Thailand on the petals of a lotus flower.

Other

Elon Musk has offered a glimpse of the spacesuit that could clothe those journeying on his company's attempted mission to Mars.

Audio software is ugly and confusing. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Promos