Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #8

The very best

The ongoing vogue of business-design transforms asset-based firms to network-based platforms. Uber and Airbnb are exampl…

In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways.

The New Yorker misses the broader picture.

Human organizational models have long been limited to a small set of effective approaches. For small organizations with …

Amanda Schaffer writes in the MIT Technology Review about “Tech’s Enduring Great Man Myth” She describes the myth:

Hillary Clinton’s capital-gains tax proposal assumes that companies only care about the short term. James Surowiecki argues that the data say otherwise.

Leaders today can no longer afford to think in conventional terms of efficiency, but must shape networks in the context of a shared mission.

It is easier than ever to become a digital nomad - a person who has no fixed address, rarely spends more than a few months in one country and keeps up with their work on their computer from co-working spaces, coffee shops or hotel rooms around the world.

Futurism

Among the most powerful traditions in the psychology of personality is the quest for a short list of concepts, whether distinct categories or dimensions of variation, describing human variety.  Some believe we already have the compass required to navigate this OCEAN: Openness to experience (fantasy, aesthetics, feelings), Conscientiousness (competence, order, dutifulness), Extraversion (warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness), Agreeableness (trust, straightforwardness, altruism), Neuroticism (anxiety, angry hostility, depression).  Or do people experience one or another of four FITS: Feeling, Intuition, Thinking, Sensation?  Or are our factions crammed at the beginning of the alphabet: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, Erudite.  Or was that raving madman right who classified us as Apollonian, Buddhist, Dionysian, Zarathustran?

Humans and Machines

We're talking about smart cities, hive minds and connected intelligence not thinking too much about what we might have to give up for it.

Boston Dynamics is continuing to work on their humanoid robots, with the conclusion of the DARPA Robotics Challenge. In new footage, their robots can be seen walking in the woods for the first time.

Experts envision automation and intelligent digital agents permeating vast areas of our work and personal lives by 2025, but they are divided on whether these

Cars are going to change a lot in the next few decades. Electricity on one hand and software on the other change what a car is, how it gets made and who might own one.

A handful of low-budget innovators are working to reinvent rigid, heavy machines and robots with materials that are soft, light, cheap and squeezable.

Algorithms are producing profiles of you. What do they say? You probably don’t have the right to know

Steven Hawking has predicted that advancements in robotic research and artificial intelligence threaten human existence. It's a concern that we are not willing to acknowledge, perhaps, because we are still trying to figure out what people are going to do as everyday work suddenly disappears.

FinTech

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) started review of a draft Web Payments Working Group Charter. The Web Payments Working Group will launch by the end of...

In the second part of his three-part series, angel investor William Mougayar looks at why and how banks should start embracing blockchain technology.

By Bernard Lunn One of my favorite Fintech strategists is Chris Skinner.  He usually gets it right and does it in interesting and entertaining ways. However I think he gets it wrong in this post in American Banker where he says: Like Airlines and Pharma, Banking’s Too Big to Disrupt I am not sure why he…

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison aims to build a Google-scale platform for online payment processing, he reveals in an interview.

Innovation

Our 15th annual celebration of people who are driving the next generation of technological breakthroughs.

The idea that particular individuals drive history has long been discredited. Yet it persists in the tech industry, obscuring some of the fundamental factors in innovation.

By Jeff Dyer, David Bryce For adherents of classic disruptive innovation theory, Tesla’s potential as a market disruptor is minimal. After all, the company doesn’t go after low-end, price-sensitive customers who are over-served by current vehicles; they don’t pursue “non-consumption” (customers who don’t currently drive cars); and the technology didn’t start out [...]

Workplace

Last week’s revelations of the lengths Amazon goes to monitor staff come amid growing evidence that thousands of other companies are using technology to check on workers

The recent claims about Amazon’s aggressive corporate culture were a cause of consternation to many – but plenty of others couldn’t see what the problem was. So is a gentler, more relaxed office culture any better for employees? And is it even what they want?

Other

Google today announced that it wants to fix your home Wi-Fi, but internally, it has long been working on far more complex networking issues. To connect the..

ANIMALS typically have two versions of any given gene stored on two different chomosomes—basically large DNA molecules—and the two versions can have important...

A story can be so much more when the audience has a stake.

Try More Stuff