Zenhabits. You are what you click. People have traditionally used the touchstones of job, religion, age and occupation to form their view of who they are and where they fit in the world.
Not so much any more. Increasingly, we are shaping our identities via our activity on online social networks like Facebook and gaming, according to the Future Identities report commissioned by Britain's chief scientist, Sir John Beddington, the BBC reports. "Near continuous access to the internet, termed 'hyper-connectivity,' will drive profound changes to society over the next 10 years," the story states.
Can Yerdle redefine consumerism? For the well-heeled, the rise of the ’sharing economy’ Adobe’s social media maven. Deep within the maze of Adobe's Time Square office stands a long work table, designated for mobile employees.
An 18-in. high partition divides the table up into temporary desk spaces. At 2 p.m. last Tuesday, the only occupant is a man in his thirties. He sits with noise-cancelling headphones, intent on his computer. A couple of the other partitioned spaces house flat screen monitors or laptops, but lack any personal details. The future of publishing is micro. Car-sharing service RelayRides halts service after cease-and-desist letter.
In recent months, many companies forming the new "sharing economy" have come up against regulatory hurdles as they become part of the formal business landscape.
In New York, half of Airbnb's rentals have been found to be technically illegal, according to state law. Ride-sharing service SideCar is also coming under scrutiny in Austin, Philadelphia, and New York City. Is social influence the new celebrity? Start-up rents out your spare desks online. A start-up has launched ShareDesk, a new online marketplace for companies to monetize idle office space in major cities around the world.
It's like a Match.com for office seekers. ShareDesk has been operating in beta since late last year, and now has over 1,000 companies participating in 50 countries - from Argentina to Venezuela. Berlin, New York, and San Francisco are among its most popular cities. Businesses rent out conferences room and desks, providing an alternative to commercial office centers. Renters can search listing by location or place custom requests with specific requirements. Internet of Everything to generate profit of $613bn in 2013. A new survey suggests business leaders believe the Internet of Everything (IoE) will result in improved job markets, wages and information security.
According to the IoE Value Index study released by Cisco, the Internet of Everything -- the practice of bringing together people, process, data, and physical things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable -- will enable global private-sector business profits to reach at least $613 billion in 2013.
The study of 7,500 businesses and IT professionals in 12 countries found that many firms could double IoE profits through greater adoption of business practices, customer approaches and technologies that leverage the concept. Cisco estimates that beyond $613 billion in profit generation, an additional $544 billion could be realized if companies adjusted their strategies to better leverage IoE. Future of Work Enabler: Flexible Service Delivery - Future_of_Work_Enabler_Flexible_Service_Delivery.pdf.
The Future of Work Is Services: So Where Is the Future of Services? - Derek Thompson. The White House likes to talk about manufacturing, and it's easy to fetishize the honor in "making things," but when you get right down to it, it's a services world, and we're all just living in it.
The manufacturing sector makes up about a tenth of GDP. It's a crucial, productive, and fiery tenth. But it's just a tenth. The vast majority of us are working for the government, administering health care, serving food, manning an aisle, or doing something else while sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day. Future Planet – The Future of Services. David Tow SYDNEY 15 October 2012.
The Director of the Future Planet Research Centre, David Hunter Tow, predicts that the current explosion of new services will trigger the biggest IP treasure hunt in the history of civilisation. The Services Sector is currently in turmoil with thousands of startup companies cashing in on new opportunities to re-engineer traditional ways of doing business- and this is just the beginning. App reports bad parking and gets you paid. If you've ever been irked by a bad parking job or seen a vehicle parked where it shouldn't be, there's now an app for that -- and you can receive a bounty to boot.
A Canadian start-up called SpotSquad has developed an app that crowdsources parking enforcement, in a pilot with the Winnipeg city government. The app automates the process of reporting bad parking jobs in private lots by using GPS and character recognition to collect identifying license plate information. Participants receive a portion of the fine paid if a citation is issued to the vehicle's owner. Fox News reported today that the pilot program would begin in July.
None of the evidence submitted by the app will be used in court, the company told Fox. Too busy to pick up the takeout? Postmates will deliver. It was 2006, and Bastian Lehmann was moving from Munich to London.
In the arduous process of getting all his stuff from one city to the other, his snowboard was left behind. It would have cost a fortune to forward it with traditional shipping services like UPS or FedEx, but Lehmann checked Yelp and found a cheaper courier service that would handle the job. Turns out he got the board transported an even cheaper way, when a friend brought it to him, but the seed for Postmates -- a same-day courier service that allows people to get whatever they need to wherever they need it -- was planted. “It’s like ride sharing for items,” Lehmann says. “We thought, 'We can create a network similar to UPS that’s part of your city that merchants can leverage.' ” The problem San Francisco-based Postmates aims to resolve isn’t so much delivering between cities (like Lehmann needed when his snowboard was left behind) as delivering within them.
U.S. cities are building commuter rail, so where are the riders? Last year, demand for public transportation was the second highest since 1957 as Americans took 10.5 billion trips.
Every mode of transportation -- from buses to subways to light rail -- saw ridership increases last year. But there's one mode that lags behind the rest, despite cities increasingly investing in them. Commuter rail -- which connects city centers with suburbs -- had the smallest growth of any transit system in the U.S. at 0.5 percent., with 10 out of 28 systems actually losing riders.
More consumers paying for online news. The Internet has habituated us to expect our online news for free, but that is starting to change as more consumers than a year ago are paying for it and as young people purchase via apps on tablets and smartphones, a study shows. "Since our last survey, we've seen a significant rise in the number or respondents paying for online news - albeit from a low base," said the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Digital News Report 2013.
Reuters reported that 12 percent of U.S. readers said they had paid for digital news in the last year, up from 9 percent a year earlier; 13 percent said they had paid in France, up from 8 percent; and 9 percent paid in the U.K., up from 4 percent. The nine-country survey had exceptions. For instance, the number of people who paid for digital news in Denmark declined.
Young people--25-to-34-years old--were "the most willing" to pay across all countries, Reuters noted in the report's "payng for digital news section. " More digital media trends: Should bus fares be free? As bus fare hikes in Brazil helped spark the largest protests that the country has seen in 20 years (those fare hikes have since been reversed in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), The Economist has a provocative proposition: make buses free. Who’s fueling the luxury goods market? Men. The Future of Advertising. The consumer is becoming an algorithm: is this a good thing? With Netflix’s 14 Emmy nominations, web programming is here to stay. Among the nominees for best television programming announced yesterday was one notable outlier. The latest SME trend: Adopting a global mindset?