2012 brings a pause in the disruption. OK, I’ve been talking with hundreds of geeks from around the world this year at three conferences, CES, DLD, and World Economic Forum. I’m seeing a trend that is worth talking about. What is it? We’re seeing the end of one of the most disruptive ages in human history. I believe that we’re seeing a pause in the disruption. More on that a little later. Just think about all the changes humans have been asked to adopt in the past eight years. Back in 2003 the mainstream was just understanding blogging. I remember back then that Tim O’Reilly popularized the term “Web 2.0.” Barcamp started in this age. Twitter was born in this age. Eight years ago Google was the only one who I knew that had these monster huge datacenters around the world with hundreds of thousands of servers.
We’ve seen extraordinary shifts in how we communicate, protest, and work together. Yammer, Jive, Salesforce Chatter, didn’t exist back then. Amazon was only a retail store back then. Does this seem mindblowing? Has Facebook Really Created 450,000 Jobs, as COO Sheryl Sandberg Claims? As Facebook prepares to file its IPO documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — as soon as Wednesday, according to recent reports — the company is trying to make the argument that it adds more to the economy than a convenient way to waste time at work. By touting the economic activity it has generated and the jobs it’s created, Facebook is also trying to pre-empt criticism that the primary winners from the IPO are insiders who stand to reap billions from the offering. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Sunday, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg touted the company’s job-creating power. “Facebook is barely seven years old and has 3,000 employees — and it has created more than 450,000 jobs in Europe and the U.S.,” she told a CNBC debate audience at the World Economic Forum.
(More: No Thanks, Facebook: Poll Suggests Users Don’t Want Timeline) Neither of Sandberg’s job-creation studies take into account lost productivity. ColaLife. TEDxBerlin 11/15/10 - Simon Berry - Colalife. New video: Kevin Slavin "Those algorithms that govern our lives" Kevin Slavin about those algorithms that govern our lives. How does our near future look like, as computing and fast internet access become ubiquitous, ever more digital data become available in easy to use formats? Well, it seems our world is being transformed by algorithms, and at the LIFT11 conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Kevin Slavin presented some fascinating insights about this disruptive change.
I try to summarize his talk. I added some musings of my own, such as the stuff about social capital rankings and the Singularity. Kevin Slavin is the co-founder of Starling, a co-viewing platform for broadcast TV, specializing in real-time engagement with live television. He also works at Area/Coding , now Zynga New York, taking advantage “of today’s environment of pervasive technologies and overlapping media to create new kinds of gameplay.” He teaches Urban Computing at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, together with Adam Greenfield (author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing).
Stealth Who will be the winner? Epagogix | experience - knowledge - prediction. Mother Earth Mother Board. The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth. In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired.
Information moves, or we move to it. During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought! " FLAG facts. Philippe Silberzahn. Thebalancingactofinnovation.com. Interview with Philippe Silberzahn, co-author of the book The Balancing Act of Innovation. Interview Walter Van Dyck, co-author of The Balancing Act of Innovation. Innovatiecentrum Vlaams-Brabant. Europees Octrooibureau (EPO) IWT. Espacenet — Home page. Search: stagnation — Marginal Revolution — Page 2. Chris MacDonald asks me: Should we expect stagnation, or continued improvement, in the action film genre? The new Bond flick, Skyfall, is getting rave reviews, with some calling it the best Bond film ever. Hyperbole aside, it is indeed very good. Should we expect the next Bond film to be less good (regression to the mean) or is this one of the fields — like baseball management — where mechanisms exist to facilitate further improvement on a fairly reliable basis?
I was less crazy about Skyfall (“M, pull out your cell phone and call for aid!”) But that’s neither here nor there. As for the stagnation issue, there are two main developments. CGI is a gain for some movies (e.g, Troy, Life of Pi, Lord of the Rings), though it often makes action scenes less visceral and more distant. The main drawback for Hollywood action movies has been globalization, which leads to too many explosions and not enough subtle dialogue and characterization.
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better:A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton eBook: Tyler Cowen. Another kind of innovation. Are we sure this is a time of major, disruptive, history-changing technological innovation? Professor Tyler Cowen in his book The Great Stagnation remembers his readers how the period from 1880 to 1940 brought us electricity, electric lights, powerful motors, automobiles, airplanes, household appliances, the telephone, indoor plumbing, pharmaceuticals, mass production, the typewriter, the tape recorder, the phonograph, radio and television.
If you look at a longer timeframe and include the Industrial Revolution, the changes are even more impressive – essentially a story of combining advanced machines with powerful fossil fuels which brought unprecedented change to humanity. Cowen: Today, in contrast, apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what is was in 1953. We still drive cars, use refrigerators, and turn on the light switch, even if dimmers are more common these days. But what about the internet? Change. Debate on "The Great Stagnation" - Tyler Cowen vs. Rob Atkinson. Tyler Cowen. Education and personal life[edit] Cowen was born in Bergen County[3] on January 21, 1962. At the age of 15, Cowen became the youngest ever New Jersey state chess champion.[4][5] Cowen graduated from George Mason University with a bachelor of science degree in economics in 1983 and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987 with thesis titled Essays in the theory of welfare economics.
At Harvard, he was mentored by game theorist Thomas Schelling, the 2005 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is married to Natasha Cowen, a lawyer. Writings[edit] Culture[edit] The Los Angeles Times has described Cowen as "a man who can talk about Haitian voodoo flags, Iranian cinema, Hong Kong cuisine, Abstract Expressionism, Zairian music and Mexican folk art with seemingly equal facility".[6] One of Cowen's primary research interests is the economics of culture.
Recent books[edit] In 2013 he published Average is Over on the future of modern economies. New York Times columns[edit] Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Concepts[edit] According to Tapscott, Wikinomics is based on four ideas: Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally. The use of mass collaboration in a business environment, in recent history, can be seen as an extension of the trend in business to outsource: externalize formerly internal business functions to other business entities.
The difference however is that instead of an organized business body brought into being specifically for a unique function, mass collaboration relies on free individual agents to come together and cooperate to improve a given operation or solve a problem. This kind of outsourcing is also referred to as crowdsourcing, to reflect this difference. The book also discusses seven new models of mass collaboration, including: The last chapter is written by viewers, and was opened for editing on February 5, 2007. Central Concepts of Wikinomics in the Enterprise[edit] Coase's Law[edit] Reception[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] Videos.
The realization is now. New polling out this week shows that Americans are frustrated with the world and pessimistic about the future. They're losing patience with the economy, with their prospects, with their leaders (of both parties). What's actually happening is this: we're realizing that the industrial revolution is fading.
The 80 year long run that brought ever-increasing productivity (and along with it, well-paying jobs for an ever-expanding middle class) is ending. It's one thing to read about the changes the internet brought, it's another to experience them. This isn't fair of course. For a while, politicians and organizations promised that things would get back to normal. I regularly hear from people who say, "enough with this conceptual stuff, tell me how to get my factory moving, my day job replaced, my consistent paycheck restored... " Some people insist that if we focus on "business fundamentals" and get "back to basics," all will return.
It's unpleasant, it's not fair, but it's all we've got. Don Tapscott - Macrowikinomics - full show. Charles Leadbeater on innovation [Część 1/2] [PL]