Muhammad Yunus on social business: Solving human problems. U.S. misses full truth on China factory workers. Leslie T. Chang: Conditions are harsh, but people ignore the full stories of Chinese workersShe says factory jobs have provided upward mobility, new opportunity in ChinaPeople look back admiringly at heroic work of immigrants to U.S. 100 years ago, she saysChang: Chinese workers deserve our interest and respect instead of our pity Editor's note: Leslie T. Chang, the author of "Factory Girls," covered China for a decade for The Wall Street Journal and has also written for The New Yorker, National Geographic and Condé Nast Traveler. She spoke at TEDGlobal in Edinburgh in June. (CNN) -- A young woman leaves her farming village at age 16 to find work in a distant city. Her first job, on a factory assembly line, pays only $50 a month. She meets a young man, a fellow migrant; they marry and have two children.
Watch Leslie Chang's TED Talk Hear the voices of China's workers Rare look inside Foxconn factory campus China's job seekers TED.com: Behind the great firewall of China. From Airbnb to TaskRabbit to Zimride, sharing is becoming big business. The nation is in a sharing mood — and start-ups are capitalizing on it. Americans with heaps of stuff, skills and time are connecting online with tech-savvy and early adopters eager to share and rent homes, cars, tools and services in exchange for deep savings. Dubbed "collaborative consumption" — or "the sharing economy" — this movement represents the newly cemented intersection of online social networking, mobile technology, the minimalist movement and heightened penny-pinching brought on by lingering economic uncertainties.
Adam Hertz, a cable company executive in San Francisco, and his wife, Joan, have enthusiastically embraced the movement. Now that their kids are grown, the empty-nesters rent their Monterey Heights-district two-bedroom mother-in-law suite through Airbnb, an online marketplace for couch-surfers and hosts. "It's been a great way to meet people," says Hertz, whose suite goes for $99 a night and is occupied about half the time. People, if not yet profits Economic impact? Could Automation Lead to Chronic Unemployment?: Andrew McAfee Sounds the Alarm. Powershift: Alvin Toffler on the Age of Post-Fact Knowledge and the Super-Symbolic Economy (1990)
By Maria Popova “We are interrelating data in more ways, giving them context, and thus forming them into information; and we are assembling chunks of information into larger and larger models and architectures of knowledge.” More than twenty years ago, in 1990, writer and futurist Alvin Toffler, whom you might recall as the author of the Future Shock, penned Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (public library) — a visionary lens on how social, political, and economic power structures are changing at the dawn of the information age, presaging many of today’s cultural paradigms and touching on other timely topics like networked knowledge, the role of intuition, and the value of adding context.
In Chapter 2, titled “Muscle, Money, and Mind,” Toffler lays the foundation of his core argument — the idea that knowledge is becoming the key currency of a new super-symbolic economy, leaving behind the materiality of the industrial age: Share on Tumblr. Millennials Struggle To Create Social Change And Pay The Bills. The Creator Of TED Aims To Reinvent Conferences Once Again | Co. Design. Is it time for a new twist on the TED model? The esteemed Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference, soon to be pushing 30, has become a juggernaut--what with sellout events, the viral success of online TED Talks, and the spin-off of smaller TED-X conferences. But the conference’s original founder, Richard Saul Wurman, is working on a new creation that radically overhauls the formula used by TED--much as TED itself reinvented the standard business conference model when Wurman launched it in 1984.
Wurman, who is no longer affiliated with TED (he sold most of the rights to Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation back in 2002 and broke off his remaining ties with the spin-off TEDMED Conference earlier this year), recently announced plans for his new WWW.WWW conference, slated to debut in Fall of 2012. But here are a few things the show won’t have: Speeches, slide shows, or tickets. Wurman hopes the result will be “intellectual jazz.” Can a conference succeed without slick presentations? Digitized Decision Making and the Hidden Second Economy. How mobile work is changing the face of business. The emerging “sharing economy” consists of businesses dedicated to changing the very way in which we live. Tools to improve efficiency, lower cost, and encourage collaborative consumption now serve as the driving force of these companies, creating a whole new kind of economy.
Arguably, the most significant progress thus far has been made in the workplace. The work environment is undergoing significant change. We used to be a nation of office workers. We committed our lives to single companies, and went to work in the same location every day. Things have changed. Mobile and cloud computing technologies have made roaming connectivity and real-time collaboration not only possible, but commonplace. Most importantly, we have a collective mandate for sustainability and efficiency, both environmental and economic. Not A Temporary Change Progressive companies realize they will benefit from offering employees flexibility with where they work. And it’s mutual. One Place Does Not Fit All. What Facebook's Changes Mean for Marketers. Facebook's bold list of changes, announced Thursday, will put more pressure on advertisers to come up with compelling content and integrate themselves further into consumers' lives.
The big loser? The "Like," which will have a smaller role in marketing, industry analysts say. One big change is that Facebook has added a control in the top right of each story that users can check to unmark a top story. Facebook will use that information over time to automatically edit the feeds. Since users now have more control over their news feeds, brands with boring or irrelevant updates will have lower visibility. Marketers, who have been told for years that they're actually publishers now, will have to put that into practice, says Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, a digital marketing firm.
How to do that? Nir Refuah, vice president of McCann Digital in Israel, says that with Facebook's redesign, consumers will be creating a "digital autobiography" in which brands will have to integrate themselves.