Think with Google: Marketing Research & Digital Trends

Generalised problems kill startups It’s crazy how often I hear founders say ‘I think the problem we’re really solving is X’. Hang on a second… You ‘think’? The surprising thing is that if you forgot temporarily why you started your business, you’re not alone. The Hivemind Singularity - Alan Jacobs In a near-future science fiction novel, human intelligence evolves into a hivemind that makes people the violent cells of a collective being. Slime mold network formation (Science). New Model Army, a 2010 novel by the English writer Adam Roberts, concerns itself with many things: the intimacy shared by soldiers at war, the motivating powers of memory and love, the rival merits of hierarchical and anarchic social structures, the legitimacy of the polity known as Great Britain, the question of European identity. Also giants. (Roberts has a history of interest in giants -- they feature prominently in his imaginative and highly excremental novel Swiftly -- and, more generally, in the scale of being: how very small, very large, and in-between-sized beings experience the world differently.

The Guts of a New Machine So you can say that the iPod is innovative, but it's harder to nail down whether the key is what's inside it, the external appearance or even the way these work together. One approach is to peel your way through the thing, layer by layer. The Aura f you want to understand why a product has become an icon, you of course want to talk to the people who dreamed it up and made it. The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives Tomorrow morning I’m doing a presentation to the top executive team of a very large organization on the next 20 years. Most of what I will cover will be general societal, business and technological drivers as well as specific strategic issues driving their business. However as part of stretching their thinking I’ll also speak a about the Singularity. As such I’ve been trying to find one good image to introduce my explanation, however I haven’t been able to find one which is quite right for the purpose. Ray Kurzweil’s Six Epochs diagram below is great and the one I’ll probably end up using, however it is a bit too over-the-top for most senior executives.

Viewpoint: Gartner on the changing nature of work 10 February 2012Last updated at 00:04 By Tom Austin Vice president, Gartner Hive mind: Working around the clock in hyper-connected 'swarms' - is this the future of work? As part of our Future of Work series running throughout February, we asked some experts to give us their take on how the way we work is going to change. Tom Austin, vice president at Gartner, has been a Gartner Fellow for a decade. He has also been chief of research at Gartner for social software, collaboration, communications, information management, business intelligence and the high-performance workplace, and is now leading an effort at defining "people-centred strategies".

Does the Use of Information Technology in Education Encourage Cheating? - Community - Utne Reader In The War on Learning (MIT Press, 2014) Elizabeth Losh examines current efforts to “reform” the use of information technology in education, particularly in higher education. She finds that many technological solutions to educational problems fail because they treat education as a product rather than a process, and proposes six basic principles of digital learning integral to successful university-based initiatives. The following excerpt comes from Chapter 1, “What They Learn in College.” Coastline paradox An example of the coastline paradox. If the coastline of Great Britain is measured using units 100 km (62 mi) long, then the length of the coastline is approximately 2,800 km (1,700 mi). With 50 km (31 mi) units, the total length is approximately 3,400 km (2,100 mi), approximately 600 km (370 mi) longer. The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length.

Desperately Seeking Simplicity - Chris Zook by Chris Zook | 12:00 PM February 2, 2012 The softly drifting snowflakes that greeted me every morning at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year were an inadequate warm-up for the cold blast of reality I felt in session after session during this five day Congress on the “state of the world.” As I participated, one theme seemed omnipresent — that while events are unfolding in the world at an accelerating pace, increasingly complex institutions are less and less able to deal with them.

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science Illustration: Jonathon Rosen "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." Internet Traffic is now 51% Non-Human So you thought the Internet was made by and for people? Think again. A study by Incapsula, a provider of cloud-based security for web sites (mind you where this data comes from), concludes that 51% of all Internet traffic is generated by non-human sources such as hacking software, scrapers and automated spam mechanisms. While 20% of the 51% non-human traffic is’ good’, the 31% majority of this non-human traffic is potentially malicious.

Walter Isaacson's 'Steve Jobs' Tuesday, 14 February 2012 What is Apple at heart: a software company, or a hardware company? This is a perennial question. The truth, of course, is that Apple is neither. Apple is an experience company.