Buy Me Once: the online shop for stuff that lasts, from T-shirts to tweezers When eight different people send me a link to the same website in the span of a week, I know I have to write about it. The site is called Buy Me Once. I’m in love, and I think the site and its mission are incredibly important. Here’s why. I talk a lot about reducing consumption, buying less and choosing to buy better quality products when it is actually necessary to make a purchase. But as I’ve discovered over the past eight years, actually doing this can be quite challenging. Initially, when I was trying to change the way I shopped, I vowed to stop buying clothing from fast fashion outlets. Banning fast fashion made me feel good, but it wasn’t long before I realized that I really wasn’t making much of a difference. This realization was disheartening. Did I really have to conduct a full-scale investigation into each company I wanted to support just to buy a new pair of shoes or lipstick? Rage. So, here we are, shopping and shopping. Nonetheless, a site like Buy Me Once is long overdue.
The Revolution will (not) be decentralised: Blockchains The data centre rules. Decentralised topologies and non-discriminatory protocols have been all but replaced by a recentralisation of infrastructure, as powerful corporations now gatekeep our networks. Everything might be accessible, but this access is mediated by a centralised entity. Whoever controls the data centre exercises political and economic control over communications. It’s difficult to see how we can counteract these recentralising tendencies in order to build a common core infrastructure. These centralising tendencies have also reared their head in cryptocurrencies. Equality as a standard Blockchain-based technologies may still have a role to play. But first of all, what is the blockchain? How the blockchain might support a commons Some of these applications are still speculative; some of them are already implemented. Node Incentivisation: Another innovation is that Ethereum incentivises participation, encouraging actors to contribute without introducing centralisation.
The Co-operative City Car Sharing and Sustainable Transportation Since the creation of the co-operative Auto Network (C.A.N.) from a student project at SFU fifteen years ago, car sharing has become one of Vancouver's most influential exports for the promotion of sustainable car use across Canada. Pioneered in Europe, car sharing was enthusiastically adopted by Vancouverites and with the early support of other co-ops like CCEC Credit Union, Vancity and The co-operators; C.A.N. became the world's first English-speaking car share organization with a starting fleet of two cars and 16 members. Today, the co-operative Auto Network has been renamed Modo co-op the car co-op, and with a fleet of nearly 250 vehicles and 7, 400 members the co-op is a North American leader in this vibrant new transport sector.
Will the Internet of Things set family life back 100 years? This article is part of The Design Economy series. The Internet is disrupting the established rules that control the way we live our lives. From business, to entertainment, to government, we have already experienced the far-reaching effects of a technology that connects us in unprecedented ways. Now, with the advent of the Internet of Things (or IoT), ‘connection’ is evolving beyond our mobile phones, tablets and computers. It’s predicted that by 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected to the web, from cars and doorbells to your pet dog’s collar and the kitchen stove. While it is clear that the number and variety of connected devices is exploding, what is less clear is the social impact of this trend. Optimists would have us believe that the IoT will free us from the mundanities of running a household. Others point to it ushering in a major political shift. To date, the debate about the impact of IoT has focussed predominantly on these techno-legal-political narratives.
« La périphérie est abandonnée par les dieux de l’architecture » LE MONDE | • Mis à jour le | Propos recueillis par Jean-Jacques Larrochelle Le projet de loi relatif à la liberté de création, à l’architecture et au patrimoine vient d’achever son parcours en deuxième lecture à l’Assemblée nationale avant de repasser entre les mains de la commission de la culture du Sénat. La présidente du Conseil national de l’ordre des architectes, Catherine Jacquot, fait le point sur l’avancement du volet architecture. Lire le récit : L’architecture subit des secousses au Sénat Le Conseil national de l’ordre des architectes que vous présidez est-il satisfait de l’avancée du projet de loi ? Oui, nous avions déposé un nombre important de propositions en faveur de l’excellence de l’architecture ordinaire et certaines ont pu aboutir. A la périphérie des villes, nombre de lotissements d’activités, commerciaux ou résidentiels, sont quasiment abandonnés par les dieux de l’architecture. Lire le décryptage : L’architecture fait sa loi brique par brique
Wechat, Line, Telegram : les messageries instantanées au cœur de la révolution des «chatbots», Une C’est la ruée vers les bots. L’annonce de Microsoft ne fait que confirmer l’intérêt des géants de la tech pour ces petits programmes informatiques qui veulent ringardiser les applis. Mais la firme de Redmond arrive sur un marché encombré, où les messageries Internet ont pris une longueur d’avance. « Les applis de “chat” vont devenir les nouveaux navigateurs, les bots seront les nouveaux sites Web. Le « bot store » de Facebook L’appli Telegram a lancé ses bots en juin. Et Facebook devrait sortir du bois lors de sa prochaine conférence développeurs, F8, le 12 avril prochain. Le plan avait été présenté par le jeune patron il y a un an , lors du précédent F8. Et le géant pourrait ne pas s’arrêter là : il s’agit aussi d’une voie possible de monétisation pour son autre application, WhatsApp, achetée 22 milliards de dollars, et qui compte déjà 1 milliard d’utilisateurs… Sébastien Dumoulin et Nicolas Rauline, Les Echos
Ethereum : rendre les contrats intelligents | Triplex, le blogue techno de Radio-Canada Cette semaine, sans tambour ni trompette, Microsoft a rendu Ethereum Virtual Machine accessible à des millions de développeurs de logiciels l’utilisation d’Ethereum Virtual Machine dans sa plateforme Visual Studio (une suite de logiciels de développement pour Windows). Ethereum? Pour faire court, Ethereum est la monnaie cryptographique décentralisée dont la valeur montée en flèche depuis quelques mois talonne maintenant Bitcoin. Mais réduire Ethereum à une cryptomonnaie alternative serait cacher la forêt avec l’arbre. Voici venir les contrats intelligents Ethereum Virtual Machine est une plateforme bâtie autour de la « chaîne de blocs » (blockchain) où se trouve sont enregistrées toutes les transactions, à l’image d’un grand livre comptable, comme pour Bitcoin, mais qui comprend aussi un langage de programmation (appelé Solidity) permettant de créer des contrats dits intelligents. Prenons un exemple. S’ils se font confiance mutuellement, le perdant payera la somme prévue sans se défiler.
Should Americans Be Line-Drying Clothes Instead of Using Washers and Dryers? In October 2015, I was in the Philippines, on a bus heading up the North Luzon Expressway out of Manila and into the mountains. I had traveled from San Francisco to visit my friend Imman, and we were escaping the relentless heat. Out the window, tropical palm trees, rice fields, and rural villages rolled by. We were talking about domestic labor when the topic of laundry came up. He asked, “How do Americans have time to do laundry?” “I don’t know,” I said. A seemingly small cultural difference began to unravel into something bigger about technology and urban planning. When I was a kid growing up in Tennessee, my mom did our family’s laundry at home, in our own washer and dryer. The history of laundry in America In the U.S., laundry didn’t become a weekly chore until the 19th century. With industrialization came the manufacture of cotton cloth. Competition started heating up, though. Industrialization continued to transform laundry. The commercial and hand laundries peaked in the 1920s.
For social software, user culture is as important as product features — Lightspeed Venture Partners Earlier this week I did a fascinating exercise. I was paired with a stranger and we were each asked to introduce ourselves in a two minute monologue. The second person to speak was asked if their introduction paralleled that of the first person. Did you feel compelled to cover areas that the other person did (e.g. family, work history, where you went to school, hobbies etc), and at similar length? And the answer, of course, was yes. How strange, that this stranger had such an impact on how you described yourself, what you chose to talk about, and what you chose not to talk about. That is how quickly culture can be created. The same is true for any social software, from Snapchat to Instagram to Facebook. When this works well, you get fantastic, coherent experiences and terrific content. When this works badly, you get ChatRoulette, Youtube comments, and Secret. Social software, like all software, can be used for good or for ill.
Snapchat & Periscope Are Transforming Brand Storytelling! — Snapchat Strategy — Medium Every brand in every industry is currently struggling with finding ways to relate with their audience, creating content of value and find unique ways to tell their stories. Technology and social media are amazing channels for brand storytelling but brands must first have a compelling story then understand and embrace the community. New mobile live streaming app Periscope owned by Twitter, has been causing quite a stir on social media, forcing brands to scramble to try and embrace the power behind mobile live streaming. Unfortunately much like Snapchat the technology, the learning curve and the requirement to embrace change is scaring many brands from adopting this technology. The more I work with brands and see brands leveraging Snapchat and Periscope the more excited I am for the future of marketing, social media and community engagement. In an upcoming post titled “Snapchat, I used to hate you. Follow me Brian Fanzo on Snapchat & Periscope under my personal brand handle: iSocialFanz
It’s time for urbanists and technologists to start talking — Sidewalk Talk It’s time for urbanists and technologists to start talking When Larry Page announced the creation of Sidewalk Labs last summer, he recognized that digital innovations have an enormous capacity to address big urban challenges like housing affordability, transportation efficiency, and energy conservation. One of the barriers to faster and wider change is a lack of dialogue between the people who live in today’s cities and the folks who build tomorrow’s technologies. Larry’s diagnosis of the problem was spot on: it takes a strong “big-picture view of the many factors that affect city life” to “develop the technologies and partnerships you need to make a difference.” In other words, it takes talk. An urban-tech divide has always frustrated the smart city movement. That’s not to pick on IBM or Portland or smart city initiatives as a whole. You could take all these pain points and be pessimistic about the convergence of city life and digital innovation — a la Peter Thiel.
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle – review The Furby is a fluffy robot toy that was popular in the late 90s. It looks part owl, part hamster and is programmed to respond to human attention. It has no intelligence, but it can fake attachment. The test is one of many cited by Sherry Turkle in Alone Together as evidence that humanity is nearing a "robotic moment". This not a science-fiction dystopia. Plainly, technology is doing peculiar things to us. Turkle is not a luddite, nor is Alone Together a salvo in some analogue counter-reformation. The argument in Alone Together unfolds in two halves. The machines are still primitive, nowhere near the Hollywood version of sociable androids. An alarming revelation in Alone Together is how close we are to putting this effect into mass production. The second half of the book deals with our addiction to the web; more familiar terrain, but equally disquieting. This digital generation also expects everything to be recorded. Rafael Behr is the Observer's chief leader writer.