Posts tagged futgerd

The Future of You - Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic on the importance of curation and finding things

The most important form of knowledge today is knowing where to find stuff. In fact, the ability to find stuff is now almost as important as the ability to create stuff. Hyperconnectors are the creative of the digital era because in the age of information overload, where everybody creates online content, effectively curating content is what really matters

The Future of You - Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic on the importance of curation and finding things

The most important form of knowledge today is knowing where to find stuff. In fact, the ability to find stuff is now almost as important as the ability to create stuff. Hyperconnectors are the creative of the digital era because in the age of information overload, where everybody creates online content, effectively curating content is what really matters

Skift Report: 13 Global Trends That Will Define Travel in 2013 by Skift

We believe these 13 trends, by no means exhaustive, will help define travel and many other interconnected sectors:

Everyone wants a Chinese tourist
Ancillary fees are the new normal
Last-minute mobile hotel booking
The rise of price transparency
Travelers are hungry for food tourism
Airports as destinations
Destination branding through movies
Digital maps are one of travel’s key battlegrounds
Personal in-flight entertainment through mobile devices
Affordable design at hotels
Blurring of business and leisure travel
Cementing of the Gulf as the next great global aviation hub
Lure of the last unknown: The rise of Myanmar

Gerd adds: nice report ( and free;)

Facebook Is Going To Sell Access To Your Inbox - BuzzFeed Mobile

Facebook, like all businesses, needs to make money. And the most valuable thing it has to sell is your attention. You might not think of your attention as “valuable,” but it is — extremely so. After its IPO, the question of how Facebook is going to make the kind of money it’s expected to became one of the central questions of existence. It’s shown a remarkable knack for pioneering lots of little ways to sell your attention, one shred at a time.

2013: A year when the future of the media may lie in the palm of your hand | Media | The Guardian

The cold truth for the moment is that there is not yet an advertiser-funded model to support any digital media enterprise of significance; digital revenues at newspapers do generate double digits of millions, but are way off the triple digits that would be required for anybody to start paying for their newsrooms and developers. Nor, really are paywalls”

Gerd adds: good point - but of course the problem is that in a truly connected world nobody really needs advertising as we knew it - it must be totally reinvented to fit the “Solomo” world. IMHO ;)

Guns in America and the Limits of Shame : The New Yorker

When will we Americans realize that our society is an unacceptably violent one, that this is how the rest of the world sees us, and that much of that violence is associated with guns? Will it be the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School? Where is our threshold for self-awareness?

Get Ready, Utilities: Solar Is Coming | ThinkProgress

Solar will become so affordable in the next 5-10 years that as many as 38 million homes and businesses will elect to produce their own power more cheaply from unsubsidized solar rather than buy it from their utility

What the world will be like in 2030 | SmartPlanet *made me think

The world’s population will continue to grow, reaching 8.3 billion by 2030 (up from 7.1 billion in 2012). Nations will become older and more urban. All these factors will combine to put pressure on precious resources. “[T]he volume of urban construction for housing, office space, and transport services over the next 40 years could roughly equal the entire volume of such construction to date in world history.”

Why Tesla is like Amazon and Elon Musk like Jeff Bezos

Right now a half a dozen Supercharger stations are sprinkled throughout California. By next year, if all goes well, Tesla drivers will be able to motor cross country from Tampa to Toronto, New York to Los Angeles and on to San Francisco and points between and beyond, snagging jolts of electricity along the way. Because he’s chairman of SolarCity, which produces these cheap and easy-to-install solar-paneled carports, Musk is creating enviable vertical integration. In essence, he’s marketing the cars at premium and giving away the gas, the opposite of HP’s much despised sell-the-printer-for-cheap-and-gouge-consumers-on-the-cartridges approach.

What’s more, these superchargers put back more energy into the grid than they take out, so Musk could be paid for producing electricity. I imagine there could be opportunities for up selling – food, coffee, sunglasses, games, electronics and tchotchkes for the kiddies at these electrical way stations. Since it takes about a half hour of charging for 150 miles of drive time – and an hour for 300 miles – drivers and passengers will have time to kill”

Gerd adds: very interesting point- this could usher in an entirely new era of ‘highway culture’ - but how will all that electricity be produced?

Twitter's Manager For Social Innovation On How Social Is Shaping The Future Of Nonprofits | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

We live in a world where more individuals have access to mobile phones than to clean water. This access to cellular technology does wonders to bring folks closer to resources, information, and connections that can change their lives. With every day that passes, technological advances increase access to more and more of the world’s population

Newspapers versus Google: Taxing times | The Economist

Google can hardly be blamed for the recession, declining readership, and slumping advertising revenue. Online advertising has not offset the decline of print ads in newspapers. In 2011 newspaper advertising globally amounted to $76 billion, down 41% since 2007, according to the World Association of Newspapers. Only 2.2% of newspapers’ advertising revenues last year came from digital platforms, and even these are vulnerable to ad-blocking software

Business and humanity are not separate to nature | Guardian Sustainable Business | Guardian

“Our current business approach (with its immense power to fuel problems as well as deliver solutions) is neither balanced nor holistic but a continuation in reductionist thinking that is anthropocentric in its belief and behaviour”
Gerd comments: totally spot-on, couldn’t have said it better myself :)

Scientific American’s list of 10 ideas about to change the world

The Sustainability Consortium, a group of 10 universities, non-profits and 80 international companies including Walmart and Coca-Cola, are creating an index that includes every step of the supply chain. The group has already released the measure it will use to evaluate its first 100 products.

Clay Shirky on the Internet as a Distractor and Disruptor - Frog Design - The Atlantic

Clay Shirky says: The first thing, a precursor to whatever the new bargain is, is to abandon copyright maximalism, the doctrine that says that the only rationale for copyright (or intellectual property, generally) is to give businesses the right to rent-extraction over the population. Copyright law, as rationalized since the Statute of Anne in Great Britain in 1710, has always had significant provisions for the value to the public for creative work, and ideas like limited duration, required library deposit, and the public domain were part of the bargain from the beginning.

That balance has been all but destroyed—in the United States, copyright has effectively become infinite, because every time works from the early 1920s start coming to the end of their term, Hollywood gets Congress to extend the term. So I am somewhat impatient with this idea that “something must be done” in the short term, as if there was a technical or legal fix to a system with a broken model. What we need is a government willing to say “Copyright is and has always been a bargain between creating a market for creative work to create incentives, and creating a cultural commons to create value for the citizens,” and then start reasoning about how such a bargain will be worked out in a world with an Internet.

Amazing: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice - The Next Web

Microsoft has today posted a video, and complementary explanation of language translation that goes far past what we thought was currently possible.
Gerd comments: think about what this means for the future of publishing, video, OTT and of course, advertising !