Topic: The Future
Our long-term interaction with the web will be defined by six trends. These trends will will involve dramatic changes that will make computing more like what we are used to seeing in many of today's movies. Kevin Kelly explains why he believes that soon the internet will beneficially surround us in ways that most users don't imagine today.
The disruption of innovation has yielded as many opportunities for those prepared to take advantage as it has brought disruption for those unprepared to adjust. New businesses have been able to profit with solutions that solve problems or enable previously excluded people to participate on their own terms. Michael Jackson explores some history and characteristics of disruptive technology.
David Messenger, EVP at American Express, discusses the drivers, or central forces, behind the changing technological world. He names four that he considers to be the most important, as follows: cell phones, rapid wireless data speeds, social networks, and new technology in general, both hardware and software. Presenting these changes with a business perspective, Messenger also discusses changes such as digital cash, security, and unlimited communication.
This audio interview from the Environmental Defense Fund's Future of Green Calls covers complex interactions of the philanthropy sector, socially conscientious nonprofit organizations, and for-profit businesses with FSG Co-Founder Mark Kramer. Kramer outlines how corporate social responsibility (CSR) acts as a lever to minimize environmental harms done by daily business activities. Also covered are how natural resources are consumed by industries and a discussion about sustainability practices.
According to Steve Yegge, Google is trying to change the world, but the problem is scale. The problems are also every social, technological, and mathematical problem imaginable. Yegge advocates for the focus on not only social media and money, but solutions to human genome coding and any issue of scale. Interweaving an analysis of popularized media and companies with philanthropic goals, he gives a rousing and humorous call to action.
During the dot com bubble of the 1990s European bankers went to telecom company CEOs and said you can be as sexy as the American dot coms. This is the basis of what went wrong for the telecom industry according to James Enck. He observes that this panel discussion has a wide range of speakers and backgrounds but there are commonalities he guides the panel to discuss with the 2008 financial meltdown in hindsight.
A fascinating look into the future of big data. As parallel computing enables massive scaling & instant availability, the need for cloud computing is mandatory. During this keynote, Marten Mickos predicts that in several years there will be a trillion devices connected to the Internet. We are rapidly reaching a point that the only way to deal with this level of scaling will be through cloud computing.
In the future consumers may have lower costs for services they demand but at the cost of their privacy and attention, while private enterprise will benefit from a wide variety of customers and more expansive relationships with those customers. Martin Geddes imagines the public will soon be ready to receive billing and customer service notices via pay-per-moment options added to Twitter or other social media instead of through today's minute-based telephony.
Three business chiefs reiterate that relationships are the most important assets -- so handling customer data is critical business. As internet marketing continues to grow, chief marketers have more data than ever on their customers. Here, top marketers talk about their data assets and how it directs company actions. Nikesh Arora of Google, John Hayes of American Express, and Yusuf Mehdi of Microsoft talk with John Battelle.
The Veteran's Administration, Medicare, and Medicaid make up the largest repository of public health data in the world, and now it's being made available in appropriate forms for the use of patients and innovators alike. Todd Parks, CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, wants to change the fee structure of healthcare from "Fee for Service" to something more efficient, and he's freeing up information on public health so everyone can see and help design better health systems.