Sneak preview of MIT research into robot humanisation
Can we build robots that can be taught in the same way that humans teach each other? That’s not how we teach robots now. Is this the way to make robots more useful in natural disasters?
No potential startup founder left behind
It looks like the enviable track record of startup accelerators like TechStars and Y Combinator derives from identifying something you might call ‘Foundational Capability’ as the basis for startup success, but there is a dark side
Startup death spiral? Surely not!
Maybe it’s just something that nobody wanted to talk about. Large organisations had, over the years, paid countless professors to study the shortcomings of large organisations, leaving the trials and tribulations of the startup unstudied, waiting for Steve Blank to one day notice something shockingly consistent about the way most startups spin out of control
Clash of innovation news titans
An epic transatlantic on-air wrangle over Google’s future. Veteran BBC innovation investigator Peter Day vs. US prediction guru Mark Anderson. They each put up a characteristically robust performance. But who won? Whatever, it was riveting radio.
Say anything you want to, we trust your judgement
Encouraging your staff to be unfettered champions of your values carries the risk of them ‘going native’. They may side with outsiders who might want to hold you to those values when they seem to conflict with your immediate operational goals.
Legends in disagreement: Kevin Kelly vs. Jaron Lanier
Kelly says that technology isn’t ‘neutral’, it’s ‘good’. Not because it’s solving our problems, but because the choices it offers propel us forward. Lanier doesn’t feel this view resolves our confusion about technology
The rebirth of the rebirth of distance
It’s been quite a while since the last big fuss about ‘peak oil’: hardly surprising, once oil fell from its pre-crash peak. A guy who made a lot of that fuss is back giving his post-crash perspective in a video. He believes the ‘local vs. global’ balance could be about to change
When social innovation is a matter of life and death
But does it scale? What if scalability, instead of being assessed in terms of ‘financial growth potential’, has to be measured in terms of ‘social impact’?
The apps creators are on fire
So many ideas, all coming at you at once. Don’t expect these people to pour anything onto the flames but gasoline. iPad (and tablet) apps from a content creation perspective
Will tomorrow’s aspiring startup staff need to sharpen their elbows?
Power has become a dirty word in a culture which favours cooperation over competition, so will this leave future recruits imagining that they’ll be able to avoid office politics by joining a startup?