Human motor racing supremacy has five years left
In five years from today, no human driver will be able to win a race against an autonomous car.
Viewing the TV implications of Steam from 50,000 feet
Google TV, Apple TV, Facebook TV, Netflix, you need to watch your backs. A more ‘socially optimised consumer experience’ may give Valve’s Steam an unbeatable edge over other contenders for tomorrow’s TV
The post-screencast era
Screencast videos are almost all painfully harder to watch than they need to be: here’s our top 5 suggestions for making screencasts infinitely more watchable, mostly just by adding a little bit of post-production.
A formidable new contender on the tech review scene
His YouTube channel alone is an eye-opener: is a new standard for consumer technology review videos being set?
The contest for your living room gathers Steam
Apple TV, Google TV and let’s not forget Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft or Sony. Here at the iij, our money is on someone else.
What happens when government goes ‘Third Platform’?
We’re told endlessly how ‘running everything from the cloud’ shreds costs for startups, so does this mean that even government could be run cheaply, if they do this too?
20 Percent Time 2.0
We pay your wages, but the IP rights for anything you create in your 20% time are 100% yours
Did Eric Schmidt really invent The Pivot before Eric Ries?
Google’s Schmidt talked about ‘morphing’ a project, but watching this Marissa Mayer video today, as she describes her boss’s suggestion three years before Ries’s, although the idea and the approach are different, the outcomes feel uncannily similar
For women computer scientists, Mudd sticks
Paltry numbers of computer scientists are women. Christine Alvarado helped QUADRUPLE those numbers at Harvey Mudd College, whose reputation for excellence rivals MIT: this video offers insight into how she did it
Reverse gamification
Puzzles are (deliberately) bad user interfaces. We’re told to love the look of things which have ‘invisible’ interfaces, because designers love simplicity. Hide those countless features, make it look simple. But this turns things into games with hidden rules. Not everyone wants to play.
Industry downloaded
Today’s dark satanic mills may soon turn darker still, once we start printing everything in three dimensions. Far less satanic, tomorrow’s mills may be our homes, as ‘economy of scale’ becomes uneconomical and mass production goes niche
Startups below zero
So I’m calling it: the margin of costs beyond a founder’s living expenses is now officially zero. What next?
Computation: digital today, analog tomorrow?
Nature chuckles at our feeble, stumbling efforts at computation. Its analog computing resources effortlessly deliver dazzling practical intelligence at microscopic scale with zero tolerance for wasted power
Are Silicon Valley VCs really in decline?
The move away from traditional VCs to Angels features strongly in talk about startup investment. So this seemingly contrary view from the very heart of Silicon Valley is intriguing
Gimmicks: innovation gone wrong, or just critics being rude and short-sighted?
When we call something a gimmick, we’re describing a feature which seems unimportant to us. But we can be so very wrong
Google’s take on native apps vs. HTML5 before Motorola
An onstage tournament in which in-house advocates from either side make their case in front of a live audience and we all try to read between the lines
Are ‘hopeless’ startups our best hope for sustainable jobs?
A startup only has to take one person out of unemployment to make a net contribution to job growth. Instead of ‘Jobseekers Allowance’ why not ‘Business Model Seekers Allowance’?
What will Google do now search is suddenly dying?
Investment legend Roger McNamee says mobile has already killed search. Smartphone users hardly use search. Is Google no longer the gatekeeper to the web, business, the world? Will Google+ put them back in the money? Does today’s ‘Facebook for business’ launch roll the dice once again?
Put it all on Jack?
Twitter? Maybe he just got lucky. Square, the way to pay with your phone? Others may beat him to it. Square, the way to turn the rest of us into merchantpreneurs? Mr Dorsey may yet live to rule our world
Over your shoulder, TechCrunch
You’ve been top of the TechMeme leaderboard for quite a while. Here comes Business Insider
Extreme uncertainty over startups as a solution to everything
Startups attempt innovation under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Is it possible that we can find new ways to solve the world’s biggest problems using ‘extreme uncertainty’?
Microsoft can beat Google, but only by letting go of a cow
It may be a cash cow, but a ‘Windows first’ policy is holding back Windows Phone in a field dominated by Android
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.
Ron Conway, archangel, on video, on how it all began
He’s been investing in a new company every six days for fifteen years. What’s that like? He secured Google’s first Venture Capital when Google had six people. What was that like?
Charisma failure = innovator failure?
Problem: many brilliant innovators wouldn’t recognise their own shortcomings in the charm department even if … (insert painfully humiliating scenario) Solution? Get ready for the Science (or Zen?) of Charisma
Either crack the Dilbert paradox, or get innovation you can’t believe in
As much as organisations tell us they want to attract fresh, innovative talent, their culture often just says no. John Hagel thinks that there’s a move coming from social networks toward ‘joint creation’ that’ll address this
What’s wrong with the way we think about education?
The old educational model of ‘compulsory knowledge consumption’ is still here, but becoming shockingly irrelevant
Left Microsoft for Google: What’s startup catalyst Don Dodge doing now?
Here he is chairing a panel of top VCs on the ‘freemium’ business model [Video]
The eCar guys that don’t build cars
Who are those guys? If they don’t build cars, what do they do? This short video tells you exactly what the eCar guys do.