War Syria crisis: US isolated as British MPs vote against air strikes — live updates. In The Guardian. Health Why We Can and Must Focus on Preventing Alzheimer’s. By David Perlmutter in The Daily Beast. Pull-quote: “…to a very significant degree Alzheimer’s disease is preventable. Research clearly shows that up to 54% of Alzheimer’s cases… Continue reading

How to value personal data, by Ctrl-Shift World Economic Forum Sharing Economy Position Paper, at Collaborative Consumption Attention Economy vs. Intention Economy, a diagram by Robert Bashor. Also part of The system dynamics of an intention economy. How does GHCQ’s Internet surveillance work? by Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins, Nick Davies and James Ball… Continue reading

The Deteriorata, which parodies The Desiderata, much as The Gluetrain Manifesto parodied The Cluetrain Manifesto. My fave line from another parody, perhaps by the same guy, of the “Markets are conversations” line: “Markets are money.” QR codes aren’t dead yet. By yours truly in Harvard Business Review. I’ll also be keynoting an upcoming iAB thing,… Continue reading

Quote of the Day: There is no way to build a mirror world without a network of decentralized cooperating agents. — Phil Windley My keynote talk at KuppingerCole‘s EIC conference in May. (Registration required.) American Customer Satisfaction Index Google’s Loon Project Puts Balloon Technology in Spotlight: Future stratospheric systems could change how the world goes… Continue reading

Where TIME Lost the Plot on Snowden and Spying Guardian pieces The NSA surveillance fallout should be a turning point for the tech industry, by Dan Gillmor On PRISM, partisanship and propaganda: Addressing many of the issues arising from last week’s NSA stories, by Glenn Greenwald Investigate Booz Allen Hamilton, not Edward Snowden: The firm… Continue reading

Apple beefs up privacy protections in iOS 7. Here’s one reason: iOS 7 users aren’t just consumers; they are customers — of Apple. And, with its finger on the pulse of the market, Apple knows that customers don’t like being tracked like animals. (Note: I’m no fan of silos, and Apple has one here. But… Continue reading

To the internet giants, you’re not a customer. You’re just another user. — Yahoo, Microsoft, Google et al don’t really offer ‘free’ email and it’s naive to expect any form of customer service from them, by John Naughton in The Guardian Monster gas cloud could unveil Milky Way’s black-hole hub, in Physics World. Exclusive Testimony… Continue reading

Price-gouging cable companies are our latter-day robber barons: Monopolistic cable providers make internet access an unaffordable luxury for tens of millions of Americans, by Heidi Moore in The Guardian. A cool conference I’d like to attend, but probably won’t. How to destroy the future: From the Cuban missile crisis to a fossil fuels frenzy, the… Continue reading

Personal cloud innovation happens at the edges, by Jeff Kramer Gartner Says the Personal Cloud Will Replace the Personal Computer as the Center of Users’ Digital Lives by 2014. A bit aggressive. From March 2012. Photos of Florence, shot from about 25,000 feet up, en route from Newark to Rome via Munich Innovations in Digital… Continue reading

Sell your data to save the economy and your future, by Jaron Lanier, for the BBC Heights of Fancy, by Thomas Leslie, an op-ed in the New York Times. Leslie, “a professor of architecture at Iowa State University, is the author of Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934,” says the new spire on One World Trade Center in… Continue reading

The Future Of Technology Isn’t Mobile, It’s Contextual, by Pete Mortensen in Co.Design The State of Wi-Fi, by Ubiquiti. Lots of stats. Disruptions: At Odds Over Privacy Challenges of Wearable Computing, by Nick Bilton, in his Bits blog at the New York Times McKinsey Global Institute: Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and… Continue reading

Media Tell Hollywood Thou Shalt Not Put A Stumbling Block Before the Treaty For The Blind, by Harold Feld. Points to the We the People Petition Why is the Media Hyping Cord-Cutting? Elements of a viral launch page, by Simon Schmid on Smashing Fred Wilson on “natural advertising” Science Tornadoes and Climate Change: Huge Stakes,… Continue reading

I’ll be participating in a run of good and fun events over the next few weeks, taking me to at least five cities in five countries. Here they are: Currently: New York, Boston and Cambridge. Then… OuiShareFest, May 2-4, Paris, where my talk will be about Markets and Relationships VRM Day, May 6, Mountain View, where… Continue reading

Last week, while most of us were busy watching the Boston Marathon bombing events unfold, an icky bill called CISPA, or HR264, was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, with enormous lobbying help from IBM and other industrial giants. There are lots of angles on why CISPA is a Bad Thing (see the link pile below for a small sample);… Continue reading

All these living things have been declared dead… Anonymous travel Apple (in 2005) Blogging (by Francine Hardaway herself, no less) Common courtesy Driving Google (in 2006) Google+ Internal medicine Journalism (in BuzzFeed, next to “The 30 Most Important Cats of 2012”) Marketing Microsoft (Paul Graham, in 2007) Search Social Networking Social media Starbucks (in 2008) Thinking (with various adjectives, especially “design…”)… Continue reading

Last weekend the cover essay in the Review section of The Wall Street Journal was The Customer as a God, by yours truly. Now that a few days have gone by, and I’ve done lots of responding in the comments below that piece and elsewhere, I can start looking at some of the responses that have… Continue reading

The storm is hitting right now: Remember that auroras can be a thousand miles high. So even if they’re over Canada, they can still be visible in the upper part of the lower U.S. 48. Or even sometimes south of there. And maybe that’s a better place to be, since it stays light up there… Continue reading

One nice thing about blogging is that you get to correct what you write. Tonight I put up a long post that I had second, third, fourth and fifth and additional thoughts about, and finally decided to kill. I do that a lot, actually. Just not usually with stuff I’ve already put up. But I… Continue reading

The Intention Economy came out on Tuesday, and coverage has been spreading. Meanwhile, while I’ve been busy at IIW, where VRM mojo has been major. Notes from the many VRM sessions at #IIW14 will appear on this page soon. Meanwhile here are some excerpts pieces that ran this week. From Selling You: Not Just on Facebook, by Haydn Shaughnessy in Forbes —… Continue reading

While everybody else is stuck in 1080p — aka “full HD” — Apple is thinking and developing on a bigger canvas than that — starting with the new iPad‘s 2048 x 1536 screen. They are always looking to move standard usage forward by large steps (where they change the whole market and win big in… Continue reading