Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award. As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur, Andrew founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. He is currently the host of “Keen On” show, the popular Techcrunch chat show.
Andrew is an acclaimed speaker on the international circuit, speaking regularly on the impact of new technology on 21st century business, education and society. Andrew’s new book about the social media revolution, “Digital Vertigo”, will be published by St Martin’s Press in 2012.
Oh dear, it hasn’t been a good few weeks for Silicon Valley. And leading the charge in this Silicon Valley bashing is the New Yorker staff writer and award-winning author George Packer. In both his new book, The Unwinding, and particularly in his recent New Yorker story “Change The World”, Packer warns that the love affair is over and Silicon Valley has lost its resonance with the rest of America. → Read More
For years, it’s been taken for granted that the US ranks low in the broadband performance table. But a controversial piece by ITIF’s Richard Bennett explodes the myth of poor US broadband. Not everyone, however, agrees with Bennett. So, to debate the ITIF Senior Research Fellow, I invited Public Knowledge SVP Harold Feld, who has a much less positive take on America’s broadband reality. → Read More
Stephen Wolfram, the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research, may well be the smartest and most interesting guy in tech. A PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech at the age of twenty, the youngest ever recipient of the MacArthur “genius” fellowship, the inventor of both Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram’s life has been dedicated to the capture and organization of all the… → Read More
Nobody can accuse Gary Reback, the acclaimed Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer, of being intrinsically anti-Google. After all, it was Reback, back in the 90s, who spearheaded the US government’s efforts to sue Google’s nemesis Microsoft – an enormously consequental event for the tech industry that made it possible for startup entrepreneurs like Larry Page and Sergey Brin to successfully take on the… → Read More
Last week, representatives of many of the world’s leading cities – including London, Boston, Mexico City, Barcelona and Christchurch – came to San Francisco to learn from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs about how to make their cities smarter. One of the people behind this LLGA Cities Summit was the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, formerly the chairman of Technorati and now one of the… → Read More
Finally we have an app that ends the age-old debate about whether or not the earth is getting warmer. The Just Science app has collated all the data from the last two centuries to determine the earth’s surface temperature. Developed by Novim, a research group from UC Santa Barbara, the Just Science app just won $20,000 from the American Clean Skies Foundation for improving our scientific knowledge… → Read More
In his acclaimed new book, Who Owns The Future?, which is out today, Lanier takes Silicon Valley to task for monopolizing ownership of the future. → Read More
To be “Morozoved” is to be savaged in 16,000 word critiques that seek to destroy the reputations of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest. So why, I asked Morozov, does he indulge in these types of intellectual blitzkriegs? “The whole debate is a nonsense,” he explains, laying out the foundations of his new book To Save Everything, Click Here. → Read More
We all suffered from something called Future Shock – a condition that, according to best-selling writer Alvin Toeffler, made us unable to deal with the pace of technological change. Today, however, our shock with the future has been replaced with present shock. That, at least, is the view of the contemporary Toeffler, Douglas Rushkoff, who has just written the much lauded Present Shock: When… → Read More
Intel is one of those rare tech companies – IBM also comes to mind – that has successfully reinvented itself with each new wave of technological disruption. So, in our post-PC, networked age, how should we define Intel now? According to their new CIO, Kim Stevenson, Intel is a “computing company” that is now trying to be “startup-like”. And one disruptive area that Stevenson believes is… → Read More
In his new book, Marketplace 3.0; Rewriting the Rules of Borderless Business, Mikitani lays out his vision for the future of online retailing. As he told me, buying products online will be marked by a shift away from what he calls “standardization” toward a more customized experience. → Read More
Finally, our secret is out. Today, Deborah Perry Piscione’s much anticipated new book Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Can Learn From The Innovation Capital Of The World is being published. As Piscione told me, the real secret of Silicon Valley lies in our absence of hierarchy. In contrast with New York, Silicon Valley is obsessed with “ideas” rather than with “greed” or “power”. → Read More
This new book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think - written by Oxford University professor Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and The Economist journalist Ken Cukier – is the definitive guide to a new age which, both authors promise, is going to revolutionize the way we live, work and think. → Read More
It’s often been said that we, as users, are “the product” of networks like Google or Facebook. But there is now a new wave of privacy centric start-ups seeking to give us back control of our personal data. One of these is Abine which boasts a suite of products that protect our online privacy. Data protection is the “new frontier”, Abine’s CEO Bill Kerrigan, who describes his startup as “the online… → Read More
Is the Internet ready for live jazz? Serial entrepreneur Brian Gruber thinks it is. With his latest startup ShowGo.tv, Gruber has created an online music experience in which we can watch live jazz from “the coolest places on earth”. → Read More
Jon Irwin, President of Rhapsody, told me at SFMusicTech that smartphone technology – particularly the IOS and Android platforms – has enabled a radically new experience for music lovers. As Irwin explained, this shifts the industry’s business model from the sale of product to what he calls “streaming as a platform,” noting the increasing dominance of subscription services like Rhapsody, Spotify… → Read More
The Pulitzer Prize winning technology journalist Matt Richtel is one of the New York Times’ crown jewels. But while Richtel works his Silicon Valley beat during the day, he has a much darker night-time profession. Richtel is also a fiction writer, the author of fantastically seductive techno-fictional novels such as Hooked and his latest book, The Cloud, released earlier this month. → Read More
Success can be determined by measuring the length of our index finger in comparison to our ring finger, Bronson told me about the research behind Top Dog. But that’s not the only conclusion about success that Bronson revealed. Riffing off Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Bronson explained the science of winning and losing, thereby rendering the legendary intuition of venture capitalists redundant. → Read More
If there is one prominent U.S. politician who has consistently staked his reputation to the digital revolution, it’s Gavin Newsom, the two-time San Francisco mayor, now Lieutenant Governor of California. This week he is launching a new book Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government, a FarmVille-inspired riff which lays out his agenda for transforming American… → Read More
Facebook is, of course, built around Mark Zuckerberg‘s ideal of a radically transparent world. Less transparent, however, is Zuckerberg’s business genius, the secret behind his awesome success. But now Zuck’s genius has been revealed by the Intel marketing executive, Ekaterina Walter, with a new Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s… → Read More
One of the high points of last week’s DLD Conference in Munich was the What’s Next? panel which explored the future of media in the digital age. Buoyantly chaired by DLD host Yossi Vardi, the panel included longtime media exec Jon Miller, whose illustrious career includes stints as Chairman and CEO of AOL and Chief Digital Officer at News Corp. → Read More
The Aaron Swartz tragedy has unleashed an intense debate about computer “crime” and the US criminal justice system. Heavyweights like Lessig, Doctorow, Greenwald, Masnick, Wu and Kerr have all written with great passion about the case. But the one article that really resonated with me was written by the Harvard Business Review blogger James Allworth. → Read More
Online piracy just won’t seem to go away. A disturbing report released today by the University of South California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab demonstrates the economic connection between the online advertising industry and pirated film, music and video content. → Read More
One of technology’s most persistently prescient crystal ball gazers is Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, a guy who – from Summize to Tweetdeck to bitly to Digg to his latest baby tapestry – always thinks ahead of the crowd. → Read More
What was the most significant tech event of 2012? No, neither Apple after Steve Jobs nor the Facebook IPO. Not at least according to John Borthwick, the CEO of Betaworks and one of the shrewdest observers of the tech scene. → Read More
Few people are better equipped to imagine the future of online journalism than Emily Bell. As Bell told me when we talked in her New York office, she believes that online journalism has a future – both in terms of content sitting behind paywalls, ad-supported news, and content subsidized by organizations or wealthy individuals. → Read More
A new Ray Kurzweil book is always a major event. And his latest work, How To Create A Mind: The Secret Of Human Thought Revealed, is classic Kurzweil – both infuriatingly brilliant and brilliantly infuriating. → Read More
Today, the dark day Syria shut down its Internet, web freedom should be at the very forefront of all of our minds. Web freedom was also center stage earlier this week when Stanford Law School hosted an event called “Sticky WCIT: Is This The End Of The Internet.” I asked several of the experts attending the event whether a WCIT meeting next week in Dubai might be a big threat to the free flow of… → Read More
Woz spoke at TEDx Brussels this week and his presence electrified the 2,000 people in the audience. Afterwards, I had the great fortune to catch the great man → Read More
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