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.
If anybody knows how to talk back to Facebook, it’s Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, America’s largest and most powerful advocacy group for kids. Steyer is the author of the new book, Talking Back to Facebook: The Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age, which includes an introduction by Chelsea Clinton and presents parents, teachers and politicians with a very practical and realistic strategy for managing the social media activities of children. → Read More
The marketing executive Ken Segall not only worked closely with Steve Jobs for years at both Apple and NeXT, but he was also the creative guy who came up with the iMac name. And he’s just written a book about what he learned from Jobs – an instant best-seller called Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success. → Read More
It was 6.30 on Sunday morning, August 9th, 2007 when Ted Morgan, the Boston based CEO of a little location technology start-up called Skyhook Wireless, got a totally unexpected call from an absolute stranger in California.
Who calls a complete stranger at 6.30 am on a Sunday morning – especially from California, where it was 3.30 am? → Read More
Personal Democracy Forum CEO Andrew Rasiej told me that most American politicians don’t know the difference between a waiter and a server. Perhaps. But one politician who certainly can distinguish between the two is Anna Eshoo, the Democratic Congresswoman for California’s 14th District, which she has represented since 1993. As Silicon Valley’s representative in DC, Eshoo not only knows her servers from her waiters, but is also well versed in complex technological policy such as spectrum, privacy and SOPA, as well as being a keen observer of the innovation that distinguishes Silicon Valley from the rest of the world. → Read More
So how, exactly, does creativity work? Jonah Lehrer’s best-selling new book Imagine: How Creativity Works is a lucid attempt to scientifically explain both creativity and imagination. As Lehrer told me when he came into our San Francisco studio last week, his goal is to make sense of that “epiphany” in the shower which results in the insight (what he calls in the book, the thing that “comes out of nowhere”) of a great idea. → Read More
There are few more articulate or passionate commentators on digital politics than Andrew Rasiej, the founder and CEO of Personal Democracy Media and the organizer of the upcoming Personal Democracy Forum. As Rasiej told me when we talked in New York City earlier this month, the Internet offers the opportunity to create what he calls “we-government” – a much more accountable and transparent form of 21st century politics than the type of governance that existed in the 20th century. But for this to happen, Rasiej reminded me, politicians need to be able to distinguish between “a server and a waiter” and we need to dilute the impact of money on our political process. → Read More
Andrew Keen interviews Laura Tyson, professor of economics at UC Berkeley. → Read More
Daniel Franklin is the Executive Editor of The Economist magazine and one of the sponsors of last week’s excellent Innovation event at UC Berkeley’s Haas School. He is also author of the new book, Megachange: The World in 2050 which imagines the major economic, scientific and political challenges and opportunities to come over the next 40 years. So how important is the Internet, I asked Franklin when we talked last week, in solving some of what he calls “the wicked problems” of the planet? And, I asked him, what can Silicon Valley learn from the rest of the world in terms of coming up with innovative technological solutions to the world’s most pressing problems? → Read More
All our global institutions — from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization to the International Monetary Fund to the G20 to the G8 — are broken. That’s at least according to Don Tapscott, the best-selling author of Superwikinomics and a guy committed to “rebooting” the world. So when I sat down with Don last week at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley last week, I gave him 8 minutes to outline how we can rebuild these global institutions in the digital 21st century. → Read More
It’s not just start-ups that radically innovate. Take, for example, Autodesk, the 3D design, engineering and entertainment software giant that, according to its President and CEO Carl Bass, continues to be “incredibly relevant” in the innovation economy. “The most creative people use our tools,” Bass told me about popular Autodesk software like Sketchbook, Pixlr and Instructables, when I talked to him at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley last week. And Bass’ optimism extends to the future where, he told me, all of Autodesk’s products will have migrated online and the cloud, mobile and social will have radically transformed its business. Indeed, in 5 years time, he predicts, computing will become an “abundant resource” thereby providing Autodesk with even richer opportunities to create innovative design, engineering and entertainment software. → Read More
Gina Bianchini is best known, of course, as the co-founder and former CEO of Ning, the social community aggregator which Glam Media bought for $150 million last year. And now (ding dong), Bianchini is back with a new start-up, a social software company called Mightybell, which she says is trying to reinvent groups online. “It’s Github for groups,” she told me when I saw her last week at The Economist’s Innovation event in Berkeley. It may be “super early days,” for Mightybell, Bianchini explained, but she is nonetheless hopeful that the start-up, which has a “vast” team of six people, has raised $3.6 million and is still in private beta, will unlock the potential of real life experiences. → Read More
I have to confess that when I think about GE, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t radical innovation. But, as usual, I might be wrong. As GE’s Chief Marketing Officer, Beth Comstock, told me when we met at The Economist‘s stimulating Innovation event last week, GE is actually totally committed to creating radically new structures of organization. As what Comstock calls the “world’s oldest start-up,” the 130 year-old company has the scale, she says, to be both nimble and agile. Indeed, she even boasts of GE doing away with traditional organizational hierarchy in some of its many manufacturing businesses so that it can generate more innovation. → Read More
Sexism and racism in Silicon Valley. It’s a debate that doesn’t seem to want to die. On one side are those who believe that Silicon Valley is a genuine meritocracy; on the other, are those who are deeply troubled by the self-evident lack of female and/or black start-up entrepreneurs. And one of the most vocal members of the latter group is the multi-affiliated academic, Vivek Wadhwa, who isn’t shy to take on what he calls the “white boy’s club” in Silicon Valley. But Wadhwa, who spent his first career as a start-up entrepreneur, is no enemy of Silicon Valley. “It’s an amazing place,” he told me when we met last week at The Economist‘s Innovation conference in Berkeley. But what troubles Wadhwa are the smattering of sexists and racists at large venture capitalist firms who, he says, kill the deals that fund minority-led startups. These “arrogant people who think they are gods,” he told me, they are the bigots who are undermining the meritocratic foundations of Silicon Valley. → Read More
Why do so many great companies fail? Professor Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School argued they fail because of something he called The Innovator’s Dilemma – a term he popularized to describe the way in which smart companies become prisoners of their own innovation. So is it possible to escape the innovator’s dilemma? I had the honor of interviewing Clay at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley last week where the great man talked to me about how Google might escape the innovator’s dilemma, why he worries about Apple’s future, how to effectively innovate in education and healthcare and why most business school professors get the economy so wrong. → Read More
There are few more iconic figures in the digital community than Stewart Brand, the effervescent founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Well, The Long Now Foundation and the guy who almost single-handedly connected the counterculture with cyberspace. So it was a real thrill to sit down last week with Stewart at The Economist‘s excellent Innovation event in Berkeley to talk about the origins of the gift economy, what the hippies got wrong (sex, the family & optimism), why the US and Europe have become so timid and how all the innovation is now coming from the south. → Read More
Back in 2009, Chad Mureta was an 18-hour a day real estate salesman living from one paycheck to the next. Driving home after a basketball game one evening, he hit a deer, flipped his truck over four times, mangled his arm and almost killed himself. Then, recovering in his hospital bed, Mureta – who knew nothing about technology or the Internet – was introduced to the app economy by a friend who gave him a newspaper article about how apps can generate significant revenue. When he got out of the hospital, Mureta borrowed $1,800 from his stepfather, built an app called Fingerprint Security Pro which eventually generated $800,000 in revenue. Mureta is now an app entrepreneur and, in good Tim Ferris style, travels around the world as a member of what he calls “the new rich”. → Read More
Every day, it seems, there is a new scandal about privacy and social networks. And few people have a better understanding of social networks’ threat to our privacy and liberty than the Chicago-based legal scholar, technologist and best-selling thriller writer, Lori Andrews. In her latest book, “I Know Who You Are And I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy”, Andrews argues that social networks like Facebook and Google+ are, indeed, destroying our privacy. → Read More
Forget all those stereotypes about repressed, understated Scandinavians. Christian Lanng, the CEO and co-founder of the business software network Tradeshift, is as unashamedly noisy as the brashest Silicon Valley entrepreneur (think a young Viking version of Marc Benioff). And not only has Lanng founded one of the most promising business start-ups in the world right now but, having relocated to the Bay Area eariler this year from his native Copenhagen, he’s also pioneering the idea of a lean intercontinental start-up with offices in Europe, America and Asia. → Read More
The technology book of 2012 may have just been published. The book is by George Dyson, it’s called Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe and its a sparkling history of the small team of scientists at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) who developed both the personal computer and the hydrogen bomb. Most of all, this is a book about John (Johnny) Von Neumann, the brilliant Hungarian mathematician who not only was the principal architect of our digital universe but also assembled the scientific team that built the foundations of the computer and the hydrogen bomb. → Read More
Trust me on this one. There are few people who have given trust and reputation more thought than security expert Bruce Schneier. His latest book, Liars And Outliers, asks the question of how society functions when we can’t trust each other. And Schneier has spent a lifetime thinking through the relationship between trust and reputation in our information economy. → Read More
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