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.
Through bestselling books like I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, many of you will be familiar with the self-proclaimed asshole Tucker Max. → Read More
TechCrunch is launching CrunchGov, which offers a Congressional leaderboard on tech friendly legislators. But what about the race for the White House – should Silicon Valley be supporting Obama or Romney? There are few people who know their way around Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. better than best-selling author and columnist Larry Downes. And, as Downes told me via Skype today, he doesn’t… → Read More
Earlier this month, I had the good fortune to attend DLD Bosphorus, an event held in Istanbul and featuring some of the hottest Turkish start-ups and entrepreneurs. It was a memorable evening. Held on the banks of the Bosphorus, at Istanbul’s amazing Modern Museum of Art, the DLD event featured a number of leading Turkish entrepreneurs including Sina Afra, the CEO of the private shopping club … → Read More
If New York has The Times and San Francisco The Chronicle, then the digital world has The Daily Dot – the first online newspaper exclusively dedicated to news about the Internet. Backed by the Los Angeles based investor Nova Spivack, the Daily Dot was founded in August 2011. As CEO Nick White told me, the “core job” of the Daily Dot is to “tell the story of the Internet.” And, so far, they seem to… → Read More
Hands up if you know what Ericsson does? Yes, we all know about that Sony-Ericsson smartphone thingamajig. But as Hans Vestberg, Ericsson’s surprisingly youthful CEO and President told me, Ericsson can claim, as much as any other company, to actually run the network. Forty percent of all the world’s digital infrastructure is provided by Ericsson and 50% of the world’s smartphone traffic goes… → Read More
One of my favorite unconferences is the European edition of Stream, the WPP/Yossi Vardi hosted extravaganza held annually just outside Athens. Last year, I interviewed Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s ebullient CEO, about the global advertising economy. And this year, I had the good fortune to sit down with Mark Read, the CEO of WPP Digital, to talk more specifically about the company’s digital strategy. → Read More
As the author of the New York Times’ bestselling Hamlet’s Blackberry, William Powers taught us how to build a good life in the digital age. And now Powers himself is doing just that. At Crowdwire, a Bluefin Labs funded project, Powers is using the tens of millions of Twitter and public Facebook comments to analyze the Presidential election. And as he told me over Skype, Crowdwire is providing… → Read More
Don Dodge is well known to longtime TechCrunch readers. Dodge was the guy who Mike Arrington turned into a bit of a martyr after he got unceremoniously fired by Microsoft back in November 2009. Indeed, as Dodge told me last week backstage at Disrupt, it was Mike’s very public attack on Microsoft which lead to Google immediately hiring Dodge as their developer evangelist, a position he still holds… → Read More
Given the ubiquity and power of today’s online networks, it’s become a cliche to describe the race between Obama and Romney as a social media election. But few social networks have become as explicitly engaged as the 4 million person strong gay network Grindr in pursuing the human rights of its members. As Grindr’s CEO Joel Simkhai told me at Disrupt, that’s because gay men don’t have equality in… → Read More
The comedian B.J. Mendelson is a master of social media. Mendelson was one of the few non celebrities included on the old Twitter suggested user list and has now over 770,000 followers – a number that makes him a genuine player in the social media game. But in spite of his Twitter fame and his more than 60,000 tweets, Mendelson believes that social media is, to put it politely, crap. And to… → Read More
My own criticism about Google’s bias are well known. But I’m far from alone in worrying that Google’s increasing investment in online content brings into question the supposed objectivity of their search engine. One notable search engine guru who has expressed his discomfort with Google’s new role as a media company is Danny Sullivan, the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. Earlier this week… → Read More
The boundary between television and the Internet continues to be swept away. The latest example of a show that brings high-quality production values to the Internet is H+, the multimillion dollar Warner Brothers-funded interactive show about a future in which we all have our technology implanted in our brains.
But what makes H+ so revolutionary is less its message than its medium. As the series… → Read More
I met Frost and Sullivan’s Chairman David Frigstad last month at the Internet Cowboy Unconference in Wyoming hosted by Idith and Yuval Almog and Yossi Vardi. Amidst the unconference crazies – the Robert Scobles and David McClures cavorting around Jackson Hole – Frigstad stood out as a grown-up, a mensch who runs a 1800 person consulting group with offices in 44 countries around the world. What was… → Read More
According to David Cho, the co-founder and CEO of Sidebark, 2012 is the year that privacy will go big (if not public). That’s because, as Cho told me when he came into our San Francisco studio, we want to share our most personal data with our most personal friends – and that can only be done by making privacy the default feature of a social network. Therein lies the rationale behind Sidebark… → Read More
While the eyes of the world are focused on the global competition in London at the moment, it’s still quite rare to hear of English start-up entrepreneurs able to successfully compete globally with the Yanks. But one London based entrepreneur who might buck this trend is Dan Wagner, the founder of the successful publishing platform M.A.I.D and the current chairman of Bright Station Ventures. → Read More
Once upon a time, we were told that markets are “conversations”. But that’s all changed. At least if you listen to Jeremiah Owyang, a much respected “Internet Analyst” at the Altimeter Group. As Owyang explained to me when he came into our San Francisco studio, today’s Internet is now in what he calls its third “optimization” phase in which the online conversation has been replaced by… → Read More
Trust me, I’m lying. That’s the title of a sensational new book by Ryan Holiday, a self-styled “media manipulator” who exposes the blogosphere as corrupt to its very core. In the book, Holiday – whose clients include best-selling authors like Tucker Max and Tim Ferriss – argues that all the major blogs represent a form of “entrepreneurial journalism” obsessed with driving page views. Everyone … → Read More
A few months ago, I had Doug Edwards, Google employee #59, on the show to confess all about Google’s early days. But whatever Google ex-employees can do, ex-Facebook employees can do better. So instead of employee #59, we’ve lined up Facebook employee #51 to reveal the most intimate truths about what it was like to work at Mark Zuckerberg’s production in the very early days. Katherine Losse was… → Read More
If 2012 turns out to be the year when the online privacy sector really takes off, then the “private social network”, EveryMe is likely to become one of the big new stories in Silicon Valley. Formed a year ago in Menlo Park out of the Y Combinator stable, EveryMe now boasts $1.5 million in start-up capital and over 500,000 users of its “circles” (heard that one before, eh?) product which is… → Read More
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the book DIGITAL VERTIGO, authored by TechCrunch columnist Andrew Keen.
It occurred to me that the corpse might make more human sense after I’d expressed myself about it on Biz Stone’s Twitter where, as @ajkeen, I had a following of several thousand followers. Squeezing the rectangular BlackBerry between my fingers, I wondered how to socially… → Read More
When we think Wikipedia, we think Jimmy Wales. But most of us don’t know that Wikipedia actually had a co-founder – a fellow called Larry Sanger, who not only worked on the original version of Wikipedia (called Nupedia) with Wales back in 2000, but claims to have been the guy who “brought to the idea of the wiki” to the crowdsourced encyclopedia.
But Sanger doesn’t seem to have any pride in… → Read More
Big data is not only hot in the startup world but also in the university. Stanford, with its intimate access to Silicon Valley is most readily associated with the study of big data. But UC Berkeley, the other great university in the Bay Area, is hot on Stanford’s heels in terms of making sense of our new data driven economy. And later this week (May 31-June 1), Berkeley is hosting a conference… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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