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studio, today’s Internet is now in what he calls its third “optimization” phase in which the online conversation has been replaced by… → Read More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
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
In this very unique edition of the “Keen On” web video series series typically hosted by Andrew Keen, we had the chance to turn the tables on the self-professed antichrist of Silicon Valley. Keen was interviewed on-stage by our own Alexia Tsotsis last week at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC conference, so I was able to snag him just after that for a conversation about his new book, “Digital Vertigo… → 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
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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