‘My twelve year old son has autism, and has a terrible time with math. We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. We stumbled upon your video on decimals, and it got through! Then we went on to the dreaded fractions. Again, he got it! We could not believe it! He is so excited.’
Video curation, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the iij Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new innovation videos, to disregard things that have caused them to be ignored or dismissed and to put them into context
You’ll need to watch this video if your knowledge of the issues has so far been mostly constrained to news coverage
It looks like the enviable track record of startup accelerators like TechStars and Y Combinator derives from identifying something you might call ‘Foundational Capability’ as the basis for startup success, but there is a dark side
This starts off as a talk about startup methodology but somehow manages to morph into a sales pitch for an intriguing new solar technology. If you’re able to keep up with Bill Gross’s sometimes ferocious pace of delivery, stick with it, it’s well worth the ride
It’s a funny old world where it takes Wired Magazine to show the medical fraternity how truly unintelligible (but life-critical) gibberish can be transformed in ways that allow us to take control of our own well being
I just read this question on Quora: ‘What good books tell the story of the business model iterations and pivots of a notable company?’ My response is not a book, but a video of a talk at Y Combinator Startup School
Where in the world are the next systemic bubbles? Can we conceive of interventions which might genuinely mitigate the risks? Are the biggest challenges to banking innovation technological, cultural, governance related, or socio-geographic?
What does cleantech look like from a strictly ‘risks and returns’ perspective? What new investment approaches will make the most promising government funded emerging technologies a realistic prospect for scalability and growth?
Innovation and academia might seem inseparable, but ‘novelties’ such as collaborative research and digital deliverables are often still seen by academic authorities as being an unacceptable encroachment upon the sovereignty of the paper-bound work of the solitary scholar
We’re leaving trails behind us, both offline and online, inside and outside social media, that we don’t notice, but marketers do, and they’re using them to spot our closest friends, betting that they’ll share our tastes and would probably buy what we bought if they were approached.
The new breed of angels: as much ‘startup coentrepreneurs’ as they are investors. Executive control, once obligatory, now seen as a liability, is being replaced with new brands of investor offerings which minimise dilution and instead creatively collaborate to facilitate leanness and opportunistic market agility. VCs are keenly studying this new wizardry
We’re making no claims about whether it’s a good or bad idea, whether it works or fails. But the meeting in this video is real and the people in it are from the very top on both sides. The ‘fly on the wall’ perspective has a unique and unprecedented feel
Most of the consumer technologies of 20 years ago seem ludicrously primitive today, whereas, for many diseases, current biotech leaves us almost as powerless to prevent the suffering and death of millions today as we were generations ago. However, it still offers the tantalising prospect of unlocking nature’s technology, and potentially rendering all our diseases and current consumer tech obsolete
Quiet and unassuming, but with a wickedly dry sense of humour: the iconic ambassador of the algorithm has a life story which deserves a wider audience than just computer scientists, who are as likely to have read his Art of Computer Programming as to have listened to Dark Side of the Moon
An epic transatlantic on-air wrangle over Google’s future. Veteran BBC innovation investigator Peter Day vs. US prediction guru Mark Anderson. They each put up a characteristically robust performance. But who won? Whatever, it was riveting radio.
Everyone can see how Big IT could feel threatened by accusations of becoming one of society’s most voracious consumers of energy. And yet, it turns out that IT and sustainability are probably inseparable
Dave McClure is not exactly a shy or timid voice in the startup investment community. He offers the unique perspective of someone who describes themselves as a geek who became a startup founder who moved on to become an investor in many startups.
So this set of conference videos was supposed to be about regulatory issues. Shockingly perhaps, it turned out to be neither alarmist scaremongering nor shameless cheerleading.
Kelly says that technology isn’t ‘neutral’, it’s ‘good’. Not because it’s solving our problems, but because the choices it offers propel us forward. Lanier doesn’t feel this view resolves our confusion about technology
If Silicon Valley investors began diverting more of their energies towards increasing entrepreneurial diversity and inclusion, could this put their impressive track record of success at risk?
Could it be true that we’ve finally mastered the art of controlling users’ emotions? This talk by a design consultant claims that this is what their research has made possible
It’s been quite a while since the last big fuss about ‘peak oil’: hardly surprising, once oil fell from its pre-crash peak. A guy who made a lot of that fuss is back giving his post-crash perspective in a video. He believes the ‘local vs. global’ balance could be about to change
What does crowdsourcing mean to an editor? Asking the audience. Doesn’t sound so radical, does it? But within mainstream media, the very term is plagued by controversy. This revealing video gives the view from some leading pioneers, both in the back room and on the front line.
The developing world has an insatiable hunger for everything our best universities have to offer. Are those universities doing enough to address this?
Remember ‘the 12 principles of green engineering’ that we covered? The same researcher was involved in putting these different sets of principles together
To get some insight into this new discipline, you might find this video describing the background to a researcher’s eureka moment well worth watching. It’s a talk by Geoffrey Ozin, widely regarded as the father of nanochemistry
If you want to innovate more effectively, you need to iterate faster. Scoble cites Oracle’s Larry Ellison as having a recipe for increasing efficiency in an unproductive team (by successively reducing headcount) and offers this as a way to keep a team small enough to iterate rapidly.
Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic explosion. The grid can’t take it.
You’ve got a revolutionary product and a choice of innovation strategies: trying to do everything you do ‘in the spirit of innovation’ or to run an otherwise traditional business, limiting additional risk: are both options misguided?
Welcome to the birthplace of investment in the online world. It’s the relaxed watering hole where the big stuff happens in Silicon Valley. The regulars constitute a “who’s who” of movers and shakers behind what’s going on right now.
Apple may have reinvented themselves as a phone company, but that doesn’t mean that Nokia can’t try to reinvent themselves too, so the question is this: what do they want to become?
As much as organisations tell us they want to attract fresh, innovative talent, their culture often just says no. John Hagel thinks that there’s a move coming from social networks toward ‘joint creation’ that’ll address this
Is this the answer to investor worries about incubator failure?
Necessary because it’s something which will happen anyway: dangerous because some of your business instincts will get you into trouble, communities are not a safe place for the inexperienced to innovate
Same as the old boss: I don’t think so; if you can’t demonstrate to her that you can truly innovate, don’t even bother applying for the job
Watch them explain how they take something that consumes the same amount of electrical power as over 8,000 staff and just make it disappear
This video about replacing yourself with a robot seriously creeps me out. But I still want to try it.
MIT somehow managed to make this happen in New York recently (warning: contains disturbingly graphic images of a ‘banker guy’ talking candidly about pharma deals)
Your most private functions may soon not be quite so private