Data is a curious thing. As consumers, we have an inkling that our daily activities — what we buy, what we do, and where we go — are analyzed and acted upon. But somehow, when it comes to wrangling a herd of humans into a room, we forget that the very same tools are available to us as well. You don’t have to be a software engineer from Google or Amazon to run a smarter meeting. You just need to think like one for a minute.
CATEGORY: Culture
Every year, we are rewarded with a new round of technology upgrades. Faster processors, bigger and brighter screens, better cameras — a bounty that promises more rapid selfies, status updates and streaming entertainments. Forget peak oil, we have hit peak tech. For the more enlightened, that means something needs to change.
CATEGORY: Culture
I followed a man the other day. He was unremarkable, except for one detail: he was listening to a pristine, vintage CD Walkman. I recognized the model, of course. It was a final generation Sony Discman — as thin as a CD itself, with a matte metallic exterior and polished chrome trim, fiber optic output and a twist action, cylindrical headphone remote with an illuminated LCD display. In other words, everything I could have possibly wanted in a music device — in 2003.
CATEGORY: Marketing
Spend enough time in LA, and you start to feel like you are living in a time loop. Burger joints, juice bars, coffee shops — it’s one long parade of endless franchise repetition. But after I complained one too many times, I was pulled aside and informed in a hushed tones that I had it all wrong. ‘You just need to know about the secret menus’, explained a friend of mine. And she was right. I did need to know. Because even the most banal of brands, it turns out, have back doors.
CATEGORY: Marketing
There is a wonderful turning point in the movie ‘Fresh’ (1994) when 12-year-old Michael, surrounded by violence, drug dealers and ghetto enforcers, applies his father’s chess lessons to eliminating the forces that oppose him. Games are more than mere pastimes; they are frameworks for thinking. That is also why they make great teaching tools for humans and machines alike.
CATEGORY: Technology
