Visiting Tokyo is like stepping off a subway station into a parallel universe of strange technologies, animated characters and perfectly wrapped pieces of fruit. Long before the iPhone existed, Japan led the world in smartphone technology and gaming. To this day, it remains a primordial soup of emerging consumer trends and digital innovations. One of my key contacts for trends in Tokyo is Serkan Toto. German by birth, he has been based in Japan since 2004 and runs a game industry consultancy called Kantan Games. I’m not the only one to enjoy talking to Serkan - he has been quoted everywhere from the New York Times to Techcrunch. In our conversation we talked about the future of mobile games, the curious persistence of flip phones in Japan, and why a Korean communications company decided to incubate the global messaging hit, LINE, in the country that asked the world to say Hello Kitty.

I met Sean when we both in Tokyo speaking at an intimate summit for banking executives. As an information junkie myself, I was fascinated by his company, Quid, which offered analysts and decision makers a visual platform for seeing patterns in complex data. Not surprisingly, Sean’s background is also a nexus of complexity. He is a physicist, decathlete, political advisor, and a TED fellow. Sean studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he received a PhD for his research on the mathematical patterns that underlie modern war. In this episode of Between Worlds we talked about the power laws behind violence and insurgency, what Kasparov learnt from his infamous chess defeat by Big Blue, the merits of creative exploration through visualization and the art of defining the 21st century concept of manliness.

Despite being the founder of Mubi, an arthouse movie streaming platform, Efe Cakarel is not what you might call a conventional cinephile. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, got an MBA at Stanford and then worked at Goldman Sachs - before throwing it all in to dedicate himself to the world of film. In his office, situated in the heart of London’s Soho, and surrounded by old film posters, vinyl records and computer equipment - we talked about the influential behaviours of Asian consumers, the dynamism of emerging markets, the economics of online streaming, the paradox of infinite choice, and why the Middle East is so in love with Turkish drama. 

I caught up with Aaron Dignan for breakfast at the Soho Grand Hotel in New York. Aaron is the CEO of the digital consulting firm, Undercurrent. Aaron is, however, no ordinary consultant. The first line of his bio explains that he “dressed up like a super hero for 180 straight days of the first grade, which marked the beginning of his life as an iconoclast, observer, theorist, and performer”.

Tariq Krim describes himself as a dreamer and a doer. He is also the founder and CEO of Jolicloud, a pioneer in personal cloud computing. Prior to Jolicloud, Tariq founded Netvibes, the personal startpage used by millions around the world. Tariq and I have been friends for many years, and I was happy to have him as the first guest on my new podcast series, Between Worlds. Sitting in a beautiful courtyard in Paris, enjoying the late afternoon sun - we had a far reaching conversation ranging from the rise and fall of French innovation, the slow-tech movement, culture, luxury, and the future of consumer product design.