Rama Allen is one of the handful of people on the planet who are not only thinking about virtual reality, but are actually creating and designing content for those platforms today. He is an executive creative director at The Mill, where he also leads the Mill LAB, an arm of the Mill focusing on the intersection of art and technology, prototyping the future of film through experimental projects and the invention of creative technologies. We hung out in New York, where we talked about the current state of the art in VR, the challenges of telling stories in multiple dimensions and what a truly cyberpunk, immersive Internet might look like.

Melanie Perkins is one of Australia’s most successful digital entrepreneurs. CEO and co-founder of Canva, an online platform which makes graphic design simple for anyone, Melanie and her team have grown the business to over 9 million users worldwide. I visited their offices in Surry Hills, Sydney where we talked about the power of authentic origin stories, disrupting the design industry, the challenges of building an agile culture, and the value of small teams.

Everyone is talking about the Internet of Things, but just what does it take to merge the physical and digital world? Brazilian entrepreneur Rodolfo Saccoman has been working on designing hardware and platforms for the coming explosion of connected devices. Put one of his AdBeacon units in a retail store or next to a billboard, and you can track people’s reactions, their emotions and demographics. His new product, the MATRIX, is like a Swiss Army knife of sensors and hopes to do for the IoT what the smartphone achieved for mobile. It just won an innovation award at CES 2016. Catching up in Miami at the offices of his company AdMobilize, we spoke about the future potential of a world in which every object is not only connected, but can see, comprehend and engage intelligently with our gestures and intentions.

Harper Reed is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on data and digital innovation. He served as the CTO of Obama’s re-election campaign and was also one of the founders of Threadless.com. His latest company, Modest, inc, was recently acquired by Paypal, where he is now working to figure out the future of commerce. Over dinner at Soho House in Chicago, we talked about digital bias and the stubborn persistence of paper, why technology is best used as a force multiplier of people power, the quantification of marketing and how smarter tools replace the need for experts, reactionary interfaces and why retailers are afraid of their customers, why iTunes credit is more meaningful to kids than cash, the power of ‘undo’ in e-commerce, and the link between local infrastructure and global innovation.

When I was growing up, my parents despaired about my refusal to open a book. They sought out doctors and teachers, convinced I had some kind of learning disability. Finally, someone worked out that the problem was not reading, but rather what they were giving me to read: I was bored with the picture books. Taking a personalized approach to teaching kids to read has long been a challenge for traditional educators, but is now within reach with new technologies like LightSail Education, an award winning literacy platform for K-12. I spoke with its founder and CEO, Gideon Stein, about how data and adaptive learning is changing the classroom, and why literacy, even in this digital age, remains a foundational skill.