Did you know that FOMO has been around since the 16th century?
Back in 1525, Erasmus, among many others, opined that due to the printing press, that there were just too many books to read — that one could never read all of the books out there in one’s lifetime.
One of the key things that I’ve seen is that is quite common among truly innovative new ideas is that they can sometimes make people feel uncomfortable. This discomfort ranges from a mild creepiness all the way to outrage and pure hatred, leading to protests and lobbying for you to be shut down (see Uber, almost anywhere there is a strong taxi union, colluding with the city government).
Ever wonder why when you have a spare moment, no matter where you are, whether it’s waiting in line, at a stoplight at an intersection, or at the coffee shop, you pull out your phone and check your feed. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Facebook feed, a Twitter feed, a Snapchat feed, or News feed that you are subscribed to.
I’ve read Wired magazine for over 20 years – I remember seeing my very first issue in a very eclectic bookstore in Toronto (now sadly gone) called “This Ain’t The Rosedale Library”. Like City Lights in San Francisco, it specialized in carrying both mainstream and subversive books, magazines, and zines. I used to go there during high school with my friend Matthew, patrolling the stacks of interesting stuff looking for the new and different.
I worked at Yahoo from 2004 through 2009. During my tenure, we ran three major programs, an enterprise-wide innovation program, which generated near-term products and services, a futurist program which crowdsourced both future strategy and future focused patentable ideas, and a targeted IP development program, which focused on developing targeted, potentially patentable ideas, with an eye to expanding the patent portfolio. We were so successful in these endeavors that those last two above led to substantial contributions to a patent portfolio which was recently valued at over $1B.
We’re going to talk a little bit about something that recently been covered in the news right around the time of the election and want to talk about it as it may be an interesting opportunity for those of you out there who are looking for some new type of startup opportunity to really dig into. I am not sure how much of a problem this is (IMHO, it seems to depend a lot on which side of the “aisle” you are on) but let’s talk about it anyway and see if we can deconstruct some opportunities in this space.
About an hour ago, I finished writing an article for thinkfuture pulse and pressed schedule to schedule it for tomorrow at 6 am my time, the normal time I publish. As I was writing the post, I thought to myself – is this my best work? I kept writing and writing and writing, reworking and reworking it, asking myself over and over again – is this my best work – does it bring my readers any value? Even as I was thinking that and writing that,
I’ve been through a lot of economic ups and downs in the Bay Area and it’s always been very interesting to me the way things work around here; it’s a very unique place. The weather is great, never too hot never too cold. The amount of people who are here who are just amazing blows my mind. There are a lot of places that aspire to be like it: Silicon Alley, Silicon Prairie or Silicon Beach or Startup Paradise (I think that’s the Hawaiian one – which is probably more accurate since very few of these startups have anything to do with Silicon)
If you have read any of my posts over time, you will have realized a number of things about me, here are three which are key for the understanding of this particular post. I am:
Lately, Facebook has been in the news for the supposed censoring (or let’s call it suppressing) of conservative speech during this election cycle. Does it happen? Of course, it does. Why does it happen? Well, simply put, the content filtering people at Facebook consider themselves “journalists” and not “reporters” Everyone is a journalist now. Plus, they use too many humans when they should be leaving it all to the algorithms, and they seem to forget the Prime Directive.
Viv, a new audio AI chat bot from the founders of Siri made its debut yesterday at Disrupt NY. While the audio recognition was interesting, it wasn’t the most interesting piece of it (Nuance provides the audio recognition) – Viv literally automatically generates code in order to provide the response that the user is looking for. The AI writes its own code. In the example they gave, Viv took about 10 milliseconds to write a 44 step program in order to respond to a query. Conceivably, the code itself, once written by Viv, is reusable, making the code development and execution even faster. If I ask Viv to book me a car to the airport, it can reach out and connect to any myriad of services in order to provide the best possible solution to my question.