“Agents represent workers who pick and choose projects that match them rather than signing on for indefinite amounts of time. The Harvard Business Review calls this supertemping. Business Week calls it going Hollywood.

But here’s the big takeaway. A fundamental shift is taking place, where the path to getting a job is massively circumventing college credentials. And, at the same time, the American public is fed up with the insane debt that college are expecting new grads to take on in order to graduate. (Good essay: How College Ruined My Life.)…
Loads of great stuff in this piece May 01, 2013 at 09:07PM

In US healthcare, which spends 17% of GDP on health and accounts for 47% of the world’s total healthcare spending) there is the urgent need to make healthcare more efficient before it literally bankrupts the economy;
In the automotive industry, car makers desperately need new sources of differentiation and revenues (from in-life servicing) to survive, and this is driving widespread innovation;
In heavy Industries, it is estimated that a 1% improvement in productivity equals a 20-30% improvement in profitability, so there are clear incentives in what GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt calls the “Industrial Internet” too. April 25, 2013 at 09:29AM

But last week, in the wake of the Boston bombings, some of those who previously viewed Twitter as an indispensable news source began turning against the service upon discovering that the wisdom of crowds is, in fact, an adage not often applicable on the Internet. Steve Brunetto, a senior executive at Edgewave, a network security company, said Tuesday’s hacking undermined Twitter at a sensitive time.

“On the heels of the Boston Marathon bombing, everyone’s trying to figure out, ‘Okay, where does Twitter fit into that news cycle? Where does Twitter fit into disseminating information?’” Brunetto said. “They’ve got an opportunity to legitimize themselves as a real player in that information life cycle but they get knocked down a peg every time somebody says, ‘Oh, you can’t believe what you read on Twitter.’” April 25, 2013 at 12:29PM

The fastest growth in internet use is in China’s poorer, more rural provinces, partly because of a surge in users connecting via mobile devices, which now outnumber those connecting from computers. The internet is no longer confined to an urban, educated and relatively well-off public. Most farmers are getting online to listen to music, play mobile games and check the weather, not blog dissent. But even casual users can be drawn into political debates online, and the internet is one place where people can speak their minds and criticise the government relatively freely. April 22, 2013 at 12:53PM

“There’s a lot of discussion in the world about the two billion that are connected,” he says. “We spend all day talking about the issues of e-commerce and start-ups and globalisation and so forth, and we forget that the majority of people are not online and that they will come online, the majority of them in the next five years. “It’s going to happen very fast. It’s going to happen in countries which don’t have the same principles that we in America have from the British legal system – around law and privacy and those sorts of things. All sorts of crazy stuff is going to happen. Human societies can’t change that fast without both good and negative implications.” April 22, 2013 at 12:53PM

“A problem well defined is a problem well solved,” Berlow said. He was referring to the idea that computers can calculate equations with a huge number of variables, but without humans to define the parameters, there’s no way for a computer to distinguish what is signal and what is noise….”

Gerd adds: this is a huge topic for the next decade April 17, 2013 at 12:26AM

There’s just one thing about Santiago Swallow that you won’t easily find online: I made him up. Everything above is true. He really does have a Twitter feed with tens of thousands of followers, he really does have a Wikipedia biography, and he really does have an official web site. But he has never been to TED or South By South West and is not writing a book. I—or rather he—flat out lied about that…”

Gerd adds: great story indeed. April 18, 2013 at 07:14AM

Spotify is now nearing a new deal with the labels to let it offer more free music on its mobile app. Why? Its data shows that many people are discovering Spotify on their phones, ignoring the desktop client entirely…”

Gerd adds: hear hear ;)
IMHO despite the fact that I love Spotify I think the record labels’ approach of having your cake and eating it will ultimately stop them from getting anywhere close to enough paying users to sustain them beyond VC money. Ek rocks, though ! April 12, 2013 at 09:24AM

I tasted Beyond Meat’s chicken alternative, for example, and honestly couldn’t tell it from real chicken. Beyond Eggs, an egg alternative from Hampton Creek Foods, does away with the high cholesterol content of real eggs. Lyrical has drastically reduced fat in its non-dairy cheeses. Even things like salt are getting a makeover: Nu-Tek has found a way to make potassium chloride taste like salt (and nothing but salt) with only a fraction of the sodium.

All this innovation could be great news for people concerned about health problems related to overconsumption of fat, salt and cholesterol. It’s important too in light of the environmental impacts of large-scale meat and dairy production, with livestock estimated to produce nearly 51% of the world’s greenhouse gases. April 04, 2013 at 09:00PM

Of course, there’s a danger to becoming part of the narrative. Humans, he explains, live in linear time, while the internet and our computers can do everything at once, and so in the digital, everything happens at once (many of Rushkoff’s thoughts on time vs. humans parallel Nicholas Carr’s writings in The Shallows). He calls this sensation “Digiphrenia.” It’s like “a dance partner who doesn’t see or feel us,” he says, and we’re frustrated as we try to sync up. March 22, 2013 at 04:12PM