From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Our apps and platforms are addictive by design. We know this both because the tech titans behind them have admitted it publicly, and because the dominant apps and social media platforms use the same suite of techniques that are well-proven to ensnare us.
I just hope that those who become influencers make smart choices; it's the kind of attention that comes quickly and is very hard to maintain. The top 10 YouTubers 10 years ago are not the top 10 YouTubers now. There are a few people that remain, and who have maintained longevity, but for the most part, influencer culture is extremely short lived.
Suddenly, your intuition about what to build is much more likely to be right because you're building what's missing in the future. You're tinkering with technologies first hand, understanding what's new about them firsthand, and understanding what's missing to fulfill and actualize their full potential firsthand.
Our minds are not structured for the pace of rapid change that we're seeing and, increasingly, will experience. It's therefore natural that our reaction is fear and a foot on the brake, but the reality is that exponential change doesn't have a dial that you can slow down.
Technology isn't a 'thing,' it's a social structure that people act upon the universe through. The social structure has incentives, roles and governance which determine the meaning and effect of the technology, not the engineering itself.
It may be an overused phrase, but the only way social media can work is if you are incredibly authentic. If you try and cultivate and curate too much it can be very obvious and transparent.
I think the biggest technological innovation that will impact Wikia – and the Internet more broadly – is the continuing progress we are seeing in reducing the costs of communication technology, such that it will reach the entire planet in relatively short order. Just think about what happens when the next billion people come online, and the next two billion after that.
In the last 20 years I believe I have become a hybrid entrepreneur – believing in the power of technology and process, but also in the very deep humanistic point of view. I guess it's a weird mix of Italian with Silicon Valley.
From around 2007 onwards, a new era dawned, marked by the widespread adoption of smartphones, essentially equipping every person with a sensor device. In tandem, social media platforms proliferated, facilitating incessant information sharing. Concurrently, Google services like Earth and Street View began to provide unprecedented access to geospatial data, granting us both the means and the method to verify a plethora of information.
Search started as a free product meaning it cannot get any less expensive for the user. You pay nothing, but the benefits of reaching larger and larger portions of humanity accrue to the provider, not to you.
For the iPad it's game over in terms of market-share… Apple has won! It's a preposterously cheap stock…
You are only ever one click away from looking at another alternative… The ability for the consumer to shop-around has made it difficult for some operators to realise the need for transparency in pricing… particularly when your product is built around opacity.