“I’m an inventor.
I became interested in long term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not in the world in which it is started.”
- Ray kurzweil
[O'Reilly Publishing]… we change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators
O’Reilly Methodology

“The future is here. It’s jusrt not evently distributed yet” – William Gibson
We “watch the alpha geeks” and think about the futures they are living in
We then look for trend data that tells us that a particular future if …

It’s official, the Linchpin Day Boston Group has found a venue. And what a great venue!
Thanks to Abby and Leah, and to the generosity of Microsoft, Linchpins from the Greater Boston area will congregate on Monday, June 10, 2010 (6:00 PM to 9:00PM) at the New England R&D Center at One Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02142 .
If one or more of these words describe you:

creative soul
linchpin
purple cow
enlightened business person
entrepreneur
entrepreneur-in-the-making
marketer
innovator
renaissance woman or man
educator at large
frustrated with the status quo
social.everything

Then, this is an event where you can meet vis-à–vis like-minded individuals. …

THE Greek government has been advised by British economists to leave the euro and default on its €300 billion (£255 billion) debt to save its economy.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), a London-based consultancy, has warned Greek ministers they will be unable to escape their debt trap without devaluing their own currency to boost exports. The only way this can happen is if Greece returns to its own currency.
Greek politicians have played down the prospect of abandoning the euro, which could lead to the break-up of the …

NAIROBI, Kenya, April 29 (UPI) — Rich Arab states such as Saudi Arabia have bought huge tracts of land across Africa in recent years in a bid to combat global food shortages, water scarcity and desertification and feed their burgeoning populations.
But now the scramble for Africa is intensifying, with investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds, corporations and business tycoons out to grab some of the world’s cheapest land — for profit.
China has leased 6.91 million acres in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the world’s largest …

For CEOs, creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking, according to a new study by IBM. The study is the largest known sample of one-on-one CEO interviews, with over 1,500 corporate heads and public sector leaders across 60 nations and 33 industries polled on what drives them in managing their companies in today’s world.
Fast Company‘s annual list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business just took on a whole new depth. And this year’s list will be …

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

From July 1st 2010 Australia will be the first country to ban logos, trademarked images and colours on cigarette packaging as part of a new anti-smoking initiative. The move comes after the Australian government raised the tax on cigarettes up by twenty-five percent on Thursday last week.
The new packet designs will feature large graphic images warning users against the negative health effects of tobacco use. Under the laws cigarette companies can only display their brand name using small, inconspicuous regulated fonts featured on the bottom of the packet.
Read more …

For the first time since Bloomberg BusinessWeek began its annual Most Innovative Companies ranking in 2005, the majority of corporations in the Top 25 are based outside the U.S. The reason: the new global leaders coming out of Asia

If Asia ever did figure out how to design cutting-edge products comparable to those dreamed up in the West, however, the one-two punch of high-value research and development and low-cost manufacturing would make it almost unbeatable in the battle for global economic supremacy.

Read more at: BusinessWeek (the list)
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{Photography by Dominic}

How generous of the nice people of 37Signal to share with the world the amazing artwork from their most recent REWORK book. The book is a MUST read for everyone with a pulse, the artwork is eye candy for who believes that :
business–>art–life–>business (again)
Links:

REWORK Illustration flickr stream
Slideshow
Buy REWORK (the book) at Amazon.com
37signal

The new book Rework tells you how.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are two of my favorite guys in the tech industry. That’s mainly because they have little in common with everyone else in the tech industry. Their 10-year-old company, 37signals, makes Web software for businesses. These products are universally hailed as simple, elegant, and useful—not to mention extremely popular and profitable. Yet 37signals’ software often seems like a byproduct of a larger mission. On Signal vs. Noise, their entertaining company blog, and in lectures and classes all over …

There’s been a lot of coverage lately about the location “war” between Gowalla and Foursquare. Nobody is arguing that Gowalla and Foursquare aren’t, on some levels, competing, but I do think a lot of people are missing the big picture here. Which is the impending location gold rush.
My cofounder, Matt Galligan, and I firmly believe that location is in a similar position as social was in 2001 or so. By that I mean that, at the time, social was very nascent, but exciting as it gave us a whole …

On the campus of Penn State University, a rivalry between a rogue campus blog and the official newspaper has become a fascinating mirror of the strife between old and new media. In only a matter of months, the unofficial campus blog Onward State, has marshaled the power of social media to compete with the award winning 112-year-old campus paper The Daily Collegian. With one-tenth of the Collegian’s staff size, Onward State has constructed a virtual newsroom that collaborates in real-time with Google Wave, outsourced its tip-line to Twitter, and …

Somalian pirate operations are becoming increasingly sophisticated, according to a March 10 UN Security Council report (.pdf), with a funding and incentive model that could double as a business school curriculum.
Here is a handy guide to the piracy business plan, based on some of their findings.
Step 1: Round up investors to provide start-up capital.
Step 2: Gather between eight and twelve pirates to form the at-sea team. They will need “a minimum of two attack skiffs, weapons, equipment, provisions, fuel and preferably a supply boat.” Each pirate should bring his …

I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.
During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.

Call it relationship inflation. Nominally, you have a lot more relationships — but in reality, few, …

I’m hardly qualified to dash off authoritative articles on the theological bona fides of African critters. But one recent evening, I made $15 for writing tips on hard-disc data recovery, another $15 for telling people how to repair burnt carpet and $7.50 for teasing out the answer to that most pressing of questions: Is a giraffe sacred?
The reason for my nighttime writing adventure was to see what life is like on a massive content farm. I was working for Demand Media, the content-provider start-up that has quickly become the …

WordPress.com‘ 10.5 million blogs are about to get a whole lot more real-time, thanks to a new behind-the-scenes development.
The WordPress team has announced in a blog post that the company has turned on support for PubSubHubbub (try saying that fast five times), a move that will get blog content to RSS services (such as Google Reader and Bloglines) much more quickly.
Read more at: Mashable

What was once just a Seattle event — first started by Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Media and Bre Pettis formerly of Etsy.com in 2006 — Ignite has grown to become an ongoing series of International geek gatherings where the brightest minds get five minutes of stage time to make their point.
Today marks the start of Ignite’s most ambitious endeavor to date: Global Ignite Week. This week-long Ignite extravaganza has been eight months in the making and is a first of its kind.
You can find an Ignite event to attend …

It might make you angry.
It might make you cry.
You might find yourself nodding in disbelief, this short ebook is chuck full of the most uncommon commodity around today: “Common Sense”.
Leave your preconceptions at the door before reading this book, when you read something that you find weird, try to forget everything you know, all the BS you, yourself, have chosen to believe, and ask yourself “does it make sense?” And just like a new car, take a few of those concepts for a test drive, try it for yourself …

Chrysler was in dire straits earlier this year, and while bankruptcy is now behind the Pentastar, the battle that looms ahead will prove if Chrysler can truly remain a viable company. Chrysler’s hope rests with Fiat, the Italian car comglomerate who took a 30% stake in Chrysler as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. While we’ve heard much and seen little thus far in regards to the future Chrysler lineup, the Detroit International Auto Show should give some hint as to the direction of Chrysler/Fiat.
One such car sure to make …