Andrew Keen

There are few more optimistic thinkers than Gary Shapiro, the CEO and president of the Consumer Electronics Association and the author of "Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Companies." Shapiro–who is also the guy behind the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas–believes 2015 might be the year the digital revolution reaches its tipping point and truly starts to change the world. New technologies as varied as 3D printing, drones, self-driving cars, and networked clothing, Shapiro thinks, are going to solve many of our most entrenched problems.

As the CEO of the business software giant SAP, Bill McDermott is self-evidently a winner. But it wasn’t also that way. Born into a humble Long Island family, McDermott is a self-made man whose journey from corner store to corner office is chronicled in his new book "Winners Dream." So is that journey from underdog to top dog still possible in today’s world? Yes, McDermott says.

So is Coca-Cola a tech company? Of course not, most people would say. But as the company’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer Guy Wollaert confessed, the future will be shaped by today’s new technologies, especially digital technology. That’s why Wollaert both attended and spoke at the Techonomy 2014 conference in Half Moon Bay. And that’s why Coca-Cola has invested in a series of innovation initatives called the Co-Founder Network, in which the company makes investments in promising start-ups.

With his trademark aplomb, the storied venture capitalist Tim Draper is revolutionizing higher education. His new Draper University of Heroes, a Silicon Valley-based startup college, is turning traditional education on its head. Instead of history, students learn the future. Instead of conventional economics, they learn about Bitcoin. And instead of success, they are taught how to fail.

It isn’t surprising that Edward Snowden chose then Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman as one of the earliest recipients of his leaked NSA documents. Gellman is the author of a best-selling book about Dick Cheney as well as many influential articles about the war on terror, and thus was a natural choice for Snowden when he sought a trustworthy journalist to publicize the PRISM materials. So was Snowden a hero? Not surprisingly, Gellman won’t be drawn into such a clichéd analysis.

There are few journalists both more reasonable and more insightful than The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki. At Techonomy 2014 in Half Moon Bay last month, Surowiecki moderated the fascinating “Can Tech Bring Equality and Peace?” panel, which included Jack Dorsey and Intel’s Genevieve Bell. So it was a real honor to have the opportunity to sit down with Surowiecki and pick his brain about the future of innovation, the Internet, and even death itself.

David Miliband, best known as the Miliband sibling who lost the British Labour party to his brother Ed, has a new job. Miliband is now the CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the New York City based organization dedicated to helping victims of war, disease, and natural disasters. Unfortunately, the IRC is in much demand. “We serve 15 million people each year,” Miliband dryly told me when we caught up at Techonomy 2014 in Half Moon Bay, Calif., where he also spoke on a panel with Jack Dorsey about the impact of technology on morality.

The central message of "The Innovators" is that collaboration is king. Partnerships, Walter Isaacson explains, are the at the core of every great enterprise—from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage’s invention of the computer to Larry and Sergei’s invention of Google. But what are the keys to being a good innovator? Are twosomes better than threesomes? Can companies—Facebook, for example, be founded by a single individual? And what, according to Isaacson, did Steve Jobs consider his great innovation?

Walter Isaacson, the biographer of great men like Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs, has now turned to the history of the digital revolution. But rather than the story of genius, Isaacson’s "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution," is actually a narrative of collaboration between talented people. Beginning with the remarkable relationship between Charles Babbage and Ida Lovelace in the middle of the 19th century, Isaacson sees the story of the digital revolution in terms of collaboration.

If it happened on YouTube, then must it be true? That was the intriguing observation of one attendee, the writer on digital life Sarah Granger, at a recent FutureCast event dedicated to online filmmaking. Granger believes that YouTube has replaced Google as the “gold standard” of truth—especially for digital natives who’ve never known any other media except the Internet. For some, the idea of YouTube representing the gold standard for truth is more than a bit worrying.

Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world. But the real online glutton may be video. Mark Nagel, the executive director of marketing for AT&T’s Foundry innovation centers, told the crowd at a recent FutureCast event about online filmmaking that video content is expected to grow 60% annually over the next few years. AT&T expects video to be 75% of its total network traffic by 2017. So does this eruption of online video represent an economic bonanza for filmmakers?

The idea that the Internet has democratized moviemaking has become one of the most repeated truisms of the digital age. But what, exactly, does the ability of everyone to post video on popular networks like YouTube, Daily Motion, and Vimeo mean to the filmmaker herself? According to the noted filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, it means that the art of intimacy and authenticity become central to the creative product. "I think there is an intimacy with the way people are experiencing it," Shlain said about online filmmaking at a recent Ericsson and AT&T hosted FutureCast. The event helped launch her latest short movie, "The Science of Character."

The idea of cloud computing these days is, of course, hardly radical. But noted film maker Tiffany Shlain has a notion of what she calls "cloud filmmaking" that is considerably different than what people typically mean when they say "cloud." For her, making movies in the cloud means curating the self-made content (usually selfies) of others to produce her own work. But isn't that crowd-sourced movie making? Not according to Shlain. "I don't like the idea of crowd sourcing.... I get nervous in crowds." Shlain told "Digital Vertigo" author Andrew Keen at a recent Ericsson and AT&T hosted FutureCast event to launch her latest short movie, "The Science of Character."

At CES this year, all the talk was about smart machines: smart cars, smart glasses, and, of course, smartphones. But should we be scared of these smart machines? Are they about to become too smart—so smart, indeed, that they are calling the shots? This was one of the most interesting audience questions at a keynote panel I moderated featuring Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg, Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs and AT&T’s SVP of Network Operations John Donovan. Interestingly enough, the panelists seemed less afraid of our networked future than the audience.

At CES this year, I moderated a keynote panel featuring Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg, Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs, and AT&T’s SVP of Network Operations John Donovan. And the CES audience was pretty impressive too—including such luminaries as FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. After the formal discussion, Rosenworcel was the first to ask the panelists a question. “Do we have enough spectrum for mobile commercial use?” she asked. “And if we don’t, how can technologies like small cells help us use it more efficiently?” “Spectrum is the life blood of the industry” Donovan said, and “the oxygen for commerce.”

Today, the smartphone is ubiquitous. But as the Internet of Things becomes more and more of a reality, what is the future of the phone? And, in the not too distant future, will it be replaced as our central operating device by such intelligent networked objects as smart clothing, smart glasses, and smart cars? At CES this year, I moderated a keynote panel featuring Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg, Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs and AT&T’s SVP of Network Operations John Donovan. And each of them spoke about their vision of a networked world in ten years time.

Is mobile redundant? No, not the technology. But has word “mobile” become redundant? After all, mobile is so ubiquitous these days that it seems as if everything we talk about in tech—from apps to devices to the networks themselves—is inevitably “mobile.” And who better to ask about the ubiquity of mobile technology than the CEOs of Ericsson and Qualcomm and the SVP of Network Operations at AT&T. I had the great fortune at CES this year to moderate a keynote panel featuring Hans Vestberg of Ericsson, Dr. Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm and John Donovan of AT&T. And this was the first question that I asked this all-star panel.

Like so many of us, California's Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom was inspired by Barack Obama's Internet-driven 2008 Presidential campaign. Indeed, Newsom was so inspired by a campaign run by "35,000 self-organizing communities" that he wrote a book called "Citizenville," which sees all change as beginning from the bottom up. But Newsom has fallen out of love with Barack Obama. As he told me at our latest Ericsson and AT&T hosted FutureCast event at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, the "bottom-up candidate" has turned into the "top-down President." Obama isn't the Internet President, Newsom insists. By transitioning from change.gov to whitehouse.gov, he's let his Internet base down.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the latest digital technology is killing privacy. As Robert Scoble said at our latest Ericsson and AT&T hosted FutureCast event at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, the future will be dominated by surveillance technologies like sensors, wearable computing, and location data. So, I asked California's Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom what, exactly, does the end of privacy mean from the perspective of a politician? Newsom was refreshingly blunt. "We never had it," he replied. "So it's like welcome to my world."

So what is politics? Is it something we do once every couple of years—electing politicians who then are supposed to do stuff for us? Or is it a collaborative space, what the ancient Greeks called a "polis," where citizens go to improve their community? According to California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, we need to change our politics from what he calls a "referendum process" to something more collaborative. More polis, less petition, Newsom says. And that's where the Internet comes in.

Should all politicians have to launch a startup before entering politics? That’s the question I asked California’s Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom, at the latest Ericsson and AT&T hosted FutureCast event held at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto. Newsom, the author of "Citizenville," a kind of digital manifesto for 21st century networked politics, didn’t beat around the bush. “Yes," Newsom replied, sounding more like a startup guy than a career politician.

The traffic is terrible, the real-estate ridiculously expensive, the public schools aren’t that great and the gulf between rich and poor is increasingly pronounced. So why do people still come to Silicon Valley? That’s the question we asked participants at a recent Ericsson and AT&T Foundry hosted FutureCast event that focused on innovation in Silicon Valley. The answers from our international audience were varied, instructive and entertaining.

Silicon Valley hasn’t had one of its best years. There are more and more complaints about inequality, discrimination against women and minorities, lack of innovation and a focus on short-term economic gain. The Valley, veterans say, isn’t what it used to be. And, they go on, if Silicon Valley is to survive, it has to reinvent itself in an increasingly competitive global economy where most of the rest of the world is trying to emulate the Valley. So, I asked David Kirkpatrick, when I interviewed him at an Ericsson and AT&T Foundry hosted FutureCast event that focused on the future of innovation, how exactly can Silicon Valley reinvent itself?

Are the smartest entrepreneurs and technologists still attracted to Silicon Valley? Does the Valley still pull in the best and brightest from around the world? According to David Kirkpatrick, who I interviewed at an Ericsson and AT&T Foundry hosted FutureCast event, the answer may well be no. Kirkpatrick tells the story of a remarkably talented Chinese guy he met in Beijing recently who had read his book, “The Facebook Effect,” five times. “I was just amazed I stumbled across that in Beijing,” he told me. This guy, Kirkpatrick explained, was running a 20-person Beijing startup just focused on making Facebook games.

Silicon Valley takes it for granted that it’s the center of the innovation universe. But that, of course, is a weakness—which points to the often parochial and inward looking nature of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors. So is Silicon Valley really the center of the innovation universe? That’s the question we asked an invitation-only crowd who came to the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto to hear me interview David Kirkpatrick at the Ericsson and AT&T hosted FutureCast event.