David Kirkpatrick

The news about fusion nuclear power is even better than many of the reports this week suggested. Yes a government lab made a major and historic breakthrough. But the best is yet to come–from startups.

Few tech developments ever have had the sudden impact of the ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence chat software, released last week. For many, using it had the quality of experiencing a transition into a new era of tech. That’s because this evolution of software developed in recent years by OpenAI, a company formed by Elon Musk […]

As the internet industry implodes, a session helped me realize that a newly-forming climate industry will replace it. Climate tech and climate-conscious companies will become the leading force in business and markets, a new force for wealth-creation.

Biden has signed some groundbreaking legislation lately, but mostly our leaders are failing us. Too many are taking actions that harm us and even them. What’s wrong with working for collective betterment?

It’s a challenging time to be an optimist. There are blights on our time. If we cannot turn ostensible optimism into action to address the world’s wrongs, we are failing our fellow humans, and ourselves.

Innovation Must Save the World. That is a key theme we think about constantly as we cap off Techonomy’s year of semi-post-pandemic re-immersion. Climate, innovation, development and equality all must be thought of in parallel.

The climate is telling us something’s wrong. Business is starting to hear the message. U.S. Steel, Ericsson, and other companies are changing, and finding new ways to work with environmentalists.

Our crises grow. Governments are slow to act. Business has an opportunity and a responsibility to take the reins, and even to save the world.

We don't take the U. N. Sustainable Development Goals seriously enough. Tech is indispensable for achieving them. Economist Jeffrey Sachs is unimpressed with business' commitment so far, especially the tech giants, he told Techonomy in this exclusive interview.

SAP has a corporate goal to drive toward Zero Emissions, Zero Waste, and Zero Inequality. It's nurturing 75 sustainability-oriented startups through its SAP.iO Foundries accelerator, focusing on everything from food to fashion.

Things are grim. And one of the grimmest parts of this moment is how uncertain everyone seems to be about what comes next.

More than one-third of the world’s population is still not connected to the internet. It’s a global scandal and a growing crisis. The International Telecommunication Union convened governments, NGOs, and businesses in Kigali, Rwanda for an effort to expand access.

The new Action Plan from the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability aims to “embed sustainability in all aspects of digitalization." Those of us who believe in the power of digital transformation need to get involved.

The climate crisis and climate action were, finally, prominent themes at this week’s World Economic Forum. We hosted two Techonomy Climate sessions with leaders from Microsoft, Salesforce, Wipro, Carbon Capture, Heliogen, and Normative. Here’s what we learned.

It’s no longer enough to just say people “need to be connected to the internet.” We require clear targets, especially since 2.9 billion people remain offline. So now the ITU and the UN Sec-General’s office have put on paper what connection really means. It is a set of guideposts and a mandate for action.

Today’s plagues are more than 10, but as I head to a Passover Seder, I cannot help thinking of the parallels. Maintaining optimism is getting harder, but being in tech helps.

Yes we’ll definitely do more climate conferences. The substance Tuesday was phenomenal. Attendees said they were enthralled and bolstered in their convictions. This is THE crisis. And Bill Gross has a lot to teach us.

By collecting the world’s carbon data and putting it in one place so companies can accurately reduce their footprint, the startup aims to reduce or remove 500 million tons of CO2 every year – 1% of the world’s emissions.

A new kind of cloud-computing video-editing software called LucidLink has exploded during the pandemic, because it enables production teams to work from anywhere. WebMD says this is the future of their business.

My interaction with Putin up close didn’t help me foresee today’s ugly war. But it did show him to be manipulative, deceptive, and cold-blooded. Machismo is not a healthy starting point.

Putin’s evil invasion of Ukraine is a pivot point, around which much is shifting. The world is spinning differently on its axis, and we don’t know what comes next.

Russia's Ukraine invasion is the first major physical war between developed countries in the connected age. As the tragedy continues to unfold, we're likely to see it manifest in the digital systems that surround us. 

We must take action on the climate emergency in many ways. But huge tech innovation is emerging from both large and small companies. We’ve got to apply it right away. It’s become a top priority for Techonomy.

Facebook was designed to make real connections, under your real name, with other people. Now it invites us to leave the real world and escape into a construct of its own invention.

Tech is now at the heart of everything, perhaps too much in many cases. This is why Techonomy exists, and this new website aims to help highlight what matters even more.

A new software for the cloud-centric, remote-work era lets collaborators easily edit a video at the same time, wherever they are. A partnership between LucidLink, IBM, and Adobe made it possible.

Will American democracy survive? It’s a sad question many of us are asking these days. It’s also the title of the opening session at our Health+Wealth of America conference on Thursday Dec. 16 in midtown Manhattan.

Techonomy’s Kirkpatrick continues to be appalled by developments at the company he wrote a book about back when. New name? Lipstick on a pig. This is a renegade media company, period, with horrific impact on the world.

Facebook is reported to be considering a name change. But its image will not be remedied by anything other than fundamental reforms.

Facebook executives and its all-powerful CEO feel so self-righteous that they dismiss all criticism outright, including this week. It’s tragic, but it’s possible to explain.

Every year, Cognizant Softvision hosts a global Programmers’ Week (on the 256th day of the year). A discussion among leaders there predicted tremendous changes for software.

How can one company make so many mistakes? An astonishing reportorial coup by the Wall Street Journal is rattling Zuckerberg's empire.

This week’s UN climate report was grim. Can business, individuals, and the world take the radical steps needed to avert a catastrophic planetary future?

3.6 billion people still remain offline. A young entrepreneur describes her Ugandan innovation journey. We also hear about Mandela, new ministries, and virtues of 5G.

We're creeping back, but are things getting better or worse? From climate emergencies to simple everyday tasks, confusion and overwhelm abound.

A book and numerous other recent accounts point to a new chink in Facebook’s armor: overwhelming evidence it can’t be trusted. Could that help force reform?

Here’s why the CEO and Facebook should not be a model for leaders determined to do right by all stakeholders. At Techonomy we’ve been thinking about that as we work to compile a list of “Worthy” tech companies.

Determination to face genuine crises may be rising as the pandemic slowly wanes. At DLD I found a new spirit of both concern and tech-centric optimism.

Cardiologist, genomics expert, and digital healthcare advocate Dr. Eric Topol is obsessed with Covid and a major force in the U.S. response. He explains his optimism at next week’s conference.

The geopolitics of technology continues to get more and more fraught. Could the world's top tech powers ever reverse course and begin to cooperate?

How can we come together? That is the question of our era. It applies across domains, across cultures, across the world. Our planet and our society have proven themselves more fragile than we believed, and the past year has proven that things can get very very bad, very quickly. Meanwhile, 2020 also proved, decisively, that […]

Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, discussed why we need a Marshall Plan for Moms.

Kinsa Health makes a connected thermometer, now used in 2.5 million American homes. That innovation is more profoundly important than it initially appears, because the insights the network leads to offer a deep predictive view into public health.

The country is split. Many don't even believe Biden was elected. But business can't function properly without truth. Why are so many business leaders speaking out about the election and the events of the week?

Zooming from home, tech stock insanity, ceaseless digital transformation and even a new cyberwar–in 2020 tech finally landed decisively at the center of modern life. The world is forever altered.

Despite many questions about the huge U.S. antitrust assault on Facebook, it will at least accomplish one thing: make the company less likely to continue heedlessly doing so many irresponsible things.

A doctor working fulltime at a national level on the pandemic. An architect aiming to decarbonize the atmosphere. A young woman who shook up Israeli politics. They all have something in common.

Digital transformation accelerated this year in a way nobody could have predicted. What does it mean to be a “tech-driven” company in this era, and why should becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise be the goal?

Spearheaded by UNICEF and the ITU, the Giga initiative aims to connect every school worldwide to the internet by 2030, and extend connectivity to far more young people everywhere. Ericsson's Heather Johnson explains.

The world is shifting on its axis and we're trying to figure out what comes next. While we may be a divided country in many ways, dialogue can still help us come together.

Three-quarters of Americans are just afraid to do things like go to the movies or ride the subway. But alongside the fear have arisen some surprising new attitudes, many of them setting in globally, during this uniquely-stressful and uncertain year.

Americans don’t recycle because too often they can’t. And even communities where recycling is a deep commitment are paying a premium to do it, rather than dump it as garbage. The whole ecosystem needs to be revamped.

AeroFarms operates the world’s largest vertical farming company. Founder David Rosenberg talks about the “circular economy” and how re-use and efficiency should drive the way we think about just about everything we do.

What’s the role of business in addressing the degrading environment and pushing towards more sustainability in society? In the opinion of Jenny Ahlen of the Environmental Defense Fund, plenty. “We need proactive business leadership."

Day one of the Health+Wealth of America conference opened with Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a medical ethicist and longtime advocate for reform of American healthcare. He got right down to talking about the things that would really make a difference in America.

Zainab Salbi, an Iraqi immigrant who has spent many years working both on issues of immigration and gender equality, will appear at the session whose name I’ve quoted in my headline. She’s writing a book about how to overcome America’s divides—not only of right and left, Republican and Democrat, but men and women, rich and poor, privileged and disenfranchised.

Now is the time to take an urgent and holistic look at where the country is headed. We think of both “health” and “wealth” in a broad sense­–what will make the nation and its people healthier, and: what should we mean by “wealth” in an age cursed by deep inequality?

Companies that can harness data best for insights will be the ones that win. But doing that is hardly simple. So Techonomy recently brought together a group of senior corporate leaders to discuss managing and finding insights from data.

Schools across the country are opening for the Fall, but COVID is transforming everything. Techonomy gathers three educators and childhood experts to help parents and all of us make sense of the moment.

The value of one bitcoin has more than doubled to $11,200 since its low in mid-March. That is just one of many signs the blockchain economy (aka “crypto”) continues to evolve and roil finance and tech.

The American and Chinese tech and internet industries have long been intertwined, but recent moves by the Trump administration aggressively seek to sully those ties. So what comes next?

The government has awakened. No matter which mega-wealthy tech power broker you think did best at yesterday’s U.S. House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing, the central message to take away is that the era of disregard is over.

Facebook says it's not a media company. But advertisers are saying it is, and it must take action. Will the company finally take the responsible steps its true customers now demand?

Our climate crisis is real and urgent. But many people who care deeply about it don't understand what's happened with economic growth. Economist Andrew McAfee's analysis will likely surprise you.

Facebook has frightening power to determine what can and cannot be said in society and in politics. Yet its all-powerful unchallengeable leader is getting frustrated with his critics, and retreating further into self-righteous isolation.

Many experts believe that digital healthcare systems and tools can provide an alternative to traditional care, as well as help people stay healthier and get treatment when necessary. But global health systems aren’t moving fast enough to take advantage of the technology.

Multidisciplinary dialog is why Techonomy exists, so no wonder we find Davos so stimulating and valuable. This year economic concerns were muted while climate ones were paramount. We curated four major sessions, working with Wipro. Watch them here. 

Microsoft's top lawyer recently co-authored a book, and shared insights with Techonomy on tech, how Cambridge Analytica changed Washington, and other topics.

This decade we'll have to take stock of how far tech got off track in the last decade. Will we undermine all the good things tech can do in our efforts to stop its evils? Only a new partnership across society is likely to avoid that.

Online gaming is not only a much bigger and more important industry than most people recognize. It's also, say some experts, a pathway that will enable society to evolve and transform.

Here are some of the key takeaways and things we learned from our recent treat in Half Moon Bay, Calif.

Techonomy's founder and editor-in-chief outlines what to expect in the days ahead as diverse leaders from business, tech, government, politics and philanthropy discuss some of the biggest issues of our time.

Reducing emissions of global warming gasses is critical. We also need to build a world economy that’s carbon negative. And there are many ways to suck up CO2. An article produced in tandem with Techonomy 2019.

To get the world off an increasingly worrisome and self-reinforcing cycle of tech dysfunction, political paralysis, and failed action on climate, we all must get involved. Techonomy is committed, and we tackle all these issues at our conference next week.

Techonomy 2019 conference is next week. We'll range from how to remedy tech's harms to new architectures to computing to startups finding new ways to create food. Today's tech landscape is so intertwined that we believe it helps to think about all those things together.

Joaquin Duato, vice chairman of the world's largest healthcare company, talks about tech, and global progress.

These aren't times for ordinary conversation. We don't believe you can separate out moral, ethical, and global thinking when you discuss business strategy and the role of tech. Our conference Nov. 17-19 in California is where we live out our convictions and act on our concerns.

Here is exactly who is speaking about what, and when, at our upcoming Nov. 17-19 Techonomy 2019 conference. We take our theme of "Reset and Restore" very seriously, even gravely, given the state of the world right now. It's not too late to join us.

Including Sir Martin Sorrell, Marissa Mayer, Wikimedia's Katherine Maher, Tim O'Reilly, Jeff Weiner, John Chambers, Tristan Harris, Craig Newmark, Denmark's Casper Klynge, Chip Conley, social entrepreneurs Jasmine Crowe & Esther Dyson, journalists Casey Newton & Andrew Keen, GE's Linda Boff, Andy Kessler, Marta Tellado, Nishith Desai & Renee James. And plenty more who won't fit here.

Techonomy's editor-in-chief outlines three transformations morphing in real-time: President Trump's standing, global attitudes towards climate change, and investor and public attitudes towards money-losing “tech” companies.

Do the travails of WeWork, Uber, and Lyft foretell a fundamental shift in what investors are willing to finance? If so, the consumer app economy may be remade.

John Chambers, an industry great, has joined us two years running, and returns to Techonomy this fall. He's an insect meat investor, a proponent of tech in France and India, and he worries about long term U.S. tech competitiveness.

Facing regulatory heat, Facebook may need a hedge in case targeted ads become less profitable. Libra could plant the seeds for a whole new approach.

The escalating tech war between the U.S. and China will hurt more than Huawei. It could do major economic damage to the world.

The big takeaway from this year's New York conference: Our approach to creating technology must change. It has to become more intentional, human-centered, and explicitly responsible.

Technology -- and collaboration -- can help us achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

When we prepped for our NY conference May 14-15, almost every speaker brought up something about being worried about tech. Nobody knows if we're headed towards enlightenment or dystopia. But it's become a main conference theme.

At Techonomy we have a point of view. At our New York conference, we plan to suffuse you in it. Tech has gone off the rails, and every company and leader has to be thoughtful about why, and what can be done.

Mark Zuckerberg took a major new step over the weekend, issuing a blunt call for government intervention to set rules for the internet – and Facebook. This is a sea change, and historic, even if far too late. Yet, Facebook’s CEO deserves credit for finally and clearly acknowledging that the respective roles of government and net platforms has to change.

At a Techonomy panel discussion about AI in Davos, Nielsen CEO David Kenny, Salesforce Chief Scientist Richard Socher, and Genpact CEO Tiger Tyagarajan all said AI would dramatically transform business, and were cautiously optimistic about what it means for people.

“You have zero privacy,” Scott McNealy, CEO of then-mighty Sun Microsystems famously said back in 1999, “Get over it.” His words have echoed through the subsequent two decades, too often seeming prescient. Now a fatalism has set in among consumers about what companies know about us and how much data is escaping our control.

The Facebook CEO's 3200 word paean to privacy is fraught with implications, not all of them necessarily intended. For all the words, this company is not yet devoted to privacy. Investors looking at all this might be inclined to sell.

The internet is in jeopardy. A small band of global technology companies have achieved a scale and influence that dwarfs most countries, and an existential split over the internet has emerged between nations. If we are going to retain the internet's extraordinary social, economic, and democratic power, we must push back.

The reports may have made it sound grim, but my takeaway from Davos was optimism about beating back climate change. And the idea that business can make money while doing good for the planet and society is a more and more mainstream idea.

Editor-in-chief David Kirkpatrick is in the midst of a round-the-world swing for Techonomy, doing interviews and moderating programs. From Singapore to Munich, to Davos, David shares highlights from his interview with Jerry Yang, his takeaways from Sheryl Sandberg's appearance at DLD, and more.

A new study finds people less freaked out about workplace automation than in the past. But it also finds companies more confident than workers that there is enough retraining and preparing going on. The transition is going to require a bigger societal effort than is yet underway.

At a recent dinner in SF hosted with Ericsson, agreement about the importance and gravity of 5G was near-unanimous. But questions abound- where will it arise first? What will it mean for the internet of things? Can we manage all that data?

In this exclusive pre-CES conversation, Vestberg talks about what 5G wireless, the industry's new standard, means for society, and for Verizon. For him it's key to how all business, and even government, will be able to improve society.

To operate successfully in this new era, we are all going to have to learn to collaborate more. The problems and opportunities faced by the world and the United States cannot be addressed by any sector or industry alone.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs is under extreme criticism for suggesting that U.S. efforts to prosecute Huawei for violations of sanctions against Iran are counterproductive and harmful to global relations. This article in the South China Morning Post explains his situation in detail.

Techonomy 2018 took place during fraught times, but the learnings were many ab out how to remain optimistic about how tech and business can still drive progress. One central learning: collaboration is key, and more important than ever.

Michael Kratsios is leading President Trump's national tech policy. Techonomy’s Josh Kampel and David Kirkpatrick recently visited Washington to spend time with Kratsios. What are his priorities? How is the Trump administration thinking about tech and innovation?

Johnson & Johnson’s Human Performance Institute at Lake Nona, Florida runs extensive programs to help leaders learn to be healthier, wiser, more grounded, and more effective. Lowinn Kibbey, global head of HPI, recently sat down with Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick for a far-ranging talk about leadership in today's chaotic world.

No matter the outcome of tomorrow’s U.S. midterm elections, political and business leaders must look inside themselves and examine how their every action, and those of their organizations, affects society’s future and the prospects of individuals in it.

Facebook is a broadcast platform for anyone, including those who would break the rules, fake the news, lie, and mislead the community. Societies around the world are reeling from the consequences. Politics and democracy are under duress. And thus far, Facebook does not have an effective way to fight back.

Robotic Process Automation is a fast-growing software designed to relieve workers of repetitive tasks. Our partner, UiPath sees it as a key to corporate digital transformation.

Tech moves quickly. For most of us, understanding our own behavior and motives as citizens, friends, and consumers can’t even catch up to the reality of our 24/7 immersion in our smartphones. Today's bizarre reality requires even greater effort than in the past, it seems to me. Here's what I think helps.

What is happening with the future of AI, and how will it alter geopolitics? That's the kind of question that motivates our company, and our preparation for our fall conference. China looks strong. Beijing-based computer scientist, investor, and author Kai-Fu Lee will be one of several interpreters.

Mark Zuckerberg was interrogated this week by Recode's Kara Swisher, but the results were unsatisfying. The Facebook CEO does show growing contrition, but failed to answer two key questions that would help the world know if we have any hope of reducing the scourge of fake news and privacy violations that Facebook has helped engender.

What will our November flagship event be like? Here are four innovative thinkers who will speak at our conference in Half Moon Bay, California- a Wall Street giant, a pioneering journalist, a robotics legend, and the leading expert on Chinese autos. Imagine all of them talking together and the insights that might lead to. Now you're imagining Techonomy 2018

Many of the company's ongoing crises result from an insufficient understanding of global politics and how Facebook changes it. Zuckerberg needs someone he'll listen to, like the 44th president of the United States.

Understanding how tech alters the world is like trying to understand the world itself. Tech's impacts on society are immense and interrelated. People come to Techonomy to explore all that for themselves and their organizations.

This is not your grandmother's Ford. CEO Jim Hackett talks like a tech guy and is reconfiguring the company as much as its cars and trucks around a vision of autonomy, electricity and services that go way beyond vehicles.

Elliot Schrage was a loyal and effective leader for Facebook, but his departure indicates significant shifts are underway at this so-controversial company. Watch who the next policy chief is to see if real change is likely.

Our speakers at Techonomy evidence a wide range of ways to think about responsibility. Tech and business can no longer just focus on making money, or assume that because they're from Silicon Valley they are golden. The world wants and desperately needs more.

Jeffrey Sachs is one of the world’s top development economists and a relentless anti-poverty crusader. Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick sat down with Sachs for a wide-ranging conversation in preparation for our upcoming Techonomy NYC conference on May 8-9 in midtown Manhattan, where the two will continue onstage.

Techonomy's program for our May conference in NYC is shaping up quickly. The conversation will range widely across technologies, company strategies, public policy, and the state of human progress. Join Microsoft President Brad Smith, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, development economist Jeffrey Sachs, Vimeo CEO Anajli Sud, and more.

The World Economic Forum this year was practically the World Technology Forum. Unlike in years past, leaders there, especially heads of state, acknowledged the depth of transformation underway in a digitized economy. Meanwhile attendees and press much criticized the net giants, notably Facebook, for threats they may pose to mental health and democracy.

Bitcoin is all the rage until it's not. A libertarian dream, it implies a distrust of established governments. This has finally sunk in on the governments themselves, and may be a cause of its continued decline. The associated blockchain technology, however, may be the real keeper.

Never in my adult lifetime has there been so much fear about what could go wrong. There are challenges, yes, but we are excited, not daunted by them.

Concerned about the FCC's net neutrality ruling? Many of the very things neutrality advocates most feared are already happening on Google and Facebook. Where's the activism?

Techonomy is not a neutral journalistic organization. We are advocates for the responsible use of technology, which seems more urgent than ever as technology continues to race ahead of society.

Facebook and Google took the brunt of criticism at Techonomy 2017, the net giants serving as proxies for an entire tech industry that increasingly appears unwilling to take responsibility for the power it wields.

Few topics are hotter than blockchain right now. In this excerpt from our conversation with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures at Techonomy NYC in May, he explains why he thinks such tools could even be the way an insurgent might challenge the overwhelming dominance of Facebook.

As society begins to realize it has allowed globe-spanning commercial net giants too much power, it also becomes clear that figuring a policy response will be hard. Techonomy's co-founder, author of The Facebook Effect, weighs in on the disturbing and growing controversy over what comes next.

Katrina Lake became the first female chief executive officer to take a company public in the U.S. this year when Stitch Fix Inc. started trading on Friday. The company suffuses itself in analytics and artificial intelligence. But its 3400-and-growing pool of stylists suggests that a future world infused with AI may not decimate the workforce after all. To hear how it operates feels like receiving brain waves from the future.

The news is techonomic: Equifax attack exposes data of nearly half of all Americans; Amazon price drops at Whole Foods decimate grocery stocks; Apple Watch used by Red Sox for cheating; Facebook harbored Russian fake news. Tech is altering business and society, which is why Techonomy 2017 in November is aimed explicitly at helping attendees understand how to cope and thrive amidst the digital chaos.

How did technological change and "innovation" contribute to bringing the U.S. to this point of fracture and animosity? And how can tech play a more active and consciously constructive role helping us get past it? In general the tech industry has not focused sufficiently on these questions. Now it must.

Kathleen Breitman is person of the hour. Her company developed Tezos, a new blockchain-based cryptocurrency whose ongoing fundraising has raised over $200 million since July 1. We talked to her about why she thinks this is the way to make a better internet, and a better world.

R. Luke DuBois is a man of many talents: musician, visual artist, and data scientist. In a recent interview with Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick, he spoke about his inspirations and gave a behind-the-scenes look at his unique dual video portrait of Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. (From the latest issue of Techonomy Magazine)

Do you want your photo flashed on a sign at an intersection? If not, don't jaywalk in China. Leave aside what happens if you're a dissident traveling in a new region. Here's a headline the WSJ used for this must-read article: "The All-Seeing Surveillance State Feared in the West is a Reality in China."

This Guardian column by Rohan Gunatillake asks a question so obvious it sounds absurd: What if tech tried to be healing instead of just addictive? In a time when our biggest platforms are acquiring outsize influence in how society functions, it's an urgent topic all technologists need to engage with.

Chief Techonomist David Kirkpatrick was blown away by Europe's energy and tech creativeness on a recent swing, both by how good the conferences were and by the importance of the digital revelations he had. Self-flying cars, anyone?

Pitney Bowes, a powerhouse in the era when sending print mail was the primary way of communication, is fully in the present today. Now, the company is emerging as a crucial part of the digital ecosystem, operating a back-end software and services infrastructure that enables Twitter to assign a location to a tweet, eBay's customers to buy and sell goods from anywhere in the world, and other services.

The Senate Finance Committee has moved legislation to finance telehealth services via the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, reports Modern Healthcare. The fact that it was the powerful Finance Committee that took this action is all the more significant, and welcome. Could it portend ongoing support for digital health measures in Congress? It would be wonderful to think so...

Techonomy's conferences about tech's impact are absurdly ambitious. But that's what makes them unique, useful, and fun. To understand what's happening because of tech in the world you need to discuss way more than the next iPhone or what's happening in the tech industry. We like to say every company is a tech company. Our Health and NYC events May 16th & 17th are for anyone who wants to understand where the world is heading and what it means for business.

A hadron collider for art and technology, Eyebeam is a Brooklyn incubator that launches companies and art projects, benefitting both. Its aesthetic centers on the rapid-moving world of technology. This institution doesn't care if you call yourself an artist or an engineer, so long as you're making things that matter.

Tech:NYC draws together local tech companies large and small to work with government, build industry ties and cultivate critical tech talent. It was only formed last year, but is already having a significant impact, both underscoring and contributing to the robust growth of technology in New York.

Today's Most-Techonomic-Article prize goes to the New York Times for this piece about a successful "ransomware" attack in January on a resort hotel in the Austrian Alps. A hacker infiltrated the hotel's network and succeeded in locking all the rooms, rendering keycards unusable. The owner relented and paid $1800. The DOJ estimates that such attacks happen 4,000 times a day in the U.S.

More "non-tech" companies than ever were at this year's CES conference in Las Vegas. The winners in the evolving digital and technologized economy will be those leaders who think most broadly. As the ever-curious Elon Musk has long understood, "Learning across multiple fields provides an information advantage (and therefore an innovation advantage) because most people focus on just one field."

Technology is rapidly changing every sector of the economy, as well as the nature of warfare. President-elect Donald Trump doesn't seem to get it. But if you lack a sense of the role of tech, you will only be operating for the short-term.

The decades-long process of Amazon taking over consumer product sales continues this holiday season with the company's dominance achieving daunting levels. The online retailer expects its peak shipments volume this year to be 10% greater than last year. In New York City, the superintendents in apartment buildings have been struggling this season to contain the huge mounds of online-ordered boxes.

Are we headed towards a world where machines do everything? Are jobs drying up because of AI and automation? It's a growing theme in our work at Techonomy. Discussions at our recent conference and a variety of stories and encounters with experts have underscored for us how hard it is to draw a firm conclusion about whether to be excited or scared.

The Internet of Things may shift how our energy system works as much as the steam engine reconfigured Western economies at the start of the industrial revolution. As the world focuses on its climate crisis, we must become more energy-efficient, produce less carbon dioxide, and power more things with electricity from wind and solar. IoT can make it possible.

We need technology to bring new solutions to global healthcare. And the potential of the Internet of Things is just beginning. Computing power, miniaturization, mobile, big data, the cloud, and social networks are driving this critical trend. Almost two in five are projected to use wearable monitoring devices by 2019. The resulting data can make the world dramatically healthier.

Mark Zuckerberg is just the most prominent of a proudly diverse and eminent group of speakers at Techonomy 2016 Nov. 9-11. We'll also hear from Ray Kurzweil, Prelude Fertility's Martin Varsavsky, Intel's Murthy Renduchintala, Fitbit CEO James Park, Blackberry CEO John Chen, NextEV USA CEO Padmasree Warrior, U.S. CIO Tony Scott, and plenty more.

Techonomy asked people coming to the Techonomy conference: What is the most important tech-related issue the incoming administration should tackle? The answers were diverse, but many focused on the challenges of cyber security and immigration.

The world is at a turning point and we have to choose. It is astonishing and daunting how fully Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump symbolize the choice the world faces. Watching their debate last week underscored for me not just how different the two of them are, but how different are the possible futures that confront the world.

Listen in to Techonomy's program planners as they discuss some big issues we're building sessions around for the Techonomy 2016 conference, November 9-11 in California. This year we’ve honed in on the reality that the world is entering a completely new era, as data-gathering of all sorts accumulates across global society. How will society determine who gets to control and utilize data about people? How much will people get access to data about themselves and their communities? What relative powers over data will companies, governments, and individuals have?

Tim O'Reilly (who is joining us at Techonomy 2016 in November) has written the best piece about Alexa yet. He doesn't just rave about the machine's astonishing capabilities, but breaks it down so we begin to understand what causes it to so romance users. It's not just the information behind it but how it prioritizes tasks and allows us to interact. It's a must-read for anyone who wants to understand where technology is going.

The shocking Brexit vote in the UK may be a landscape-altering moment that will shift how we have to view the world. At a top-level conference in Germany there was both near-despair and some hope. But nobody was sanguine, and the overarching issue of how to deal with a world increasingly awash with refugees loomed very large.

How big an impact will artificial intelligence have on business and society? Should we fear it? What will it mean for jobs? At a recent Techonomy salon dinner discussion on AI, top leaders from Accenture, IBM, SAP, and Verizon, among others, gave some fascinating answers.

When organizing a conference, you never really know it’s going to work until it’s over. So we're pretty darn gratified that by all accounts, our first ever Techonomy NYC event was a rousing success. Tech is rocking along, changing things right and left, and here you could feel it happening. Here is what happened, with links to all the session videos, transcripts, and photos you want to see.

We curated an astonishingly diverse group of speakers to provoke us on May 26 about how tech and the Internet of Things points to an entirely new sort of society. It changes health, cities, how we'll work, business structure and strategy, the future of marketing, and more. The entire event, which took place Thursday May 26, is now available on video. Program details here: https://techonomystg.wpenginepowered.com/conf/nyc/agenda/.

The perspective you get doing business and journalism in New York is global, in context of every industry, and grounded in human, social and political realities. So it's about time we organized here the kind of big-picture conversation about how tech changes everything that Techonomy uniquely curates. An amazing group of speakers from tech, business, government, and media help us understand the Internet of Things and much more.

Join leading thinkers at our first day-long hometown conference, Techonomy NYC on Thursday, May 26. Here in New York we get different insights and see opportunities we might miss in Silicon Valley, or anywhere else. Speakers include Agus, boyd, Everson, Federer, Foroohar, Morgan, Rosenworcel, Ruh, Sundararajan, Tantoco, Tett, Winkler, and many more. It's going to rock.

Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture & design and director of R&D at The Museum of Modern Art, is a passionate advocate for the importance of design in society and business. Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick conducted this extensive interview with her over lunch in New York.

The "Internet of Things" is the next big move as the economy goes digital. Measuring and acting on signals generated by everything from steps individuals take to the amount of water flowing over a dam, a vast new industry is emerging to bring more efficiency to society. In a comprehensive new report released Tuesday, Verizon outlines why this Internet of Things (IoT) transition is critical to business. The company has products, a platform, and enormous enthusiasm for this transformation.

Philips CEO Frans van Houten was a big presence at the giant recent HIMSS healthcare & tech conference in Las Vegas. HIMSS is where the digital world meets the world of health, and Philips aims increasingly to be a central player in that conjunction. I interviewed van Houten briefly on the show floor and separately conducted a lengthy interview with him on stage. He has five lessons he wants healthcare to learn from other industries.

Amazon's Echo ambient voice interface device is a breakthrough with growing implications for the future of computing. And the relationship developing between Amazon and Ford to add vehicle-related functions to Echo's cloud service is one more piece of evidence to show how vast Echo's potential could be. Soon you will be able simply to speak in your living room to turn on your car, set its heater for 72, or perform all sorts of other tasks relating to your vehicle.

Bernard Tyson of Kaiser Permanente and John Chen of Blackberry are two of the most amazing CEOs in the world. Tyson leads and is expanding one of the most important and innovative companies in the U.S. healthcare system. Chen, for his part, has had an eminent and highly successful career, especially in transforming, growing and selling Sybase. Now he is bluntly and unemotionally tackling one of the most challenging tasks in business--rescuscitating Blackberry. They spoke together at Techonomy 2015 in Half Moon Bay.

Sara Gardner of Hitachi Data Systems explains why we need to take a bigger-picture view of the Internet of Things.

At a fascinating dinner in Davos, health care leaders tackled the changing face of healthcare in a digital age, and how technology can empower both patients and caregivers. The deeply-informed group was optimistic that huge progress is possible, and soon. The host was healthcare technology giant Philips,

CES was a gigantic, if predictable, letdown when it comes to "consumer electronics." Everything seemed incremental. People ask each other "What's the most interesting thing you've seen?" My answer was an announcement not a device--Amazon's deal with Ford to put its Echo "Alexa" technology inside of cars. It was the Internet of Things that loomed large in the background--not to make connected toasters but to transform society with connected efficiency.

Every January just after New Year's, as if to force upon recently idle strivers the urgency of redoubling their labors, converge hundreds of thousands of tech-focused leaders, strategists, inventors, financiers, retailers, and journalists. CES is American tech's biggest trade show, fiesta, business meeting, glad-handing exercise, walking course, and source of both elation and frustration. Says Slava Rubin, CEO of Indiegogo, who we ran into at our hotel's check-in: "CES is one giant networking event."

There's huge controversy in India over Facebook's "Free Basics" Internet plan, part of the global Internet.org initiative the company has been spearheading. Facebook's aim, it says, is to get more people onto the Internet, since being online is essential for participation in any modern economy. In India, however, the project is encountering fierce resistance from elites who say it violates "net neutrality." But do all the critics--mostly upper-class and affluent Indian pundits, professors and anti-corporate activists--have a better way to get many millions of less-privileged Indians onto the Internet?

And so another year ends–with stunning speed and with surprising and slightly disturbing warmth here in New York. Techonomy wishes you happy and merry and a new year of continued optimism, despite the mood of the moment. Here are some thoughts about the kind of world we can collectively create, worth keeping in mind as a new year dawns amidst escalating short-sighted rhetoric and much distraction.

At least four big things happened at Techonomy 2015: Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker announced the department's Digital Economy Agenda, Marc Benioff called for equality as a corporate virtue, social network creator Sean Parker criticized social networks as havens of narcissism, and McKinsey explained just how complex for every kind of worker will be the transition to a partially-automated world.

By 2025 food shortages and price fluctuations could be a thing of the past, everywhere. New technologies for cultivating plants indoors could feed eight billion people, save energy and dramatically reduce pollution. But beyond the growing enthusiasm for "vertical farms" or "plant factories" lies the potential to alter elements in the recipe for these environments to create plants and foods with no precedent–more nutritious, hardy, or tasty–or whatever other characteristics we decide to favor.

The latest issue of the print and digital Techonomy Magazine includes articles on topics ranging from how the emergence of genomic medicine challenges the American health care system to a deep look at how technologized indoor agriculture may remake not only what we eat but its environmental consequences as well. We look at the inclusive potential of the Blockchain, and sit down with Museum of Modern Art design curator Paola Antonelli. There are also sections with fascinating quotes from our Bio, Policy and Detroit conferences from earlier in the year.

Techonomy 2015 is done, and we're all still resonating with the thinking that emanated from that packed stage in Half Moon Bay. Links in this post go to the videos of various sessions and you can go directly to the full menu on the conference report page. The video above is one of the most noteworthy sessions, a surprising conversation called Gods In Boxes, about the values that underlie the algorithms that surround us.

The transition to a technologized and interconnected society is challenging for everyone, everywhere. As we gain new efficiencies and capabilities, we still need to keep amity and constructive human interaction as our supreme priority. But it's not easy. That's why we call the upcoming Techonomy 2015 conference "Re-Humanizing Society." The opening session on Sunday November 8 is "Human Values in a Technologized Age." Joining the conversation in Half Moon Bay, California: Benioff, Chambers, Lanier, Parker, Prabhakar, and Pritzker.

What comes after so-called 4G wireless, today’s highest-bandwidth systems (sometimes called LTE)? Even though only a small portion of smartphone users in a few countries so far have 4G, Ericsson, one of the telecoms industry’s leading tech providers, is already deep into planning the next phase. These 5G systems will differ dramatically from those today, […]

Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson, which makes much of the world’s wireless infrastructure, sees an even more connected world in our future. In this short excerpt of a conversation with Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick, he explains that as more and more of our devices are online and interacting, and as mobile broadband dovetails with cloud services, […]

Digital privacy isn’t simple for anyone–consumers, the companies that hold data, or the government. In this high-profile session at Techonomy Policy in June 2015, leaders from AT&T and Microsoft joined venture capitalist Brad Burnham and FCC Commissioner Julie Brill in a probing conversation that underscored the many challenges. Brill worries that consumers do not understand […]

“Every industry…is ripe for some kind of disruption,” says Citi Ventures’ Vanessa Colella, a veteran investor and tech expert embedded in the heart of a major multinational financial institution. In this video interview, conducted by Techonomy at a recent dinner jointly hosted with Citi Ventures, Colella speaks about the challenges and opportunities for big companies […]

Should America have a bipartisan technology agenda? It certainly seems like a good idea. And Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey argued for one emphatically at the closing session of the Techonomy Policy conference in Washington in early June. What made the session remarkable, at least to those of us whose expectations are dulled by the deluge of punditry proclaiming partisan deadlock in Washington, is that Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska agreed with him. Fischer of course is a Republican, and Booker a Democrat. Booker says we are now too often choking innovation rather than allowing it to flourish. Meanwhile, Sean Parker, the tech entrepreneur and investor, who joined the two onstage, spoke passionately about his own bipartisan approach to policy advocacy. He says his friends call him crazy for not just supporting politicians of one party, but he says he thinks "it's actually quite sane."

Experts across the political spectrum profess to be mystified by the skyrocketing Trump campaign. Politico recently published a piece with predictions from 16 of them about how the straw-topped candidate's efforts will end. One who sounded on target was Mary Matalin, the longstanding Republican strategist, who professed her admiration for Trump's "authenticity." That's part of what I think has thrust this reality show into the forefront of American politics.

The Oculus event marks a milestone for the company and for its owner Facebook. While its Oculus Samsung Gear VR viewer for Samsung smartphones has been on the market awhile, it has been limited to people who have a couple specific models of smartphone and also to very limited amounts of VR content, generally of a much lower quality than will soon be possible. Today's 1:00 pm ET event marks the first time Oculus has told the world exactly what kind of experience to expect from its flagship PC-connected device, which we hope will emerge later this year.

If only our country focused on finding the potential in its children, amazing things could happen, as this inspiring article from The New York Times shows. When a committed philanthropist spent a relatively small amount of money, $11 million over 21 years, it completely turned around student educational attainment in a mid-sized predominantly African-American town in Florida. It also had a major positive impact on the community itself. The key was aggressive early-childhood education, along with training for parents.

Recently Techonomy hosted a dinner in New York, and our guests wanted relentlessly to talk about data. Where will society produce it? How much can we manage? Who will control it? What will they do to us with it? How can individuals retain influence over it? These are elemental questions for our era. They are questions that not only citizens, but government itself needs to be methodically asking. The dinner had nothing to do with our impending Techonomy Policy conference next Tuesday, June 9, in Washington. But it’s no coincidence that the opening session is entitled “Keeping America Innovative In the Age of Data Exhaust.”

We live in a time of increasingly obsessive worry that our lives are being worsened by the tech that surrounds us. We are sacrificing our privacy, we hear, as we dwell online. We don't spend enough time with real people and too much instead in virtual interaction. We suffer from shortening attention spans. And on and on. However, there are likely to be endless ways to employ tech to combat the effects of tech that we decide we really do not like. This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education is about tools to reduce distraction while taking online courses. It points toward what's possible. Careful research on students showed that using software to give them incentives not to stop studying really worked.

Starbucks is in the crosshairs. How dare it ask its employees, customers, and America to discuss the role of race and racism in American society? The company recently began a project it calls "Race Together," in partnership with USA Today, aiming to begin a lengthy process of discussion and reflection on the inequities and distortions in American society, and even in the minds of all of us. What right does it have to do that? Hypocrisy! cry the critics. The pushback has been brutal, especially on Twitter, where extended and respectful discussion is almost impossible. Starbucks is being wrongly vilified. Why is it so hard for all these cavilers to accept the possibility that the company realizes its employment numbers are unequal and inappropriate, by any impartial moral standard?

At last year's Techonomy Bio, we put venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson on a panel of investors. In his enthusiasm for the unbridled potential of innovation in the life sciences to transform society, Jurvetson at one point said "we're sitting on a can of miracles." Why a can? He did not say, but his observation became a kind of touchstone for us at Techonomy for why we continue to build this event. "Sitting on a Can of Miracles" is what we're calling this year's session on investing in bio-progress. Jurvetson himself we have promoted to our opening panel, which our Director of Programs Alex Cudaback christened "You Say You Want a Revolution?" Here we ask where we'll see the most impact from life sciences innovation, and how information technology is driving bio-progress.

After putting down yet another slavishly admiring profile of top Apple designer Jony Ive this weekend in the egregiously-named "How to Spend It" magazine published by the Financial Times, I had a nagging sense that something was wrong. Of course, like all the strategically placed articles about Ive in recent weeks, this one was yet another indirect attempt by Apple to create a slavishly admiring article about the incipient Apple Watch. The Watch, Apple is desperate to let us know, is imminent, and we ought to care. But what is it, exactly, that Apple is telling us we ought to care about?

In late January both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, two entities founded by the same guy, announced major new directions that have a weird and provocative parallelism. One is a new product category from Microsoft, and the other a new vision for global economic progress from the Gates Foundation. Both merit our attention, not only as organizational initiatives but as powerful visions for the world's future.

Could better technology have prevented today's shocking decision-making blunder by Governor Andrew Cuomo and other political officials about winter storm Juno that led to a total economic shutdown across the Northeast United States? Weather prediction technology in the United States is dangerously antiquated. And overly-timid U.S. governmental spending and political considerations are preventing the system from remaining state-of-the-art.

General Electric Senior Vice President Beth Comstock stopped by Techonomy's office recently to talk about corporate innovation. Besides overseeing all GE's sales and marketing activities, she's responsible for growth and market innovation. She rose through corporate communications to become GE's CMO, then ran sales and digital for NBC Universal before her current job. When we asked about her light bulb experiences, we didn't know that shortly after our meeting CEO Jeff Immelt would give her an additional job leading GE's $3 billion lighting business. We started by asking how someone with a marketing background got so interested in innovation.

"I'm very worried," says Neelie Kroes, who has served as a vice president of the European Commission since 2010. "The changes in technology nowadays are so fast that we have to change our mindset. This is my biggest frustration in the commission. It takes so much time for governments to know what is at stake. We can't consult ten times about issues like we did in former times." Kroes's concerns are widely shared, especially in the United States. Says Steve Case, who spends as much time as any major tech leader working with leaders of both parties in Washington: "The pace of innovation continues to accelerate and outstrip the ability of governments to react."

In a couple weeks our Techonomy conference continues the dialogue we began in 2010 on how tech transforms business and society. We've moved from Arizona to a beautiful cliffside location at the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. It will be our best ever.

Big and venerable companies around the world are increasingly confronting a vexing problem: They’re too big and venerable. The ironic truth: To get even bigger, they have to learn to act small. Executives increasingly believe that new ideas and innovations that can generate growth are most likely to emerge in organizations like small start-ups. So the mandate for large companies is to find ways to replicate the culture and practices of smaller companies inside their walls.

Ray Ozzie is betting the next phase of his career on reinventing the phone call. Ozzie yesterday launched Talko, a voice application that is built with an Internet foundation. "We feel voice calls are ripe for a rebirth," says his Talko co-founder Matt Pope. "We start from a reconceptualization of what a phone call could be and weave messaging elements into that." Ozzie is one of the great tech visionaries of the modern era. In the 1980s he invented Lotus Notes, an enterprise PC app that in many ways laid the groundwork for the social and sharing-oriented world we live in today. It was the first widely-used collaborative software, or groupware.

When Techonomy's Chief Program Director Simone Ross first proposed in late 2011 that we consider doing an entire conference in Detroit, I was a little confused. Detroit? Isn't Techonomy all about cutting edge, shiny, new, transformative technologies and the things being transformed? Why head to America's most distressed big city? But Simone convinced me to head there with her before Christmas that year and I, like her, became captivated. Techonomy is back in Detroit for our third annual Techonomy Detroit conference on Tuesday, September 16, because it turns out to be the perfect place for a "techonomic" discussion about a number of trends everybody needs to understand better.

I'm not sure why Amazon is the one who wants to own Twitch, but it must be part of the merchant's desire to broaden more fully into online media and become a real network of entertainment and content. This elucidating review of a Twitch viewing experience from Re/code underscores several things: the uniqueness of the platform's interface and viewing experience, the immaturity of many of its users, and the power of the brand among those testosterone-fueled boys and young men. It could be a dicey property for a would-be decorous part of the global media landscape to manage, but Bezos thought it was worth a billion dollars, so anybody who wants to know where media is going needs to be alert to it.

In my field of business journalism, writers have traditionally had "beats" that corresponded to specific industries. One might cover energy, autos, airlines, financial services, or media. Similarly, analysts on Wall Street have specialized along similar lines. Rankings and ratings of companies by industry continue to proliferate. But today such categorizations are increasingly an obstacle to understanding rather than useful demarcations for meaningful analysis. Many of today's most exciting companies do not fall neatly into a conventional category. Business in a technologized age has raced ahead to a new unbounded shape.

Techonomy's offices on Manhattan's West 22d Street have been buzzing ever since our half-day Techonomy Bio conference on June 17. We got an overwhelmingly positive reception for a meeting that brought leading researchers and experts in the life sciences together with IT and Internet thinkers and business generalists. Drew Endy, a Stanford professor who is one of the world's leaders in synthetic biology, on stage called the event "awesome" and said he had never seen such a collection of people in one place. "People in other sectors of technology simply don’t know very much about biology and biology’s economic impact," he said.

Magisto wants to do for video what Instagram did for photos—provide intuitive tools to edit and enhance them and make them easy to share. Founded in Israel in 2009 by two experts in computer vision and artificial intelligence, Magisto enables a user to simply select photos and videos on their smartphone, choose a visual theme, and automatically create a sophisticated edited product in minutes. There's a lot of computer science on the back end making that possible. Magisto launched in January 2012 at the Consumer Electronics Show, won an app competition there, and now has 20 million registered users worldwide, up from 3 million last year. With 30 employees, the company has offices in Tel Aviv, New York, and San Francisco. Techonomy sat down with Magisto CEO Oren Boiman for a wide-ranging talk about video, social media, and how people want to express themselves.

For us here at Techonomy, next Tuesday's Techonomy Bio conference is a catalytic and mind-expanding moment. It's a half-day foray into the systems of life. We come from the world of IT and the Internet, but have concluded that becoming too embedded in it will increasingly be a deep limitation. For any of us to innovate and understand the future progress of mankind, we have to recognize that for all their compelling charms, digital tools are just one part of the toolset. Now that biology yields every day to greater understanding, it is going to pull human society into fundamentally new directions.

Suzanne Anker finds beauty and meaning at the borderlines of science. This visual artist and sculptor talks about “the way in which visual art and the biological sciences in­tersect because of technology.” She is conversant in the languages of all of them. Anker often takes inspiration from the ways biological information is depicted. Her tools may also come from technological realms. She's been making sculpture with 3D printers for twelve years, since long before the technology became trendy.

In February 2009 Jack Dorsey had recently departed from Twitter, which he co-founded. When his longtime friend Jim McKelvey, a glass blower from St. Louis, lost out on the sale of a $2,000 piece because he was unable to accept credit cards, together they realized that their powerful smartphone devices should be able to process credit cards. So Jack sat down in his apartment with engineer Tristan O’Tierney and drew a series of rough sketches to show how a smartphone credit card app might work. Over that year, he continued elaborating his vision with more drawings.

Constance DeCherney is a young marketer with a big new job--creating a special operation inside digital marketing expert iCrossing, hosting mini-summits to bring brands together with landscape-changing startups. Clients like Toyota get together with groups of what she calls, in this exclusive Techonomy video interview, "the boldest disruptors." For that session one participant was Dash, which connects your car using a smartphone app for a social driving experience and to make driving more efficient.

Jim Farley of Ford joined David Kirkpatrick onstage at Techonomy 2013 in Tucson. Farley leads Ford’s drive to connect more closely with customers, and serves not only as Ford's chief marketing officer, but also as chief of its Lincoln division. Farley says that data makes marketers better by enabling greater responsiveness to trends and better targeting. "But," the adds, "there's a whole piece of consumer data we haven't figured out yet.

At Techonomy we don't launch new events lightly. So Techonomy Bio is a big step. It's a half-day conference the afternoon of Tuesday June 17 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. We're striding forward because for all our passionate belief in the importance of technology for business and social progress, "technology" is more than the impact of computing and the Internet.

When the European Court of Justice—the rough equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court—ruled that individuals have the "right to be forgotten," it took a dangerous step backward. Among many potential negative consequences, it could contribute to slowing global economic growth. The court endorsed a profoundly ahistorical, anti-technological argument about the supposed rights of individuals.

The grandiosity and in many cases inspired designs of the plethora of dramatic new hotels across China provide a window into its psyche. China is big. China is bold. China is where the future is happening. The greenfield of a long-depressed economy enriched with newfound wealth and a newfound sense of its own potential, even a sense of its return to former greatness—all these combine to enable a kind of imperial overreach in architecture. These buildings, many of them, are beautiful. They also bespeak a confidence in the future and a sense of destiny that is lacking in Western culture these days. These stunning buildings also implicitly celebrate technology, because they require so much to build.

How much difference can one company make? Mark Zuckerberg appears to be setting out to test that question with his immodest goal of connecting everyone on the planet to the Internet. While many companies talk about "doing well by doing good," Facebook's Internet.org initiative makes most other corporate projects for social betterment look banal. But such extreme ambition is not illogical. A unique combination of circumstances confers on Facebook a position—and perhaps a responsibility—unlike any other company. Facebook's site is the most popular on the global Internet. Over one billion people now use it on phones, making it the most popular mobile app as well. The Internet itself, in turn, is an unprecedented tool for social value and growth, transforming business and individual opportunity around the world.

Computing has changed a lot in the last 50 years, but one 50-year-old technology remains significant. The durability of the mainframe illustrates the maxim that new technologies don't usually replace old ones, but rather coexist alongside them. When the IBM System 360 debuted on April 7, 1964, it was, in effect, the first general-purpose computer of any type. We don't call today's app-laden smartphones mainframes as we use them for everything from texting to watching Netflix movies, but they are the descendants of the 360. Meanwhile, real mainframes that use the basic architecture of the 360 are still essential in business. IBM's current-generation zEnterprise systems have extraordinary capabilities, and can manage 1.1 million transactions per second.

German Chancellor Merkel has called for a "European data network" that would prevent Europe-to-Europe information from passing through the U.S., and the EU has joined with Brazil to build a new undersea fiber optic cable that would be out of the control of U.S. telecoms companies. Up until now, however, Net infrastructure outside of countries like China has sent data packets on routes based on efficiency, not on national origins. Now a former German Defense Minister in Merkel's own government has come out against the mindset that leads to these parochial policies that would "balkanize" the Internet. In an article for Techonomy, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg argues against what he calls "data secessionism."

Getting living organisms to do our manufacturing work for us may be the next big shift in materials science. This Quartz article explains how it becomes not inconceivable that in the nearish future we will have biological materials helping us assemble solar panels, for example, or possibly helping work with a variety of different non-biological materials. The ability of living cells to help assemble non-living ones is a big breakthrough the article reports on. It suggests that future capabilities might even include things like tape that repairs itself biologically if it detects that its adhesive is weakening. Wow.

Data is nothing new. We at Techonomy get excited because there is now more of it, in more massageable forms, which will likely assist society in adding efficiency to all sorts of processes and systems that have heretofore been sloppy or unfair. However, we don't worship at the foot of data, especially not at the cost of deprecating other forms of analysis and interpretation. Which is why we found this essay by the redoubtable Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic gratifying. We admire Nate Silver's election work as much as the next citizen, but I and we agree with Wieseltier that thinking and arguing based on experience and values can be equally, and sometimes more, valuable.

Jeremy Rifkin writes in the New York Times about the future of the collaborative, sharing, free economy, making some original new points. Most notably, he argues that because the Internet of Things will radically accelerate the growth of sharing and efficiency, it will implicitly lead to a reduction in capitalism itself and a further rise in the importance of non-profit institutions. The rise of "free goods," tackled directly at Techonomy 2012 by MIT economist Erik Brynolffson, is in Rifkin's opinion now going to extend well beyond the digital and virtual (where things like Gmail, this website, and innumerable other free opportunities are available). Rifkin argues that capitalism, while it has a future, will become a "niche" part of the economy. Philanthropy and NGOs may become much more central to all of our notions of social leadership and economic health.

Of all the surprises and gifts tumbling tumultuously from the world's startups and programmers, none are more daunting to the casual observer than Bitcoin. What is it, really? Should I buy some? What would that mean? Where would it be? Why are so many smart people doing so, and creating companies to help others do that? What problems does it solve? For one thing, a transnational currency that can be traded without intermediaries has appeal. But while we can say that confidently, it's not even clear Bitcoin fits that definition. Now at least a thorough examination of the phenomenon has emerged from Goldman Sachs. The company has great incentive to get its analysis of Bitcoin right, so when it says this is not really a currency, we should take note.

Now that so many of us wear Fitbits, Nike Fuelbands, Jawbone Ups, and other devices that track our steps, sleep, calories, and more stuff every day, it's about time that we did more with the information than just compete with each other. Wired explains that Practice Fusion, a major electronic medical records company, is partnering with companies that make heart-rate and diabetes monitors so doctors can start getting data from our devices methodically. It's a baby step but an important one. Practice Fusion expects to include other devices as well.

It's idiotic that the most important form of modern travel remains a prisoner of 1960s-era technology. Air travel needs a major technology upgrade. This article in the Guardian is just one of many observations emerging in the wake of the disappearance of a 777 traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. How can a modern aircraft just disappear, with nobody even knowing what it was doing for the last hour or so of its flight? Because it had less-sophisticated communications technology in some ways than in your smartphone.

The past year or so have seen a headlong rush around the world towards simple messaging applications. Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp shows it cannot ignore the rise not only of that service but also of others including WeChat, Line, Viber, and Kik. These services are beginning to play the role that Facebook has mostly played around the world--default mobile app for communication. Their simplicity is their strength. While Facebook is not as existentially threatened as this excellent Buzzfeed article suggests, it's a worthy read if you want to understand the macro context in which Mark Zuckerberg felt he had no choice but to act.

Just about every city in the world is now teaming with young people (and some older ones) who are starting companies with ambitious and tech-savvy aims. This good essay by a former Facebook European executive underscores how pointless it is for everyone to compare their own region or city with Silicon Valley. Yes that hub will remain potent, but with tech transforming the entire planet there is ample reason for confidence that numerous other places can become vibrant hubs. The bigger challenge for Europe is the continuing prejudice in many countries against entrepreneurship and risk, and labor laws that frequently become punitive.

Back in early November, right around the time his name started appearing on the short list of candidates to become Microsoft's CEO, I had lunch with Satya Nadella in New York. It was eye-opening for a number of reasons, most of them positive for Microsoft. I left convinced that this guy would be a great choice for the job. His comments carry considerably more meaning now that he really is the new CEO.

The first time I met Mark Zuckerberg I told him he seemed like a natural CEO. He acted offended. "I never wanted to run a company," he said bluntly. Then he added, perfunctorily, "A business is a good vehicle for getting stuff done." But that was September 2006. Facebook was just two-and-a-half years old. He impressed me so much I went back and wrote a column for Fortune, where I worked, entitled Why Facebook Matters. Now the company is ten. (It launched February 4, 2004.) Zuckerberg is 29, not 22. He is no longer embarrassed to be a businessman. By a lucky coincidence of timing, Facebook's quarterly results announced just last Wednesday were spectacular. As the company hits this historic landmark, its financial foundation is provably rock-solid.

A global survey of leaders in education arrived at six five-year predictions. But they didn't just say social media will burgeon as a tool, along with "blended learning," in which online and offline methods converge. The leaders surveyed by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative also think college will become more like a startup, literally. Methods that replicate the atmosphere of startups will emerge on campus. And the influence of the maker movement will lead to actually producing things as a way to learn. Also likely to become more important: data-driven learning and assessment, as well as just plain more online learning.

DLD, Continental Europe's highest-level technology conference, opened this week in Munich with a panel on European competitiveness. The key takeaway: Snowden's revelations were, as one European executive said, "A gift to the European Internet industry." Fair enough. But even as the halls vibrated with the sound of cards being exchanged between aggressive Euro-technologists and investors and other hyperconnectors from around the world, the ongoing dominance of the U.S. was in evidence.

In the waning days of Bloomberg's New York, I threaded my way past multiple checkpoints and up a private elevator in Police headquarters to visit Ray Kelly, who leaves office December 31 along with the mayor. I wanted to understand how he'd used tech during his 12 years as Commissioner of Police, during which city crime dropped 40%. "When the administration came in, this department was the world's largest user of carbon paper and whiteout," is the first thing Kelly said. His apocryphal claim foreshadowed the rest of the interview.

At Techonomy, we've argued from the beginning that there is no real difference between a "tech" company and a "company." We held a session entitled "Every Company is a Software Company" at our 2011 conference, and aim to be a central meeting point for traditional companies and startups. This interesting piece from TechCrunch points to the stunning number of acquisitions being made by established, supposedly "non-tech" companies in a wide variety of industries. And the article's list is just the tip of the iceberg.

The fast-growing Digital Public Library of America aims to make accessible the holdings of every library, historical society, and other repository of information. Not just text but photos and other resources flow through this aggregator of sites. The DPLA regularizes the metadata so anyone can search through vast troves of specialized material. Want to find where your great-grandmother lived in rural Minnesota? This is how you may do it.

The Saguaros were vibrating outside the hall in Tucson during Techonomy 2013 last week, such were the energy waves emanating from the stage. Or perhaps the foundation of business was shaking. I don't know. One thing that is clear is that the giants of old industry are really starting to think differently about how to conduct their business, organize their companies, and evolve their products.

Techonomy 2013 is 11 days away, and as we prep speakers we're getting excited. Those who join us outside Tucson will hear Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini explain how he's building the "Intel Inside of healthcare." Stewart Brand explores the ethos driving tech. Tim O'Reilly and Max Levchin delineate the coming world. Tony Hsieh talks about companies intersecting with cities, especially Zappos' own Las Vegas. A 14-year-old explains Minecraft, and the ZZ Ward plays her soulful music. That's just the start.

With Techonomy 2013 just weeks away, our team at Broadway and Bond in NoHo is putting the final touches on our best program ever. Techonomy carries a heritage from our many years at Fortune. It's a living magazine. Tina Brown calls conferences "theatrical journalism," and we don't eschew that, but ideas are what get us most excited. The conference opens with a look at the extraordinary ways tech is changing business, and ends with an even bigger-picture look at how innovation is transforming the world and life.

In Indonesia, a typical weekend for a typical poor twenty-something frequently begins with a trip to a local store to buy some prepaid data access for his or her cellphone. The rest of the weekend will be spent using up that data, mostly accessing Facebook. As in so much of the world, the main way a huge percentage of Indonesians know what's happening with their friends is by using Facebook. With the announcement this week of Internet.org, a consortium of companies devoted to expanding mobile Internet access in the less-developed parts of the world, Mark Zuckerberg has found firm footing as a leader in public policy. The consortium was his idea, and emerged from his passions.

Today the capital's leading media source (yes, still more important than Politico—after all, even people in New York read it) began publishing a regular blog about the intersection of technology and public policy, called (slightly opaquely) The Switch. This is, in our view, just the kind of techonomic movement that the world, and journalism, needs. As its first post explains, the site's goals will be "making the policy process accessible to technologists, while helping policy professionals gain a deeper understanding of technology."

One of my favorite pundits for decades has been Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital in Silicon Valley. Gurley recently penned this authoritative article on the many reasons why those who miss the transition to apps may miss the next generation of users. This is not the next generation of web/mobile/Internet users. This is the next generation of customers—period. The App economy is global, it is ubiquitous, and it is growing with astonishing speed, as he notes. Gurley's long background as a PC security analyst, author, conference organizer, and for the last decade or so venture investor position him uniquely. His perspective is essential.

News about the National Security Agency's PRISM program and its privileged access to internal user data at nine U.S. Internet companies has unleashed a torrent of justified anger and hand-wringing. But the worries do not go far enough. Almost everybody is still looking at this through a narrow domestic lens. Our values and goals may be more challenged than you think.

Drones are among the fastest-growing concerns of citizens and governments worldwide. The U.S. has taken the lead in using them militarily for attacks and assassination, generating extensive criticism and promoting a debate over whether the policy reduces or increases terrorism. Israel, too, has extensively used military drones, and China has admitted contemplating it. Now worries have emerged among rights activists and others that the decision over whether or not to kill may itself be delegated to the drones.

It's one of the defining technologies of our day, already, even though it's not even really released. Everybody has a question or a complaint about Google Glass. Whether you think them cool or creepy, the combination of the technology's potential and the fact that Google is the vendor has the world reacting. Sage observer Larry Downes argues in Harvard Business Review that there is no stopping this tech. But he makes note of calls to regulate it, much like governments that initially insisted someone walk in front of early cars carrying a red flag to warn horse-riders of the oncoming danger. Congress and governments generally seem to have no clue this time, either. Google, meanwhile, is saying nothing.

I'm jealous of anyone graduating college today. You are stepping as a newly-burnished adult into an era of unprecedented promise, innovation, and opportunity. The world you will witness and contribute to can be fairer, wealthier, and more peaceful than any that people have ever known. What makes all these glories possible is the exponential pace of change driven by technology. Your generation takes that for granted, and revels in it. But it makes those older than you deeply uncomfortable, and many simply refuse to see it. That puts a lot of responsibility on you.

I have lots of quibbles with Joel Kotkin's recent essay published at the Daily Beast and already echoing elsewhere. He gets numerous facts wrong, and some of his assumptions are silly. But anyone in tech better pay close attention to his thorough summing-up of the numerous ways that tech's billionaires and their often-wealthy allies increasingly aim to influence social policy at a time when more and more Americans (and others in the developed-world middle class around the world) find middle-class life out of reach, and poverty grows among the less educated.

When even the UN starts appealing to the global crowd for direction and buy-in you know the tools of communication and leadership have really begun to change. This essay in The Guardian by a UN assistant secretary-general explains the many ways in which the organization is asking how to meet its so-called Millenium Development Goals. It includes the amazing statistic that there are now more mobile phones in the world than toilets. That's why it is using SMS and other mobile querying methods alongside web surveys and in-person meetings in places like the Amazon.

What inefficiencies frustrate you in your day-to-day life? What could work better about your home and the things that surround you—your car, your commute, your job, your health care, your aging parent's physical situation, or your local government? Entrepreneurs and innovators are beginning determinedly to address those problems. How can I be so confident? Because of the macro trend that some, including we at Techonomy, call the "Internet of Everything" (IoE for shorthand). We see it as a big deal worth devoting a half day to, along with a superb group of speakers, at our Techonomy Lab: Man, Machines, and the Network on May 16.

Washington appears best suited to screwing up good ideas, even when more or less everyone there agrees it's a good idea. Fiscal Times here examines the politics and details surrounding tech-oriented immigration reform, including increasing H-1B visas, letting immigrant PhDs in STEM subjects stay in the U.S., and exempting entrepreneurs who are creating jobs from deportation. Because these are such logical reforms, they can't be passed individually but must become part of a comprehensive package, because Congress typically weighs down no-brainer bills with stupid amendments. Thus, Zuckerberg's new pro-immigration lobbying group FWD.us wisely supports a comprehensive bill, though it's hard to achieve.

A thoughtful article at Wired.com by Evan Selinger asks the right questions about the TV ads for the new Facebook Home app for Android phones. How appropriate is the kind of self-absorbed distraction that the ads depict users of the software indulging in? Should we celebrate people who tune out those around them, opting instead for entertainment provided by their friends? While one ad shows a guy on a plane being greeted by a young relative, another depicts a young woman at a family dinner completely ignoring her relatives as she enjoys her friends' snowball fight, a ballet performance, and a loud drummer.

My friend Loic Le Meur writes an ebullient explanation for LinkedIn of the many ways you can advance a business without agonizing over it. His main message is not to agonize, but rather just do it. Company ideas come when you least expect them; the best ideas don't flow from workaholism; mistakes are part of the package; starting before you're ready is routine; and focusing on how much money you'll make is counterproductive.

I've never seen Mark Zuckerberg beaming throughout an entire press announcement, as he did today at the launch of the new Facebook phone software. It shows that he believes the so-called "Facebook Home" for Android means Facebook has nailed an important piece in its evolution toward becoming central to the communications systems for all the people of the planet. That is, after all, his goal, as it has been since roughly late 2004. You can tell he has confidence that Facebook has made good decisions about what we need in a new interface for interacting with phones, and that he's certain of the quality of the engineering and design thinking behind the product.

We know the world is awash with new connections and that social media is transforming our social and political landscape. But did you ever think that the CIA may have ways to use social, Skype, and email accounts of officers of unfriendly governments to deliver personal messages and attempt both to track and influence them? This Daily Beast article by Eli Lake explains how the scramble to prevent Syria from using chemical weapons has led to some cutting-edge techniques for intelligence and influence.

This weekend at Techonomy 2012, we gather near Tucson to try to make sense of the explosion of data, the empowerment of the planet by mobile devices, how companies and governments must reorganize themselves, the insurgent influence of robots, and the growing global power of a few key American Internet companies. And that's just all I could fit into the first sentence.

As our annual conference approaches in Tucson, Techonomy Media seeks to broaden its scope and impact. We want to further highlight the opportunities and challenges for business in a world being transformed by technology. We need your help as we crowdsource an important brainstorming exercise. We want to figure out more exactly what characteristics make a company tech-savvy, forward-looking, and resilient. We see every industry's dynamics being turned upside down by the Internet, by empowered consumers, by data, and by entrepreneurial insurgents. We say every company ought to be a technology company, and like to talk about "techonomic" companies, but what exactly do you think that means? What is a techonomic company?

To those of us who believe in science, which includes the rest of the world and apparently no more than half of Americans, it has been painful in recent years to see continued bizarre and destructive weather, even as data clearly suggested climate change is at least partly responsible. Now in the wake of Hurricane Sandy's devastation, experts like Eric Pooley of the Environmental Defense Fund are clearly articulating yet again why we must act. This will be hard politically, because reasonable action will by necessity be global, not just national. We're not too good at that here. Not to mention that many Americans, including powerful politicians, still willfully disregard reality and the likely costs of inaction. This essay by Pooley from The New Republic eloquently underscores the basics. Business Week's cover story entitled It's Global Warming, Stupid! also is a must-read. (Pooley, a great supporter of Techonomy, was my editor at Fortune.)

This friday Microsoft makes several epochal announcements, including a radically redesigned version of Windows that veers sharply from the established, tedious, conventions. Those who love tedious conventions will be annoyed, but those who like cool new stuff—most of us, these days—will likely be, at a minimum, intrigued, and perhaps enthralled. Microsoft should never be counted out. And alongside the new OS—coming in two versions for Intel and ARM chips—will be a new all-Microsoft device called Surface, based on ARM. It of course would love to be an iPad killer. Don't hold your breath for that one, but the signs suggest Surface will be a hit, at least with the vast numbers of corporations that are deeply committed to Microsoft products.

At Techonomy we believe that just about literally everything is being transformed by technology, especially Internet technology, and we also are quite psyched about 3D printing. It's another example of the empowerment of individuals—in the potent tradition of the PC, Web browser, Facebook, etc. But now guns are beginning to be made with 3D printers. There is likely nothing that can be done to stop that. It underscores another fundamental Techonomy point—that all of us, as citizens, leaders, and human beings—need to be thinking harder about what technology is doing to the world in which we live. Disruption is right.

How work evolves in the age of the Net is a crucial question for every country, not least the U.S. The easily assembled palette of services that is evolving from suppliers like Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce, and many others gives companies and employees a new ability to employ tech quickly for business advantage. Cloud, mobile, social, and analytics can be mixed and matched increasingly by anyone. Joe McKendrick of Forbes has a thoughtful take on some of the implications for employment.

MakerBot of Brooklyn released new 3D printers, and it's a breakthrough. One costs only $2,199, but has extraordinary capabilities. MakerBot also announced it is opening a store in Soho. At Techonomy we believe 3D printing is one of those unexpected results of the digital revolution likely to upend industries and recast competition. Those who get it will win, and those who oppose it will lose. Even as 3D printing enters more and more material areas, so it will be used for larger products. We've heard of plans to build airplane wings, even entire buildings, with future (near future) versions of this technology. Wired's new issue puts MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis on the cover with the headline "This Machine will Change the World."

People keep asking, "Why are you doing a Techonomy conference in Detroit?" We're known for our invite-only annual retreat in the desert near Tucson. So why, you may wonder, is our first one-day event in a gritty, depressed, financially-troubled city that seems well past its glory?

Columnist Daniel Howes today explains as only a savvy local can why technology and entrepreneurship may be the best and only hope for Detroit's ravaged economy and jobs landscape. His column is a gratifying response to our months of work preparing the conference that begins tomorrow. We really do believe that in a technologizing time, the opportunities for rapid transformation are gigantic and real. But we also believe that it will not happen automaticallly. The changes that need to happen will require business, government, and civic leaders to actively embrace the opportunities presented by technology's headlong progress. We are here in Detroit because we hope it happens. Tomorrow's conference is our contribution.

Measuring ourselves with finer and finer detail is one of the rapidly-developing trends that suggests big changes afoot in how we will conceive of medical diagnosis and treatment. It should lead to more intelligent identification of what leads to various medical conditions, and throw much current medical research into a new light. In effect people will be able to begin to conduct p2p drug effectiveness tests, for one thing. This interesting article by Quentin Hardy in the New York Times touches on some of the implications.

We believe in the potential of technology to make the world a happier, healthier, wealthier, and more peaceful place. Techonomy's name embodies our beliefs and our mission—it combines the words "technology" and "economy" because technology has become a central part of the economy in which we operate and the society in which we live. Today technology is inextricably entwined with just about every activity that humans undertake. We embrace that fact, and seek as a company to help the world take advantage of it.

It's no secret that technology is changing the world. Unfortunately, there are a surprising number of people who don't get it. Many of them, even more unfortunately, are important leaders in business, other powerful instutitions, and governments. To meet the challenges that face us—whether as leaders of organizations, as leaders of countries, or as the global community addressing our collective challenge—we will only be successful if we unreservedly embrace technology and innovation as essential tools.