The Great Seduction

Trust as new gold standard

Trust me on this: social media continues to revolutionise the internet. According to data released by The Nielsen Company last week, 17 per cent of all time spent on the Internet in August took place on either social networking or blogging sites, a 300 per cent increase from the previous year.

A similarly dramatic rate of increase next year would mean that we would all be spending over 50 per cent of our time socially networking. What it would really mean, of course, is that the Internet would have become nothing more or less than a meta social network in which we would all be permanently connected to one another.

The reality is that this social media age is already upon us....

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Why 2010 won't be like 1984

Someone somewhere said that we only have one or two creative ideas in our lives which we continually rewrite, recycle and revise. I suspect this is as true for writers and artists as it is for technology innovators like Steve Jobs.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the new iPad or iTablet, Apple’s touchscreen device rumored to be introduced early next year, is a radically updated version of the Apple Newton which the Telegraph recently included in its hall of shame as one of the four worst designed gadgets of all time.

Yes, like Martin Peters, the Newton handheld computer was at least ten years ahead of its time....

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Top Brits in Tech

For some unfathomable reason, neither of the two most influential Britons in technology were on the Telegraph’s top 50 most influential Britons in technology list.The first omission is quite inexcusable. Mike Moritz, the Welsh born, Oxford educated partner at Sequoia Capital, the iconic Silicon Valley venture capitalist who invested early in Yahoo!, PayPal, Google and YouTube, wasn’t included on the list. Nor was John Borthwick, the London born founder of the New York City based Betaworks which - as an investor in Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Summize and Stocktwits - is the most influential incubator of the rapidly evolving real-time economy.

It’s the British disease, of course, to turn up our noses at the dull money men and focus on the glitter of Twitter celebs like Stephen Fry (#20) or the silly wealth of celeb entrepreneurs like Richard Branson (#21). Indeed, there wasn’t a single venture capitalist or early-stage investor in the top 50 list......

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Sidewiki: Google's colonial sideswipe

Not only do our friends at Google want to own all of our brains, but now they also wants to own all of the comments on our websites. With a new downloadable feature called Sidewiki announced yesterday, Google is adding a feature that allows anyone to comment on a webpage and for that information to be openly available on the Internet.

As always, the good doctors at Google are presenting their new product as a dream, something we’ve always desired...

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Information Politics: The definining issue of our age

What is the greatest political question of our age? According to Amelia Andersdotter, the Swedish Pirate Party’s candidate elect for the European Assembly, that question is “informational politics”.

Andersdotter may well be correct. While the environment was certainly the most powerful single political issue of the last part of the 20th century, today it is increasingly clear that information politics – issues pertaining to the just distribution and manageable of data on the electronic network – is quickly becoming the most controversial and divisive issue of the early 21st century.

“It’s the biggest issue of our generation,” Andersdotter explained to me when I recently interviewed her in the southern Dutch city of Tilburg. Her meteoric career in the Swedish Pirate Party certainly supports such a dramatic statement. Joining the nascent party in early 2006, Andersdotter has now been elected to the European Assembly and, and will take her seat in Brussels early next year provided the Irish ratify the Lisbon Treaty in their October referendum.

So what, exactly, is information politics?

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Amelia Andersdotter up close

Amelia Andersdotter is one of the most remarkable young politicians in Europe. A member of the Swedish Pirate Party, Andersdotter was recently elected to the European Assembly. Provided that Ireland ratifies the Lisbon Treaty, Andersdotter - who is currently still a student at Lund University in Sweden - will become the youngest member of the assembly and a critical voice in reforming European intellectual property law.

Yesterday, both Andersdotter and I spoke about the Internet at the Incubate Festival in Tilburg, Holland. As we sat outside her hotel in a rather noisy downtown Tilburg, Andersdotter was gracious enough to talk to me about why exactly she joined the Pirate Party and how she hopes it will revolutionize the 21st century world of informational politics.....

FOR VIDEO INTERVIEW SEE TELEGRAPH

The Brazilian Book

Physical books – those textual products combining paper and words – are slowly but surely being replaced by the ebook, a handheld computer such as Amazon’s Kindle or the new Sony Reader that incorporates hundreds of texts on a single digital device.

Yesterday, for example, on the day that Dan Brown’s latest blockbuster, The Lost Symbol, was released globally by Random House, digital sales of the book on the Kindle were rivalling paper sales on Amazon.com. As The KindleNation blog said yesterday, it’s hard to imagine what could be a 2009 bigger story in the publishing world than the Kindle’s to compete, head-to-head, with the physical book.Malcolm

Gladwell’s much quoted “tipping point” for the e-book has now been reached....

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Cult of the child

There’s only one thing more incorrect than the Silicon Valley delusion about the wisdom of the crowd, and that’s the wisdom of the child.

Peddled by venture capitalists, new media journalists, and, of course, by young startup entrepreneurs themselves, is the mistaken idea that it’s smarter to invest in youth than in experience.

Unfortunately, this cult of youth is preached by some very powerful grownups. “By age 35, Mozart was dead,” Mike Moritz, the 55-year-old partner at Sequoia Capital , told Garage Technology Ventures managing director Guy Kawasaki at a Silicon Valley conference last month.

“There’s no doubt about it, young people develop interesting ideas. Look across the sciences, most scientists have done their most fertile imaginative work by the time they are thirty,” Moritz -- who joined Sequoia Capital at the ripe old age of 32 -- explained to Kawasaki, extending his argument from the art of Mozart to the history of science in general.

So why are the young so wise?

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Can Facebook fail?

Okay, I admit it. I was wrong. Wrong about Facebook, even wrong about Mark Zuckerberg.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been imagining Facebook as the next dotcom Titanic, the classically over-hyped Silicon Valley start-up, all youthful bluster, but neither a business model nor any meaningful revenue. With its Twitter obsession and endless rumors of anarchy at its Palo Alto offices (not to mention Ben Mezrich’s less than stellar semi-fictional book about Facebook’s founding), I’ve always assumed that Facebook would fail in some meltdown of historic proportion....

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Twestival: improving the world with social networks

On the Internet, everything is viral. Last September, Amanda Rose, a Canadian entrepreneur and social media graduate student, organized a “Twestival” (a Twitter-Festival) in London to raise money for charity. Organized in two weeks, the first Twestival attracted 250 people who, having connected via Rose and some of her friends on Twitter, then met in real life in Trafalgar Square to help raise cash for a homeless charity.

“We raised £1,000 and 14 boxes of canned foods,” Rose explained when she spoke to me from Toronto over Skype yesterday.

12 months later and Twestival has, quite literally, gone global. This weekend, 133 cities around the world - from Rio de Janeiro to Toronto to Dubai to Copenhagen – are celebrating Twestivals which all will raise money for local causes. Rose is aiming to raise a collective $400,000 this weekend from what she is calling “Twestival Local” – a not unrealistic target given that the Twestival website attracted over half a million visitors in August and is projecting an additional million visitors this month.....

For MORE at Daily Telegraph