The Great Seduction

Keen On... John Borthwick #2

As the CEO of betaworks, John Borthwick is one of the most influential architects of the social web. Borthwick, who used to run technology strategy at Time Warner, co-founded betaworks as a new medium company for the social economy. Today, betaworks is a network of around 30 companies – including Bitly, Tweetdeck, Chartbeat and SocialFlow – all, in Borthwick’s words, “loosely connected at the data level.”

 

Borthwick on betaworks as a new medium company.  

 

Borthwick on betaworks’ crown jewels. 

 

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Keen On... John Borthwick

With billions of dollars flowing into today’s social economy, betaworks CEO John Borthwick sees the social economy radically changing not only media, but all 21st century industries. It’s 1998 all over again, he told me when we met last week in New York City – thus arguing that today’s social boom still has at least a couple of years of innovation left in it.

 

Borthwick on why 2011 is like 1998.  

 

Borthwick on monetization, curation, and real innovation.  

 

Borthwick on why social isn’t in Google’s DNA.  

 

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Keen on... Kevin Kelly Part 2

In his important new book, What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly – the legendary Silicon Valley provocateur and Wired magazine’s Senior Maverick – introduces technology as a thing with needs, wants and appetites. What Kelly thinks of as “technology” might not quite be God, but it’s something that reflects the laws of the universe and is thus central to our experience as human beings.

 

What Does Technology Want?  

 

What Is the Future of Technology?  

 

Is Technology God?  

 

 

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Keen on... Kevin Kelly

As Silicon Valley legends go, Kevin Kelly is up there with John Perry Barlow, Woz, Stewart Brand, Steve Jobs and a select group of dreamers, troublemakers and lunatics who invented the future that we at TechCrunch now cover every day. The publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review between 1984 and 1990, the co-founder of the Hacker Conference, one of the founders of the Well in 1985, the co-founder and original executive editor of Wired magazine, Kelly has always been a step or two ahead of everyone else.

 

What Does Kevin Kelly Want?   

 

Kevin Kelly on the Social Revolution  

 

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Keen On… Evgeny Morozov

What should be the role of the Internet in US foreign policy? Should we be encouraging Twitter and Facebook to overthrow the governments in Iran, China and Russia? Is the Internet the United States’ best weapon against authoritarianism?

According to Stanford University visiting fellow Evgeny Morozov, the United States government is suffering from what he calls the “net delusion” of allowing the Internet to determine its foreign policy. In The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Morozov argues that the Internet isn’t encouraging democracy overseas and thus the State Department is mistaken to promote what Hilary Clinton has called her “Internet Freedom Policy.”

Morozov on the net delusion

Morozov on the US government’s mistaken Internet agenda

Morozov on the right foreign policy for the digital age

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Cloud Cover

"The future," science fiction writer William Gibson once wryly observed, “is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Today, Gibson’s words have a particular prescience for an American entertainment industry struggling, in the eye of the Internet’s seemingly perpetual destructive storm, to reinvent itself. The future has indeed arrived for the recorded movie and music businesses, but not only is it unevenly distributed, it is a future in which the very issue of distribution— how entertainment is transported from the producer to the consumer—will determine the survivors and victims of the early 21st-century digital storm.

If you want to see the future of distribution in the entertainment industry, glance up into the sky. Imagine a celestial space dotted with massively powerful computers directly storing and distributing personal data, movies, and music over an interconnected global network to consumers. This is the future and it’s called “cloud computing.”

Don’t be misled, however, by its ethereal sounding name. There’s nothing otherworldly about the cloud....

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