digital living

Much to my happiness, the internets are in a frenzy about the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (aka SOPA). Congress is currently in recess, but the House announced a hearing on the potential impact to the Domain Name Service on January 18 and everyone expects the Senate to begin discussing a similar bill “PROTECT IP Act” when they return to DC on January 24.

I caught up with the super-smart Richard Sedley yesterday and he pointed me at this astounding TEDx talk by Luis Von Ahn, who was one of the people that invented the CAPTCHA. Luis talks about reCAPTCHA, the project to create human gain from the 200 million CAPTCHAs that are solved by humans around the world every day and apply all those millions of tiny actions towards helping to digitise old books (apparently over 10% of humanity have so far helped digitise human knowledge).

The backlash against the information overload of the modern Internet era is getting stronger than ever. After years of sharing everything with everyone and breathlessly embracing the latest site du jour on the social Web, people are realizing that they can no longer keep up.

The rapid proliferation of mobile devices is making it possible for not just communities, but also entire nations, to narrow the digital divide between society's have's and have-not's. Not only are these mobile devices more affordable for lower-income individuals, they also are more accessible for individuals in hard-to-reach or under-served areas.

Guest Post by: Jo Stratmann

Last week we held a senior executive round table event at Claridges and one of the topics of discussion was about the proposed European Union (EU) directive on data privacy and the potential impact of this on social media.

The reason large parts of the corporate Internet is boring, difficult and of little direct use / effect is because we are unnecessarily complicating it. The Internet should be one thing: simple.

This is the second part of my presentation The next 80%, find the first part here: Part 1: Introduction.

According to Microsoft people have moved on, they have explored and adopted online communication / connected technologies to such a degree that they are almost unrecognizable compared to only five years ago.

The old adage that the key to creativity is to view the world through the eyes of a child has never been more relevant. Ever since this summer's release of the phenomenally popular The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore by Moonbot Studies - a company already dubbed the Pixar of the iPad generation - there has been a steady procession of innovation in the market for children’s publishing for the iPad.