DLD14 Magazine

Content & Context Index 1.

Content & Context

2.

Emerging Cloud Trends

3.

Designed Systems Embed Morality

4.

Waze and Means

5.

The BIT - Barry Silbert’s Cryptocurrency Investment Fund

6.

Content that Connects

7.

Smarter Typing

8.

Mindset of Abundance - Dream that Everything is Possible

9.

Advertising is Rocket Science

10. The Rise of Native Advertising 11. What Artificial Intelligence Means for Consumers and Businesses 12. Why Bitcoin is Better Than Central Bank Money 13. Wearable Electromagnetic Kicks for your Perfomance 14. OrCam - Disrupting Limited Vision 15. Music Meets Content 16. The World Mind That Came In From The Counterculture 17. Keeping the Internet Open in 2014 - All Hands on Deck 18. It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD Cyber World 19. Hans Ulrich Obrist - On The Intersection of Technology And Art 20. Compassion

©GERSINA

Content & Context Jennifer Schenker

Ever since its creation in 2004 DLD founder Steffi Czerny and co-chairs Hubert Burda and Israeli tech investor Yossi Vardi have invited some of the brightest and most interesting people on the planet to brainstorm and network at this invitation-only conference in Munich.

It is no accident that DLD’s motto is “connect the unexpected”: Czerny, known for her neon-colored tights and warm smile, is a consummate connector who prefers to put the spotlight on others, rather than herself. Informilo’s Editor-in-Chief Jennifer L. Schenker takes you backstage to find out more about the woman who launched DLD and what to expect from the conference.

How did you end up creating a conference that the digerati, writers, musicians, artists and scientists all want to attend?

Tell us a little about your background.

I was born in Bavaria. My mother was involved with the German American Society so from my early childhood we always had guests from abroad in our house. I have always been very curious and in the ‚70s spent a year in the U.S., living on The Farm, a famous commune in Tennessee which was formed by San Francisco hippies. It is interesting to note that four members of the Farm later started the WELL, one of the most influential early online communities. It was all about alternative lifestyles. In the beginning it was fantastic but in the end the people became fanatic and it became like a sect so I went back to Germany, studied political science and history, trained as a journalist at the prestigious DJS (Deutsche Journalistenschule [German School of Journalism]) which was very hard to get into but somehow I made it, and started to write for newspapers and lifestyle magazines.

I met Hubert Burda (the chairman of Burda Media) in 1995 and I found him to be outstanding as a publisher, as a poet, as an artist, and an amazing person. I guess I must have made some impressions on him too because he asked me if I would like to come and work for him. Burda was the first German publishing house to invest in Internet activities. It was the beginning of the Internet. He said to me, ‘media has totally changed, you are a curious person — help me to figure out how to change from a traditional publishing company into a modern media company.’

Hubert sent me very early to conferences such as TED in Monterey. There was nothing like it in Germany or Europe at this time so I thought, ‘let’s do something like this here.’ I was working with Christa Maar, the head of the Burda Foundation, and went to Israel, where I met Yossi Vardi. We kept running into each other at conferences and decided to launch a conference together. We created a forerunner to the DLD Tel Aviv conference called, ‘Cool People in the Hot Desert’ 11 years ago, long before it was in vogue for everyone to think of Israel as the start-up nation. And then we decided to do a Digital Life Design conference in Munich.

What kind of conference did you set out to create?

We started with 300 people and the concept of gathering people from various backgrounds who are open to new ideas and creating an open atmosphere. At DLD speakers don’t speak and then go; it is more of a community experience. DLD is about investing in people — we invite people who are not famous because of their character. I can tell when someone is burning for an idea — when he or she is totally enthusiastic about what they do.

This kind of engagement, of energetic fever — to produce, transform, to disrupt something —is the recipe for DLD and has made the conference successful.

[Yahoo CEO] Marissa Mayer was seven times at DLD. The first time she came nobody knew her. Now she is a superstar. When [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg presented, Facebook only had a few million users. [Chinese artist] Ai Weiwei was invited to speak in 2007.

And, we took a bet on a blond girl from New York with a strange name who behaved strangely on the advice of a music agent I know because she had a fire in her — and had Lady Gaga perform live at DLD before anyone had heard of her.

I connect with these people through a network of friends, and I trust and act on their recommendations — otherwise you would always see the same people at the conference. DLD is an ecosystem — you have to feed it carefully — not too much fertilizer — not too much water — and then it works.

Since much of the conversation at DLD centers around digital disruption it is not surprising that previous speakers have included Google chairman Eric Schmidt, YouTube founder Chad Hurley and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. But the mix has also included scientists such as biologists Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins, authors such as Nassim Taleb, musician Yoko Ono and Nobel Laureates Martti Ahtisaari, Muhammad Yunus and Daniel Kahneman. And you have made some very unusual pairings on stage. Can you give us some examples?

DLD is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. What are your goals for the conference going forward?

I would love for the network process to be even more intense –– to be able to pair all the relevant people to each other. Content & Context [this year’s theme] not only refers to the fact that technologies are starting to “understand” things about us and our environment. It also describes DLD in a nutshell — connecting people and ideas to inspire each other and discover common patterns.

Former Facebook president Sean Parker and Alchemist author Paulo Coelho; Esther Dyson and her father, the physicist Freeman Dyson and her brother [author and science historian] George Dyson; Nobel Laureate Marttii Ahtisaari and his son [technology entrepreneur] Marko, to name a few.

Steffi Czerny is Managing Director of DLD Media and co-founder of DLD Conference as well as its global spin-offs DLDwomen Conference, DLD Tel Aviv Festival, DLDmoscow and DLDcities.

Joining the Burda group in 1995, Steffi has held several executive positions in new media activities.

ŠBOSTAN

Emerging Cloud Trends Werner Vogels

Since the first DLD 10 years ago we have seen many changes in technology. It could be argued that many of the biggest changes we have seen are powered by cloud computing. In that time the cloud has moved from being a technology that we were using internally at Amazon.com, as a way to better serve our customers, to the driver of tremendous innovation in hundreds of thousands of companies around the world.

In the last 10 years we have seen the cloud revolutionising how businesses operate in the same way as the electricity grid at the start of the 20th century. No longer do organisations need to focus valuable human and capital resources on maintaining and procuring expensive technology hardware, they can focus on what they do best, building better products and services for their customers. From the world’s fastest growing start-ups, like Dropbox, Instagram, Spotify, Pinterest and Shazam, through to some of the world’s largest enterprises, like Samsung, Royal Dutch Shell and Unilever, through to governments and education and research institutes, all are using cloud computing technologies to innovate and better serve their customers and citizens around the world.

Despite all of the amazing innovation we have already seen since the first DLD, all that time ago, we are still at Day One. Into the next decade cloud will power exciting innovations in ways we have not even considered yet and will touch every area of our lives. Out of everything our customers are doing I have picked four trends that are set to become big over the coming year.

CLOUD WILL ENABLE YOUR CONTENT TO FOLLOW YOU WHEREVER YOU GO

Cloud has changed how we interact with mobile devices. In the past content would be moved to the device, now devices are just a window to content and services that live in the cloud. This started with our smartphones and tablets, where regardless of which device we use, or the location, we have access to our content and subscriptions. Now this approach is migrating to non-mobile devices such as Samsung Smart TV’s. The devices are beautifully designed and beautifully built but the core functionally of these television sets is software connected to services running in the cloud. This is also moving beyond traditional devices, for example my car is already connected to my Amazon Cloud Player giving me music everywhere I go. I have seen the first treadmills where the moment I step on them they reconfigure to give access to my music & videos, my newspaper subscriptions and books, but also my documents in services like Dropbox. I no longer need to bring my content; cloud enables my content to follow me wherever I go.

Mick Stevens / The New Yorker

CLOUD BASED ANALYTICS ENHANCES THE OFF LINE WORLD.

The cloud is already the place where researchers collaborate on data that flows in real-time from devices such as the Mars Rover or the Ilumina DNA sequencer into cloud storage. In the future expect an explosion in data generation by real-world devices and where that data is stored, analysed and shared in the cloud. For example we will see a rise in the industrial cloud where industrial environments are equipped with sensors producing data to improve efficiency and reliability. An example is the project we run with GE on instrumenting their Gas Turbines or with Shell where they are going to drop sensors in their oil wells that generate Petabytes of data.

Also in our daily lives we will see the rise of cloud connected sensors and devices such as the Nest Thermostat or the home control applications built by energy companies like Essent. Around the world pu-

blic transport companies are instrumenting their busses and trams with sensors that feed into platforms like One Bus Away that can give real-time updates to travellers. Passengers themselves can also become sensors: services like Mooveit use the anonymised information from an application on passengers’ phones to give real time transport information in the same way that Waze does for cars.

FASTER AND FASTER, CLOUD MOVES DATA PROCESSING TO REAL-TIME

Up until this point Big Data has very much focused on looking historically people who brought product X also brought product Y, the market moved in this direction last week so is likely to move in that direction now. There has always been a close relationship between Big Data and cloud computing as it requires no limits in terms of compute and storage but, as AWS is adding real-time processing capabilities, we see we a rise in data analytics that is able to produce results for our cu-

stomers in real-time, radically changing the products they can build. For example we see companies with real time recommendations, in the form of “other people in your network are reading X”. Some of the frontrunners here are the companies working on second screen technologies, such as Channel 4, that make use of real-time data to power the information they present to augment TV watching. A company like Netflix that processes over 40 Billion events a day uses real-time analytics to power their operations, their customer engagement and their business metrics.

We see almost every industry taking advantage of the cloud to radically improve the speed at which they can process their data; take Bankinter in Spain for example. Bankinter uses AWS for their credit risk simulations to assess the financial health of their clients. By using AWS they have been able to reduce their processing time from 23 hours to 20 minutes. This is taking analysis from looking back a day to near real time computation.

anyone can become an internet broadcaster operating worldwide without any capital investment. A well-known case is that of the AWS powered LiverpoolTV but every football club worldwide is following their example.

Another very popular case is that of performing arts organizations, from orchestras to theatre companies, which give exclusive access to their performances through cloud-based media production.

This way they are able to reach a much larger audience, which would often not be able to attend their performances in person. It extends their revenue potential, which is needed in times where arts subsidies are disappearing. A good example is Berliner Philharmoniker, the world famous orchestra that gives access to their live performances through the digitalconcerthall.com that makes use of all AWS regions around the world to provide a high quality media experience.

THE CLOUD ALLOWS EVERYONE TO BECOME A MEDIA COMPANY

In 2014 expect a great rise in organizations that are adding media capabilities to their offerings. A good example is sports clubs. All are looking for ways to establish an engagement with their fan base beyond the 2 hours on a weekend.

A successful way to achieve a weeklong engagement is by daily distribution or fresh, exclusive media content. The subscription revenues for clubs that often have millions of fans around the world are substantial. Cloud based services for pre and post production, as well as distribution, are readily available such that

Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale.

Designed Systems Embed Morality Lukas Kubina

“Evgeny Morozov vs. The Internet“ read the headline of the Columbia Journalism Review a few weeks ago. Indeed, the controversial 29 year old is taking on the manifold myths of “disruptive technologies” and unmasks them as marketing jargon. Instead of attributing an inherent force to technology that is capable of saving the world, he is advocating to bethink the social, political, and economic systems. And to get real.

Snappy terms like “Internet Freedom” and “Digital Diplomacy” claim that technology is benevolent. You are stressing its ambivalent effects on democratization and democracies. What’s this thing - “The Internet” - to you?

I don’t believe there’s much point in talking about “technology” as a causal force. I like to think in terms of systems – of social arrangements, meanings, and machines. Those can do many things: enslave, liberate, empower, disempower, make people sad or happy. Some of these systems – or assemblages or apparatuses as they are also called – can be tweaked such that they help forces that are not necessarily interested in democratization, be that dictators or corporations or whoever. I think this is a pretty simple message actually. There’s, however, a certain sense of coherence that we attribute to a set of systems (or assemblages or apparatuses) that, for very complex reasons, we decided to call “the Internet.” I think that this sense of coherence – which, on most interpretations, also holds that “the Internet” is a natural ally of democracy – is false. Figuring out why we have these assumptions is a big challenge and that’s why I spend more and more time working on some kind of intellectual and cultural history of how we talk about “the Internet” - and technology more broadly.

From the Twitter Revolution (Iran) to the Youtube War (Syria), the impact of social media in political turmoil has been widely propagated in the past years. What do you think about its part?

I’m increasingly reluctant to speculate on issues that ought not to be interpreted through the lenses of technology. To be frank, I have no clue about the political consequences of the Arab Spring, as the process is still very much on-going, especially in Egypt. To speculate about the role of social media in such a messy process would be silly – a mistake that many commentators have committed. There’s no denying that technological infrastructure tends to play a major supporting role in political processes that are unfolding in most countries today. Who would be surprised by this discovery these days?

But to understand the exact impact, you need to know something about the dynamics of those processes and then figure out what features of what tools and platforms are most conducive to speeding up or slowing down some of those dynamics.

The idea that some wise guys in Silicon Valley or New York can tell you the impact of social media on the Arab Spring without knowing a single thing about the Middle East is laughable.

©DLD

„For American spies, Big Data is like crack cocain“, you said once and were suggesting sending them on „big data rehab.“ The Snowden revelations have triggered a lively debate in Germany. What do you think of “information sovereignty“ and initiatives like the Schengen Cloud?

What’s so lively about the debate in Germany? It’s the same thing all over again: we have to pass new laws, we have to press the US to do something, we want a no-spy treaty. This is all like rearranging chairs on the Titanic. There’s a huge structural change in how we think about transactions and enterprise, with reputation – and personal data – suddenly playing a very important role, perhaps, becoming a new form of currency. Under this new regime, we would want to pay for stuff with our own personal information, which we would also want to collect. No laws or tools would be of much help to people who want to self-disclose information about them for personal gain. This is an on-going transformation at the very heart of capitalism. Snowden’s revelations hinted at that but few people have pursued this line of inquiry in the mainstream debate – in part because the debate is dominated by lawyers focused on constitutional rights and hackers who want to build privacy-protecting tools.

What we need is to bring in some people

with understanding of politics and economics. This is not a debate about legal transgressions – it’s a debate about future of capitalism. Schengen Cloud or no Schengen Cloud, there’s much more at stake here.

Kenneth Roth, the director of HRW, pointed at a particular problem: the erosion of trust in US Internet companies will trigger information sovereignty in authoritarian states and the capabilities of domestic censorship (eg. Russia, China or Iran). How do you view the recent statement by Silicon Valley giants demanding more protection from the NSA. Is it credible? Can it make a difference?

The argument about information sovereignty is a valid concern. On the other hand, I don’t mind seeing Brazil or India taking active steps to think about alternative technological arrangements that would lessen their reliance on Silicon Valley and the distributed cloud-computing model. I don’t much care for Silicon Valley giants. Much of what they provide right now, in my opinion, ought to be provided by a different model, with a much stronger public involvement. What they present to us as apps and start-ups could very well be end-points of public infrastructure that would operate on a very different, non-commercial logic.

Market logic has replaced morality. We are trading our data in exchange for a service. We get Gmail for free and non-encrypted - so Google can monetize with ads and it is easily traceable for NSA? Shouldn’t we finally reinstall the logic that good service can be paid in a currency which isn’t data?

Well, yes. Some services ought to be paid with our taxes; others with fees; some ought to be a combination of the two.

And not all of them ought to be privately run. I think advertising is just a prelude to something much bigger; eventually both Google and Facebook will be in data-heavy industries like banking and insurance. And they will be much better and more ruthless than their existing competitors simply because they have access to so much data. I’m not sure I would trust Google to provide responsible banking services given how much it knows about customers.

worthy causes – like free software – and turn them into more dubious ones – like open-source. We need to understand how that happens and we need to be very careful about the terms we use. But I think the big step that we must take is to resituate the technology debate in debates about economics and politics. This is the only appropriate context that matters: we don’t just use iPhone apps to track our health – we use them to track our health at a time when Big Pharma companies hold more power than ever, when the idea of public health is crumbling, when patients are encouraged to distrust doctors and take matters into their own hands, when we are told that we have to proactively manage every potential disease before we see any symptoms. This is the right context for understanding a phenomenon like The Quantified Self: we can’t make sense of it just by analysing decisions by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

17 years ago, Carl Sagan warned that society should pay more attention to science and technology, to avoid that eventually we don’t run things anymore but things run us. This call for scepticism resonates well with your latest book “Solutionism” in which you criticize that Internet corporations control the public debate and sell us expropriation and manipulation as progress. How can we bring the social, political, and economic systems back into the debate?

One way to do it, I hope, is to constantly reveal that the technological is also the political. Designed systems embed morality – and we need to understand how they do it. We also have to be critical of all the terms we take for granted today: innovation, disruption, and so on. Silicon Valley doesn’t just come with apps – it also comes with words. Often, they take

Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar in the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford University and a Scwhartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He is also a blogger and contributing editor to Foreign Policy Magazine.

Jennifer Schenker

Waze and Means

Noam Bardin, a scheduled speaker at DLD, is the CEO of Waze, the Israeli crowd-sourced navigation and mapping app that sold to Google last summer for $1.15 billion.

Bardin, who holds a B.A. in Economics from Hebrew University and a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, recently spoke with Informilo’s Jennifer L. Schenker about Waze before and after the sale.

Why sell to Google rather than go public?

Why go public at all? None of us saw going public as a positive. I ran a tech company that went public [VoIP provider DeltaThree] and it was one of the worst experiences of my life. Why is the old model of an IPO still relevant? There are many other monetization models that don’t require it. The question is more why we didn’t stay independent.

Why didn’t you?

In the world of tech today the reality is that four, five large conglomerates will end up owning most of the technology.

The large companies are going to build a product anytime something proves to be a success. In the case of Waze we were competing directly with Nokia, Google, Apple and TomTom which was quite something for a small company based in Ra’anana in Israel. If you are going to get really big you have to come up with a new platform. And only one successful platform along the lines of those built by the likes of a Google or a Facebook or maybe a Twitter comes along every ten years.

The odds of it happening are slim. Every start-up should assume it will not happen to them so then the question is, ‚how big can you grow on your own and who is the right company to acquire you?’ For us it all came together.

What other benefits do you think the company has reaped since the Google acquisition?

A big mistake we made was not hiring more aggressively in 2013. By the end of 2012 we only had 108 people and should have had more. But we were conservative and agoni-

zed over each hire. We would wait until one of our employees would fall apart from exhaustion before getting them help because we didn’t want to create more overhead. What Google has done is to put their recruiting force behind us — now we have multiple people whose only job is to focus on recruitment for us.

We are hiring very fast. Google knows how to find the best people everywhere; so we have a well-oiled machine working behind us now.

The sale created a lot of millionaires — including you — but a lot of people don’t realize there is a whole other group of people who benefited: the Waze sale netted $1.5 million for Tmura, an organization that for the past decade has offered high-tech entrepreneurs the opportunity to donate their start-up’s shares or stock options — as Waze did three years ago — with the proceeds going to help the disadvantaged in Israel. What led Waze to give a percentage of its shares to the organization in the first place?

The model used by Tmura began in the U.S. but never really took off there.

That’s because Americans regularly give to causes; it’s part of their culture. This is not the case in Israel. So it was important to build a philanthropic model for Israeli high-tech people and that is what Tmura has done.

In 2013 Tmura distributed over $2 million to Israeli charities focused on kids and education. We involved all the employees in shortlisting five philanthropic organizations we wanted to support. It was a very moving moment. People were literally in tears when they suddenly saw what life is like for people below the poverty line in Israel.

tech brands. The most important factor in determining the success of a start-up is the experience of the founders along with who are their investors and mentors.

When people eventually leave Waze, we will be releasing into the market developers and product people who have done it before, seen it and understand what it takes to become very big globally.

Another great social outcome from our exit is that one of our investors, Li Ka-Shing (the billionaire investor behind Horizon Ventures, a Hong-Kong based firm that invests in early-stage ventures in the tech sector), donated the proceeds from the Waze exit. When Waze — his first tech investment in Israel — was sold to Google he donated $130 million to the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology, a public research institute located in Haifa) and another $140 million to a project promoting cooperation between the Technion and a Chinese university; so now Israelis attending the Technion can spend time studying in China. So a lot of public good has come out of Waze.

What’s next for Waze?

We have to look at the world at the scale of a Google — that is our challenge now.

But Google is letting us be independent and allowing us to do things that are different and outside of its comfort zone.

You will not see Waze becoming more like Google Maps but rather more and more of something else based on a stronger community, that is more social and used as an everyday commuting tool.

Waze has become the new poster child for tech success in Israel and is inspiring a whole new generation of start-ups to focus on being mobile first. In what other ways do you think the sale has impacted the Israeli start-up scene?

We are recruiting Israelis from abroad who work for Google and want to come back to Israel. We are also recruiting a lot in Israel so more Israelis are going to get trained in the Google way and see the world at a scale that doesn’t exist in Israel.

This was one of the key things that Israel was missing in the ‚90s: to know how do Bay area companies work and think, how start-ups go from small to huge and to do one of the things that makes Silicon Valley so special — building global

Noam Bardin has served as CEO of Waze since March 2009, building the company to become one of the world’s most talked-about startups through its acquisition by Google in June 2013. Noam continues to lead the global Waze team within Google to help Wazers around the world enjoy faster, safer drives.

Creative Commons

The BIT - Barry Silbert’s Cryptocurrency Investment Fund Lukas Kubina

Barry Silbert has been a trailblazer on the intersection of technology and finance for many years. When he first spoke at DLD in 2011, reports gave SecondMarket a valuation of $200 million on annual revenue of $35 million. These figures were largely driven by Facebook – whose pre-IPO shares were traded on the platform. In September 2013, Second Market launched an investment vehicle for Bitcoins, the Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT). In this interview, Barry speaks about his fascination for the digital currency, it’s design and how it has been evolving over time and where he sees it going.

Is this easy access the main deficit you are trying to fix. Why should investors invest in the Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT) instead of buying Bitcoins directly?

How did you first get hooked on Bitcoin?

I became familiar with Bitcoin in the summer of 2011. At the time, the price went from a few dollars to thirty dollars over the course of a few weeks and back down to a dollar. The concept of Bitcoin, this digital currency and transaction network, not created or controlled by a government or company, had a real appeal to me. I didn’t think it was going to be successful but every month I did check in on the price and news. The price and volume going up forced me to take a real second look. In early 2012 I started speaking with economist and focussed on what Bitcoin really is.

When did you start investing in Bitcoin?

In 2012, I invested in Bitcoin first, subsequent to that I invested in Bitcoin companies. My guess is I am probably the most active angel investor in the Bitcoin field, may be not in terms of dollars but I invested in over fifteen companies. What I learnt through that process was it’s a fairly difficult process to purchase Bitcoin for investors. In the US, there are no exchanges operating, you have to rely on exchanges that are located in Japan, and typically these exchanges are not regulated. The idea of opening an account and wiring money there is something that most large investors don’t wanna do.

Yes, that’s the main issue we are trying to solve. The other issue is: once you own the Bitcoin you are responsible to keeping them safe. Early on, the Bitcoin enthusiasts tended to be technology savvy or at least they were keen to figure out how to store Bitcoin. Now it is moving to a broader audience, especially to high net-worth investor groups. They don’t have the expertise or the time to figure it out. So the second issue we are trying to solve was the security and safety thing.

Please explain how the BIT works and how it has performed since its inception?

Technically speaking it’s an open ended trust. What it means: you raise unlimited amounts of money into this vehicle on an ongoing basis. Basically, we replicated the very popular gold ETF – the spider gold – which was launched 10 years ago and was widely viewed being the first investment vehicle investing in gold possible for the general public. We launched BIT on September 25th 2013. It is geared towards institutional and high net-worth investors. In order to be able to invest, you need what the SEC calls investor test (you have to a certain income or certain net-worth). It is not publically traded and it is not open to all investors. It exceeded all our prospection. We initially hoped that the fund will grow to be ten million by the end of 2013. On Tuesday 31st, it was over 50 million dollars.

Michael Sharkey / Bloomberg Markets

By design, Bitcoin mining is limited to 21 million. Similar to goldbacking, critiques argue that this is the main flaw. Such restrictions can eventually cause deflation, exploding Bitcoin value and bears the risk of economic breakdown once people start hoarding them. What’s your point on that?

It’s important to remember that Bitcoin really is two things: 1) Bitcoin is a digital currency and 2) Bitcoin is a global transaction network. They really serve two different purposes. VCs and technologist agree that there’s no debate that a global transaction network could be really disruptive as it relates to things like online payments, and money transfers. But

where there is a lot debate is around Bitcoin as a digital currency and as a store of value. Bitcoin has many of the attributes that make sound money and it has many of the attributes of gold. Gold has – other than copper and steal - little intrinsic value. Specific to your point about deflation: it’s more an economic kind of debate between the Keynesian and the Austrian school. Imagine a world in which you believe the money you have has more value tomorrow. That would have a pretty dramatic effect on the economies around the world. But that’s really not what’s happening with Bitcoin where it’s either a transition over decades or, more likely, you just hold a portion of your money in Bitcoins.

There are hardly any switching barriers between different digital currencies, Litecoins, Peercoins, Coinye West, etc all seem to have the same value proposition; why do you trust in Bitcoin specifically?

You are absolutely right. The beauty of digital currencies is that they are so easily exchangeable. Ultimately, none of our currencies today have much value from a utility perspective. From an investment perspective Bitcoin is really the first mover: it has the longest track record, it clearly has the largest money base and deepest liquidity. I personally think Bitcoin is the winner for two reasons: 1) at a 10 billion monetary base, there’s a substantial amount of money, reputation, time

Currently 12.1 million Bitcoin are in circulation, with a total value of about $8.8 billion. At this size, the value of Bitcoin can fluctuate violently based on actions by a few big investors or the Chinese government. The regulatory clouds are clearing. The currency is gaining legal legitimacy and finding political from across the political spectrum. Libertarians like the idea of a currency that’s not linked to a central bank. Liberals see Bitcoin as a way for consumers to escape high banking fees. The anonymous character has attracted also a certain crime scene which can transact drug deals, assassinations and launder money (think of the FBI takedown of Silk Road). In accordance, Barry made an awkwardly precise prediction for 2013 on Twitter:

and energy by a lot of individuals around the world. There’s not much of an incentive for these millions of early adaptors and evangelists to switch. Further, it’s unlikely that there’s another group of cryptographers, entrepreneurs, investors, and early adaptors out there that had not embraced digital currency and is still waiting to jump onto something. Reason number 2) is that Bitcoin is a software, a living piece of technology that will react to whatever the market demands of it.

All the alternative digital currencies are get-rich-quick schemes or great testing grounds for new features which could be potentially incorporated into the Bitcoin protocol.

Now if you think this was far fetched, his 2014 predictions are really bold:

You predicted “2014 is the year of Bitcoin and Wall Street”, can you explain that statement a little further and what do you think are the next waves for Bitcoin?

I think Bitcoin has five waves. Wave number one was the experimentation phase when hackers and hobbyists were playing with the protocol since Bitcoin was created in 2009 till 2011. In this time it was about technological advancements without value attributed to Bitcoin. Wave number two started in 2011 and is the early adopters phase where you start seeing entrepreneurs trying out new ideas, or like me, people investing in Bitcoins and the entrepreneurs. At the end of 2012, the venture capital wave began.

Andreesen Horowitz, Google Ventures and a lot of great investors started to invest in Bitcoin businesses. This is certainly continuing through the next year as many investors are looking to move into this space. Wave number four starts 2014 and that’s Wall Street. Second Market as an organisation has always been at the intersection of technology and finance. Since we have launched the BIT, we are seeing a growing interest in Bitcoin by different types of Wall Street firms.

Wall Street professionals are personally putting their money in our trust. They are tipping their toes and are testing before they are putting their clients’ money into the space. We are going to see that the BIT is going to be available on a growing number of wealth management platforms, institutional money like hedge funds will get active as investors, and the large Wall Street banks are going to trade Bitcoin.

And that will supply the critical monetary base for wave number five?

Wave number five is mass consumer adoption. I believe the only way that mass consumer adoption happens is if two things occcur: 1) the monetary base has to grow to something substantially larger than ten billion because otherwise a lot of merchants don’t see the opportunity and wouldn’t take the currency risk and change it immediately into their local currency, which is impossible at large scale with the monetary base as small as it is; and 2) a real proliferation of products and services are launched to acquire and hold Bitcoin easily. The VC backed startups who are going to launch their products and services now in 2014 are going to be the catalyst for mass consumer adoption in 2015.

Barry Silbert is the Founder and CEO of SecondMarket, a secure online platform that enables private companies, investment funds and other issuers to manage liquidity, raise capital and communicate with their stakeholders.

Jeanny Gering

Content that Connects Being part of the DLD community you most likely have heard some impressive, outrageous, unique and inspirational stories. Allen Lau, CEO and co-founder of Wattpad, has made stories his business. In the run up to DLD14 we found out more about the man’s ideas and vision for the potential of storytelling.

How come the traditional publishing houses aren’t the inventors of and investors in creative business models like Wattpad?

Our time is often called „the age of images” - pictures and videos are increasingly the mode of communication. What makes you believe in the written word as a source for business?

Despite the perception, people are reading more, not less - they’re just reading differently. Wattpad’s growth - we more than doubled engagement on the platform last year - proves that people still love to read, write and engage over the written word. There are about 7 billion mobile devices in the world, the majority of which are internet connected or enabled. And there are 4 billion people who can read or write or both. This represents a huge market opportunity for Wattpad as we democratize the written word and make it easy for people around the world to read and write online through their mobile devices.

Change can be slow in the traditional publishing world. Since the advent of the printing press more than 500 years ago, publishing has been a tightly-controlled process where a handful of players dictate the next phase or evolution of the industry. I don’t have a background in publishing and this industry naivete frees me to experiment with bold ideas. Ideas that may be dismissed in the traditional publishing world. Self-expression is important to the Wattpad community.

More than publishing a book, people in the community want to share their voice, connect with others and be social. Wattpad does work closely with the publishing industry. Through these partnerships readers in the Wattpad community get access to even more stories and connect with even more writers, and publishers get their authors in front of a global, engaged audience of millions of readers.

What’s the secret behind Wattpad’s ability to create an online community?

In the traditional publishing industry there are many layers of people who stand between reader and writer - booksellers, publishers, editors, agents, etc. On Wattpad, people connect directly with each other and readers are empowered to influence and shape the stories they love through comments and messages to the writer. Writers benefit from ongoing feedback and encouragement through a direct connection to their fan base. By humanizing the publishing process Wattpad has created an incredibly active and positive community that spans the globe.

How do you handle the question of quality and standards with regards to the content that gets published on Wattpad?

With more than 30 million story parts shared on the platform by both established authors and emerging writers there is something to suit every taste. Wattpad does not operate like a gatekeeper dictating what stories will be published and ultimately read by others. Instead it is a facilitator by creating a platform where people can read and share the stories that matter to them.

What makes investors believe in your enterprise?

And finally - DLD is turning ten in 2014, so we like to get an insight from our DLD14 speakers what their vision is for the coming ten years for their business or industry?

I see a future where readers are discovering, recommending and sharing stories as easily as they share songs and videos today. New stories will be streamed to readers like episodes based on past likes and who they follow. This means as a reader, I will interact with the writer and other fans from all over the world as we consume the media.

Our investors like fellow DLD14 speaker Albert Wenger (Union Square Ventures) look for companies that use internet technology to disrupt major industries and transform society. As a free platform where people connect through stories in real-time from any phone, tablet or computer, Wattpad does just that by fundamentally changing reading, writing and storytelling around the world.

Allen is CEO and co-founder of Wattpad, the world’s largest community for reading and sharing stories. For the past 10 years Allen has been exploring the power of mobile, social platforms and user-generated content.

Karen Khurana

Smarter Typing Texting is one of the most popular mobile services, but typing on the go can still be a drag sometimes. What if there were an engine that already knows what you want to say before you do?

Swiftkey is an Android App and underlying technology in many mobiles that makes fast and accurate typing an ease. Thanks to an artificial intelligent engine, it learns to predict the words you want to type next. We talked with Ben Medlock, co-founder and CTO of Swiftkey about advancements in machine and language learning, the tricky parts of human intelligence and what’s ahead of us in the fields of mobile and AI.

Is it harder or easier for a machine to learn a language?

I think humans are still much better in learning languages than machines. To get to a stage where we are able to mimic the language learning ability of the human brain will still take quite a bit of time.

Swiftkey learns from the messages you have written, but it’s already pretty good in guessing what your next word is when you have just installed it. Can you explain how the technology behind the surface works?

As we talk about smart phones and artificial intelligence: Are the systems we use today truly intelligent or is it more precise to say they are programmed to process data in a way that seems intelligent?

Swiftkey uses predictive models that are trained on very large quantities of text that we gather from very different sources. On top of that we have a personalization mechanism that learns from the way you use language. It analyses texts you have written in the past, such as email or facebook posts, if you allow it to. The accuracy to the predictions is a result of the unification and blending of these different models working together to predict the most likely thing you want to say.

That’s a perennial question, isn’t it? It depends on how you define intelligence.

I think it is a very difficult term to define.

And that’s because we have so many intuitions about what it means in different contexts. If the way you define intelligence is by human understanding, then we are a very long way off. The fundamental question in understanding is the question of self-awareness. There are some theories about what self-awareness is and what it means but the reality is we are nowhere near to creating it at the moment.

Is this kind of machine learning in anyway comparable to the way a child picks up a language?

It’s interesting because it’s quite different to the type of learning that a child goes through. A child learns from lots of different types of stimuli. It learns to use language by correlating visual inputs with oral as well as written inputs, whereas for text processing using machine learning we tend to use very large quantities of text data, at least at the moment. So we are biased towards learning from text, but then the machine has a lot of text to learn from.

On the other hand, a more practical way of defining intelligence is essentially the accuracy with which machines can perform a task that benefits their human uses. So you can say that a machine is unintelligent when it does something that creates more work for the user. That’s a potentially useful way of thinking about intelligence because it’s much more measurable. So an intelligent keyboard is one that supports the user in terms of the creation of text. If you define intelligence in that more practical way, we are making really good progress. But there’s still a long way to go.

What about creative thinking? Would it be possible, for instance, to build a Swiftkey version for creative writing?

Yeah, that’s something we have thought about and we have actually built a number of language models over the last few years that capture the way different people use language. For example, we trained the engine on the sonnets of Shakespeare. And then one of our staff used that to actually help him to write a new sonnet. So you can definitely use these statistical models to enhance creativity.

And that’s a really interesting area, although what we are mostly focused on in the product is enhancing efficiency and functionality, but creativity is a really interesting area as well.

Speaking of efficiency and functionality – when a software works so flawlessly, people tend to not realize how complex the processes in the background are anymore. Can you share some examples to illustrate the complexity behind the surface?

That’s true. A good example of something that Swiftkey does, yet people don’t necessarily understand, is that everytime you tap on the screen, it collects a sample and it’s constantly retraining probability distribution that represent the way you perceive the keyboard to be. So, for instance, if you are always tapping to the left and below the visual character symbol for a certain key, we are learning that from the key presses. For every character on the keyboard there’s a different probability distribution that has different characteristics, a bit like a fingerprint for the way you interact with the keyboard.

The analysis of this probability distribution works alongside the language mode-

ling and improves accuracy, but of course, most people are completely unaware that this is happening. What you see is just a static keyboard view, but the actual position of the characters and how they are skewed is constantly evolving.

What are further applications or developments in the fields of AI you are currently excited about?

There’s an area called deep learning which is essentially the field of stacking artificial neural networks in such a way that they can learn representations of the world for use in particular tasks. I think this is really the frontier of applied machine learning at the moment: In order to build machines that are significantly

more intelligent than the ones that we have today what we need to do is to learn how to represent the world in ways that help us to solve problems more accurately. The field of machine learning has been successful because it allows machines to break away from the kind of explicit programming that most of computing has been based on for the last 50 years.

And deep learning is a way of taking that a step further. So I am pretty excited about what that will lead to in terms of helping us to solve specific inference problems more effectively.

Are there any examples of applications of deep learning for your area?

Yes, the one we are particularly interested in is language modeling. That means we learn mathematical representations for words that go beyond just the strings of characters that words have been represented by primarily in language modeling.

And you already see some quite significant improvements to things like voice recognition through the use of this kind of technology. And of course we are interested in bringing that into typing as well.

This power should lead to a new generation of interfaces that are much more dynamic. We would like to see that trend in bigger and most significant ways across the software that people are using on their mobile.

The same is true for the devices. We have been through a process of hardware homogenizing. I think a trend for the next ten years is for devices to increasingly become objects that people can identify with, that are more personalized and fit the body better such as curved screens that wrap around wrists. As soon as we have flexible screens and less technical constraints, it will be interesting to explore different geometries like circles, spheres and individual forms people are drawn to.

DLD turns 10 this year. As we always like to look forward, which trends and developments do you see coming within the next decade or the near future within your field?

Within the field of mobile technology, there’s a big trend towards systems and interfaces that adapt to users rather than just the other way around. The technologies we use such as machine learning and AI are able to adapt to the way an individual user behaves without the user having to explicitly instruct the machine.

Ben Medlock is co-founder and CTO of SwiftKey, and invented the intelligent keyboard for smartphones and tablets that has transformed typing on touchscreens. SwiftKey’s keyboard was the best-selling app on Google Play in both 2013 and 2012 and has been #1 in 58 countries.

Lukas Kubina

Mindset of Abundance Dream that Everything is Possible Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur with a passion to solve world’s biggest challenges with innovative technologies. The business minded philanthropist is a jack of all trades: a sample of his activities includes Moon Express, inome, World Innovation Institute, Intelius, TalentWise and Infospace and being on the board of X PRIZE Foundation and Singularity University. This interview is about the mindset of abundance, pattern recognition and moon exploration.

ŠABOSCH

Naveen, why do you think abundance is the key solution to our global problems?

The whole idea of sustainability in Europe is a synonym for conservation. It’s the mind-set of scarcity. Conserving is a short-term strategy in life because in the long term you need to create more of what you need rather than using less of what you have. Europe is driven by the fact that we will run out of fossil fuels. They are thinking substitution rather than increase.

The mind-set of abundance is changing your behaviour completely. At DLD, all of us are in the same room. You will never see somebody saying, “hey, you need to get out of here, you are taking my oxygen.” Everybody believes that the oxygen is in abundance. Would we fight war over things if we were to believe these are abundant? We fight war over water, land, food and all types of things. However, in a broader sense all these are in abundance in the universe. The earth is just a tiny dot in the galaxy. More than 70 % of our planet is not even inhibited. How about scarce resources? We can bring them over from the moon or different asteroids and planets.

If you go back a hundred years ago, aluminium was the most scarce metal. Until the technological electrolysis came about that made it easy to purify bauxite into aluminium. Technological progress made it abundant. Similar, think about energy: our planet gets eight times more energy than it consumes just purely from

sun every single day. The technology to harvest all of that doesn’t exist yet, but imagine if you could create abundance of energy! It’s a paradigm shift in your mind-set – everything changes! If energy is abundant you can desalinise water. What if we come up with technologies that people can live on oceans? The problem of scarce land goes away. In aging, it’s only a matter of time until we can grow our own organs.

Is this technological leap towards abundance changing the way we are as human beings. In the information economy this has already brought us information overload?

The whole concept of “I” will change forever. Between Lukas and Naveen, who are we really? Our body? Our body is constantly changing from being a baby to now. Our DNA? Your DNA is given to your children, too. Every cell in my body? But 90% of the cells in your body are micro bacteria. You are really a host to these foreign cells. It boils down to that the real difference between Lukas and Naveen are experiences and memory.

20 years ago we used to remember phone numbers. Today, all our phone numbers are in some sense augmented to our cell phones. We are augmenting our memory to search engines. All we have to remember is what we search for. So what if you transfer these experiences and memories somewhere else, does that become you?

Isn’t that at least an ambivalent evolution? This decrease of memory capacity as a result of outsourcing information to technology, isn’t that a threat to our way of thinking and ultimately our existence?

You would argue that this decline is taking place. But what if you are only storing the meaning of things in abstract rather than the actual thing. We are continuing to evolve our neo cortex in a way that will allow us to continue to grow

ty in life and they go out and solve it.

The human ingenuity is what causes innovation. Experts are really good in incrementing evolution but the most disruptive ideas actually come from non-experts. Because the way the neo cortex works, it’s basically a pattern-matching device that matches problems with patterns of solution. If you are a non-expert you actually have to think in abstract terms because you have never solved that problem before. That allows you to put things together that have never been put together. I am on the board of the X Prize and we see time and time again: rarely, if ever, the prize is won by a team that consists of experts.

The Moon Express is very modular, can you outline the approach?

© naveenjain.com

Different topic: why on earth do you want to go to the moon?

The number one thing that drives me is allowing people to dream that everything is possible. Here’s the man that grow up so poor that there was no food to eat. I came to the US with five dollars in my pocket. Today, if I believe to be able to build a company to be able to land on the moon. Imagine what else is possible!

Would we be able to create a fundamentally new drug because the gravity on the moon is different? What about the rare earth elements that are common moon elements? What if we can bring helium-3 to the planet? You got to allow people to dream and imagine! Entrepreneurs look at a challenge as their biggest opportuni-

We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We analysed that landing on the moon has three separate modules. Going from the earth surface to the earth orbit, between earth orbit and moon orbit, and lastly between moon orbit and moon surface. Our approach is simple: We plan to use other rocket companies for to take us into satellite orbit (lots of companies are competing in this area and prices are coming down significantly), where we use our own 3D printed titanium rocket that is moving between satellite orbit and moon orbit. The same rocket acts as a braking rocket to help us land on the moon surface gently. Our rocket will use Hydrogen Peroxide(H2O2, which can be derived from water). As we know that water exists on the moon, so we are essentially using water as fuel so we can create our fuel right on the moon. We plan to use this fuel to carry mined elements back to earth on

its return trip. Just a decade ago, our approach would not have been possible because additive 3D printing were not possible which makes the cost of complexity close to zero. All of these exponential technologies coming together in this interdisciplinary approach is allowing us to push innovation forward.

How do you view the latest push in the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program: the projected exploitation not only of known lunar reserves of metals such as iron, but also of lunar helium-3. Will this ultimately be a new Space Race?

You are absolutely right that Chinese landing on the moon is likely to be the catalytic event to start the space race, There’s a treaty signed amongst the nations stating that “No country can own any planet.” However, similar to international water, anyone can use their private resources to harvest the resources on the moon similar to the international water.

China just sent their lander to the moon to find and mine for valuable resources.

The United States are taking a different approach. They think the best way to compete is to have entrepreneurs commercialize space including commercializing the mining for resources on the moon, Entrepreneurs are innovative, fast, nimble, they use private resources without any bureaucratic system, and they are more cost effective. Beyond that, entrepreneurs who are successful in commercializing space have potential to build amazingly profitable enterprises but they can also make the humanity better by creating abundance of resources on earth.

I am firm believer that doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive.

Philanthropy to me is never about giving money but about solving problems. And a business that is not profitable is not sustainable.

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur and philanthropist driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovation. He is the founder of several companies and serves on the board of Singularity University. Furthermore Naveen Jain has been awarded many honors for his entrepreneurial successes and leadership skills.

Advertising is

ROCKET SCIENCE Jeanny Gering

A conversation with George John, CEO of Rocket Fuel, who gained rocket scientist credentials at NASA and puts his know-how to use in the world of advertising and branding.

Can you share some of your insights on how AI may reach limits in terms of creativity? AI may allow us to build machines and robots that are capable of incredible things, but can they ever reach human capacity of creative thinking?

As DLD is turning ten in 2014, what were some of the most important developments in your field in the last decade? And in your view - what’s the most exciting development in AI ahead of us?

I think big data is the most important milestone. The granularity with which we can remember and analyse data now for decision making is immense. Rocket Fuel would not have been possible ten years ago. With regards to AI I can’t think of a ten year horizon, but it will go as far as anyone has been able to imagine. My bet is within our life time we will see, maybe not physical robots that resemble humans, but we’re likely to see special purpose AI that will be functional in a certain domain, which can be as varied as game shows, medical or legal AI, where a huge amount of information needs to be processed but with the ability to reason. So fields where it’s still difficult to imagine, AI will be used in the near enough future.

There’s a story in a book called “Automate This” by Chris Steiner and it tells of someone who programed an AI system to compose music. When the music was played to an audience they all thought it was wonderful, until they were told that a computer had made it which made them mad. So, my guess is if you can train an AI system to approximate the appeal of a work of art to humans, then the system could produce, first randomly and eventually more and more productively, artefacts that would be appealing to humans as art. Of course one could get really philosophical about this and ask what makes us human and is creative thought one of those features? But so far the history of AI is that there is a level of human conceipt. So we think of a task that only we can do, and in the history of AI sure enough someone has programed a computer to do just that thing. But then there’s the “moving frontier problem” in AI, which is that by the time we have programed a computer to do a very human task it’s not really considered AI anymore. Like navigation systems in cars nowadays are just a normal feature of a modern car and not some amazig feat of artifical intelligence.

Putting big data in the context of advertising - how powerful is it? And how aware do you think the average consumer is of how his or her data is used?

Advertisers have been rational for long time. You know they run a campaign and assess how it goes and try to do something even smarter the next time. The

advance with big data is that you don’t only see how a whole campaign went but you can assess how a single exposure works. So I think the value is to be able to observe and learn at a much finer level. With regards to consumers I think it’s interesting, because I don’t encounter many who have the right concept of anonymous tracking for instance. There’s a false idea among some that they are being tracked and there’s someone with a whole dossier on them in some far away office. But my hope is that the industry is changing and moving towards initiatives that give the consumer more control in how they can be tracked, so that there’s more of an understanding for the algorithmically curated web experience. To give you an example: we rarely get emails regarding privacy at Rocket Fuel. But once in a while we do get an email which is really angry about being anonymously tracked, and people give us their name and email address and ask to be deleted from the system. Ironically we could not have known their name or email address up to this point. So I think there’s a gap in how consumers use the internet and how they understand it.

What are the most important and maybe unexpected skills you bring from your time at NASA as a rocket scientist to your job as CEO at Rocket Fuel?

At NASA I was in the group called “artifical intelligence lab”, and the main topics we dealt with were related to either autonomous space crafts or other kinds of AI related to augmenting human work.

When working on autonomous space craft you have a certain style of thinking, because you don’t think of a human pilot who you can advise how to use the space craft. You think of a fully autonomous auto pilot that makes all decisions by itself, which leads you to take a much broader range of possibilities into account. So I think that was useful for Rocket Fuel and our advertising systems, because these systems have up to forty billion opportunities a day to reach out to consumers, which is well beyond the capacity of any one human. In my view, doing that right demanded the same kind of autonomous space craft way of thinking.

Is Big Data, and the understanding companies can galvanise from it, applicable to any kind of brand or do some brands have to rely on different ways to understand their customer base?

Well I think big data always helps but it’s a question of how much granularity makes sense. You can definitely create a lot of extra value from the context in which the data is collected. Even if you stay away from specific information about the consumer, information that remains anonymous, you still get a better understanding of your customer base.

George John is co-founder, CEO and Chairman of Rocket Fuel Incorporated.Rocket Fuel operates a software platform built around Artificial Intelligence and Big Data that it uses to power an optimized media buying engine, running digital advertising campaigns for the world’s greatest brands.

Karen Khurana

The Rise of Native Advertising

The digital world continues to disrupt the traditions of publishing media. With decimated rates for display ads and more players in the field, it gets more complicated to find decent revenue streams for publishers in the digital sphere. We spoke with Brian Morrissey, editor-in-chief of Digiday, about the current trend towards native advertising and the challenges publishers have to face.

What are the biggest challenges publishers have to face in the context of native advertising?

Digiday covers the transitions the media industry is undergoing from analogue to digital including perspectives from publishers, agencies and brands. In your view, what are the most interesting trends within this field today?

For the publishing field, I think the most interesting trend around there is native advertising. The concept is not particularly new, advetorials have existed for a while. However, there’s a supply and demand imbalance in the media system right now: brands have so many different options to place ads that publishers need to figure out new ways to provide value in order to survive.

Another really important trend that is related to this development is the rise of programmatic advertising. These automated ad systems are making advertising very efficient for brands because they can find specific audiences no matter where they are. This efficiency on the other side ends up challenging publishers a lot.

They have to adopt these automated systems, yet they often lead to lower ad rates. So while the standard banner ads are mostly handled by automated systems, the real value for the publishers has to be in providing something that machines can’t do and that’s where the concept of native advertising comes in.

I think the biggest challenge is first of all doing it in an ethical and transparent way. The attraction for many advertisers is that the format doesn’t exactly feel like advertising. However, as a publisher you have to make sure, it doesn’t fool the readers. Another big challenge is to develop the internal capability to create it. The editorial staff typically can’t do it. So we see more and more publishers that build up their own internal creative service departments to create the content on behalf of advertisers. A company like Vice Media is pretty much half an advertising company, half a publishing company. It is what publishers have to do today. And the final challenge will be pricing pressure. Right now native advertising is like a new bright and shiny object that allows publishers to charge pretty good rates for it. However, the rates will naturally come down when more and more publishers offer these kind of advertising opportunities.

Some publishers charge native ads based upon how many posts and display space you get. Does native advertising offer the opportunity to break away from CPM-based rates?

In the field of regular display ads, there is a lot of pressure on CPMs, the price is going down. Native advertising right now has an advantage of being new so publishers are able to charge a premium

for it. Right now the metrics aren’t totally set. A lot of publishers want the advertisers to judge the success based on publisher metrics like pageviews and shares.

The problem is those can be easy to gain.

You can charge someone based on the number of pageviews for a sponsored post. And you can just buy those pageviews through different networks for much lower cost so that it becomes an arbitrage game. Those views might not be from the type of people the advertiser wants. So we are in a weird situation right now where publishers are buying advertising for their advertising.

Looking at the way native advertising is implemented today, do you think users clearly understand which posts are paid for or do we need a new set of standards to assure transparency?

We recently had hearings here by the Federal Trade Commission that looks into these matters. Right now everyone is labeling native ads differently and there are a lot of euphemisms around there. Some call it „featured partners”, some say „associated with”. What is interesting is that the New York Times is about to start running native advertising and will actually just call the posts „paid”. I think the standards will come. When you look at search advertising, Microsoft called their ads „featured links” first, Google used the label „sponsored” and eventually changed it to „advertising”. As they got really good at making sure the ads were very high quality, the label didn’t really matter anymore. So I think over time we will see the pendulum swinging towards just calling these things what they are which is advertising.

Apart from the labeling, by its very nature native advertising seeks to mimic its editorial surrounding. So isn’t there still a risk that it blurs the distinction between content and advertising that has been part of the journalistic code of ethics for quite some time?

There is always a risk of that. But I think there is a way to mediate that risk and make sure you try to balance by following the same kind of ethics that have governed journalism for a long time. However, you got to operate within the reality of a truly challenging business climate. I think there has always been a push and pull between the business and editorial side and this won’t stop. The only thing that has changed recently is that the voice of the business side probably wins the day more often because it is a very challenging environment.

Do you think we will see new content models evolving in the near future?

I think we will see all sorts of new formats striving. And this is a good thing, it’s an age of experimentation trying new models and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It will be interesting to see if anyone can come up with a real publishing model for mobile. People like Circa are trying to do that for news, USA today recently created a sports section for mobile that runs articles with less than 50 words. These are interesting models. And I do believe that there will be a flight to quality. For the most part media brands have always been build on quality. And I think we will going to end up seeing that.

And the shift to mobile has added to that environment.

Yeah, it’s funny because if you look at the shift from analogue to the desktop Internet, publishers have struggled to figure out new content and business models.

And now on top of that there comes this shift from desktop to mobile that has hit them. Ad rates are starting to come up, but a reader of a newspaper is still worth less than a half on the desktop and the value is decimated again for a user on the mobile. The majority of digital advertising is still banner ads and they don’t translate very well to mobile. Most of them are not even readable. And that’s another attraction for native advertising: it’s easier to translate to mobile.

Brian Morrissey is the editor-in-chief of Digiday, a vertical media company that covers the digital media and marketing industry. Prior to joining Digiday in 2011, Morrissey was digital editor at Adweek for six years. He’s a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism.v

Simon Patterson

What Artificial Intelligence Means for Consumers and Businesses Ask consumers about “artificial intelligence” (AI) and most will think first of popular science fiction, and characters such as Marvin the Paranoid Android in Douglas Adams’s book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, or, more ominously, the malicious Skynet in “The Terminator” films. The term has an inherently futuristic feel; AI is generally not considered likely to be prevalent in our lifetimes.

However AI computers that act independently, make autonomous decisions, and learn from their experiences and mistakes without human direction, are ubiquitous in our daily routine—although we don’t realize it, we interact with them many times a day.

For example, computers working in this way serve highly personalized content, advertising and shopping ideas on the websites we visit, often anticipating our interests and needs. Computers make lightning-fast decisions to buy and sell stocks and manage our pension investments on our behalf. Computers assess our health, diagnose conditions and recommend drug therapies, in some cases with better outcomes and success rates than our doctors. In a business context, computers make rapid resource allocation decisions, for example, which goods to stock in a physical store, or how best to allocate marketing spend online

©Gengiskanhg / Creative Commons License

minute by minute. And now, computers drive cars better than we can. The cars in the autonomous driving tests do have accidents—but more likely when the human driver is operating them to and from the test, rather than in the test itself!

AI takes advantage of and builds upon other parallel and profound technology advancements: mobile, data and cloud.

In this mobile era, everyone has, or will soon have, a powerful computer in her or his pocket, putting AI in easy reach. There has been a well-documented explosion of data, mostly unstructured, such as video, photos, social network status posts and so forth, which does not fit into the neat “rows and columns” data format that computers have used for decades. New data storage and analytical techniques have been developed to deal with all this unstructured data; however, in many ca-

ses because of the scale, complexity and speed required, it’s beyond the capabilities of humans and AI is required to make sense of and act on it. Finally, the advent of the cloud means that gigantic storage and processing capabilities are instantly deployable at low cost, making it feasible and economic to utilize AI in far more situations than before.

Despite all this progress, AI is still at a relatively early stage of development and there are many open questions. What does it mean for a computer to be intelligent?

Human cognition is flawed, for example, subject to bias; are we trying to replicate it or come up with something superior?

Is the goal to replace humans altogether or “augment” us with machines so that together human and machine do better?

As well as the consumer and societal benefits that AI brings, there may be a more sinister side. Given the ability of AI to act in a very personalized way at scale, could it also become an efficient tool used by unscrupulous regimes for discrimination and persecution? What if AI goes wrong and someone is hurt, who is responsible? Could the engineer who developed it go to jail, or be liable financially? Or will there be a concept of a “robot jail”

for the errant algorithm? And what about all the people whose jobs get replaced by machines, where will they go to work?

AI is very much with us today, and is here to stay, with all the tremendous benefits it brings. However it also challenges much of the basic legal and cultural framework that has developed over decades in our biggest industries, such as retail, transportation, healthcare and financial services. The discussion now should probably be less about the AI technology itself, and more about creating a new framework to manage the risks and opportunities associated with it.

Simon Patterson joined Silver Lake in 2005 and is a Managing Director. He serves on the boards of Dell, Gerson Lehrman Group, MultiPlan and Intelsat. He is also a Non-Executive Director of N Brown Group plc and a member of the Advisory Board of the Prince’s Trust.

Aaron Koening

Why Bitcoin is Better Than Central Bank Money The current monetary system is evil. When central banks can manipulate the money supply, the devaluation of money is inevitable. Only those who are close to the artificial source of money being created „out of thin air“ benefit from this, while everyone else’s money loses its value.

History has shown that central economic planning never works, yet we still use a system in which interest rates and money supply are centrally planned – with frequently disastrous results. The Austrian School of Economics – spearheaded by great minds like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich August von Hayek – has taught this lesson for more than a century. Austrian School economists were the only ones who predicted the financial crises of both 1929-1931 and 2007-2008.

that, they can be sent through the Internet at the speed and costs of an email. And because Bitcoin works without a central bank, its value cannot be manipulated by politicians.

Government monopolies on money are a relatively new phenomenon. For thousands of years, naturally scarce metals such as gold and silver were the basis for currencies--banknotes were simply receipts for precious metals. Until 1971, when US President Richard Nixon abolished the gold standard--in part to help fund the Vietnam war--the the world’s most important medium of exchange was backed by gold; other currencies were pegged to it. Since then, central banks have been able print as much money as they like.

Unbacked currencies have allowed skyrocketing government debt and fuelled countless economic bubbles. It is only a matter of time before this system--where debts are paid by new debts and few people make huge profits at the expense of many others--collapses like a house of cards.

Recently a software developer known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto suggested a solution to this problem: a new currency and payment system called Bitcoin. Bitcoins have the same qualities that made gold and silver the money of choice for thousands of years: they’re scarce, fungible and they don’t decay. On top of

With these qualities, Bitcoin has more world-changing potential than even the Internet itself. People can now directly transfer money to each other without the need for a third party. You don’t need a bank or even Paypal to send money instantly to someone on another continent. You don’t have to trust politicians and central bankers that they will „keep inflation rates low“ and „guarantee your savings“. Your bank account can’t be frozen, your savings can’t be confiscated or devalued. When our current monetary system collapses – and I am looking forward to that day – we will thank “Satoshi Nakamoto” for having invented the better one that is already taking its place.

Aaron Koenig is the founder and organiser of Bitcoin Exchange Berlin (BXB) as well as the publisher and editor of the libertarian magazine BLINK. In his main job he directs and produces short animated films for clients, lately most of them Bitcoin start-ups.

Lukas Kubina

Wearable Electromagnetic Kicks for your Performance „Fire, flash, fling, flower, fun, fast, flex, floor, fish, find, focus...“ Amol Sarva is playing a recording of his results in a verbal intelligence test. With Halo, the entrepreneur and science punk is creating a helmet crafted to enhance performance by electromagnetic stimulation. His experiments indicate a strong positive effect. We sat down and chatted about the wearable device (December, New York).

Halo promises to be wearable doping without side-effects.

Marvellous! Can you walk us through the fundamental technology?

For twenty years, there has been increasing use of invasive techniques. My co-founder spent the last 12 years in this area with his company „Neuropace“. Essentially, they make a pacemaker for your brain.

It detects the condition of your brain. If you are having an epilepsy it can intervene and fix the condition! With Halo, it’s the opposite of invasive. The helmet contains an electromagnetic field. In medicine, they call it neuromodulation. Generally, we are about to stand on the shoulders of the technological generation that started 10 years ago with the iPod, and is now the smartphone and all that, and build gadgets for healthcare.

Is this where you see next level wearables are going?

Yeah, absolutely. Today, wearables are devices with sensors that gather data and have output. I think what’s more powerful is the opposite direction. Feeding the body.

You did a prototype and tested it on yourself?

Yes. The first time I stuck the first HALO Prototype on my head two things happened. First thing: I completely blinded myself. I saw a massive bright light and was scared shitless. The second thing that happened is: I survived and was completely fine. Nothing really happened. Then I started to play around with experiments: I drew, I tried to memorize numbers, I played games. My performance with Halo always beat my usual scores. For instance I played the only game I had on

my iPhone. With stimulation I got five highscores in a row. Crushing my iPhone score, I saw the effect for the first time.

From there, we’ve been building something based on real science, real trials…

And there’s still a significant effect after taking the placebo effect and the learning curve, into account?

Yeah, after the crazy first experiment, we learnt more about biology and technology and wanted it to be safer, not shooting anything into our vision system and optic nerves again. We chose more rigorous trials from cognitive psychology. We recruited a group of people that were healthy and wanted to try it, trained them on the task first, divided them into groups secretly and gave some people real stuff and some people fake stuff. The guys who got real stimulation were much better.

Still, the development sounds more like wild style instead of common laboratory practice?

Think of the Royal Academy of Science or Galiani and Volta in Italy; this is exactly how they discovered stuff. ..Marie Curie killed herself..

And got two Noble Prizes. We are bringing the entrepreneur and technology culture to the body and medicine. And hope to unbottle technologies that have been in medicine for many years but their benefits haven’t been fully unlocked.

The video games are a silly example. If you had a stroke and couldn’t walk, Halo could help you relearn that. There is some very preliminary data about it, but think of brain damages from an accident, Alzheimer, Parkinson. There’s so many

problems we should be working on. So, yes, we brought punk to the laboratory in a sense that we are introducing a different mind-set.

There are many fields of application, from medical purposes to car racing, where would you like to start?

The potential of the technology is massive. The idea that you can boost your performance with wearable technology instead of exercise or meditation is huge.

It essentially impacts everything we do as people. We use our minds to do stuff. So where’s the limit? The best minds work on the worst problems: cancer, climate..

Imagine they could do these things even better. These extraordinary prospects are exciting!

This made you become Dr. Frankenstein? (laughs) I did a PhD at Stanford in cognitive science. While I was doing this work I was hearing about crazy things.

At the time it was even more marginal. I had heard about someone, nobody believed him, they thought he was an idiot…

But something that promises to make your mind work better is simply seductive. After I sold my last company last year, I started to remember the most amazing things I have ever been involved in. Halo made it to the top of my list. Also, when I started to research, I realised there hasn’t been much progress in the area, people still don’t believe in it. Then I built my prototype and once I saw this light flashing I knew this was something really magic!

Dr. Amol Sarva is an American entrepreneur who cofounded Virgin Mobile USA, the simple smartphone Peek, discussion platform Knotable, and Halo Neuroscience, a wearable technology for enhancing cognitive function.

OrCam - Disrupting Limited Vision Yonatan Wexler

The NYT tech columnist Nick Bilton announced that 2014 is going to be the year of wearables. And we believe he’s right. The last years brough us playful gadgets like Jawbone’s UP or Nike’s Fuel. This year, DLD has brought together a colourful mix of next generation wearables, many of them at the intersection of technology, health, and medicine. In this blog piece, the DLD14 speaker Yonatan Wexler introduces his supersmart wearable camera OrCam.

It is fitting that the solution to many difficulties experienced by the visually impaired should have been found in the field of Computer Vision – a branch of computer science that teaches computers to see.

Despite very significant technological advances in many fields, it is striking that so little assistive technology is available to the visually disabled. The assistive devices that are available tend to be awkward to use, and with limited capabilities.

According to the 2011 National Health Survey by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 21.2 million people in the United States over the age of 18 have some kind of visual impairment, including age-related conditions, diseases and birth defects. It is estimated that worldwide there are 342 million adults with significant visual impairment.

Enter OrCam, a small, wearable camera that allows the user to perform a variety of tasks that, although taken for granted by sighted people, are very difficult and complicated for those with limited vision. OrCam is unobtrusive and easily clips onto the wearer’s existing glasses, connected by a thin cable to a small pocket-sized computer. A bone-conduction

speaker provides discrete yet clear speech as it reads aloud the words or object pointed to by the user. OrCam can read text (books, newspapers, menus, signs and more) and recognize objects such as product, landmarks, traffic lights and faces.

One of its most useful features is being able to learn a new object so that the user can teach it to memorize a favorite product.

OrCam is based on computer vision algorithms – most notably the Shareboost algorithm – pioneered by Dr. Amnon Shashua, Dr. Shai Shalev-Shwartz and myself. The Shareboost method offers a reasonable trade-off between recognition accuracy and speed by actually minimizing the amount of additional computer power required with each new object it learns to recognize. This stands in sharp contrast to other approaches such as “deep learning” techniques which require huge computing resources. One of our biggest challenges was successfully recognizing visual information in different lighting conditions and on variable surfaces.

The device is not a medical device and is specifically designed with a very simple user interface. Simply stated, “point to read, wave to memorize” - to recognize an object or text, the wearer simply points at it with his or her finger, and the device then interprets the scene. The device is also programmed to recognize a pre-stored set of objects and allows the user to add to its collection by simply waving the object in the camera’s field of view.

I cannot begin to verbalize the intense satisfaction when I see a visually impaired person try the device and experience new freedom and independence for the first time. Our pilot shipment of the first 100 devices was completed this past October.

We’re working hard on making more improvements based on the user feedback we’ve received. Helping the visually disabled to overcome their challenges – particularly easy access to information – is a rewarding task indeed.

Jonatan Wexler is an experienced Computer Vision scientist who has spent the last three years with OrCam Technologies developing a unique device for blind and visually impaired people using sophisticated image and text recognition technology.

Music Content Meets

Jeanny Gering

Fabrice Sergent is the Founder and CEO of Cellfish, a leading digital publisher of innovative mobile content and applications. Especially music and live concert apps are an important part to Cellfish’s profile, not least because Fabrice is a music lover himself.

Find out more about the man behind the business in this exclusive interview for DLD.

Cellfish was founded ten years ago in 2014 just like DLD. What are some of your milestones of that decade?

It’s great to be a teenager! (laughs) We’ve gone through a lot of transformation in the past 10 years but the fundamentals of why we created this company have come true. Since our early beginnings, we have

been investing in mobile and social entertainment for music fans with initiatives such as BlingTones or more recently Bandsintown, which rapidly became the largest concert discovery app in America.

Even though record sales have declined over the last few years, we believe interest for music has never been stronger than it is today – where music fans can

watch, listen and explore music on more devices than ever before. As for our company milestones, there have been many.

From our successful acquisitions of Airborne Studios in 2010, Bandsintown in 2011 and ToneMedia this past year, to the expansion of our team to 240 staffers around the world to our diversified business model that enables us to reach 150 million music, sports and entertainment fans. The past 10 years have been very exciting and I look forward to the next 10 years.

Bandsintown is looking to reach a global audience. Which countries are the most interesting markets for you and why?

Bandsintown reaches a global audience in 210 countries – we’re the leading concert discovery app on iOS, Android, Amazon Kindle and Facebook. The majority of our users are in America, followed closely by the UK, Germany and then France. In terms of cities, London is our largest city outside of the U.S., which makes sense given the city’s musical roots. We hope to be even more relevant not only in these countries but also in Asia and Latin America, where we see the concert activities booming.

Bandsintown also works with a lot of Big Data. Can you see the trends in how music is being consumed?

We see trends in music consumption at Bandsintown but also through ToneMedia, our music ad platform. ToneMedia reaches 120 million music fans per month and with that combined data, we see trends quite clearly. For example, you no longer need to purchase an album when you can stream pretty much anything you want on Spotify for $10/month. Fans don’t need to carry their music collection around with them, they can stream it via Wi-Fi directly from the cloud. In the last five years in the U.S., the live music industry grey by 50 percent, which shows that even in times of economic downturn, the live concert experience is irreplaceable for most people. And that’s a global phenomenon because the balance between digital and physical is merging.

The fact that the rise of digital and social networks came at the same time as a boom in live music is very good news – especially for Bandsintown. We may operate in the digital space but our purpose is for you to get out and meet others in real life, through music.

What is your interest in music? Is it purely professional or are you a musician at heart?

Cellfish has always been very involved in music. Me and my cofounder, Julien Mitelberg, are large electronic music fans, always have been. I also like jazz. That’s one of the reasons why our company is focusing on music fans today. I believe you have to be passionate as an entrepreneur about what you do. It increases your energy levels.

Can you share your thoughts on how music is becoming more important in the advertising and branding industry?

It’s our belief that artists are becoming more and more the media, or a medium, themselves. Artists use social media and multiplatform publishing to promote themselves and reach their fans – it’s a direct one-to-one communication. Many managed to build a real fan following through social media and that’s where brands have a great opportunity. There has never been as much content creation around music as today. I think because artists touch people on a deeply personal level they can allow brands to attach themselves to that connection. So brands can really go much further – beyond the traditional endorsement of, for example being visible in the concert venue, they can really be part of the artist and their output and the dialogue with the fans.

Do you think that the branding industry will have an increasing influence on how the artists create their image? Or do you think the artist will be the trendsetters and brands will follow?

Just as artists discovered that selling records will not sustain their lifestyle, they also discovered that touring is the best way to make money in this industry.

Now artists are learning that brands are just another source of revenue for them, as we see in sports between athletes and brands. However, you have to be more creative in the music business. It really is about letting the artist be who they are and let them create their image and make the authentic connection with the fans. The big three labels (Sony, Universal and Warner) have had to narrow their strategy and eliminate risks when it comes to investing in artists – investing only in marketing clones with mass appeal and large sales potential. This opens the playing field for new and emerging talent who take risks, brand themselves and create a niche (like Lady Gaga), which any brand can tap into. It comes down to investment and risk; how much is your brand willing to put in and how much risk are you willing to take, when marrying your brand to a rising star?

So you think that social and mobile can save the music industry?

Definitely! If artists continue to use the social networks as they are now, I can see a renaissance coming out of this. We add about 2,000 new artists every week to our Bandsintown platform and 60% of all artists in America are using Bandsintown to market their tour dates online. Since touring is the main way for artists to make a living, and it’s their passion, they need these new channels of communication and platforms to make that work.

What was the last gig you went to?

The last concert was by a small band that we discovered through Bandsintown, who played our holiday party in NYC. They are called City Of The Sun and their sound is very eclectic – indie, folk and rock. They’re a really energizing band live!

What do you hope the next ten years will bring to the music and branding industry?

Our vision at Bandsintown is that there needs to be a place where fans can tell their concert stories. They want to share photos, video, tweets, etc… with their friends and to the world. We are evolving the platform to work before the show (concert alerts), during the show (tweets, photos, video), and after the show (concert ratings, memorabilia). We have about 700K RSVP’s to shows per month, so we can start displaying content amongst fans with others who were NOT able to attend. We are also testing tech that will activate mobile devices all at the same time during live events. I believe technology should improve society. I hope that we will create many more moments of passion and joy through music by providing fans with memorable experiences.

Fabrice Sergent is the Founder and CEO of Cellfish, one of the largest mobile and social media application publishers with a reach to over 150 million music, sports and entertainment fans.

He is a media and Internet pioneer with 20 years of experience, having led many multi-branded properties to market aimed at the mobile generation.

The World Mind That Came In From The Counterculture DLD Team Be imaginative, exciting, compelling, inspiring: That’s what John Brockman expects of himself and others. Arguably, the planet’s most important literary agent, Brockman brings its cyber elite together in his Internet salon „Edge.” Journalist Jordan Mejias paid a visit to the man from the Third Culture. (Published in FAZ ).

The Internet had yet to be born but the talk still revolved around it. In New York, that was, half a century ago. „Cage,“ as John Brockman recalls, „always spoke about the spirit that we all share. That wasn’t some kind of holistic nonsense.

He was talking about profound cybernetic ideas.“ He got to hear about them on one of the occasions when John Cage, the music revolutionary, Zen master and

mushroom collector, cooked mushroom dishes for him and a few friends. At some point Cage packed him off home with a book. „That’s for you,“ were his parting words. After which he never exchanged another word with Brockman. Something that he couldn’t understand for a long time. „John, that’s Zen,“ a friend finally explained to him. „You no longer need him.“

Wowe

© Edge.org

Norbert Wiener was the name of the author, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine the name of the book. Page by page Brockman battled his way through the academic text, together with Stewart Brand, his friend, who was about to publish the Whole Earth Catalog, the shopping primer and bible of the environmentally-driven counterculture. For both readers, physics and mathematics expanded into an infinite space that no longer distinguished between the natural and human sciences, mind and matter, searching and finding.

Like the idea of the Internet—which was slowly acquiring contours during these rambling 1960s discussions—the idea of Edge, the Internet salon around which Brockman’s life now revolves, was also taking shape. Edge is the meeting place for the cyber elite, the most illustrious minds who are shaping the emergence of the latest developments in the natural and social sciences, whether they be digital, genetic, psychological, cosmological or neurological. Digerati from the computer universe of Silicon Valley aren’t alone in giving voice to their ideas in Brockman’s salon. They are joined in equal measure by other eminent experts, including the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the cosmologist Martin

Rees, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the economist, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, the quantum physicist David Deutsch, the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, and the social theorist Anthony Giddens.

Ranging from the co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak to the decoder of genomes Craig Venter, his guest list is almost unparalleled even in the boundless realm of the Internet. Even the actor Alan Alda and writer Ian McEwan can be found in his forum.

John Brockman is a cultural impresario, whose career has encompassed the avant-garde art world, science, books, software, and the Internet. He is publisher and editor of Edge.org, the highly acclaimed website devoted to discussions of cutting edge science, and CEO of Brockman, Inc. the leading international literary agency for serious nonfiction authors.

Keeping the Internet Open in 2014

All Hands on Deck Albert Wenger

For the New Year, I tweeted that we should “ll work together in 2014 to keep the Internet open for the benefit of humankind everywhere.” That couldn’t be any more pressing as there is a full scale assault under way and we don’t seem to be doing much about it.

MediaMatters

by the desire to support players such as Netflix. The MPAA has just joined the W3C which is likely to help accelerate this (check out the Twitter replies to the announcement).

First, thanks to Edward Snowden we have a much better view into the extent of domestic and international surveillance activities. The non-democratic ultrasecret and blackhat based approach taken by the NSA has done much to undermine the trust required for an open Internet. A full on embrace of crypto and anonymity as a response has the potential to self limit openness. We need to make an overhaul of the NSA’s budget, civilian supervision, transparency of reporting a top political and protest priority for 2014. As part of this I support a pardon for Snowden.

Second, we have the rise of ISP level filtering. The UK is taking an unfortunate lead here. Not surprisingly this is being done under the guise of protecting children from pornography. This is of course energizing calls for ISP or country-level filtering in other places, such as Australia. Herdict is a project by the Berkman center to try to measure the impact of these kinds of filters on the reachability of different web sites. We should be supporting projects like this and actively protesting ISP level filtering ideally boycotting ISPs that filter if there are ones available in your region that don’t.

Third, the W3C seems to be moving closer to including DRM as a web standard. This seems partially in response to the burgeoning proprietary DRM solutions being pushed by different browser providers which in turn appears driven

Fourth, as more and more Internet traffic is moving to wireless devices with the continued fast growth of smartphones, AT&T is gutting net neutrality with a „sponsored” bandwidth scheme. In essence large providers can subsidize bandwidth which will then not count towards a monthly cap in plans. This is the kind of move that strongly tilts the playing field in the favor of large incumbents, many of which are the same companies that cooperated with the government on secret surveillance and are supporting proprietary DRM. I am sure there is more, but these are the four that are on my mind. It will require a concerted effort by everyone who cares about these issues to help push back this year.

Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures. He currently serves on the board of several companies including Foursquare, MongoDB, Shapeways, Twilio and Wattpad. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT.

It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD

Cyber World Rod Beckstrom

The Internet is history’s biggest and most complex system but it wasn’t designed for security. It was intended to be open and engaging - a platform for sharing and collaboration that was accessible to everyone everywhere.

Free Press

But the door we’ve opened to innovation and sharing comes with unintended consequences, and living with a serious cyber threat is our new global reality: The book The Starfish and The Spider: the Unstoppable Power Of Leaderless (Beckstrom & Brafman; 2006) introduced a model for thinking about decentralized networks, organizational leadership, strategy, competition and evolution. And it is helpful to consider the growing cyber threat in a comparable framework.

BECKSTROM’S LAW OF CYBERSECURITY 1. Anything attached to a network can be hacked.

2. Everything is being attached to networks.

3. Everything is vulnerable.

My cybersecurity model relates to what is really going on in our new, more vulnerable world - from a systems perspective, and from a realpolitik perspective.

And it starts with a basic fact. Through the impact and reach of the Internet, the world of power and politics has changed forever. We now live in a MAD, MAD, MAD cyber world.

First, let’s look at the classic MAD: nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction. Nuclear MAD evolved from the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons after World War II. It changed the nature of war and geopolitics and helped secure the precarious peace among superpowers that has held for almost seventy years while countless small regional wars have been fought.

The second MAD is cyber MAD, or Mutually Assured Disruption. It echoes the underlying concept of nuclear MAD: nation states and others have the ability to cripple each other’s power systems, industries and economies through broad-scale cyber attacks (Stuxnet ist he most salient case). And like nuclear MAD, cyber MAD leads to some level of deterrence among nation states. If one government launches a full-scale cyber attack on another, they or the people in their country are likely to receive the same back. And they know it. But cyber MAD is fundamentally different from nuclear MAD. Nuclear weapons have not been used in war since 1945. But cyber weapons are used millions of times every second. Nuclear weapons are discrete, identifiable and easy to detect if detonated. Cyber weapons are pervasive, unidentified and often difficult or impossible to detect and attribute. So some of the lessons the Cold War taught to many of our current government policymakers are radically inapplicable to cyber MAD.

The third MAD is Mutually Assured Dependence on the Internet, or simply Internet MAD, reflecting our shared reliance on the Internet, and upon each other through the Internet, for communications, commerce, power, travel, shipping, infrastructure – in fact, for almost everything we do. That makes Internet MAD a positive force that delivers incredible benefits to mankind. Most individuals and countries could not function very well without it, and our reliance is growing. A recent survey showed that 57 percent of American women would give up sex for a week before they would give up their smartphones. If that’s not a sign of Internet addiction, I don’t know what is.

THE INTERNET CREATES BENEFIT FOR THE HUMAN MANKIND The Internet benefits all nations, no matter their political orientation, and though they may disagree on some aspects of its use, most of them recognize the importance of keeping it working. Internet MAD helps hold our world together. There are significant implications for nation states and for citizens of the world in this MAD, MAD, MAD cyber world. Governments and societies must evolve to cope with a new reality, just as the world learned to cope with nuclear MAD after World War II. There are many motivations for

attacking systems: obtaining state secrets, accessing commercially sensitive information, stealing assets, political activism.

But even those who hack and attack want the Internet to work. They know that without it, they couldn’t achieve their broader goals, whatever they may be.

Nonetheless, about 70,000 new strains of malware appear every day.

The growth of nuclear weapons was contained first by non-proliferation - limiting the number of nations with weapons - and then by arms negotiations to limit the number of weapons. In cyber space, there are no effective containment policies and the scale, diversity, and growth rate of the Internet mean that none are likely to emerge in the near future.

And the current rapid pace of tech development is far beyond that of nuclear development when nuclear MAD was in full play. According to reports, more than 100 nations are investing in offensive cyber capabilities. Relationships among cyber attackers – where they even exist lack trust, engagement and cohesion, and an atmosphere of retaliation prevails. It’s like the Wild West - except that it engulfs the planet.

This produces a very different set of challenges for those who seek to contain the growing cyber threat. As we learn to live in this MAD cyber world, we must work together to create a more stable and secure Internet, because the downside of

Internet MAD’s positive mutual dependence is that the capacity for destruction at the hands of cyber attackers is immense. Some might propose breaking up the Internet to protect their national interests, creating separate and self-contained national networks (think of the recurrent debate in the EU in the NSA scandal aftermath). But as we move steadily closer to connecting every person in the world, our economic future will depend even more on maintaining a unified global Internet. It is the foundation for continued innovation and economic growth and a platform for communication across cultural borders and political boundaries. Its unity is essential to our collective future.

SO HOW DO WE DEFEND OURSELVES AGAINST CYBER ATTACK? In the spirit of collaboration, I have some ideas to contribute.

First, we must develop global definitions, norms and standards for cybersecurity. Second, we must build global trust.

Third, we need to use transparency and economic incentives to drive to a higher level of security. Lastly, we must build better security into the Internet itself.

These ideas are just a beginning, a means of starting this crucial global discussion.

The Internet is one of mankind’s greatest collective achievements and protecting it is fundamental to our future. The moment has come to bring sanity back to our MAD, MAD, MAD cyber world.

Rod Beckstrom is a well-known cybersecurity authority, Internet leader and expert on organizational leadership. Rod currently serves as an advisor to multinational companies, governments and international institutions, including serving as Chief Security Advisor to Samsung SSIC.

89PLUS

Hans Ulrich Obrist

On The Intersection of Technology And Art Hans Ulrich Obrist, a scheduled speaker at DLD14 and co-director of exhibitions and programs and director of international projects at London’s Serpentine Galleries, recently spoke to Informilo’s Eric Sylvers about the nexus of art and tech.

Is it fair to say that the intersection of art and tech is one of the focuses at the Serpentine Galleries in London? Will it become a bigger one in future?

Yes, absolutely. We have done the 89plus Marathon, bringing together 40 speakers. When we think about the future of the gallery we think about how it is an important moment to expand the digital aspect of the galleries and the art displayed. We hired a digital curator so it is clearly a very important focus for us.

You have been involved with the DLD conference for a long time. What attracts you to come to DLD and what do you think has been the winning formula of DLD founder Steffi Czerny?

With the introduction of 3D printing and the maker revolution there seems to be more of a mash-up these days between art and technology — do you agree?

The nexus of art and technology is very key for our time. Each year I curate an arts panel at DLD. We did a panel in 2010 which focused on clouds, which have played such an important role in art and also in poetry. And obviously now there is the digital cloud. Many of the challenges of our time need a multidisciplinary approach, for example engineering and design meet art. Two years ago at DLD we looked into post-Internet art and how it was basically bringing together a whole generation of artists. Internet is no longer a fascination and post-Internet artists just use it as part of the current condition.

I’m always thinking about how can we go into the future, to curate the future in relation to technology.

I think Steffi is one of the great junction makers of our time. No one does it better than her connecting people from different fields. DLD is a laboratory for me to test different things and I learn so much every time. So many new ideas come to me there. I would never miss it. DLD is a magical moment. Wherever Steffi is she brings people together. In this sense DLD never stops, it’s 365 days a year.

You have helped bring many interesting people to DLD. Can you give me a few names and talk about how you think their participation has helped further the conversation at DLD? For the panel we did about how a 21stcentury art and architecture school would link to technology we brought together [Dutch architect] Rem Koolhaas with artists like Thomas Demand and Piero Golia and with patron and collector Maja Hoffmann. This panel triggered the beginning of the Strelka School in Moscow so these panels are also about production of reality. For the Parallel Universes we started the dialog between artists Olafur Eliasson and Ai Weiwei. For Solar we brought together [Whole Earth Catalog editor] Stewart Brand in collaboration with Edge.org and John Brockman. Also present were Eliasson and artist Tino Sehgal as well as several inventors of solar technology.

89plus is about helping young artists get exposure. Why is this necessary when the digital revolution is leveling the playing field by making it easier for everybody to get exposure?

Simon Castets and I founded 89plus in order to be useful to artists and we hope that all the projects do have utility and I think they do. Very often these young artists haven’t meet their peers from around the world and we give them an opportunity to do that. We believe it’s important to bring all these geographies together and trigger meetings. Many of these artists have very experimental work and we want to facilitate their work and help them realize their art. We are now installing residencies such as the 89plus residency with Google. They invite the artists to create a new work.

You have mentioned how the idea for your Instagram handwriting project came from something the Italian writer Umberto Eco had written. Can you give us the details?

In a Guardian article, which had been translated from an Italian newspaper, Umberto Eco lamented the disappearance of handwriting among kids. When I read that over breakfast I though that is totally true, everything happens on a computer now. I thought rather than send kids back to take a course in calligraphy, which is what Eco was calling for, it would be interesting to introduce handwriting to the digital age.

A few days later I was in the studio of the artist Ryan Trecartin in Los Angeles with the writer Kevin McGarry when Ryan said you should join Instagram. All of a sudden he took my iPhone and downloaded the app onto the phone. He took a photo of me with his phone and put it on his Instagram account and suddenly I’m thrown in the water. I didn’t know what to do with my account. I came back to Europe, it was December, and went on Christmas vacation with Etel Adnan

How does the Instagram handwriting project fit with your foray into digital art?

and Simone Fattal at the seaside in Italy.

We recorded long conversations. We started speaking about handwriting and I thought I could post sentences. I meet great artists, writers, scientists and architects and I saw I could post their writings.

A sort of visual tweet put on Instagram and then also on Twitter. It became a ritual. I believe in rituals. Now every day I post one thing on Instagram. That is the genesis. It’s an infinite conversation. For me it is kind of a movement of some sort.

I want to celebrate the beauty of handwriting.

The Instagram project has very much grown out of the Do It project. In 1993 one of my first projects was Do It, which addressed the digitalization of art. We invited artists to write a recipe that other people could do and posted the results online (www.e-flux.com). We thought of how to do it on the Internet. It grew from there. In my work that was the first time I thought about digitalization and now with Instagram there is no end in sight.

I’m endlessly excited every day to do it and will continue this year and maybe for several years or the rest of my life. Do It has gone on for 20 years.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991 he has curated more than 250 shows.

Compassion Tania Singer

Questions about the difference between empathy and compassion, or about whether compassion can be trained, are now answered by a newly published eBook and film. A Christmas Treat from Tania Singer and the DLD Team.

Edited by Tania Singer and Matthias Bolz from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, the book explains how mental training transforms the human brain, and that compassion can reduce pain. It summarises fascinating results of the science of compassion, but also describes training programmes and practical experiences. The book thus provides not only a unique overview of current research into empathy and compassion, but also offers an exciting way of approaching the topic for interested readers—including useful information for everyday life. The eBook has evolved from a workshop, How to Train Compassion, which was organised by Singer’s department and hosted in artist Olafur Eliasson’s studio in Berlin back in 2011. It was produced with the support of the Max Planck Society, offering the reader many videos from the workshop, sound art collages by Nathalie Singer, as well as impressive pieces of visual art by Olafur Eliasson.

The film Raising Compassion brings together workshop participants in a remarkable exchange between science, art, and contemplative practice. In a series of informal conversations about compassion, initiated by Tania Singer and Olafur Eliasson, they discuss the public perception of compassion, compassion-training programs at various research centers, their experiences working with prisoners and in hospitals, and promote the practical uses of compassion-training in dealing with social-political issues. The eBook can be downloaded, and the film can be viewed here.

Tania Singer is the Director of the Department of Social Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, where she investigates the foundations of human social behaviour.

Content & Context Index 1.

Content & Context

2.

Emerging Cloud Trends

3.

Designed Systems Embed Morality

4.

Waze and Means

5.

The BIT - Barry Silbert’s Cryptocurrency Investment Fund

6.

Content that Connects

7.

Smarter Typing

8.

Mindset of Abundance - Dream that Everything is Possible

9.

Advertising is Rocket Science

10. The Rise of Native Advertising 11. What Artificial Intelligence Means for Consumers and Businesses 12. Why Bitcoin is Better Than Central Bank Money 13. Wearable Electromagnetic Kicks for your Perfomance 14. OrCam - Disrupting Limited Vision 15. Music Meets Content 16. The World Mind That Came In From The Counterculture 17. Keeping the Internet Open in 2014 - All Hands on Deck 18. It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD Cyber World 19. Hans Ulrich Obrist - On The Intersection of Technology And Art 20. Compassion

©GERSINA

Content & Context Jennifer Schenker

Ever since its creation in 2004 DLD founder Steffi Czerny and co-chairs Hubert Burda and Israeli tech investor Yossi Vardi have invited some of the brightest and most interesting people on the planet to brainstorm and network at this invitation-only conference in Munich.

It is no accident that DLD’s motto is “connect the unexpected”: Czerny, known for her neon-colored tights and warm smile, is a consummate connector who prefers to put the spotlight on others, rather than herself. Informilo’s Editor-in-Chief Jennifer L. Schenker takes you backstage to find out more about the woman who launched DLD and what to expect from the conference.

How did you end up creating a conference that the digerati, writers, musicians, artists and scientists all want to attend?

Tell us a little about your background.

I was born in Bavaria. My mother was involved with the German American Society so from my early childhood we always had guests from abroad in our house. I have always been very curious and in the ‚70s spent a year in the U.S., living on The Farm, a famous commune in Tennessee which was formed by San Francisco hippies. It is interesting to note that four members of the Farm later started the WELL, one of the most influential early online communities. It was all about alternative lifestyles. In the beginning it was fantastic but in the end the people became fanatic and it became like a sect so I went back to Germany, studied political science and history, trained as a journalist at the prestigious DJS (Deutsche Journalistenschule [German School of Journalism]) which was very hard to get into but somehow I made it, and started to write for newspapers and lifestyle magazines.

I met Hubert Burda (the chairman of Burda Media) in 1995 and I found him to be outstanding as a publisher, as a poet, as an artist, and an amazing person. I guess I must have made some impressions on him too because he asked me if I would like to come and work for him. Burda was the first German publishing house to invest in Internet activities. It was the beginning of the Internet. He said to me, ‘media has totally changed, you are a curious person — help me to figure out how to change from a traditional publishing company into a modern media company.’

Hubert sent me very early to conferences such as TED in Monterey. There was nothing like it in Germany or Europe at this time so I thought, ‘let’s do something like this here.’ I was working with Christa Maar, the head of the Burda Foundation, and went to Israel, where I met Yossi Vardi. We kept running into each other at conferences and decided to launch a conference together. We created a forerunner to the DLD Tel Aviv conference called, ‘Cool People in the Hot Desert’ 11 years ago, long before it was in vogue for everyone to think of Israel as the start-up nation. And then we decided to do a Digital Life Design conference in Munich.

What kind of conference did you set out to create?

We started with 300 people and the concept of gathering people from various backgrounds who are open to new ideas and creating an open atmosphere. At DLD speakers don’t speak and then go; it is more of a community experience. DLD is about investing in people — we invite people who are not famous because of their character. I can tell when someone is burning for an idea — when he or she is totally enthusiastic about what they do.

This kind of engagement, of energetic fever — to produce, transform, to disrupt something —is the recipe for DLD and has made the conference successful.

[Yahoo CEO] Marissa Mayer was seven times at DLD. The first time she came nobody knew her. Now she is a superstar. When [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg presented, Facebook only had a few million users. [Chinese artist] Ai Weiwei was invited to speak in 2007.

And, we took a bet on a blond girl from New York with a strange name who behaved strangely on the advice of a music agent I know because she had a fire in her — and had Lady Gaga perform live at DLD before anyone had heard of her.

I connect with these people through a network of friends, and I trust and act on their recommendations — otherwise you would always see the same people at the conference. DLD is an ecosystem — you have to feed it carefully — not too much fertilizer — not too much water — and then it works.

Since much of the conversation at DLD centers around digital disruption it is not surprising that previous speakers have included Google chairman Eric Schmidt, YouTube founder Chad Hurley and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. But the mix has also included scientists such as biologists Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins, authors such as Nassim Taleb, musician Yoko Ono and Nobel Laureates Martti Ahtisaari, Muhammad Yunus and Daniel Kahneman. And you have made some very unusual pairings on stage. Can you give us some examples?

DLD is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. What are your goals for the conference going forward?

I would love for the network process to be even more intense –– to be able to pair all the relevant people to each other. Content & Context [this year’s theme] not only refers to the fact that technologies are starting to “understand” things about us and our environment. It also describes DLD in a nutshell — connecting people and ideas to inspire each other and discover common patterns.

Former Facebook president Sean Parker and Alchemist author Paulo Coelho; Esther Dyson and her father, the physicist Freeman Dyson and her brother [author and science historian] George Dyson; Nobel Laureate Marttii Ahtisaari and his son [technology entrepreneur] Marko, to name a few.

Steffi Czerny is Managing Director of DLD Media and co-founder of DLD Conference as well as its global spin-offs DLDwomen Conference, DLD Tel Aviv Festival, DLDmoscow and DLDcities.

Joining the Burda group in 1995, Steffi has held several executive positions in new media activities.

ŠBOSTAN

Emerging Cloud Trends Werner Vogels

Since the first DLD 10 years ago we have seen many changes in technology. It could be argued that many of the biggest changes we have seen are powered by cloud computing. In that time the cloud has moved from being a technology that we were using internally at Amazon.com, as a way to better serve our customers, to the driver of tremendous innovation in hundreds of thousands of companies around the world.

In the last 10 years we have seen the cloud revolutionising how businesses operate in the same way as the electricity grid at the start of the 20th century. No longer do organisations need to focus valuable human and capital resources on maintaining and procuring expensive technology hardware, they can focus on what they do best, building better products and services for their customers. From the world’s fastest growing start-ups, like Dropbox, Instagram, Spotify, Pinterest and Shazam, through to some of the world’s largest enterprises, like Samsung, Royal Dutch Shell and Unilever, through to governments and education and research institutes, all are using cloud computing technologies to innovate and better serve their customers and citizens around the world.

Despite all of the amazing innovation we have already seen since the first DLD, all that time ago, we are still at Day One. Into the next decade cloud will power exciting innovations in ways we have not even considered yet and will touch every area of our lives. Out of everything our customers are doing I have picked four trends that are set to become big over the coming year.

CLOUD WILL ENABLE YOUR CONTENT TO FOLLOW YOU WHEREVER YOU GO

Cloud has changed how we interact with mobile devices. In the past content would be moved to the device, now devices are just a window to content and services that live in the cloud. This started with our smartphones and tablets, where regardless of which device we use, or the location, we have access to our content and subscriptions. Now this approach is migrating to non-mobile devices such as Samsung Smart TV’s. The devices are beautifully designed and beautifully built but the core functionally of these television sets is software connected to services running in the cloud. This is also moving beyond traditional devices, for example my car is already connected to my Amazon Cloud Player giving me music everywhere I go. I have seen the first treadmills where the moment I step on them they reconfigure to give access to my music & videos, my newspaper subscriptions and books, but also my documents in services like Dropbox. I no longer need to bring my content; cloud enables my content to follow me wherever I go.

Mick Stevens / The New Yorker

CLOUD BASED ANALYTICS ENHANCES THE OFF LINE WORLD.

The cloud is already the place where researchers collaborate on data that flows in real-time from devices such as the Mars Rover or the Ilumina DNA sequencer into cloud storage. In the future expect an explosion in data generation by real-world devices and where that data is stored, analysed and shared in the cloud. For example we will see a rise in the industrial cloud where industrial environments are equipped with sensors producing data to improve efficiency and reliability. An example is the project we run with GE on instrumenting their Gas Turbines or with Shell where they are going to drop sensors in their oil wells that generate Petabytes of data.

Also in our daily lives we will see the rise of cloud connected sensors and devices such as the Nest Thermostat or the home control applications built by energy companies like Essent. Around the world pu-

blic transport companies are instrumenting their busses and trams with sensors that feed into platforms like One Bus Away that can give real-time updates to travellers. Passengers themselves can also become sensors: services like Mooveit use the anonymised information from an application on passengers’ phones to give real time transport information in the same way that Waze does for cars.

FASTER AND FASTER, CLOUD MOVES DATA PROCESSING TO REAL-TIME

Up until this point Big Data has very much focused on looking historically people who brought product X also brought product Y, the market moved in this direction last week so is likely to move in that direction now. There has always been a close relationship between Big Data and cloud computing as it requires no limits in terms of compute and storage but, as AWS is adding real-time processing capabilities, we see we a rise in data analytics that is able to produce results for our cu-

stomers in real-time, radically changing the products they can build. For example we see companies with real time recommendations, in the form of “other people in your network are reading X”. Some of the frontrunners here are the companies working on second screen technologies, such as Channel 4, that make use of real-time data to power the information they present to augment TV watching. A company like Netflix that processes over 40 Billion events a day uses real-time analytics to power their operations, their customer engagement and their business metrics.

We see almost every industry taking advantage of the cloud to radically improve the speed at which they can process their data; take Bankinter in Spain for example. Bankinter uses AWS for their credit risk simulations to assess the financial health of their clients. By using AWS they have been able to reduce their processing time from 23 hours to 20 minutes. This is taking analysis from looking back a day to near real time computation.

anyone can become an internet broadcaster operating worldwide without any capital investment. A well-known case is that of the AWS powered LiverpoolTV but every football club worldwide is following their example.

Another very popular case is that of performing arts organizations, from orchestras to theatre companies, which give exclusive access to their performances through cloud-based media production.

This way they are able to reach a much larger audience, which would often not be able to attend their performances in person. It extends their revenue potential, which is needed in times where arts subsidies are disappearing. A good example is Berliner Philharmoniker, the world famous orchestra that gives access to their live performances through the digitalconcerthall.com that makes use of all AWS regions around the world to provide a high quality media experience.

THE CLOUD ALLOWS EVERYONE TO BECOME A MEDIA COMPANY

In 2014 expect a great rise in organizations that are adding media capabilities to their offerings. A good example is sports clubs. All are looking for ways to establish an engagement with their fan base beyond the 2 hours on a weekend.

A successful way to achieve a weeklong engagement is by daily distribution or fresh, exclusive media content. The subscription revenues for clubs that often have millions of fans around the world are substantial. Cloud based services for pre and post production, as well as distribution, are readily available such that

Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale.

Designed Systems Embed Morality Lukas Kubina

“Evgeny Morozov vs. The Internet“ read the headline of the Columbia Journalism Review a few weeks ago. Indeed, the controversial 29 year old is taking on the manifold myths of “disruptive technologies” and unmasks them as marketing jargon. Instead of attributing an inherent force to technology that is capable of saving the world, he is advocating to bethink the social, political, and economic systems. And to get real.

Snappy terms like “Internet Freedom” and “Digital Diplomacy” claim that technology is benevolent. You are stressing its ambivalent effects on democratization and democracies. What’s this thing - “The Internet” - to you?

I don’t believe there’s much point in talking about “technology” as a causal force. I like to think in terms of systems – of social arrangements, meanings, and machines. Those can do many things: enslave, liberate, empower, disempower, make people sad or happy. Some of these systems – or assemblages or apparatuses as they are also called – can be tweaked such that they help forces that are not necessarily interested in democratization, be that dictators or corporations or whoever. I think this is a pretty simple message actually. There’s, however, a certain sense of coherence that we attribute to a set of systems (or assemblages or apparatuses) that, for very complex reasons, we decided to call “the Internet.” I think that this sense of coherence – which, on most interpretations, also holds that “the Internet” is a natural ally of democracy – is false. Figuring out why we have these assumptions is a big challenge and that’s why I spend more and more time working on some kind of intellectual and cultural history of how we talk about “the Internet” - and technology more broadly.

From the Twitter Revolution (Iran) to the Youtube War (Syria), the impact of social media in political turmoil has been widely propagated in the past years. What do you think about its part?

I’m increasingly reluctant to speculate on issues that ought not to be interpreted through the lenses of technology. To be frank, I have no clue about the political consequences of the Arab Spring, as the process is still very much on-going, especially in Egypt. To speculate about the role of social media in such a messy process would be silly – a mistake that many commentators have committed. There’s no denying that technological infrastructure tends to play a major supporting role in political processes that are unfolding in most countries today. Who would be surprised by this discovery these days?

But to understand the exact impact, you need to know something about the dynamics of those processes and then figure out what features of what tools and platforms are most conducive to speeding up or slowing down some of those dynamics.

The idea that some wise guys in Silicon Valley or New York can tell you the impact of social media on the Arab Spring without knowing a single thing about the Middle East is laughable.

©DLD

„For American spies, Big Data is like crack cocain“, you said once and were suggesting sending them on „big data rehab.“ The Snowden revelations have triggered a lively debate in Germany. What do you think of “information sovereignty“ and initiatives like the Schengen Cloud?

What’s so lively about the debate in Germany? It’s the same thing all over again: we have to pass new laws, we have to press the US to do something, we want a no-spy treaty. This is all like rearranging chairs on the Titanic. There’s a huge structural change in how we think about transactions and enterprise, with reputation – and personal data – suddenly playing a very important role, perhaps, becoming a new form of currency. Under this new regime, we would want to pay for stuff with our own personal information, which we would also want to collect. No laws or tools would be of much help to people who want to self-disclose information about them for personal gain. This is an on-going transformation at the very heart of capitalism. Snowden’s revelations hinted at that but few people have pursued this line of inquiry in the mainstream debate – in part because the debate is dominated by lawyers focused on constitutional rights and hackers who want to build privacy-protecting tools.

What we need is to bring in some people

with understanding of politics and economics. This is not a debate about legal transgressions – it’s a debate about future of capitalism. Schengen Cloud or no Schengen Cloud, there’s much more at stake here.

Kenneth Roth, the director of HRW, pointed at a particular problem: the erosion of trust in US Internet companies will trigger information sovereignty in authoritarian states and the capabilities of domestic censorship (eg. Russia, China or Iran). How do you view the recent statement by Silicon Valley giants demanding more protection from the NSA. Is it credible? Can it make a difference?

The argument about information sovereignty is a valid concern. On the other hand, I don’t mind seeing Brazil or India taking active steps to think about alternative technological arrangements that would lessen their reliance on Silicon Valley and the distributed cloud-computing model. I don’t much care for Silicon Valley giants. Much of what they provide right now, in my opinion, ought to be provided by a different model, with a much stronger public involvement. What they present to us as apps and start-ups could very well be end-points of public infrastructure that would operate on a very different, non-commercial logic.

Market logic has replaced morality. We are trading our data in exchange for a service. We get Gmail for free and non-encrypted - so Google can monetize with ads and it is easily traceable for NSA? Shouldn’t we finally reinstall the logic that good service can be paid in a currency which isn’t data?

Well, yes. Some services ought to be paid with our taxes; others with fees; some ought to be a combination of the two.

And not all of them ought to be privately run. I think advertising is just a prelude to something much bigger; eventually both Google and Facebook will be in data-heavy industries like banking and insurance. And they will be much better and more ruthless than their existing competitors simply because they have access to so much data. I’m not sure I would trust Google to provide responsible banking services given how much it knows about customers.

worthy causes – like free software – and turn them into more dubious ones – like open-source. We need to understand how that happens and we need to be very careful about the terms we use. But I think the big step that we must take is to resituate the technology debate in debates about economics and politics. This is the only appropriate context that matters: we don’t just use iPhone apps to track our health – we use them to track our health at a time when Big Pharma companies hold more power than ever, when the idea of public health is crumbling, when patients are encouraged to distrust doctors and take matters into their own hands, when we are told that we have to proactively manage every potential disease before we see any symptoms. This is the right context for understanding a phenomenon like The Quantified Self: we can’t make sense of it just by analysing decisions by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

17 years ago, Carl Sagan warned that society should pay more attention to science and technology, to avoid that eventually we don’t run things anymore but things run us. This call for scepticism resonates well with your latest book “Solutionism” in which you criticize that Internet corporations control the public debate and sell us expropriation and manipulation as progress. How can we bring the social, political, and economic systems back into the debate?

One way to do it, I hope, is to constantly reveal that the technological is also the political. Designed systems embed morality – and we need to understand how they do it. We also have to be critical of all the terms we take for granted today: innovation, disruption, and so on. Silicon Valley doesn’t just come with apps – it also comes with words. Often, they take

Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar in the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford University and a Scwhartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He is also a blogger and contributing editor to Foreign Policy Magazine.

Jennifer Schenker

Waze and Means

Noam Bardin, a scheduled speaker at DLD, is the CEO of Waze, the Israeli crowd-sourced navigation and mapping app that sold to Google last summer for $1.15 billion.

Bardin, who holds a B.A. in Economics from Hebrew University and a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, recently spoke with Informilo’s Jennifer L. Schenker about Waze before and after the sale.

Why sell to Google rather than go public?

Why go public at all? None of us saw going public as a positive. I ran a tech company that went public [VoIP provider DeltaThree] and it was one of the worst experiences of my life. Why is the old model of an IPO still relevant? There are many other monetization models that don’t require it. The question is more why we didn’t stay independent.

Why didn’t you?

In the world of tech today the reality is that four, five large conglomerates will end up owning most of the technology.

The large companies are going to build a product anytime something proves to be a success. In the case of Waze we were competing directly with Nokia, Google, Apple and TomTom which was quite something for a small company based in Ra’anana in Israel. If you are going to get really big you have to come up with a new platform. And only one successful platform along the lines of those built by the likes of a Google or a Facebook or maybe a Twitter comes along every ten years.

The odds of it happening are slim. Every start-up should assume it will not happen to them so then the question is, ‚how big can you grow on your own and who is the right company to acquire you?’ For us it all came together.

What other benefits do you think the company has reaped since the Google acquisition?

A big mistake we made was not hiring more aggressively in 2013. By the end of 2012 we only had 108 people and should have had more. But we were conservative and agoni-

zed over each hire. We would wait until one of our employees would fall apart from exhaustion before getting them help because we didn’t want to create more overhead. What Google has done is to put their recruiting force behind us — now we have multiple people whose only job is to focus on recruitment for us.

We are hiring very fast. Google knows how to find the best people everywhere; so we have a well-oiled machine working behind us now.

The sale created a lot of millionaires — including you — but a lot of people don’t realize there is a whole other group of people who benefited: the Waze sale netted $1.5 million for Tmura, an organization that for the past decade has offered high-tech entrepreneurs the opportunity to donate their start-up’s shares or stock options — as Waze did three years ago — with the proceeds going to help the disadvantaged in Israel. What led Waze to give a percentage of its shares to the organization in the first place?

The model used by Tmura began in the U.S. but never really took off there.

That’s because Americans regularly give to causes; it’s part of their culture. This is not the case in Israel. So it was important to build a philanthropic model for Israeli high-tech people and that is what Tmura has done.

In 2013 Tmura distributed over $2 million to Israeli charities focused on kids and education. We involved all the employees in shortlisting five philanthropic organizations we wanted to support. It was a very moving moment. People were literally in tears when they suddenly saw what life is like for people below the poverty line in Israel.

tech brands. The most important factor in determining the success of a start-up is the experience of the founders along with who are their investors and mentors.

When people eventually leave Waze, we will be releasing into the market developers and product people who have done it before, seen it and understand what it takes to become very big globally.

Another great social outcome from our exit is that one of our investors, Li Ka-Shing (the billionaire investor behind Horizon Ventures, a Hong-Kong based firm that invests in early-stage ventures in the tech sector), donated the proceeds from the Waze exit. When Waze — his first tech investment in Israel — was sold to Google he donated $130 million to the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology, a public research institute located in Haifa) and another $140 million to a project promoting cooperation between the Technion and a Chinese university; so now Israelis attending the Technion can spend time studying in China. So a lot of public good has come out of Waze.

What’s next for Waze?

We have to look at the world at the scale of a Google — that is our challenge now.

But Google is letting us be independent and allowing us to do things that are different and outside of its comfort zone.

You will not see Waze becoming more like Google Maps but rather more and more of something else based on a stronger community, that is more social and used as an everyday commuting tool.

Waze has become the new poster child for tech success in Israel and is inspiring a whole new generation of start-ups to focus on being mobile first. In what other ways do you think the sale has impacted the Israeli start-up scene?

We are recruiting Israelis from abroad who work for Google and want to come back to Israel. We are also recruiting a lot in Israel so more Israelis are going to get trained in the Google way and see the world at a scale that doesn’t exist in Israel.

This was one of the key things that Israel was missing in the ‚90s: to know how do Bay area companies work and think, how start-ups go from small to huge and to do one of the things that makes Silicon Valley so special — building global

Noam Bardin has served as CEO of Waze since March 2009, building the company to become one of the world’s most talked-about startups through its acquisition by Google in June 2013. Noam continues to lead the global Waze team within Google to help Wazers around the world enjoy faster, safer drives.

Creative Commons

The BIT - Barry Silbert’s Cryptocurrency Investment Fund Lukas Kubina

Barry Silbert has been a trailblazer on the intersection of technology and finance for many years. When he first spoke at DLD in 2011, reports gave SecondMarket a valuation of $200 million on annual revenue of $35 million. These figures were largely driven by Facebook – whose pre-IPO shares were traded on the platform. In September 2013, Second Market launched an investment vehicle for Bitcoins, the Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT). In this interview, Barry speaks about his fascination for the digital currency, it’s design and how it has been evolving over time and where he sees it going.

Is this easy access the main deficit you are trying to fix. Why should investors invest in the Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT) instead of buying Bitcoins directly?

How did you first get hooked on Bitcoin?

I became familiar with Bitcoin in the summer of 2011. At the time, the price went from a few dollars to thirty dollars over the course of a few weeks and back down to a dollar. The concept of Bitcoin, this digital currency and transaction network, not created or controlled by a government or company, had a real appeal to me. I didn’t think it was going to be successful but every month I did check in on the price and news. The price and volume going up forced me to take a real second look. In early 2012 I started speaking with economist and focussed on what Bitcoin really is.

When did you start investing in Bitcoin?

In 2012, I invested in Bitcoin first, subsequent to that I invested in Bitcoin companies. My guess is I am probably the most active angel investor in the Bitcoin field, may be not in terms of dollars but I invested in over fifteen companies. What I learnt through that process was it’s a fairly difficult process to purchase Bitcoin for investors. In the US, there are no exchanges operating, you have to rely on exchanges that are located in Japan, and typically these exchanges are not regulated. The idea of opening an account and wiring money there is something that most large investors don’t wanna do.

Yes, that’s the main issue we are trying to solve. The other issue is: once you own the Bitcoin you are responsible to keeping them safe. Early on, the Bitcoin enthusiasts tended to be technology savvy or at least they were keen to figure out how to store Bitcoin. Now it is moving to a broader audience, especially to high net-worth investor groups. They don’t have the expertise or the time to figure it out. So the second issue we are trying to solve was the security and safety thing.

Please explain how the BIT works and how it has performed since its inception?

Technically speaking it’s an open ended trust. What it means: you raise unlimited amounts of money into this vehicle on an ongoing basis. Basically, we replicated the very popular gold ETF – the spider gold – which was launched 10 years ago and was widely viewed being the first investment vehicle investing in gold possible for the general public. We launched BIT on September 25th 2013. It is geared towards institutional and high net-worth investors. In order to be able to invest, you need what the SEC calls investor test (you have to a certain income or certain net-worth). It is not publically traded and it is not open to all investors. It exceeded all our prospection. We initially hoped that the fund will grow to be ten million by the end of 2013. On Tuesday 31st, it was over 50 million dollars.

Michael Sharkey / Bloomberg Markets

By design, Bitcoin mining is limited to 21 million. Similar to goldbacking, critiques argue that this is the main flaw. Such restrictions can eventually cause deflation, exploding Bitcoin value and bears the risk of economic breakdown once people start hoarding them. What’s your point on that?

It’s important to remember that Bitcoin really is two things: 1) Bitcoin is a digital currency and 2) Bitcoin is a global transaction network. They really serve two different purposes. VCs and technologist agree that there’s no debate that a global transaction network could be really disruptive as it relates to things like online payments, and money transfers. But

where there is a lot debate is around Bitcoin as a digital currency and as a store of value. Bitcoin has many of the attributes that make sound money and it has many of the attributes of gold. Gold has – other than copper and steal - little intrinsic value. Specific to your point about deflation: it’s more an economic kind of debate between the Keynesian and the Austrian school. Imagine a world in which you believe the money you have has more value tomorrow. That would have a pretty dramatic effect on the economies around the world. But that’s really not what’s happening with Bitcoin where it’s either a transition over decades or, more likely, you just hold a portion of your money in Bitcoins.

There are hardly any switching barriers between different digital currencies, Litecoins, Peercoins, Coinye West, etc all seem to have the same value proposition; why do you trust in Bitcoin specifically?

You are absolutely right. The beauty of digital currencies is that they are so easily exchangeable. Ultimately, none of our currencies today have much value from a utility perspective. From an investment perspective Bitcoin is really the first mover: it has the longest track record, it clearly has the largest money base and deepest liquidity. I personally think Bitcoin is the winner for two reasons: 1) at a 10 billion monetary base, there’s a substantial amount of money, reputation, time

Currently 12.1 million Bitcoin are in circulation, with a total value of about $8.8 billion. At this size, the value of Bitcoin can fluctuate violently based on actions by a few big investors or the Chinese government. The regulatory clouds are clearing. The currency is gaining legal legitimacy and finding political from across the political spectrum. Libertarians like the idea of a currency that’s not linked to a central bank. Liberals see Bitcoin as a way for consumers to escape high banking fees. The anonymous character has attracted also a certain crime scene which can transact drug deals, assassinations and launder money (think of the FBI takedown of Silk Road). In accordance, Barry made an awkwardly precise prediction for 2013 on Twitter:

and energy by a lot of individuals around the world. There’s not much of an incentive for these millions of early adaptors and evangelists to switch. Further, it’s unlikely that there’s another group of cryptographers, entrepreneurs, investors, and early adaptors out there that had not embraced digital currency and is still waiting to jump onto something. Reason number 2) is that Bitcoin is a software, a living piece of technology that will react to whatever the market demands of it.

All the alternative digital currencies are get-rich-quick schemes or great testing grounds for new features which could be potentially incorporated into the Bitcoin protocol.

Now if you think this was far fetched, his 2014 predictions are really bold:

You predicted “2014 is the year of Bitcoin and Wall Street”, can you explain that statement a little further and what do you think are the next waves for Bitcoin?

I think Bitcoin has five waves. Wave number one was the experimentation phase when hackers and hobbyists were playing with the protocol since Bitcoin was created in 2009 till 2011. In this time it was about technological advancements without value attributed to Bitcoin. Wave number two started in 2011 and is the early adopters phase where you start seeing entrepreneurs trying out new ideas, or like me, people investing in Bitcoins and the entrepreneurs. At the end of 2012, the venture capital wave began.

Andreesen Horowitz, Google Ventures and a lot of great investors started to invest in Bitcoin businesses. This is certainly continuing through the next year as many investors are looking to move into this space. Wave number four starts 2014 and that’s Wall Street. Second Market as an organisation has always been at the intersection of technology and finance. Since we have launched the BIT, we are seeing a growing interest in Bitcoin by different types of Wall Street firms.

Wall Street professionals are personally putting their money in our trust. They are tipping their toes and are testing before they are putting their clients’ money into the space. We are going to see that the BIT is going to be available on a growing number of wealth management platforms, institutional money like hedge funds will get active as investors, and the large Wall Street banks are going to trade Bitcoin.

And that will supply the critical monetary base for wave number five?

Wave number five is mass consumer adoption. I believe the only way that mass consumer adoption happens is if two things occcur: 1) the monetary base has to grow to something substantially larger than ten billion because otherwise a lot of merchants don’t see the opportunity and wouldn’t take the currency risk and change it immediately into their local currency, which is impossible at large scale with the monetary base as small as it is; and 2) a real proliferation of products and services are launched to acquire and hold Bitcoin easily. The VC backed startups who are going to launch their products and services now in 2014 are going to be the catalyst for mass consumer adoption in 2015.

Barry Silbert is the Founder and CEO of SecondMarket, a secure online platform that enables private companies, investment funds and other issuers to manage liquidity, raise capital and communicate with their stakeholders.

Jeanny Gering

Content that Connects Being part of the DLD community you most likely have heard some impressive, outrageous, unique and inspirational stories. Allen Lau, CEO and co-founder of Wattpad, has made stories his business. In the run up to DLD14 we found out more about the man’s ideas and vision for the potential of storytelling.

How come the traditional publishing houses aren’t the inventors of and investors in creative business models like Wattpad?

Our time is often called „the age of images” - pictures and videos are increasingly the mode of communication. What makes you believe in the written word as a source for business?

Despite the perception, people are reading more, not less - they’re just reading differently. Wattpad’s growth - we more than doubled engagement on the platform last year - proves that people still love to read, write and engage over the written word. There are about 7 billion mobile devices in the world, the majority of which are internet connected or enabled. And there are 4 billion people who can read or write or both. This represents a huge market opportunity for Wattpad as we democratize the written word and make it easy for people around the world to read and write online through their mobile devices.

Change can be slow in the traditional publishing world. Since the advent of the printing press more than 500 years ago, publishing has been a tightly-controlled process where a handful of players dictate the next phase or evolution of the industry. I don’t have a background in publishing and this industry naivete frees me to experiment with bold ideas. Ideas that may be dismissed in the traditional publishing world. Self-expression is important to the Wattpad community.

More than publishing a book, people in the community want to share their voice, connect with others and be social. Wattpad does work closely with the publishing industry. Through these partnerships readers in the Wattpad community get access to even more stories and connect with even more writers, and publishers get their authors in front of a global, engaged audience of millions of readers.

What’s the secret behind Wattpad’s ability to create an online community?

In the traditional publishing industry there are many layers of people who stand between reader and writer - booksellers, publishers, editors, agents, etc. On Wattpad, people connect directly with each other and readers are empowered to influence and shape the stories they love through comments and messages to the writer. Writers benefit from ongoing feedback and encouragement through a direct connection to their fan base. By humanizing the publishing process Wattpad has created an incredibly active and positive community that spans the globe.

How do you handle the question of quality and standards with regards to the content that gets published on Wattpad?

With more than 30 million story parts shared on the platform by both established authors and emerging writers there is something to suit every taste. Wattpad does not operate like a gatekeeper dictating what stories will be published and ultimately read by others. Instead it is a facilitator by creating a platform where people can read and share the stories that matter to them.

What makes investors believe in your enterprise?

And finally - DLD is turning ten in 2014, so we like to get an insight from our DLD14 speakers what their vision is for the coming ten years for their business or industry?

I see a future where readers are discovering, recommending and sharing stories as easily as they share songs and videos today. New stories will be streamed to readers like episodes based on past likes and who they follow. This means as a reader, I will interact with the writer and other fans from all over the world as we consume the media.

Our investors like fellow DLD14 speaker Albert Wenger (Union Square Ventures) look for companies that use internet technology to disrupt major industries and transform society. As a free platform where people connect through stories in real-time from any phone, tablet or computer, Wattpad does just that by fundamentally changing reading, writing and storytelling around the world.

Allen is CEO and co-founder of Wattpad, the world’s largest community for reading and sharing stories. For the past 10 years Allen has been exploring the power of mobile, social platforms and user-generated content.

Karen Khurana

Smarter Typing Texting is one of the most popular mobile services, but typing on the go can still be a drag sometimes. What if there were an engine that already knows what you want to say before you do?

Swiftkey is an Android App and underlying technology in many mobiles that makes fast and accurate typing an ease. Thanks to an artificial intelligent engine, it learns to predict the words you want to type next. We talked with Ben Medlock, co-founder and CTO of Swiftkey about advancements in machine and language learning, the tricky parts of human intelligence and what’s ahead of us in the fields of mobile and AI.

Is it harder or easier for a machine to learn a language?

I think humans are still much better in learning languages than machines. To get to a stage where we are able to mimic the language learning ability of the human brain will still take quite a bit of time.

Swiftkey learns from the messages you have written, but it’s already pretty good in guessing what your next word is when you have just installed it. Can you explain how the technology behind the surface works?

As we talk about smart phones and artificial intelligence: Are the systems we use today truly intelligent or is it more precise to say they are programmed to process data in a way that seems intelligent?

Swiftkey uses predictive models that are trained on very large quantities of text that we gather from very different sources. On top of that we have a personalization mechanism that learns from the way you use language. It analyses texts you have written in the past, such as email or facebook posts, if you allow it to. The accuracy to the predictions is a result of the unification and blending of these different models working together to predict the most likely thing you want to say.

That’s a perennial question, isn’t it? It depends on how you define intelligence.

I think it is a very difficult term to define.

And that’s because we have so many intuitions about what it means in different contexts. If the way you define intelligence is by human understanding, then we are a very long way off. The fundamental question in understanding is the question of self-awareness. There are some theories about what self-awareness is and what it means but the reality is we are nowhere near to creating it at the moment.

Is this kind of machine learning in anyway comparable to the way a child picks up a language?

It’s interesting because it’s quite different to the type of learning that a child goes through. A child learns from lots of different types of stimuli. It learns to use language by correlating visual inputs with oral as well as written inputs, whereas for text processing using machine learning we tend to use very large quantities of text data, at least at the moment. So we are biased towards learning from text, but then the machine has a lot of text to learn from.

On the other hand, a more practical way of defining intelligence is essentially the accuracy with which machines can perform a task that benefits their human uses. So you can say that a machine is unintelligent when it does something that creates more work for the user. That’s a potentially useful way of thinking about intelligence because it’s much more measurable. So an intelligent keyboard is one that supports the user in terms of the creation of text. If you define intelligence in that more practical way, we are making really good progress. But there’s still a long way to go.

What about creative thinking? Would it be possible, for instance, to build a Swiftkey version for creative writing?

Yeah, that’s something we have thought about and we have actually built a number of language models over the last few years that capture the way different people use language. For example, we trained the engine on the sonnets of Shakespeare. And then one of our staff used that to actually help him to write a new sonnet. So you can definitely use these statistical models to enhance creativity.

And that’s a really interesting area, although what we are mostly focused on in the product is enhancing efficiency and functionality, but creativity is a really interesting area as well.

Speaking of efficiency and functionality – when a software works so flawlessly, people tend to not realize how complex the processes in the background are anymore. Can you share some examples to illustrate the complexity behind the surface?

That’s true. A good example of something that Swiftkey does, yet people don’t necessarily understand, is that everytime you tap on the screen, it collects a sample and it’s constantly retraining probability distribution that represent the way you perceive the keyboard to be. So, for instance, if you are always tapping to the left and below the visual character symbol for a certain key, we are learning that from the key presses. For every character on the keyboard there’s a different probability distribution that has different characteristics, a bit like a fingerprint for the way you interact with the keyboard.

The analysis of this probability distribution works alongside the language mode-

ling and improves accuracy, but of course, most people are completely unaware that this is happening. What you see is just a static keyboard view, but the actual position of the characters and how they are skewed is constantly evolving.

What are further applications or developments in the fields of AI you are currently excited about?

There’s an area called deep learning which is essentially the field of stacking artificial neural networks in such a way that they can learn representations of the world for use in particular tasks. I think this is really the frontier of applied machine learning at the moment: In order to build machines that are significantly

more intelligent than the ones that we have today what we need to do is to learn how to represent the world in ways that help us to solve problems more accurately. The field of machine learning has been successful because it allows machines to break away from the kind of explicit programming that most of computing has been based on for the last 50 years.

And deep learning is a way of taking that a step further. So I am pretty excited about what that will lead to in terms of helping us to solve specific inference problems more effectively.

Are there any examples of applications of deep learning for your area?

Yes, the one we are particularly interested in is language modeling. That means we learn mathematical representations for words that go beyond just the strings of characters that words have been represented by primarily in language modeling.

And you already see some quite significant improvements to things like voice recognition through the use of this kind of technology. And of course we are interested in bringing that into typing as well.

This power should lead to a new generation of interfaces that are much more dynamic. We would like to see that trend in bigger and most significant ways across the software that people are using on their mobile.

The same is true for the devices. We have been through a process of hardware homogenizing. I think a trend for the next ten years is for devices to increasingly become objects that people can identify with, that are more personalized and fit the body better such as curved screens that wrap around wrists. As soon as we have flexible screens and less technical constraints, it will be interesting to explore different geometries like circles, spheres and individual forms people are drawn to.

DLD turns 10 this year. As we always like to look forward, which trends and developments do you see coming within the next decade or the near future within your field?

Within the field of mobile technology, there’s a big trend towards systems and interfaces that adapt to users rather than just the other way around. The technologies we use such as machine learning and AI are able to adapt to the way an individual user behaves without the user having to explicitly instruct the machine.

Ben Medlock is co-founder and CTO of SwiftKey, and invented the intelligent keyboard for smartphones and tablets that has transformed typing on touchscreens. SwiftKey’s keyboard was the best-selling app on Google Play in both 2013 and 2012 and has been #1 in 58 countries.

Lukas Kubina

Mindset of Abundance Dream that Everything is Possible Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur with a passion to solve world’s biggest challenges with innovative technologies. The business minded philanthropist is a jack of all trades: a sample of his activities includes Moon Express, inome, World Innovation Institute, Intelius, TalentWise and Infospace and being on the board of X PRIZE Foundation and Singularity University. This interview is about the mindset of abundance, pattern recognition and moon exploration.

ŠABOSCH

Naveen, why do you think abundance is the key solution to our global problems?

The whole idea of sustainability in Europe is a synonym for conservation. It’s the mind-set of scarcity. Conserving is a short-term strategy in life because in the long term you need to create more of what you need rather than using less of what you have. Europe is driven by the fact that we will run out of fossil fuels. They are thinking substitution rather than increase.

The mind-set of abundance is changing your behaviour completely. At DLD, all of us are in the same room. You will never see somebody saying, “hey, you need to get out of here, you are taking my oxygen.” Everybody believes that the oxygen is in abundance. Would we fight war over things if we were to believe these are abundant? We fight war over water, land, food and all types of things. However, in a broader sense all these are in abundance in the universe. The earth is just a tiny dot in the galaxy. More than 70 % of our planet is not even inhibited. How about scarce resources? We can bring them over from the moon or different asteroids and planets.

If you go back a hundred years ago, aluminium was the most scarce metal. Until the technological electrolysis came about that made it easy to purify bauxite into aluminium. Technological progress made it abundant. Similar, think about energy: our planet gets eight times more energy than it consumes just purely from

sun every single day. The technology to harvest all of that doesn’t exist yet, but imagine if you could create abundance of energy! It’s a paradigm shift in your mind-set – everything changes! If energy is abundant you can desalinise water. What if we come up with technologies that people can live on oceans? The problem of scarce land goes away. In aging, it’s only a matter of time until we can grow our own organs.

Is this technological leap towards abundance changing the way we are as human beings. In the information economy this has already brought us information overload?

The whole concept of “I” will change forever. Between Lukas and Naveen, who are we really? Our body? Our body is constantly changing from being a baby to now. Our DNA? Your DNA is given to your children, too. Every cell in my body? But 90% of the cells in your body are micro bacteria. You are really a host to these foreign cells. It boils down to that the real difference between Lukas and Naveen are experiences and memory.

20 years ago we used to remember phone numbers. Today, all our phone numbers are in some sense augmented to our cell phones. We are augmenting our memory to search engines. All we have to remember is what we search for. So what if you transfer these experiences and memories somewhere else, does that become you?

Isn’t that at least an ambivalent evolution? This decrease of memory capacity as a result of outsourcing information to technology, isn’t that a threat to our way of thinking and ultimately our existence?

You would argue that this decline is taking place. But what if you are only storing the meaning of things in abstract rather than the actual thing. We are continuing to evolve our neo cortex in a way that will allow us to continue to grow

ty in life and they go out and solve it.

The human ingenuity is what causes innovation. Experts are really good in incrementing evolution but the most disruptive ideas actually come from non-experts. Because the way the neo cortex works, it’s basically a pattern-matching device that matches problems with patterns of solution. If you are a non-expert you actually have to think in abstract terms because you have never solved that problem before. That allows you to put things together that have never been put together. I am on the board of the X Prize and we see time and time again: rarely, if ever, the prize is won by a team that consists of experts.

The Moon Express is very modular, can you outline the approach?

© naveenjain.com

Different topic: why on earth do you want to go to the moon?

The number one thing that drives me is allowing people to dream that everything is possible. Here’s the man that grow up so poor that there was no food to eat. I came to the US with five dollars in my pocket. Today, if I believe to be able to build a company to be able to land on the moon. Imagine what else is possible!

Would we be able to create a fundamentally new drug because the gravity on the moon is different? What about the rare earth elements that are common moon elements? What if we can bring helium-3 to the planet? You got to allow people to dream and imagine! Entrepreneurs look at a challenge as their biggest opportuni-

We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We analysed that landing on the moon has three separate modules. Going from the earth surface to the earth orbit, between earth orbit and moon orbit, and lastly between moon orbit and moon surface. Our approach is simple: We plan to use other rocket companies for to take us into satellite orbit (lots of companies are competing in this area and prices are coming down significantly), where we use our own 3D printed titanium rocket that is moving between satellite orbit and moon orbit. The same rocket acts as a braking rocket to help us land on the moon surface gently. Our rocket will use Hydrogen Peroxide(H2O2, which can be derived from water). As we know that water exists on the moon, so we are essentially using water as fuel so we can create our fuel right on the moon. We plan to use this fuel to carry mined elements back to earth on

its return trip. Just a decade ago, our approach would not have been possible because additive 3D printing were not possible which makes the cost of complexity close to zero. All of these exponential technologies coming together in this interdisciplinary approach is allowing us to push innovation forward.

How do you view the latest push in the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program: the projected exploitation not only of known lunar reserves of metals such as iron, but also of lunar helium-3. Will this ultimately be a new Space Race?

You are absolutely right that Chinese landing on the moon is likely to be the catalytic event to start the space race, There’s a treaty signed amongst the nations stating that “No country can own any planet.” However, similar to international water, anyone can use their private resources to harvest the resources on the moon similar to the international water.

China just sent their lander to the moon to find and mine for valuable resources.

The United States are taking a different approach. They think the best way to compete is to have entrepreneurs commercialize space including commercializing the mining for resources on the moon, Entrepreneurs are innovative, fast, nimble, they use private resources without any bureaucratic system, and they are more cost effective. Beyond that, entrepreneurs who are successful in commercializing space have potential to build amazingly profitable enterprises but they can also make the humanity better by creating abundance of resources on earth.

I am firm believer that doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive.

Philanthropy to me is never about giving money but about solving problems. And a business that is not profitable is not sustainable.

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur and philanthropist driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovation. He is the founder of several companies and serves on the board of Singularity University. Furthermore Naveen Jain has been awarded many honors for his entrepreneurial successes and leadership skills.

Advertising is

ROCKET SCIENCE Jeanny Gering

A conversation with George John, CEO of Rocket Fuel, who gained rocket scientist credentials at NASA and puts his know-how to use in the world of advertising and branding.

Can you share some of your insights on how AI may reach limits in terms of creativity? AI may allow us to build machines and robots that are capable of incredible things, but can they ever reach human capacity of creative thinking?

As DLD is turning ten in 2014, what were some of the most important developments in your field in the last decade? And in your view - what’s the most exciting development in AI ahead of us?

I think big data is the most important milestone. The granularity with which we can remember and analyse data now for decision making is immense. Rocket Fuel would not have been possible ten years ago. With regards to AI I can’t think of a ten year horizon, but it will go as far as anyone has been able to imagine. My bet is within our life time we will see, maybe not physical robots that resemble humans, but we’re likely to see special purpose AI that will be functional in a certain domain, which can be as varied as game shows, medical or legal AI, where a huge amount of information needs to be processed but with the ability to reason. So fields where it’s still difficult to imagine, AI will be used in the near enough future.

There’s a story in a book called “Automate This” by Chris Steiner and it tells of someone who programed an AI system to compose music. When the music was played to an audience they all thought it was wonderful, until they were told that a computer had made it which made them mad. So, my guess is if you can train an AI system to approximate the appeal of a work of art to humans, then the system could produce, first randomly and eventually more and more productively, artefacts that would be appealing to humans as art. Of course one could get really philosophical about this and ask what makes us human and is creative thought one of those features? But so far the history of AI is that there is a level of human conceipt. So we think of a task that only we can do, and in the history of AI sure enough someone has programed a computer to do just that thing. But then there’s the “moving frontier problem” in AI, which is that by the time we have programed a computer to do a very human task it’s not really considered AI anymore. Like navigation systems in cars nowadays are just a normal feature of a modern car and not some amazig feat of artifical intelligence.

Putting big data in the context of advertising - how powerful is it? And how aware do you think the average consumer is of how his or her data is used?

Advertisers have been rational for long time. You know they run a campaign and assess how it goes and try to do something even smarter the next time. The

advance with big data is that you don’t only see how a whole campaign went but you can assess how a single exposure works. So I think the value is to be able to observe and learn at a much finer level. With regards to consumers I think it’s interesting, because I don’t encounter many who have the right concept of anonymous tracking for instance. There’s a false idea among some that they are being tracked and there’s someone with a whole dossier on them in some far away office. But my hope is that the industry is changing and moving towards initiatives that give the consumer more control in how they can be tracked, so that there’s more of an understanding for the algorithmically curated web experience. To give you an example: we rarely get emails regarding privacy at Rocket Fuel. But once in a while we do get an email which is really angry about being anonymously tracked, and people give us their name and email address and ask to be deleted from the system. Ironically we could not have known their name or email address up to this point. So I think there’s a gap in how consumers use the internet and how they understand it.

What are the most important and maybe unexpected skills you bring from your time at NASA as a rocket scientist to your job as CEO at Rocket Fuel?

At NASA I was in the group called “artifical intelligence lab”, and the main topics we dealt with were related to either autonomous space crafts or other kinds of AI related to augmenting human work.

When working on autonomous space craft you have a certain style of thinking, because you don’t think of a human pilot who you can advise how to use the space craft. You think of a fully autonomous auto pilot that makes all decisions by itself, which leads you to take a much broader range of possibilities into account. So I think that was useful for Rocket Fuel and our advertising systems, because these systems have up to forty billion opportunities a day to reach out to consumers, which is well beyond the capacity of any one human. In my view, doing that right demanded the same kind of autonomous space craft way of thinking.

Is Big Data, and the understanding companies can galvanise from it, applicable to any kind of brand or do some brands have to rely on different ways to understand their customer base?

Well I think big data always helps but it’s a question of how much granularity makes sense. You can definitely create a lot of extra value from the context in which the data is collected. Even if you stay away from specific information about the consumer, information that remains anonymous, you still get a better understanding of your customer base.

George John is co-founder, CEO and Chairman of Rocket Fuel Incorporated.Rocket Fuel operates a software platform built around Artificial Intelligence and Big Data that it uses to power an optimized media buying engine, running digital advertising campaigns for the world’s greatest brands.

Karen Khurana

The Rise of Native Advertising

The digital world continues to disrupt the traditions of publishing media. With decimated rates for display ads and more players in the field, it gets more complicated to find decent revenue streams for publishers in the digital sphere. We spoke with Brian Morrissey, editor-in-chief of Digiday, about the current trend towards native advertising and the challenges publishers have to face.

What are the biggest challenges publishers have to face in the context of native advertising?

Digiday covers the transitions the media industry is undergoing from analogue to digital including perspectives from publishers, agencies and brands. In your view, what are the most interesting trends within this field today?

For the publishing field, I think the most interesting trend around there is native advertising. The concept is not particularly new, advetorials have existed for a while. However, there’s a supply and demand imbalance in the media system right now: brands have so many different options to place ads that publishers need to figure out new ways to provide value in order to survive.

Another really important trend that is related to this development is the rise of programmatic advertising. These automated ad systems are making advertising very efficient for brands because they can find specific audiences no matter where they are. This efficiency on the other side ends up challenging publishers a lot.

They have to adopt these automated systems, yet they often lead to lower ad rates. So while the standard banner ads are mostly handled by automated systems, the real value for the publishers has to be in providing something that machines can’t do and that’s where the concept of native advertising comes in.

I think the biggest challenge is first of all doing it in an ethical and transparent way. The attraction for many advertisers is that the format doesn’t exactly feel like advertising. However, as a publisher you have to make sure, it doesn’t fool the readers. Another big challenge is to develop the internal capability to create it. The editorial staff typically can’t do it. So we see more and more publishers that build up their own internal creative service departments to create the content on behalf of advertisers. A company like Vice Media is pretty much half an advertising company, half a publishing company. It is what publishers have to do today. And the final challenge will be pricing pressure. Right now native advertising is like a new bright and shiny object that allows publishers to charge pretty good rates for it. However, the rates will naturally come down when more and more publishers offer these kind of advertising opportunities.

Some publishers charge native ads based upon how many posts and display space you get. Does native advertising offer the opportunity to break away from CPM-based rates?

In the field of regular display ads, there is a lot of pressure on CPMs, the price is going down. Native advertising right now has an advantage of being new so publishers are able to charge a premium

for it. Right now the metrics aren’t totally set. A lot of publishers want the advertisers to judge the success based on publisher metrics like pageviews and shares.

The problem is those can be easy to gain.

You can charge someone based on the number of pageviews for a sponsored post. And you can just buy those pageviews through different networks for much lower cost so that it becomes an arbitrage game. Those views might not be from the type of people the advertiser wants. So we are in a weird situation right now where publishers are buying advertising for their advertising.

Looking at the way native advertising is implemented today, do you think users clearly understand which posts are paid for or do we need a new set of standards to assure transparency?

We recently had hearings here by the Federal Trade Commission that looks into these matters. Right now everyone is labeling native ads differently and there are a lot of euphemisms around there. Some call it „featured partners”, some say „associated with”. What is interesting is that the New York Times is about to start running native advertising and will actually just call the posts „paid”. I think the standards will come. When you look at search advertising, Microsoft called their ads „featured links” first, Google used the label „sponsored” and eventually changed it to „advertising”. As they got really good at making sure the ads were very high quality, the label didn’t really matter anymore. So I think over time we will see the pendulum swinging towards just calling these things what they are which is advertising.

Apart from the labeling, by its very nature native advertising seeks to mimic its editorial surrounding. So isn’t there still a risk that it blurs the distinction between content and advertising that has been part of the journalistic code of ethics for quite some time?

There is always a risk of that. But I think there is a way to mediate that risk and make sure you try to balance by following the same kind of ethics that have governed journalism for a long time. However, you got to operate within the reality of a truly challenging business climate. I think there has always been a push and pull between the business and editorial side and this won’t stop. The only thing that has changed recently is that the voice of the business side probably wins the day more often because it is a very challenging environment.

Do you think we will see new content models evolving in the near future?

I think we will see all sorts of new formats striving. And this is a good thing, it’s an age of experimentation trying new models and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It will be interesting to see if anyone can come up with a real publishing model for mobile. People like Circa are trying to do that for news, USA today recently created a sports section for mobile that runs articles with less than 50 words. These are interesting models. And I do believe that there will be a flight to quality. For the most part media brands have always been build on quality. And I think we will going to end up seeing that.

And the shift to mobile has added to that environment.

Yeah, it’s funny because if you look at the shift from analogue to the desktop Internet, publishers have struggled to figure out new content and business models.

And now on top of that there comes this shift from desktop to mobile that has hit them. Ad rates are starting to come up, but a reader of a newspaper is still worth less than a half on the desktop and the value is decimated again for a user on the mobile. The majority of digital advertising is still banner ads and they don’t translate very well to mobile. Most of them are not even readable. And that’s another attraction for native advertising: it’s easier to translate to mobile.

Brian Morrissey is the editor-in-chief of Digiday, a vertical media company that covers the digital media and marketing industry. Prior to joining Digiday in 2011, Morrissey was digital editor at Adweek for six years. He’s a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism.v

Simon Patterson

What Artificial Intelligence Means for Consumers and Businesses Ask consumers about “artificial intelligence” (AI) and most will think first of popular science fiction, and characters such as Marvin the Paranoid Android in Douglas Adams’s book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, or, more ominously, the malicious Skynet in “The Terminator” films. The term has an inherently futuristic feel; AI is generally not considered likely to be prevalent in our lifetimes.

However AI computers that act independently, make autonomous decisions, and learn from their experiences and mistakes without human direction, are ubiquitous in our daily routine—although we don’t realize it, we interact with them many times a day.

For example, computers working in this way serve highly personalized content, advertising and shopping ideas on the websites we visit, often anticipating our interests and needs. Computers make lightning-fast decisions to buy and sell stocks and manage our pension investments on our behalf. Computers assess our health, diagnose conditions and recommend drug therapies, in some cases with better outcomes and success rates than our doctors. In a business context, computers make rapid resource allocation decisions, for example, which goods to stock in a physical store, or how best to allocate marketing spend online

©Gengiskanhg / Creative Commons License

minute by minute. And now, computers drive cars better than we can. The cars in the autonomous driving tests do have accidents—but more likely when the human driver is operating them to and from the test, rather than in the test itself!

AI takes advantage of and builds upon other parallel and profound technology advancements: mobile, data and cloud.

In this mobile era, everyone has, or will soon have, a powerful computer in her or his pocket, putting AI in easy reach. There has been a well-documented explosion of data, mostly unstructured, such as video, photos, social network status posts and so forth, which does not fit into the neat “rows and columns” data format that computers have used for decades. New data storage and analytical techniques have been developed to deal with all this unstructured data; however, in many ca-

ses because of the scale, complexity and speed required, it’s beyond the capabilities of humans and AI is required to make sense of and act on it. Finally, the advent of the cloud means that gigantic storage and processing capabilities are instantly deployable at low cost, making it feasible and economic to utilize AI in far more situations than before.

Despite all this progress, AI is still at a relatively early stage of development and there are many open questions. What does it mean for a computer to be intelligent?

Human cognition is flawed, for example, subject to bias; are we trying to replicate it or come up with something superior?

Is the goal to replace humans altogether or “augment” us with machines so that together human and machine do better?

As well as the consumer and societal benefits that AI brings, there may be a more sinister side. Given the ability of AI to act in a very personalized way at scale, could it also become an efficient tool used by unscrupulous regimes for discrimination and persecution? What if AI goes wrong and someone is hurt, who is responsible? Could the engineer who developed it go to jail, or be liable financially? Or will there be a concept of a “robot jail”

for the errant algorithm? And what about all the people whose jobs get replaced by machines, where will they go to work?

AI is very much with us today, and is here to stay, with all the tremendous benefits it brings. However it also challenges much of the basic legal and cultural framework that has developed over decades in our biggest industries, such as retail, transportation, healthcare and financial services. The discussion now should probably be less about the AI technology itself, and more about creating a new framework to manage the risks and opportunities associated with it.

Simon Patterson joined Silver Lake in 2005 and is a Managing Director. He serves on the boards of Dell, Gerson Lehrman Group, MultiPlan and Intelsat. He is also a Non-Executive Director of N Brown Group plc and a member of the Advisory Board of the Prince’s Trust.

Aaron Koening

Why Bitcoin is Better Than Central Bank Money The current monetary system is evil. When central banks can manipulate the money supply, the devaluation of money is inevitable. Only those who are close to the artificial source of money being created „out of thin air“ benefit from this, while everyone else’s money loses its value.

History has shown that central economic planning never works, yet we still use a system in which interest rates and money supply are centrally planned – with frequently disastrous results. The Austrian School of Economics – spearheaded by great minds like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich August von Hayek – has taught this lesson for more than a century. Austrian School economists were the only ones who predicted the financial crises of both 1929-1931 and 2007-2008.

that, they can be sent through the Internet at the speed and costs of an email. And because Bitcoin works without a central bank, its value cannot be manipulated by politicians.

Government monopolies on money are a relatively new phenomenon. For thousands of years, naturally scarce metals such as gold and silver were the basis for currencies--banknotes were simply receipts for precious metals. Until 1971, when US President Richard Nixon abolished the gold standard--in part to help fund the Vietnam war--the the world’s most important medium of exchange was backed by gold; other currencies were pegged to it. Since then, central banks have been able print as much money as they like.

Unbacked currencies have allowed skyrocketing government debt and fuelled countless economic bubbles. It is only a matter of time before this system--where debts are paid by new debts and few people make huge profits at the expense of many others--collapses like a house of cards.

Recently a software developer known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto suggested a solution to this problem: a new currency and payment system called Bitcoin. Bitcoins have the same qualities that made gold and silver the money of choice for thousands of years: they’re scarce, fungible and they don’t decay. On top of

With these qualities, Bitcoin has more world-changing potential than even the Internet itself. People can now directly transfer money to each other without the need for a third party. You don’t need a bank or even Paypal to send money instantly to someone on another continent. You don’t have to trust politicians and central bankers that they will „keep inflation rates low“ and „guarantee your savings“. Your bank account can’t be frozen, your savings can’t be confiscated or devalued. When our current monetary system collapses – and I am looking forward to that day – we will thank “Satoshi Nakamoto” for having invented the better one that is already taking its place.

Aaron Koenig is the founder and organiser of Bitcoin Exchange Berlin (BXB) as well as the publisher and editor of the libertarian magazine BLINK. In his main job he directs and produces short animated films for clients, lately most of them Bitcoin start-ups.

Lukas Kubina

Wearable Electromagnetic Kicks for your Performance „Fire, flash, fling, flower, fun, fast, flex, floor, fish, find, focus...“ Amol Sarva is playing a recording of his results in a verbal intelligence test. With Halo, the entrepreneur and science punk is creating a helmet crafted to enhance performance by electromagnetic stimulation. His experiments indicate a strong positive effect. We sat down and chatted about the wearable device (December, New York).

Halo promises to be wearable doping without side-effects.

Marvellous! Can you walk us through the fundamental technology?

For twenty years, there has been increasing use of invasive techniques. My co-founder spent the last 12 years in this area with his company „Neuropace“. Essentially, they make a pacemaker for your brain.

It detects the condition of your brain. If you are having an epilepsy it can intervene and fix the condition! With Halo, it’s the opposite of invasive. The helmet contains an electromagnetic field. In medicine, they call it neuromodulation. Generally, we are about to stand on the shoulders of the technological generation that started 10 years ago with the iPod, and is now the smartphone and all that, and build gadgets for healthcare.

Is this where you see next level wearables are going?

Yeah, absolutely. Today, wearables are devices with sensors that gather data and have output. I think what’s more powerful is the opposite direction. Feeding the body.

You did a prototype and tested it on yourself?

Yes. The first time I stuck the first HALO Prototype on my head two things happened. First thing: I completely blinded myself. I saw a massive bright light and was scared shitless. The second thing that happened is: I survived and was completely fine. Nothing really happened. Then I started to play around with experiments: I drew, I tried to memorize numbers, I played games. My performance with Halo always beat my usual scores. For instance I played the only game I had on

my iPhone. With stimulation I got five highscores in a row. Crushing my iPhone score, I saw the effect for the first time.

From there, we’ve been building something based on real science, real trials…

And there’s still a significant effect after taking the placebo effect and the learning curve, into account?

Yeah, after the crazy first experiment, we learnt more about biology and technology and wanted it to be safer, not shooting anything into our vision system and optic nerves again. We chose more rigorous trials from cognitive psychology. We recruited a group of people that were healthy and wanted to try it, trained them on the task first, divided them into groups secretly and gave some people real stuff and some people fake stuff. The guys who got real stimulation were much better.

Still, the development sounds more like wild style instead of common laboratory practice?

Think of the Royal Academy of Science or Galiani and Volta in Italy; this is exactly how they discovered stuff. ..Marie Curie killed herself..

And got two Noble Prizes. We are bringing the entrepreneur and technology culture to the body and medicine. And hope to unbottle technologies that have been in medicine for many years but their benefits haven’t been fully unlocked.

The video games are a silly example. If you had a stroke and couldn’t walk, Halo could help you relearn that. There is some very preliminary data about it, but think of brain damages from an accident, Alzheimer, Parkinson. There’s so many

problems we should be working on. So, yes, we brought punk to the laboratory in a sense that we are introducing a different mind-set.

There are many fields of application, from medical purposes to car racing, where would you like to start?

The potential of the technology is massive. The idea that you can boost your performance with wearable technology instead of exercise or meditation is huge.

It essentially impacts everything we do as people. We use our minds to do stuff. So where’s the limit? The best minds work on the worst problems: cancer, climate..

Imagine they could do these things even better. These extraordinary prospects are exciting!

This made you become Dr. Frankenstein? (laughs) I did a PhD at Stanford in cognitive science. While I was doing this work I was hearing about crazy things.

At the time it was even more marginal. I had heard about someone, nobody believed him, they thought he was an idiot…

But something that promises to make your mind work better is simply seductive. After I sold my last company last year, I started to remember the most amazing things I have ever been involved in. Halo made it to the top of my list. Also, when I started to research, I realised there hasn’t been much progress in the area, people still don’t believe in it. Then I built my prototype and once I saw this light flashing I knew this was something really magic!

Dr. Amol Sarva is an American entrepreneur who cofounded Virgin Mobile USA, the simple smartphone Peek, discussion platform Knotable, and Halo Neuroscience, a wearable technology for enhancing cognitive function.

OrCam - Disrupting Limited Vision Yonatan Wexler

The NYT tech columnist Nick Bilton announced that 2014 is going to be the year of wearables. And we believe he’s right. The last years brough us playful gadgets like Jawbone’s UP or Nike’s Fuel. This year, DLD has brought together a colourful mix of next generation wearables, many of them at the intersection of technology, health, and medicine. In this blog piece, the DLD14 speaker Yonatan Wexler introduces his supersmart wearable camera OrCam.

It is fitting that the solution to many difficulties experienced by the visually impaired should have been found in the field of Computer Vision – a branch of computer science that teaches computers to see.

Despite very significant technological advances in many fields, it is striking that so little assistive technology is available to the visually disabled. The assistive devices that are available tend to be awkward to use, and with limited capabilities.

According to the 2011 National Health Survey by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 21.2 million people in the United States over the age of 18 have some kind of visual impairment, including age-related conditions, diseases and birth defects. It is estimated that worldwide there are 342 million adults with significant visual impairment.

Enter OrCam, a small, wearable camera that allows the user to perform a variety of tasks that, although taken for granted by sighted people, are very difficult and complicated for those with limited vision. OrCam is unobtrusive and easily clips onto the wearer’s existing glasses, connected by a thin cable to a small pocket-sized computer. A bone-conduction

speaker provides discrete yet clear speech as it reads aloud the words or object pointed to by the user. OrCam can read text (books, newspapers, menus, signs and more) and recognize objects such as product, landmarks, traffic lights and faces.

One of its most useful features is being able to learn a new object so that the user can teach it to memorize a favorite product.

OrCam is based on computer vision algorithms – most notably the Shareboost algorithm – pioneered by Dr. Amnon Shashua, Dr. Shai Shalev-Shwartz and myself. The Shareboost method offers a reasonable trade-off between recognition accuracy and speed by actually minimizing the amount of additional computer power required with each new object it learns to recognize. This stands in sharp contrast to other approaches such as “deep learning” techniques which require huge computing resources. One of our biggest challenges was successfully recognizing visual information in different lighting conditions and on variable surfaces.

The device is not a medical device and is specifically designed with a very simple user interface. Simply stated, “point to read, wave to memorize” - to recognize an object or text, the wearer simply points at it with his or her finger, and the device then interprets the scene. The device is also programmed to recognize a pre-stored set of objects and allows the user to add to its collection by simply waving the object in the camera’s field of view.

I cannot begin to verbalize the intense satisfaction when I see a visually impaired person try the device and experience new freedom and independence for the first time. Our pilot shipment of the first 100 devices was completed this past October.

We’re working hard on making more improvements based on the user feedback we’ve received. Helping the visually disabled to overcome their challenges – particularly easy access to information – is a rewarding task indeed.

Jonatan Wexler is an experienced Computer Vision scientist who has spent the last three years with OrCam Technologies developing a unique device for blind and visually impaired people using sophisticated image and text recognition technology.

Music Content Meets

Jeanny Gering

Fabrice Sergent is the Founder and CEO of Cellfish, a leading digital publisher of innovative mobile content and applications. Especially music and live concert apps are an important part to Cellfish’s profile, not least because Fabrice is a music lover himself.

Find out more about the man behind the business in this exclusive interview for DLD.

Cellfish was founded ten years ago in 2014 just like DLD. What are some of your milestones of that decade?

It’s great to be a teenager! (laughs) We’ve gone through a lot of transformation in the past 10 years but the fundamentals of why we created this company have come true. Since our early beginnings, we have

been investing in mobile and social entertainment for music fans with initiatives such as BlingTones or more recently Bandsintown, which rapidly became the largest concert discovery app in America.

Even though record sales have declined over the last few years, we believe interest for music has never been stronger than it is today – where music fans can

watch, listen and explore music on more devices than ever before. As for our company milestones, there have been many.

From our successful acquisitions of Airborne Studios in 2010, Bandsintown in 2011 and ToneMedia this past year, to the expansion of our team to 240 staffers around the world to our diversified business model that enables us to reach 150 million music, sports and entertainment fans. The past 10 years have been very exciting and I look forward to the next 10 years.

Bandsintown is looking to reach a global audience. Which countries are the most interesting markets for you and why?

Bandsintown reaches a global audience in 210 countries – we’re the leading concert discovery app on iOS, Android, Amazon Kindle and Facebook. The majority of our users are in America, followed closely by the UK, Germany and then France. In terms of cities, London is our largest city outside of the U.S., which makes sense given the city’s musical roots. We hope to be even more relevant not only in these countries but also in Asia and Latin America, where we see the concert activities booming.

Bandsintown also works with a lot of Big Data. Can you see the trends in how music is being consumed?

We see trends in music consumption at Bandsintown but also through ToneMedia, our music ad platform. ToneMedia reaches 120 million music fans per month and with that combined data, we see trends quite clearly. For example, you no longer need to purchase an album when you can stream pretty much anything you want on Spotify for $10/month. Fans don’t need to carry their music collection around with them, they can stream it via Wi-Fi directly from the cloud. In the last five years in the U.S., the live music industry grey by 50 percent, which shows that even in times of economic downturn, the live concert experience is irreplaceable for most people. And that’s a global phenomenon because the balance between digital and physical is merging.

The fact that the rise of digital and social networks came at the same time as a boom in live music is very good news – especially for Bandsintown. We may operate in the digital space but our purpose is for you to get out and meet others in real life, through music.

What is your interest in music? Is it purely professional or are you a musician at heart?

Cellfish has always been very involved in music. Me and my cofounder, Julien Mitelberg, are large electronic music fans, always have been. I also like jazz. That’s one of the reasons why our company is focusing on music fans today. I believe you have to be passionate as an entrepreneur about what you do. It increases your energy levels.

Can you share your thoughts on how music is becoming more important in the advertising and branding industry?

It’s our belief that artists are becoming more and more the media, or a medium, themselves. Artists use social media and multiplatform publishing to promote themselves and reach their fans – it’s a direct one-to-one communication. Many managed to build a real fan following through social media and that’s where brands have a great opportunity. There has never been as much content creation around music as today. I think because artists touch people on a deeply personal level they can allow brands to attach themselves to that connection. So brands can really go much further – beyond the traditional endorsement of, for example being visible in the concert venue, they can really be part of the artist and their output and the dialogue with the fans.

Do you think that the branding industry will have an increasing influence on how the artists create their image? Or do you think the artist will be the trendsetters and brands will follow?

Just as artists discovered that selling records will not sustain their lifestyle, they also discovered that touring is the best way to make money in this industry.

Now artists are learning that brands are just another source of revenue for them, as we see in sports between athletes and brands. However, you have to be more creative in the music business. It really is about letting the artist be who they are and let them create their image and make the authentic connection with the fans. The big three labels (Sony, Universal and Warner) have had to narrow their strategy and eliminate risks when it comes to investing in artists – investing only in marketing clones with mass appeal and large sales potential. This opens the playing field for new and emerging talent who take risks, brand themselves and create a niche (like Lady Gaga), which any brand can tap into. It comes down to investment and risk; how much is your brand willing to put in and how much risk are you willing to take, when marrying your brand to a rising star?

So you think that social and mobile can save the music industry?

Definitely! If artists continue to use the social networks as they are now, I can see a renaissance coming out of this. We add about 2,000 new artists every week to our Bandsintown platform and 60% of all artists in America are using Bandsintown to market their tour dates online. Since touring is the main way for artists to make a living, and it’s their passion, they need these new channels of communication and platforms to make that work.

What was the last gig you went to?

The last concert was by a small band that we discovered through Bandsintown, who played our holiday party in NYC. They are called City Of The Sun and their sound is very eclectic – indie, folk and rock. They’re a really energizing band live!

What do you hope the next ten years will bring to the music and branding industry?

Our vision at Bandsintown is that there needs to be a place where fans can tell their concert stories. They want to share photos, video, tweets, etc… with their friends and to the world. We are evolving the platform to work before the show (concert alerts), during the show (tweets, photos, video), and after the show (concert ratings, memorabilia). We have about 700K RSVP’s to shows per month, so we can start displaying content amongst fans with others who were NOT able to attend. We are also testing tech that will activate mobile devices all at the same time during live events. I believe technology should improve society. I hope that we will create many more moments of passion and joy through music by providing fans with memorable experiences.

Fabrice Sergent is the Founder and CEO of Cellfish, one of the largest mobile and social media application publishers with a reach to over 150 million music, sports and entertainment fans.

He is a media and Internet pioneer with 20 years of experience, having led many multi-branded properties to market aimed at the mobile generation.

The World Mind That Came In From The Counterculture DLD Team Be imaginative, exciting, compelling, inspiring: That’s what John Brockman expects of himself and others. Arguably, the planet’s most important literary agent, Brockman brings its cyber elite together in his Internet salon „Edge.” Journalist Jordan Mejias paid a visit to the man from the Third Culture. (Published in FAZ ).

The Internet had yet to be born but the talk still revolved around it. In New York, that was, half a century ago. „Cage,“ as John Brockman recalls, „always spoke about the spirit that we all share. That wasn’t some kind of holistic nonsense.

He was talking about profound cybernetic ideas.“ He got to hear about them on one of the occasions when John Cage, the music revolutionary, Zen master and

mushroom collector, cooked mushroom dishes for him and a few friends. At some point Cage packed him off home with a book. „That’s for you,“ were his parting words. After which he never exchanged another word with Brockman. Something that he couldn’t understand for a long time. „John, that’s Zen,“ a friend finally explained to him. „You no longer need him.“

Wowe

© Edge.org

Norbert Wiener was the name of the author, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine the name of the book. Page by page Brockman battled his way through the academic text, together with Stewart Brand, his friend, who was about to publish the Whole Earth Catalog, the shopping primer and bible of the environmentally-driven counterculture. For both readers, physics and mathematics expanded into an infinite space that no longer distinguished between the natural and human sciences, mind and matter, searching and finding.

Like the idea of the Internet—which was slowly acquiring contours during these rambling 1960s discussions—the idea of Edge, the Internet salon around which Brockman’s life now revolves, was also taking shape. Edge is the meeting place for the cyber elite, the most illustrious minds who are shaping the emergence of the latest developments in the natural and social sciences, whether they be digital, genetic, psychological, cosmological or neurological. Digerati from the computer universe of Silicon Valley aren’t alone in giving voice to their ideas in Brockman’s salon. They are joined in equal measure by other eminent experts, including the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the cosmologist Martin

Rees, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the economist, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, the quantum physicist David Deutsch, the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, and the social theorist Anthony Giddens.

Ranging from the co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak to the decoder of genomes Craig Venter, his guest list is almost unparalleled even in the boundless realm of the Internet. Even the actor Alan Alda and writer Ian McEwan can be found in his forum.

John Brockman is a cultural impresario, whose career has encompassed the avant-garde art world, science, books, software, and the Internet. He is publisher and editor of Edge.org, the highly acclaimed website devoted to discussions of cutting edge science, and CEO of Brockman, Inc. the leading international literary agency for serious nonfiction authors.

Keeping the Internet Open in 2014

All Hands on Deck Albert Wenger

For the New Year, I tweeted that we should “ll work together in 2014 to keep the Internet open for the benefit of humankind everywhere.” That couldn’t be any more pressing as there is a full scale assault under way and we don’t seem to be doing much about it.

MediaMatters

by the desire to support players such as Netflix. The MPAA has just joined the W3C which is likely to help accelerate this (check out the Twitter replies to the announcement).

First, thanks to Edward Snowden we have a much better view into the extent of domestic and international surveillance activities. The non-democratic ultrasecret and blackhat based approach taken by the NSA has done much to undermine the trust required for an open Internet. A full on embrace of crypto and anonymity as a response has the potential to self limit openness. We need to make an overhaul of the NSA’s budget, civilian supervision, transparency of reporting a top political and protest priority for 2014. As part of this I support a pardon for Snowden.

Second, we have the rise of ISP level filtering. The UK is taking an unfortunate lead here. Not surprisingly this is being done under the guise of protecting children from pornography. This is of course energizing calls for ISP or country-level filtering in other places, such as Australia. Herdict is a project by the Berkman center to try to measure the impact of these kinds of filters on the reachability of different web sites. We should be supporting projects like this and actively protesting ISP level filtering ideally boycotting ISPs that filter if there are ones available in your region that don’t.

Third, the W3C seems to be moving closer to including DRM as a web standard. This seems partially in response to the burgeoning proprietary DRM solutions being pushed by different browser providers which in turn appears driven

Fourth, as more and more Internet traffic is moving to wireless devices with the continued fast growth of smartphones, AT&T is gutting net neutrality with a „sponsored” bandwidth scheme. In essence large providers can subsidize bandwidth which will then not count towards a monthly cap in plans. This is the kind of move that strongly tilts the playing field in the favor of large incumbents, many of which are the same companies that cooperated with the government on secret surveillance and are supporting proprietary DRM. I am sure there is more, but these are the four that are on my mind. It will require a concerted effort by everyone who cares about these issues to help push back this year.

Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures. He currently serves on the board of several companies including Foursquare, MongoDB, Shapeways, Twilio and Wattpad. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT.

It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD

Cyber World Rod Beckstrom

The Internet is history’s biggest and most complex system but it wasn’t designed for security. It was intended to be open and engaging - a platform for sharing and collaboration that was accessible to everyone everywhere.

Free Press

But the door we’ve opened to innovation and sharing comes with unintended consequences, and living with a serious cyber threat is our new global reality: The book The Starfish and The Spider: the Unstoppable Power Of Leaderless (Beckstrom & Brafman; 2006) introduced a model for thinking about decentralized networks, organizational leadership, strategy, competition and evolution. And it is helpful to consider the growing cyber threat in a comparable framework.

BECKSTROM’S LAW OF CYBERSECURITY 1. Anything attached to a network can be hacked.

2. Everything is being attached to networks.

3. Everything is vulnerable.

My cybersecurity model relates to what is really going on in our new, more vulnerable world - from a systems perspective, and from a realpolitik perspective.

And it starts with a basic fact. Through the impact and reach of the Internet, the world of power and politics has changed forever. We now live in a MAD, MAD, MAD cyber world.

First, let’s look at the classic MAD: nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction. Nuclear MAD evolved from the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons after World War II. It changed the nature of war and geopolitics and helped secure the precarious peace among superpowers that has held for almost seventy years while countless small regional wars have been fought.

The second MAD is cyber MAD, or Mutually Assured Disruption. It echoes the underlying concept of nuclear MAD: nation states and others have the ability to cripple each other’s power systems, industries and economies through broad-scale cyber attacks (Stuxnet ist he most salient case). And like nuclear MAD, cyber MAD leads to some level of deterrence among nation states. If one government launches a full-scale cyber attack on another, they or the people in their country are likely to receive the same back. And they know it. But cyber MAD is fundamentally different from nuclear MAD. Nuclear weapons have not been used in war since 1945. But cyber weapons are used millions of times every second. Nuclear weapons are discrete, identifiable and easy to detect if detonated. Cyber weapons are pervasive, unidentified and often difficult or impossible to detect and attribute. So some of the lessons the Cold War taught to many of our current government policymakers are radically inapplicable to cyber MAD.

The third MAD is Mutually Assured Dependence on the Internet, or simply Internet MAD, reflecting our shared reliance on the Internet, and upon each other through the Internet, for communications, commerce, power, travel, shipping, infrastructure – in fact, for almost everything we do. That makes Internet MAD a positive force that delivers incredible benefits to mankind. Most individuals and countries could not function very well without it, and our reliance is growing. A recent survey showed that 57 percent of American women would give up sex for a week before they would give up their smartphones. If that’s not a sign of Internet addiction, I don’t know what is.

THE INTERNET CREATES BENEFIT FOR THE HUMAN MANKIND The Internet benefits all nations, no matter their political orientation, and though they may disagree on some aspects of its use, most of them recognize the importance of keeping it working. Internet MAD helps hold our world together. There are significant implications for nation states and for citizens of the world in this MAD, MAD, MAD cyber world. Governments and societies must evolve to cope with a new reality, just as the world learned to cope with nuclear MAD after World War II. There are many motivations for

attacking systems: obtaining state secrets, accessing commercially sensitive information, stealing assets, political activism.

But even those who hack and attack want the Internet to work. They know that without it, they couldn’t achieve their broader goals, whatever they may be.

Nonetheless, about 70,000 new strains of malware appear every day.

The growth of nuclear weapons was contained first by non-proliferation - limiting the number of nations with weapons - and then by arms negotiations to limit the number of weapons. In cyber space, there are no effective containment policies and the scale, diversity, and growth rate of the Internet mean that none are likely to emerge in the near future.

And the current rapid pace of tech development is far beyond that of nuclear development when nuclear MAD was in full play. According to reports, more than 100 nations are investing in offensive cyber capabilities. Relationships among cyber attackers – where they even exist lack trust, engagement and cohesion, and an atmosphere of retaliation prevails. It’s like the Wild West - except that it engulfs the planet.

This produces a very different set of challenges for those who seek to contain the growing cyber threat. As we learn to live in this MAD cyber world, we must work together to create a more stable and secure Internet, because the downside of

Internet MAD’s positive mutual dependence is that the capacity for destruction at the hands of cyber attackers is immense. Some might propose breaking up the Internet to protect their national interests, creating separate and self-contained national networks (think of the recurrent debate in the EU in the NSA scandal aftermath). But as we move steadily closer to connecting every person in the world, our economic future will depend even more on maintaining a unified global Internet. It is the foundation for continued innovation and economic growth and a platform for communication across cultural borders and political boundaries. Its unity is essential to our collective future.

SO HOW DO WE DEFEND OURSELVES AGAINST CYBER ATTACK? In the spirit of collaboration, I have some ideas to contribute.

First, we must develop global definitions, norms and standards for cybersecurity. Second, we must build global trust.

Third, we need to use transparency and economic incentives to drive to a higher level of security. Lastly, we must build better security into the Internet itself.

These ideas are just a beginning, a means of starting this crucial global discussion.

The Internet is one of mankind’s greatest collective achievements and protecting it is fundamental to our future. The moment has come to bring sanity back to our MAD, MAD, MAD cyber world.

Rod Beckstrom is a well-known cybersecurity authority, Internet leader and expert on organizational leadership. Rod currently serves as an advisor to multinational companies, governments and international institutions, including serving as Chief Security Advisor to Samsung SSIC.

89PLUS

Hans Ulrich Obrist

On The Intersection of Technology And Art Hans Ulrich Obrist, a scheduled speaker at DLD14 and co-director of exhibitions and programs and director of international projects at London’s Serpentine Galleries, recently spoke to Informilo’s Eric Sylvers about the nexus of art and tech.

Is it fair to say that the intersection of art and tech is one of the focuses at the Serpentine Galleries in London? Will it become a bigger one in future?

Yes, absolutely. We have done the 89plus Marathon, bringing together 40 speakers. When we think about the future of the gallery we think about how it is an important moment to expand the digital aspect of the galleries and the art displayed. We hired a digital curator so it is clearly a very important focus for us.

You have been involved with the DLD conference for a long time. What attracts you to come to DLD and what do you think has been the winning formula of DLD founder Steffi Czerny?

With the introduction of 3D printing and the maker revolution there seems to be more of a mash-up these days between art and technology — do you agree?

The nexus of art and technology is very key for our time. Each year I curate an arts panel at DLD. We did a panel in 2010 which focused on clouds, which have played such an important role in art and also in poetry. And obviously now there is the digital cloud. Many of the challenges of our time need a multidisciplinary approach, for example engineering and design meet art. Two years ago at DLD we looked into post-Internet art and how it was basically bringing together a whole generation of artists. Internet is no longer a fascination and post-Internet artists just use it as part of the current condition.

I’m always thinking about how can we go into the future, to curate the future in relation to technology.

I think Steffi is one of the great junction makers of our time. No one does it better than her connecting people from different fields. DLD is a laboratory for me to test different things and I learn so much every time. So many new ideas come to me there. I would never miss it. DLD is a magical moment. Wherever Steffi is she brings people together. In this sense DLD never stops, it’s 365 days a year.

You have helped bring many interesting people to DLD. Can you give me a few names and talk about how you think their participation has helped further the conversation at DLD? For the panel we did about how a 21stcentury art and architecture school would link to technology we brought together [Dutch architect] Rem Koolhaas with artists like Thomas Demand and Piero Golia and with patron and collector Maja Hoffmann. This panel triggered the beginning of the Strelka School in Moscow so these panels are also about production of reality. For the Parallel Universes we started the dialog between artists Olafur Eliasson and Ai Weiwei. For Solar we brought together [Whole Earth Catalog editor] Stewart Brand in collaboration with Edge.org and John Brockman. Also present were Eliasson and artist Tino Sehgal as well as several inventors of solar technology.

89plus is about helping young artists get exposure. Why is this necessary when the digital revolution is leveling the playing field by making it easier for everybody to get exposure?

Simon Castets and I founded 89plus in order to be useful to artists and we hope that all the projects do have utility and I think they do. Very often these young artists haven’t meet their peers from around the world and we give them an opportunity to do that. We believe it’s important to bring all these geographies together and trigger meetings. Many of these artists have very experimental work and we want to facilitate their work and help them realize their art. We are now installing residencies such as the 89plus residency with Google. They invite the artists to create a new work.

You have mentioned how the idea for your Instagram handwriting project came from something the Italian writer Umberto Eco had written. Can you give us the details?

In a Guardian article, which had been translated from an Italian newspaper, Umberto Eco lamented the disappearance of handwriting among kids. When I read that over breakfast I though that is totally true, everything happens on a computer now. I thought rather than send kids back to take a course in calligraphy, which is what Eco was calling for, it would be interesting to introduce handwriting to the digital age.

A few days later I was in the studio of the artist Ryan Trecartin in Los Angeles with the writer Kevin McGarry when Ryan said you should join Instagram. All of a sudden he took my iPhone and downloaded the app onto the phone. He took a photo of me with his phone and put it on his Instagram account and suddenly I’m thrown in the water. I didn’t know what to do with my account. I came back to Europe, it was December, and went on Christmas vacation with Etel Adnan

How does the Instagram handwriting project fit with your foray into digital art?

and Simone Fattal at the seaside in Italy.

We recorded long conversations. We started speaking about handwriting and I thought I could post sentences. I meet great artists, writers, scientists and architects and I saw I could post their writings.

A sort of visual tweet put on Instagram and then also on Twitter. It became a ritual. I believe in rituals. Now every day I post one thing on Instagram. That is the genesis. It’s an infinite conversation. For me it is kind of a movement of some sort.

I want to celebrate the beauty of handwriting.

The Instagram project has very much grown out of the Do It project. In 1993 one of my first projects was Do It, which addressed the digitalization of art. We invited artists to write a recipe that other people could do and posted the results online (www.e-flux.com). We thought of how to do it on the Internet. It grew from there. In my work that was the first time I thought about digitalization and now with Instagram there is no end in sight.

I’m endlessly excited every day to do it and will continue this year and maybe for several years or the rest of my life. Do It has gone on for 20 years.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991 he has curated more than 250 shows.

Compassion Tania Singer

Questions about the difference between empathy and compassion, or about whether compassion can be trained, are now answered by a newly published eBook and film. A Christmas Treat from Tania Singer and the DLD Team.

Edited by Tania Singer and Matthias Bolz from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, the book explains how mental training transforms the human brain, and that compassion can reduce pain. It summarises fascinating results of the science of compassion, but also describes training programmes and practical experiences. The book thus provides not only a unique overview of current research into empathy and compassion, but also offers an exciting way of approaching the topic for interested readers—including useful information for everyday life. The eBook has evolved from a workshop, How to Train Compassion, which was organised by Singer’s department and hosted in artist Olafur Eliasson’s studio in Berlin back in 2011. It was produced with the support of the Max Planck Society, offering the reader many videos from the workshop, sound art collages by Nathalie Singer, as well as impressive pieces of visual art by Olafur Eliasson.

The film Raising Compassion brings together workshop participants in a remarkable exchange between science, art, and contemplative practice. In a series of informal conversations about compassion, initiated by Tania Singer and Olafur Eliasson, they discuss the public perception of compassion, compassion-training programs at various research centers, their experiences working with prisoners and in hospitals, and promote the practical uses of compassion-training in dealing with social-political issues. The eBook can be downloaded, and the film can be viewed here.

Tania Singer is the Director of the Department of Social Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, where she investigates the foundations of human social behaviour.