dld14 magazine

Content & Context

Emerging Cloud Trends

Designed Systems Embed Morality

Waze and Means

The BIT - Barry Silbert’s Cryptocurrency Investment Fund

Content that Connects

Smarter Typing

Mindset of Abundance - Dream that Everything is Possible

Advertising is Rocket Science

The Rise of Native Advertising

What Artificial Intelligence Means for Consumers and Businesses

Why Bitcoin is Better Than Central Bank Money

Wearable Electromagnetic Kicks for your Perfomance

OrCam - Disrupting Limited Vision

Music Meets Content

The World Mind That Came In From The Counterculture

Keeping the Internet Open in 2014 - All Hands on Deck

It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD Cyber World

Hans Ulrich Obrist - On The Intersection of Technology And Art

Compassion

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Content & Context

Index

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 pe-ople 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 neo-n-colored tights and warm smile, is a consummate connector who prefers to put the spo-tlight 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.

Content & ContextJennifer Schenker

©GERSINA

Tell us a little about your background.

I was born in Bavaria. My mother was involved with the German American So-ciety so from my early childhood we al-ways had guests from abroad in our ho-use. I have always been very curious and in the ‚70s spent a year in the U.S., li-ving 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 in-fluential early online communities. It was all about alternative lifestyles. In the be-ginning 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 (Deut-sche Journalistenschule [German School of Journalism]) which was very hard to get into but somehow I made it, and star-ted to write for newspapers and lifestyle magazines.

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

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 gu-ess I must have made some impressions on him too because he asked me if I wo-uld like to come and work for him. Burda was the first German publishing house to invest in Internet activities. It was the be-ginning of the Internet. He said to me, ‘media has totally changed, you are a cu-rious 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 conferen-ces such as TED in Monterey. There was nothing like it in Germany or Eu-rope 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 con-ference 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.

[Yahoo CEO] Marissa Mayer was seven times at DLD. The first time she came nobody knew her. Now she is a super-star. When [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuc-kerberg 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 be-haved strangely on the advice of a mu-sic 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.

What kind of conference did you set out to create?

We started with 300 people and the con-cept of gathering people from various backgrounds who are open to new ide-as 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 invi-te 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.

Steffi Czerny is Managing Director of DLD Media and co-founder of DLD Conferen-ce as well as its global spin--offs DLDwomen Conferen-ce, DLD Tel Aviv Festival, DLDmoscow and DLDcities. Joining the Burda group in 1995, Steffi has held several executive positions in new media activities.

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 Wi-kipedia 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?

Former Facebook president Sean Parker and Alchemist author Paulo Coelho; Es-ther 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.

DLD is celebrating its 10th anniversa-ry 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. Con-tent & 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 disco-ver common patterns.

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 technolo-gy 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.

Werner Vogels


©BOSTAN

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 mainta-ining and procuring expensive techno-logy 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, Pinte-rest and Shazam, through to some of the world’s largest enterprises, like Samsung, Royal Dutch Shell and Unilever, thro-ugh 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 wo-uld 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 re-gardless 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 televi-sion 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 everywhe-re 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.

CLOUD BASED ANALYTICS ENHANCES THE OFF LINE WORLD.

The cloud is already the place where re-searchers 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 sto-red, 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 com-panies like Essent. Around the world pu-

blic transport companies are instrumen-ting 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 bro-ught 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 ca-pabilities, we see we a rise in data analytics that is able to produce results for our cu-

Mick Stevens / The New Yorker

Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Ama-zon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s tech-nology vision, which is to conti-nuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale.

stomers in real-time, radically changing the products they can build. For example we see companies with real time recom-mendations, 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 re-al-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 im-prove the speed at which they can pro-cess 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 the-ir processing time from 23 hours to 20 minutes. This is taking analysis from lo-oking back a day to near real time com-putation.

THE CLOUD ALLOWS EVERYONE TO BECOME A MEDIA COMPANY

In 2014 expect a great rise in organiza-tions 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 sub-scription 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 distri-bution, are readily available such that

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

Another very popular case is that of per-forming arts organizations, from orche-stras 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 poten-tial, which is needed in times where arts subsidies are disappearing. A good exam-ple is Berliner Philharmoniker, the world famous orchestra that gives access to the-ir live performances through the digi-talconcerthall.com that makes use of all AWS regions around the world to provi-de a high quality media experience.


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 tech-nology is benevolent. You are stressing its ambivalent effects on democratiza-tion and democracies. What’s this thing - “The Internet” - to you?

I don’t believe there’s much point in tal-king about “technology” as a causal for-ce. 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 ne-cessarily interested in democratization, be that dictators or corporations or who-ever. I think this is a pretty simple mes-sage actually. There’s, however, a certain sense of coherence that we attribute to a set of systems (or assemblages or appa-ratuses) 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 Inter-net” - 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, espe-cially in Egypt. To speculate about the role of social media in such a messy pro-cess would be silly – a mistake that many commentators have committed. There’s no denying that technological infrastruc-ture 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 dyna-mics of those processes and then figure out what features of what tools and plat-forms 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 im-pact of social media on the Arab Spring without knowing a single thing about the Middle East is laughable.

„For American spies, Big Data is like crack cocain“, you said once and were sugge-sting 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 Ger-many? It’s the same thing all over aga-in: 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 rearran-ging chairs on the Titanic. There’s a huge structural change in how we think about transactions and enterprise, with reputation – and personal data – sudden-ly playing a very important role, perhaps, becoming a new form of currency. Un-der this new regime, we would want to pay for stuff with our own personal infor-mation, which we would also want to col-lect. No laws or tools would be of much help to people who want to self-disclo-se 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 eco-nomics. This is not a debate about legal transgressions – it’s a debate about futu-re of capitalism. Schengen Cloud or no Schengen Cloud, there’s much more at stake here.

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

The argument about information sove-reignty is a valid concern. On the other hand, I don’t mind seeing Brazil or India taking active steps to think about alterna-tive technological arrangements that wo-uld lessen their reliance on Silicon Val-ley and the distributed cloud-computing model. I don’t much care for Silicon Val-ley giants. Much of what they provide ri-ght now, in my opinion, ought to be pro-vided 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 infra-structure that would operate on a very different, non-commercial logic.

©DLD

Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scho-lar 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.

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 moneti-ze 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-he-avy industries like banking and insuran-ce. And they will be much better and more ruthless than their existing compe-titors 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.

17 years ago, Carl Sagan warned that so-ciety 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 cor-porations 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 mo-rality – 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

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 ca-reful about the terms we use. But I think the big step that we must take is to re-situate 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 he-alth – 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 con-text 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.

Waze and MeansJennifer Schenker

Noam Bardin, a scheduled speaker at DLD, is the CEO of Waze, the Israeli crowd-sour-ced 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.

zed over each hire. We would wait un-til 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 net-ted $1.5 million for Tmura, an organiza-tion 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.

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 provi-der 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 plat-form along the lines of those built by the likes of a Google or a Facebook or may-be 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-

Noam Bardin has served as CEO of Waze since March 2009, building the company to beco-me one of the world’s most tal-ked-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.

In 2013 Tmura distributed over $2 mil-lion to Israeli charities focused on kids and education. We involved all the em-ployees 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 po-verty line in Israel.

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 Techno-logy, 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.

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 Isra-el 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 Sili-con Valley so special — building global

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 develo-pers and product people who have done it before, seen it and understand what it takes to become very big globally.

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 dif-ferent 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 stron-ger community, that is more social and used as an everyday commuting tool.

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 in-terview, 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.

The BIT- Barry Silbert’s Cryptocurrency Investment Fund

Lukas Kubina

Creative Commons

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 Bitco-in, this digital currency and transaction network, not created or controlled by a government or company, had a real ap-peal 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 spe-aking with economist and focussed on what Bitcoin really is.

When did you start investing in Bitcoin?

In 2012, I invested in Bitcoin first, sub-sequent to that I invested in Bitcoin com-panies. 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 Bitco-in 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 regula-ted. The idea of opening an account and wiring money there is something that most large investors don’t wanna do.

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?

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 pos-sible 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.

By design, Bitcoin mining is limited to 21 million. Similar to goldbacking, critiques argue that this is the main flaw. Such re-strictions 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 tran-saction network. They really serve two different purposes. VCs and technologist agree that there’s no debate that a glo-bal transaction network could be really disruptive as it relates to things like on-line payments, and money transfers. But

where there is a lot debate is around Bit-coin 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 va-lue. Specific to your point about defla-tion: it’s more an economic kind of debate between the Keynesian and the Austrian school. Imagine a world in which you be-lieve the money you have has more va-lue 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.

Michael Sharkey / Bloomberg Markets

There are hardly any switching barriers between different digital currencies, Li-tecoins, 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 mo-ver: it has the longest track record, it cle-arly has the largest money base and de-epest liquidity. I personally think Bitcoin is the winner for two reasons: 1) at a 10 billion monetary base, there’s a substan-tial amount of money, reputation, time

and energy by a lot of individuals aro-und the world. There’s not much of an incentive for these millions of early ada-ptors 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 wa-iting to jump onto something. Reason number 2) is that Bitcoin is a software, a living piece of technology that will re-act 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.

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 Chi-nese government. The regulatory clouds are clearing. The currency is gaining le-gal legitimacy and finding political from across the political spectrum. Liberta-rians 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 cha-racter has attracted also a certain crime scene which can transact drug deals, as-sassinations and launder money (think of the FBI takedown of Silk Road). In accordance, Barry made an awkwardly precise prediction for 2013 on Twitter:

Now if you think this was far fetched, his 2014 pre-dictions are really bold:

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, ra-ise capital and communicate with their stakeholders.

You predicted “2014 is the year of Bitco-in 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 Bitco-in was created in 2009 till 2011. In this time it was about technological advan-cements without value attributed to Bit-coin. 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 Bit-coins and the entrepreneurs. At the end of 2012, the venture capital wave began. Andreesen Horowitz, Google Ventu-res and a lot of great investors started to invest in Bitcoin businesses. This is cer-tainly 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 Mar-ket as an organisation has always been at the intersection of technology and finan-ce. 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 be-fore they are putting their clients’ mo-ney 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 tra-de Bitcoin.

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

Wave number five is mass consumer ad-option. 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 cu-rrency, 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.

Being part of the DLD community you most likely have heard some impressive, outrageo-us, 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.

Jeanny Gering


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

Despite the perception, people are re-ading more, not less - they’re just reading differently. Wattpad’s growth - we more than doubled engagement on the plat-form 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 majo-rity of which are internet connected or enabled. And there are 4 billion people who can read or write or both. This re-presents 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 thro-ugh their mobile devices.

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

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 dic-tate 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. Ide-as that may be dismissed in the traditio-nal 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. Watt-pad 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, en-gaged audience of millions of readers.

What’s the secret behind Wattpad’s abi-lity to create an online community?

In the traditional publishing industry the-re are many layers of people who stand between reader and writer - booksellers, publishers, editors, agents, etc. On Wat-tpad, people connect directly with each other and readers are empowered to in-fluence 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 Wat-tpad has created an incredibly active and positive community that spans the globe.

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 explo-ring the power of mobile, so-cial platforms and user-gene-rated content.

How do you handle the question of qu-ality 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 dic-tating 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 en-terprise?

Our investors like fellow DLD14 speaker Albert Wenger (Union Square Ventu-res) 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 com-puter, Wattpad does just that by funda-mentally changing reading, writing and storytelling around the world.

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 discove-ring, 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 re-ader, I will interact with the writer and other fans from all over the world as we consume the media.

SmarterTyping

Karen Khurana

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.

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 expla-in how the technology behind the surface works?

Swiftkey uses predictive models that are trained on very large quantities of text that we gather from very different sour-ces. On top of that we have a personaliza-tion 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 ac-curacy to the predictions is a result of the unification and blending of these diffe-rent models working together to predict the most likely thing you want to say.

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

It’s interesting because it’s quite diffe-rent 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, where-as for text processing using machine lear-ning 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.

Is it harder or easier for a machine to le-arn a language?

I think humans are still much better in le-arning 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.

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

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 in-tuitions about what it means in different contexts. If the way you define intelligen-ce is by human understanding, then we are a very long way off. The fundamen-tal question in understanding is the qu-estion of self-awareness. There are some theories about what self-awareness is and what it means but the reality is we are no-where near to creating it at the moment.

On the other hand, a more practical way of defining intelligence is essentially the ac-curacy with which machines can perform a task that benefits their human uses. So you can say that a machine is unintelli-gent when it does something that creates more work for the user. That’s a poten-tially useful way of thinking about intel-ligence because it’s much more measura-ble. 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 real-ly good progress. But there’s still a long way to go.

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

Yeah, that’s something we have thought about and we have actually built a num-ber of language models over the last few years that capture the way different pe-ople use language. For example, we tra-ined the engine on the sonnets of Sha-kespeare. 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, al-though what we are mostly focused on in the product is enhancing efficiency and functionality, but creativity is a really in-teresting area as well.

Speaking of efficiency and functionality – when a software works so flawlessly, pe-ople tend to not realize how complex the processes in the background are anymo-re. Can you share some examples to illu-strate the complexity behind the surface?

That’s true. A good example of some-thing 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 in-stance, if you are always tapping to the left and below the visual character sym-bol for a certain key, we are learning that from the key presses. For every character on the keyboard there’s a different pro-bability distribution that has different characteristics, a bit like a fingerprint for the way you interact with the keyboard. The analysis of this probability distribu-tion works alongside the language mode-

ling and improves accuracy, but of cour-se, 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 deve-lopments in the fields of AI you are cur-rently 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 ma-chine learning at the moment: In order to build machines that are significantly

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

This power should lead to a new genera-tion of interfaces that are much more dy-namic. We would like to see that trend in bigger and most significant ways across the software that people are using on the-ir mobile.

The same is true for the devices. We have been through a process of hardwa-re homogenizing. I think a trend for the next ten years is for devices to increasin-gly become objects that people can iden-tify 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 techni-cal constraints, it will be interesting to explore different geometries like circles, spheres and individual forms people are drawn to.

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 accura-tely. The field of machine learning has been successful because it allows machi-nes to break away from the kind of expli-cit 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 represen-ted by primarily in language modeling. And you already see some quite signifi-cant improvements to things like voice recognition through the use of this kind of technology. And of course we are inte-rested in bringing that into typing as well.

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 techno-logies 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.

Dream that Everything is Possible

MindsetAbundance

of

Lukas Kubina

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, Inte-lius, TalentWise and Infospace and being on the board of X PRIZE Foundation and Sin-gularity University. This interview is about the mindset of abundance, pattern recognition and moon exploration.

©ABOSCH

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

The whole idea of sustainability in Eu-rope 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 fu-els. 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 ne-ver see somebody saying, “hey, you need to get out of here, you are taking my oxy-gen.” Everybody believes that the oxy-gen 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 abundan-ce in the universe. The earth is just a tiny dot in the galaxy. More than 70 % of our planet is not even inhibited. How abo-ut scarce resources? We can bring them over from the moon or different astero-ids and planets.

If you go back a hundred years ago, alu-minium was the most scarce metal. Un-til 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 min-d-set – everything changes! If energy is abundant you can desalinise water. What if we come up with technologies that pe-ople 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 abun-dance changing the way we are as human beings. In the information economy this has already brought us information over-load?

The whole concept of “I” will change fo-rever. 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 remem-ber 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 evolu-tion? 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 ta-king place. But what if you are only sto-ring the meaning of things in abstract rather than the actual thing. We are con-tinuing 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 pat-terns 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 mo-dular, can you outline the ap-proach?

We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We analysed that lan-ding 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 ap-proach is simple: We plan to use other rocket companies for to take us into sa-tellite orbit (lots of companies are com-peting 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 surfa-ce 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 ri-ght on the moon. We plan to use this fuel to carry mined elements back to earth on

© 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 fundamen-tally 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-

Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur and philanthropist driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovation. He is the fo-under of several companies and serves on the board of Singularity University. Furthermore Naveen Jain has been awarded many ho-nors for his entrepreneurial suc-cesses and leadership skills.

its return trip. Just a decade ago, our ap-proach would not have been possible be-cause additive 3D printing were not pos-sible which makes the cost of complexity close to zero. All of these exponential technologies coming together in this in-terdisciplinary 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 ultima-tely 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 na-tions stating that “No country can own any planet.” However, similar to interna-tional 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 com-mercialize space including commercia-lizing the mining for resources on the moon, Entrepreneurs are innovative, fast, nimble, they use private resources witho-ut any bureaucratic system, and they are more cost effective. Beyond that, entre-preneurs who are successful in commer-cializing space have potential to build amazingly profitable enterprises but they can also make the humanity better by cre-ating 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 su-stainable.

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.

Jeanny Gering

Advertising is

ROCKET SCIENCE

Can you share some of your insights on how AI may reach limits in terms of cre-ativity? 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?

There’s a story in a book called “Auto-mate 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 even-tually more and more productively, arte-facts that would be appealing to humans as art. Of course one could get really philo-sophical 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 con-ceipt. So we think of a task that only we can do, and in the history of AI sure eno-ugh 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 navi-gation 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 adverti-sing - 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 some-thing even smarter the next time. The

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

I think big data is the most important mi-lestone. 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, may-be not physical robots that resemble hu-mans, but we’re likely to see special pur-pose 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 pro-cessed but with the ability to reason. So fields where it’s still difficult to imagine, AI will be used in the near enough future.

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

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 le-vel. With regards to consumers I think it’s interesting, because I don’t encounter many who have the right concept of ano-nymous tracking for instance. There’s a false idea among some that they are be-ing 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 algo-rithmically curated web experience. To give you an example: we rarely get ema-ils 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.

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

Well I think big data always helps but it’s a question of how much granularity ma-kes 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 ano-nymous, you still get a better understan-ding of your customer base.

What are the most important and may-be 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 “artifi-cal intelligence lab”, and the main topics we dealt with were related to either au-tonomous 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 pi-lot who you can advise how to use the space craft. You think of a fully autono-mous auto pilot that makes all decisions by itself, which leads you to take a much broader range of possibilities into acco-unt. So I think that was useful for Rocket Fuel and our advertising systems, becau-se these systems have up to forty billion opportunities a day to reach out to con-sumers, which is well beyond the capaci-ty of any one human. In my view, doing that right demanded the same kind of au-tonomous space craft way of thinking.


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.

Karen Khurana

What are the biggest challenges pu-blishers have to face in the context of na-tive advertising?

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 re-aders. 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 de-partments to create the content on be-half 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 pressu-re. 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 opportu-nities.

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

Digiday covers the transitions the media industry is undergoing from analogue to digital including perspectives from pu-blishers, 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 particu-larly new, advetorials have existed for a while. However, there’s a supply and de-mand imbalance in the media system ri-ght 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 auto-mated ad systems are making advertising very efficient for brands because they can find specific audiences no matter whe-re they are. This efficiency on the other side ends up challenging publishers a lot. They have to adopt these automated sys-tems, yet they often lead to lower ad ra-tes. 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.

for it. Right now the metrics aren’t total-ly set. A lot of publishers want the adver-tisers to judge the success based on pu-blisher 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 page-views 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 adverti-ser 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 the-re are a lot of euphemisms around the-re. 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 eventual-ly 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.

Brian Morrissey is the editor--in-chief of Digiday, a vertical media company that covers the digital media and marke-ting 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

Apart from the labeling, by its very na-ture 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 gover-ned journalism for a long time. Howe-ver, 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 vo-ice of the business side probably wins the day more often because it is a very chal-lenging environment.

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 Inter-net, 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 adver-tising 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.

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

I think we will see all sorts of new for-mats 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 pu-blishing 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.


Ask consumers about “artificial intel-ligence” (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 futuri-stic feel; AI is generally not considered likely to be prevalent in our lifetimes.

Simon Patterson

However AI computers that act indepen-dently, 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 ti-mes 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 invest-ments on our behalf. Computers assess our health, diagnose conditions and re-commend drug therapies, in some cases with better outcomes and success rates than our doctors. In a business context, computers make rapid resource alloca-tion decisions, for example, which go-ods to stock in a physical store, or how best to allocate marketing spend online

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 hu-man 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. The-re has been a well-documented explosion of data, mostly unstructured, such as vi-deo, 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-

©Gengiskanhg / Creative Commons License

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

ses because of the scale, complexity and speed required, it’s beyond the capabi-lities 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 be-nefits 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 responsi-ble? 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, trans-portation, healthcare and financial servi-ces. 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 asso-ciated with it.


Aaron Koening

The current monetary system is evil. When central banks can manipulate the money supply, the devaluation of money is ine-vitable. Only those who are close to the artificial source of money being created „out of thin air“ benefit from this, while every-one 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.

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

Government monopolies on money are a relatively new phenomenon. For tho-usands of years, naturally scarce metals such as gold and silver were the basis for currencies--banknotes were simply re-ceipts for precious metals. Until 1971, when US President Richard Nixon abo-lished 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 sky-rocketing government debt and fuelled countless economic bubbles. It is only a matter of time before this system--whe-re 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 sug-gested a solution to this problem: a new currency and payment system called Bit-coin. Bitcoins have the same qualities that made gold and silver the money of cho-ice for thousands of years: they’re scarce, fungible and they don’t decay. On top of

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.

With these qualities, Bitcoin has more world-changing potential than even the Internet itself. Pe-ople 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 politi-cians 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 moneta-ry system collapses – and I am looking forward to that day – we will thank “Sa-toshi Nakamoto” for having invented the better one that is already taking its place.

Wearable Electromagnetic Kicks for your Performance

Lukas Kubina

„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 per-formance by electromagnetic stimulation. His experiments indicate a strong positive effect. We sat down and chatted about the wearable device (Decem-ber, New York).

Halo promises to be weara-ble doping without side-effects. Marvellous! Can you walk us thro-ugh the fundamental technology?

For twenty years, there has been increasing use of invasive techniqu-es. My co-founder spent the last 12 years in this area with his compa-ny „Neuropace“. Essentially, they make a pacemaker for your brain. It detects the condition of your brain. If you are having an epilep-sy it can intervene and fix the con-dition! With Halo, it’s the opposi-te 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 de-vices 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 your-self?

Yes. The first time I stuck the first HALO Prototype on my head two things hap-pened. 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 comple-tely 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 some-thing 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 technolo-gy 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 re-cruited a group of people that were heal-thy 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 exac-tly how they discovered stuff.

..Marie Curie killed herself..

And got two Noble Prizes. We are brin-ging the entrepreneur and technology culture to the body and medicine. And hope to unbottle technologies that have been in medicine for many years but the-ir 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

Dr. Amol Sarva is an Ameri-can entrepreneur who cofo-unded Virgin Mobile USA, the simple smartphone Peek, discussion platform Knotable, and Halo Neuroscience, a we-arable technology for enhan-cing cognitive function.

problems we should be working on. So, yes, we brought punk to the laboratory in a sense that we are introducing a diffe-rent 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 mas-sive. 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 co-gnitive 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 belie-ved him, they thought he was an idiot… But something that promises to make your mind work better is simply seducti-ve. 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 ha-sn’t been much progress in the area, pe-ople 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!

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.

OrCam- Disrupting Limited Vision

Yonatan Wexler

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

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, inclu-ding age-related conditions, diseases and birth defects. It is estimated that world-wide there are 342 million adults with si-gnificant visual impairment.

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

Enter OrCam, a small, wearable camera that allows the user to perform a varie-ty of tasks that, although taken for gran-ted 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 poc-ket-sized computer. A bone-conduction

Jonatan Wexler is an experienced Computer Vision scientist who has spent the last three years with OrCam Technologies develo-ping a unique device for blind and visually impaired people using so-phisticated image and text reco-gnition technology.

speaker provides discrete yet clear speech as it reads aloud the words or object po-inted to by the user. OrCam can read text (books, newspapers, menus, signs and more) and recognize objects such as pro-duct, 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 pro-duct.

OrCam is based on computer vision al-gorithms – 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 minimi-zing 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-sto-red 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 im-provements based on the user feedback we’ve received. Helping the visually disa-bled to overcome their challenges – par-ticularly easy access to information – is a rewarding task indeed.

Fabrice Sergent is the Founder and CEO of Cellfish, a leading digi-tal publisher of innovative mobile content and applications. Espe-cially music and live concert apps are an important part to Cell-fish’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.

Jeanny Gering

MusicMeets Content

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 en-tertainment for music fans with initiati-ves 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 inte-rest 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 com-pany milestones, there have been many. From our successful acquisitions of Air-borne 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 busi-ness 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 the-se countries but also in Asia and Latin America, where we see the concert acti-vities booming.

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

We see trends in music consumption at Bandsintown but also through ToneMe-dia, 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 down-turn, the live concert experience is irre-placeable 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 so-cial 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 pur-pose is for you to get out and meet others in real life, through music.

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

Cellfish has always been very involved in music. Me and my cofounder, Julien Mi-telberg, 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 entrepre-neur 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 perso-nal 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 re-cords 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 real-ly 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, Uni-versal 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 ap-peal 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?

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 pio-neer with 20 years of experien-ce, having led many multi-bran-ded properties to market aimed at the mobile generation.

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 ar-tists in America are using Bandsintown to market their tour dates online. Since to-uring 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 Bandsin-town, 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 indu-stry?

Our vision at Bandsintown is that there needs to be a place where fans can tell their concert stories. They want to sha-re 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 (con-cert ratings, memorabilia). We have abo-ut 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 tech-nology should improve society. I hope that we will create many more moments of passion and joy through music by pro-viding fans with memorable experiences.

Be imaginative, exciting, compelling, inspiring: That’s what John Brockman expects of him-self 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 ).

DLD Team


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 cyber-netic 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. Some-thing that he couldn’t understand for a long time. „John, that’s Zen,“ a friend fi-nally explained to him. „You no longer need him.“

Wowe

John Brockman is a cultural im-presario, whose career has en-compassed 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 di-scussions of cutting edge science, and CEO of Brockman, Inc. the le-ading international literary agen-cy for serious nonfiction authors.

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 pu-blish the Whole Earth Catalog, the shop-ping primer and bible of the environmen-tally-driven counterculture. For both readers, physics and mathematics expan-ded into an infinite space that no longer distinguished between the natural and human sciences, mind and matter, sear-ching 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 Daw-kins 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 geno-mes 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.

© Edge.org

Keeping the Internet Open in 2014

All Hands on DeckFor 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.

Albert Wenger

MediaMatters

Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures. He cur-rently serves on the board of se-veral companies including Four-square, MongoDB, Shapeways, Twilio and Wattpad. Albert gra-duated from Harvard College in economics and computer scien-ce and holds a Ph.D. in Informa-tion Technology from MIT.

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).

Fourth, as more and more Internet traf-fic is moving to wireless devices with the continued fast growth of smartphones, AT&T is gutting net neutrality with a „sponsored” bandwidth scheme. In es-sence large providers can subsidize band-width 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 co-operated with the government on secret surveillance and are supporting proprie-tary 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.

First, thanks to Edward Snowden we have a much better view into the extent of domestic and international surveillan-ce activities. The non-democratic ultra-secret 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 fil-tering. The UK is taking an unfortunate lead here. Not surprisingly this is being done under the guise of protecting child-ren from pornography. This is of course energizing calls for ISP or country-level filtering in other places, such as Austra-lia. Herdict is a project by the Berkman center to try to measure the impact of these kinds of filters on the reachabili-ty of different web sites. We should be supporting projects like this and actively protesting ISP level filtering ideally boy-cotting 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 stan-dard. This seems partially in response to the burgeoning proprietary DRM solu-tions being pushed by different browser providers which in turn appears driven

It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD

Cyber WorldRod 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 enga-ging - 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 con-sequences, and living with a serious cyber threat is our new global reality: The book The Starfish and The Spider: the Unstop-pable Power Of Leaderless (Beckstrom & Brafman; 2006) introduced a model for thinking about decentralized networks, organizational leadership, strategy, com-petition 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 vul-nerable world - from a systems perspec-tive, 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: nuc-lear Mutually Assured Destruction. Nuc-lear MAD evolved from the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons after World War II. It changed the natu-re of war and geopolitics and helped se-cure the precarious peace among super-powers that has held for almost seventy years while countless small regional wars have been fought.

The second MAD is cyber MAD, or Mu-tually Assured Disruption. It echoes the underlying concept of nuclear MAD: na-tion states and others have the ability to cripple each other’s power systems, indu-stries 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 laun-ches 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 fundamental-ly different from nuclear MAD. Nuclear weapons have not been used in war since 1945. But cyber weapons are used mil-lions of times every second. Nuclear we-apons 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 tau-ght 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 re-liance on the Internet, and upon each other through the Internet, for commu-nications, commerce, power, travel, ship-ping, infrastructure – in fact, for almost everything we do. That makes Internet MAD a positive force that delivers incre-dible benefits to mankind. Most indivi-duals 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 mat-ter their political orientation, and though they may disagree on some aspects of its use, most of them recognize the importan-ce 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 infor-mation, 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 the-ir 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 - li-miting the number of nations with we-apons - 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 gro-wth rate of the Internet mean that none are likely to emerge in the near future. And the current rapid pace of tech de-velopment 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 cy-ber 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 engu-lfs the planet.

This produces a very different set of chal-lenges 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 se-cure Internet, because the downside of

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

Internet MAD’s positive mutual depen-dence is that the capacity for destruction at the hands of cyber attackers is immen-se. Some might propose breaking up the Internet to protect their national intere-sts, creating separate and self-contained national networks (think of the recurrent debate in the EU in the NSA scandal af-termath). 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 In-ternet. It is the foundation for continued innovation and economic growth and a platform for communication across cul-tural 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 cybersecuri-ty. 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 gre-atest collective achievements and protec-ting it is fundamental to our future. The moment has come to bring sanity back to our MAD, MAD, MAD cyber world.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, a scheduled speaker at DLD14 and co-director of exhibitions and programs and director of international projects at London’s Serpentine Gal-leries, recently spoke to Informilo’s Eric Sylvers about the nexus of art and tech.

Hans Ulrich ObristOn The Intersection of Technology And Art

89PLUS

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 challen-ges 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 lon-ger 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 re-lation to technology.

Is it fair to say that the intersection of art and tech is one of the focuses at the Ser-pentine Galleries in London? Will it be-come a bigger one in future?

Yes, absolutely. We have done the 89plus Marathon, bringing together 40 spe-akers. 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 display-ed. We hired a digital curator so it is cle-arly 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?

I think Steffi is one of the great junction makers of our time. No one does it better than her connecting people from diffe-rent 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 sen-se DLD never stops, it’s 365 days a year.

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 disappearan-ce 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 calli-graphy, 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 down-loaded 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

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 co-nversation at DLD?

For the panel we did about how a 21st-century 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 be-ginning 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 Se-hgal 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.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, Lon-don. Prior to this, he was the Cu-rator of the Musée d’Art Moder-ne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kit-chen Show) in 1991 he has cura-ted more than 250 shows.

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 archi-tects and I saw I could post their writings. A sort of visual tweet put on Instagram and then also on Twitter. It became a ri-tual. 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 hand-writing.

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

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.

CompassionQuestions about the difference between em-pathy and compassion, or about whether com-passion can be trained, are now answered by a newly published eBook and film. A Christmas Treat from Tania Singer and the DLD Team.

Tania Singer

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 sum-marises fascinating results of the science of compassion, but also describes training programmes and practical experien-ces. 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 eBo-ok has evolved from a workshop, How to Train Compassion, which was orga-nised 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, of-fering the reader many videos from the workshop, sound art collages by Nathalie Singer, as well as impressive pieces of vi-sual art by Olafur Eliasson.

The film Raising Compassion brings to-gether workshop participants in a remar-kable exchange between science, art, and contemplative practice. In a series of in-formal conversations about compassion, initiated by Tania Singer and Olafur Eliasson, they discuss the public percep-tion of compassion, compassion-training programs at various research centers, their experiences working with priso-ners 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 Neu-roscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, where she investigates the fo-undations of human social be-haviour.

Content & Context



Waze and Means

The BIT - Barry Silbert’s Cryptocurrency Investment Fund


Smarter Typing

Mindset of Abundance - Dream that Everything is Possible

Advertising is Rocket Science




Wearable Electromagnetic Kicks for your Perfomance

OrCam - Disrupting Limited Vision

Music Meets Content


Keeping the Internet Open in 2014 - All Hands on Deck

It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD Cyber World

Hans Ulrich Obrist - On The Intersection of Technology And Art

Compassion

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Content & Context

Index