Bill Gates on Technology and Saving the World

Bill Gates starts an in-depth Financial Times interview with a simple truth: 

Bill Gates describes himself as a technocrat. But he does not believe that technology will save the world. Or, to be more precise, he does not believe it can solve a tangle of entrenched and interrelated problems that afflict humanity’s most vulnerable: the spread of diseases in the developing world and the poverty, lack of opportunity and despair they engender. “I certainly love the IT thing,” he says. “But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.”

Adam Savage: Ground Rules for Success

The infinitely curious, brilliant, and kind Adam Savage gave the closing benediction at Boing Boing: Ingenuity theatrical experience at a former Masonic Lodge in San Francisco on August 18. The co-host of Mythbusters, co-founder of Tested, and Boing Boing contributor inspired us with his personal story of becoming a maker and outlined ten ground rules for success. 

Ben Chestnut: Creating an Environment for Creativity and Empowerment

Ben Chestnut is MailChimp's co-founder and CEO. After studying industrial design and physics at Georgia Institute of Technology and working as a designer for an mp3 website, Ben founded The Rocket Science Group in 2000. There, he built web apps—before they were even called web apps—for companies like BellSouth, CNN, Coca-Cola and The Arthritis Foundation. Within a year, Ben launched MailChimp, which grew alongside The Rocket Science Group. MailChimp was a hit, and he started focusing exclusively on it in 2005. Since then, MailChimp has grown from 9,000 users to more than 3,000,000. MailChimp makes it easy to design and send beautiful emails, manage your subscribers and track your campaign's performance. It takes powerful tools like segmentation, a/b testing and ROI tracking, and turns them into something anyone can use.

This presentation was recorded live at The Summit, hosted by The Youth Cartel on November 10 and 11, 2012.

Creative Destruction

Nick Bilton writing in The New York Times Bit's Blog, Disruptions: Apple’s Next Unveiling Could Make or Break a Business: 

The economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction” in 1942 to describe the less-than-tidy way free markets lead to progress: the telephone replaced the telegraph; the cellphone replaced the telephone; the smartphone (we’re still in the middle of this one) is replacing the cellphone; and so on. Something gets destroyed and something new and exciting is built on top of it.

...

The destruction and renewal upon which the tech industry has thrived has accelerated thanks to the Internet, cheap smartphone apps and lower costs of doing business. Facebook, for example, which in just a few years has gone from a start-up to one of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley, has to constantly be on the lookout for the next big threat. And when it can’t take those competitors out at the knees, it buys them, like the photo-sharing service Instagram.

So who is safe from the perils of the smartphone? No one, it seems. Not even Apple.

The Arecibo Observatory: Beyond The Big Dreams

This is a fantastic mini-documentary introducing The Arecibo Observatory. I grew up in Puerto Rico and visited the observatory with my family. I would never forget looking at it and realizing how enormous it is, and how it is perfectly embedded in the landscape.