An astronaut aboard the ISS took this intriguing picture of the Silicon Valley. And it reminds us how far we have gone with technology and how it progresses humanity. We see images from the Mars' surface, got close-up pictures from Jupiter, look at distant galaxies, see strange animals deep in the oceans, or watch live events on the other side of the globe. We are in the period of the singularity, where we are so connected that humans will start changing. Your smartphone and computer are already kind of your artificial limbs that many cannot live without. Funny enough, a Hollywood actress plays a significant part in that progress, thanks to her invention. Read about her at the end of this newsletter.
And soon we'll be surrounded even more by the Internet of Things with wearable technology, implants, even sensors in agriculture an all over our apartments. Siri, Amazon Echo's Alexa, Fitbit, and all the other makers of IoT hardware are showing us the future today. And we'll need to learn how to communicate and behave with those machines. A good way to stay ahead is reading this newsletter and my blog.
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The new basic skill of the 21st century is coding. After reading, writing, and math the focus of many educational programs has turned to writing software and the ability to program machines. It comes as no surprise that several learning platforms started using GAMIFICATION as a way to teach coding. Codecademy, CodeFights, CodinGame, or LittleCodr are just four of over a dozen examples that I list in my wiki.
The CREATIVITY-technique of the day is Be Bored. But not just any type of bored. In total there are five types of boredom, of which three are good for creativity. Relaxing, calibrating, and searching boredom are the ones. But that requires that you get out of your daily routine and tasks and take the time so that you can be bored.
A list of more creativity techniques can be found here.
Some say INNOVATION is inevitable. The reason they say so is that the very same ideas are often conceived by several people within a short period of time without them knowing of each other. Already in the 1920s researchers found 140 examples of innovations done independently by several people within a short time, often separated by countries or even continents.
How is that possible? Think of innovation as being based on evolutionary building blocks, where each building block is built by the existing ones. Combining new and old building blocks brings us inevitably to new combinations, to innovation. The logical consequence is that innovation is inevitable and therefore should also not really be patentable. There is even a name for this: the adjacent possible. Just ponder on it...
Did you know that the Silicon Valley alone has 30,000 tech-STARTUPs, but only a few hundred get funded by Angels and VCs? And the majority of this money goes to just 3% of all startups?
Those facts should not let you despair, because the number of successful startups also increased. And just the last 2 years we saw an explosion in the number of unicorns - startups with an evaluation of $1bn - from 40 just two years ago to over 120 today. The WSJ has more on that.
Articles I liked around STARTUPS and SILICON VALLEY MINDSET:
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How is an INTRAPRENEUR different from an entrepreneur? Glad that you asked, because there are some differences. Intrapreneurs have a salary, create a business for someone else's business, need management approval, have readily available company resources, less financial risks but also get less rewards, and have lower autonomy. Off-putting? Not necessarily.
So what motivates them to do all this? Because their motivation is not based on extrinsic factors but how much impact they can have. We need them. Be nice to them and support them.
NSFW - Google Doodle: Hedy Lamarr - Actress & Inventor
Today's NSFW - internet lingo for Not Safe For Work - is a Google Doodle from this week celebrating Hedy Lamarr. One of the most beautiful Hollywood actresses ever was also a big nerd. She invented - among other things - spread-spectrum communication technology, which is the basis of how cell phones are handed over from one to the next tower, and kind of how wireless devices works. Her life-story is also quite eventful and worth a ready over a nice glass of wine.
