10 publications:
- Springwise.com. A website and fabulous electronic newsletter. Thousands of people out there, looking for new business ideas, from all over the world. Every time the weekly email newsletter comes, it is full of great stuff.
- The Week: A collection of digest and articles/columns from all over North America, and is unbelievably useful.
- The National Bureau of Economic Research Digest. Email newsletter. Economists submit working papers, short, shorter than journal articles, and this offers great summaries.
- Arts Journal. Outstanding email newsletter; daily and weekly. Summarizes a whole array of information in the arts, and the broader world of ideas and the intersection of arts and sciences. The intersection of arts and sciences is among the most interesting thing happening in the world today.
- The New Scientist. Fabulous—stuff on the website is excellent, user friendly, making science understandable and relevant.
- Popurl. A massive agglomeration of what is happening on the web right now, an MRI of the global web brain.
- Seth Godin’s Blog. Outstanding. He really irritates me—8 times out of 9 it is really interesting, really insightful, really useful. His ability to crank out something every single day is really amazing.
- Employee First, Customer Second. A new business book coming out next summer, with a crazy, radical, counterintuitive notion. Coming from a CEO of an Indian technology company. The result is that customers love us, because when employees are happy, customers happy. Very interesting new management ideas coming out of India.
- Different: Escaping the Competitive Heard. Purple Cow meets Blue Ocean. A book for people who don’t read business books. Very smart, very strategic book against conformity.
- The Thing. I don’t even know how to describe the Thing—it is an object based quarterly magazine. But instead of getting a magazine in your mailbox, you get a “thing.” A mix of art, a subscription, ideas.
Five Trends Worth Watching this Year:
Trend Number 1: Apps for Everyone! It is astonishing how many apps come out every day, and I don’t see why we will not each have our own app. Mobile Roadie has a very small elegant way to have people create their own app. This is really just a beginning; five years from now, most people will have their own app.
Trend Number 2. Socrates Meets Statistics: Know thyself and track your personal, bodily data. It is amazing the amount of data each body creates every day, and there are ways to capture that and track that. Ten years from now we will be amazed that we didn’t use to track our every single step we take for our health. Total Recall is a book that speaks to this really well.
Trend number 3: This may not be the American or Chinese century, but the English century- the English language century. We now have a worldwide first language. There will be soon a “Starbucks” of English instruction, a branded shop to teach English all over the world.
Trend number 4: Dysfunction is High Function. Quite a list of gamechanging dyslexics—it is really weird, but somehow very compelling. “Orchid Children,” an Atlantic article that is really fascinating, speaks to this. The Hypomanic edge is another book that speaks powerfully to this, that in the US we have genetically selected for hypomania and that has created our US global competitive advantage.
Trend Number 5. Obama is Reagan. Not politically, but the parallels are astonishing, in the way the President is an outsider, the economy is in terrible shape, the ideology is out of control, the FedReserve is significantly involved. Their approval rating curve is very, very similar. I guarantee you: by 2012, it will be morning in America, and Obama’s reelection is certain.