The idea of private blockchains, such as enterprise blockchain platforms, will eventually “fail miserably,” was the prediction of CEO of Abra during Fortune’s “Balancing The Ledger” show on Feb. 25 ’19, which now seems to be reality.
Bill Barhydt, CEO of cryptocurrency wallet and investing app Abra, has argued that the idea of a truly decentralized cryptocurrency contradicts the notion of private blockchains.
Unlike public blockchains, such as those of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), which can be accessed and joined by anyone, private blockchains represent a permissioned network with access controls that restrict who can join, meaning that they operate like a centralized database system.
Speaking during the show, Barhydt compared enterprise blockchain solutions with the concept of an extranet, a term for a local network protocol that was popular in the 1990s. An extranet represents a controlled private network that only allows access to an authorized set of customers.
Abra’s CEO argued that the extranet phenomenon is “exactly what’s happened with all this enterprise blockchain nonsense.”
Barhydt elaborated that private blockchains will eventually fail, stating:
“People have this fallacy idea that they’re going to make blockchain work inside the firewall. It’s all going to fail miserably. […] It’s all about a truly decentralized cryptocurrency and a private blockchain. It just makes no sense.”
Barhydt’s stance echoes previous statements by Bitcoin developer and Blockchain Capital venture partner Jimmy Song. In June 2018, Song stated that using blockchain technology for a private and centralized system, such as an enterprise, “makes zero sense.”
In the Fortune interview, Barhydt additionally commented on JPMorgan Chase’s recent launch of its bespoke digital currency, JPM Coin. Barhydt suggested that JPMorgan Chase misrepresented its new initiative, stating that it seems more like “a ledger meant for settling trades” than a coin. Barhydt also stated that “if it really is a private blockchain and private coin, I’m guessing it’s a complete waste of time.”
Recently, Ripple (XRP) CEO Brad Garlinghouse said that JPM Coin “misses the point” of crypto, arguing that “introducing a closed network today is like launching AOL after Netscape’s IPO.”
Garlinghouse also claimed that “if banks of different digital asset groups want to settle trades with one another, they’ll have to make markets between their unique digital assets or trade between their digital assets and a common fiat currency.”
My opinion is that private blockchains will soon be replaced by agile and better performing databases within private ecosystems, but we will no longer call them blockchains.
In fact, the term blockchain and its architecture was born to address very specific needs where trust is not needed to ensure trust.
Myself, I designed a distributed ledger protocol (DLT), in 2009, and the reason I decided to move to a public blockchain, OTIchain, today is to ensure independent and transparent communication to my stakeholders while avoiding costly audits for them and us, freeing up these resources for research and development.
In my and in the majority of the experts view if the blockchain is classified in a private environment it does not solve the problem, on the contrary it creates an additional onerous overstructure.
Images in this post are considered to be in the public domain since found on the web and media therefore supposed to be copyright-free images – it’s not intended from the author of the post to violate any copyright right infringement laws, or to offend anyone; in the case you advise a violation, would you advise me and I’ll promptly remove them. The post it’s also an expression of my personal opinion.
You’ve probably never heard of General Magic, but in Silicon Valley the company is a legend. An Apple spin off in 1990 with most of the original Mac team on board and a brave new product idea: a portable gadget they called “personal communicator”.
Connected to a telephone socket, it could manage e-mails, dial phone numbers and even send SMS, like instant messages, complete with emoji and stickers.
Provided with an app store equipped with games, music and downloadable programs that could do things like check stock prices and keep track of expenses.
In the original Vision he could take pictures with an accessory (optional). There was also a prototype with a TOUCH SCREEN that could make cell phone calls and surf the web wirelessly, then embryonic. In other words, General Magic pulled out of his proverbial hat the technological equivalent of a working iPhone, a decade before Apple started working on the real one. Shortly after, General Magic himself disappeared.
The early ’90s iphone story
Fueled by hugely positive press, General Magic’s concept IPO in 1995, the first of its kind, raised $96 million before the product had been launched. The stock nearly doubled on the first day, closing at over $26 per share. By 1999, the stock had plunged to $1.38.
Money wasn’t an issue the early ’90s iPHONE were super founded!
General Magic had its origins in Marc Porat convincing Apple CEO John Sculley in the late eighties to spin off a new division to invent an early prototype of the smart phone. Under Sculley’s leadership, Apple developed General Magic’s operations.
A spin off of APPLE … can you imagine … WoW
“I came to Apple in 1988 and remember one of the first things I said to Sculley was that Apple had no future unless they did something beyond the computer,” Porat recalled. “They were so insecure and chaotic and dysfunctional that we [General Magic] were able to work our way through and recruit amazing people.”
The team who invented the future … today are considered some of the best and brightest minds in business and technology.
The 98% of the world’s smartphone market can be traced back to two people who sat no more than 10 feet apart at a company called General Magic? That’s Tony Fadell and Andy Rubin, in case you were wondering.
So too in that office sat the founder of eBay Pierre Omidyar, the original Macintosh engineer Andy Hertzfeld, their head of marketing Joanna Hoffman (played by Kate Winslet in the Steve Jobs movie), Kevin Lynch aka the man behind the Apple Watch, the former CTO of the USA Megan Smith and a host of names who went on to great success and today are considered some of the best and brightest minds in business and technology.
Such an AMAZING team again and again WoW so what went wrong?
General Magic had what it takes to become a very successful company, a BIG TECH like APPLE to MICROSOFT, so money, the right partners a great team, what went wrong?
the General Magic original logo
“Simply” the fact that the CEO was not able to be faithful to the original vision, letting himself be distracted by the good intentions of his stakeholders.
The Vision is so important that only those who are able to be faithful to it to the end and uncompromisingly succeed as Steve Jobs has shown, but that’s another story that hopefully many future CEO’s will be able to repeat in the future, and for one time, why not also in the old EU continent.
Freely inspired from the article of Youval Noah Harari with my opinions
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and philosopher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among small elite of Corporate and Government Agencies.
Artificial Intelligence, If chess is our canary in the coal mine, we have been duly warned that the canary is dying
There
is nothing inevitable about democracy. For all the success that democracies have
had over the past century or more, they are blips in history. Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule have been
far more common modes of human governance.
The emergence of liberal
democracies is associated with ideals of liberty and equality that may seem
self-evident and irreversible. But these ideals are far more fragile than we
believe. Their success in the 20th
century depended on unique technological conditions that may prove ephemeral.
Opinion
In Italy for example television at the beginning helped to unify the country and to educate the masses on Italian language, high quality theatrical comedies live filmed, opera, classic concert, shows composed of highly qualified dance bodies and anchormen where the routine and an intellectual democracy widespread well-being saw the light, afterwards came the decadence.
In the second decade of the 21st century, liberalism has begun to lose credibility. Questions about the ability of liberal democracy to provide for the middle class have grown louder;politics have grown more tribal.
Information technology is
continuing to leap forward; biotechnology is beginning to provide a window into
our inner lives—our emotions, thoughts, and choices. Together, infotech and
biotech will create unprecedented upheavals in human society, eroding human
agency and, possibly, subverting human desires. Under such conditions, liberal democracy and free-market economics
might become obsolete.
Ordinary people may not understand artificial
intelligence and biotechnology in any detail, but they can sense that the
future is passing them by. In 1938 the common man’s
condition in the Soviet Union, Germany, or the United States may have been
grim, but he was constantly told that he was the most important thing in the
world, and that he was the future (provided, of course, that he was an
“ordinary man,” rather than, say, a Jew or a woman). He looked at the propaganda posters—which typically depicted coal
miners and steelworkers in heroic poses—and saw himself there: “I am in that
poster! I am the hero of the future!”
In 2018 the common person feels increasingly
irrelevant. Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about
excitedly in ted Talks,
at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic
engineering, AI, machine learning—and common
people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about
them.
In the 20th century, the
masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role
in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they
are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump may therefore
demonstrate a trajectory opposite to that of traditional socialist revolutions.
The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital
to the economy but lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed
political power but feared they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps
in the 21st century, populist revolts will be staged not against economic elite
that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them
anymore. This may well be a losing
battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against
exploitation.
The revolutions in information technology and
biotechnology are still in their infancy, and the extent to which they are responsible for the
current crisis of liberalism is debatable. Most people in Birmingham, Istanbul,
St. Petersburg, and Mumbai are only dimly aware, if they are aware at all, of
the rise of AI and its potential impact on their lives. It is undoubtable,
however, that the technological revolutions now gathering momentum will in the next few decades confront humankind
with the hardest trials it has yet encountered.
Let’s start with jobs and incomes, because whatever
liberal democracy’s philosophical appeal, it has gained strength in no small
part thanks to a practical advantage: The decentralized approach to
decision making that is characteristic of liberalism—in both politics and
economics—has allowed liberal democracies to outcompete other states, and to
deliver rising affluence to their people.
This is why the people see the blockchain as a genuine social impact cushion to the raising technology oligarchy.
Liberalism reconciled the proletariat with the
bourgeoisie, the faithful with atheists, natives with immigrants, and Europeans
with Asians by promising everybody a larger slice of the pie. With a constantly growing pie, that was possible. And
the pie may well keep growing. However, economic growth may not solve social
problems that are now being created by technological disruption, because such
growth is increasingly predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive
technologies.
Fears of machines pushing
people out of the job market are, of course, nothing new, and in the past such
fears proved to be unfounded. But artificial
intelligence is different from the old machines. In the past, machines competed
with humans mainly in manual skills. Now they are beginning to compete with us
in cognitive skills. And we don’t know of any third kind of skill—beyond
the manual and the cognitive—in which humans will always have an edge.
At least for a few more
decades, human intelligence is likely to far exceed computer intelligence in
numerous fields. Hence as computers take over more routine cognitive jobs, new
creative jobs for humans will continue to appear. Many of these new jobs will
probably depend on cooperation rather than competition between humans and AI.
Human-AI teams will likely prove superior not just to humans, but also to
computers working on their own.
However, most of the new jobs
will presumably demand high levels of expertise and ingenuity, and therefore
may not provide an answer to the problem of unemployed unskilled laborers, or
workers employable only at extremely low wages. Moreover, as AI continues to improve, even jobs that demand high intelligence and
creativity might gradually disappear. The world of chess serves as
an example of where things might be heading. For several years after IBM’s computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, human
chess players still flourished; AI was used to train human prodigies, and teams
composed of humans plus computers proved superior to computers playing alone.
Yet in recent years, computers have become so good at
playing chess that their human collaborators have lost their value and might
soon become entirely irrelevant. On December 6, 2017, another crucial milestone was reached when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8
program. Stockfish 8 had won a world
computer chess championship in 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated
human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. By
contrast, AlphaZero had not been taught
any chess strategies by its human creators—not even standard openings. Rather,
it used the latest machine-learning principles to teach itself chess by playing
against itself. Nevertheless, out of
100 games that the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish 8, AlphaZero won
28 and tied 72—it didn’t lose once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing
from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional
to the human eye. They could be described as creative, if not downright
genius.
Can you guess how long
AlphaZero spent learning chess from scratch, preparing for the match against
Stockfish 8, and developing its genius instincts? Four hours[1]. For centuries, chess was considered one of the
crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to
creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.
AlphaZero is not the only
imaginative software out there. One of the ways to catch cheaters in chess
tournaments today is to monitor the level of originality that players exhibit. If they play an exceptionally creative
move, the judges will often suspect that it could not possibly be a human move—it
must be a computer move. At least in chess, creativity
is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans! So if chess is
our canary in the coal mine, we have been duly warned that the canary is dying. What is happening today to human-AI teams in chess
might happen down the road to human-AI teams in policing, medicine, banking,
and many other fields.
What’s more, AI enjoys
uniquely nonhuman abilities, which makes the difference between AI and a human
worker one of kind rather than merely of degree. Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are
connectivity and updatability.
For example, many drivers are
unfamiliar with all the changing traffic regulations on the roads they drive,
and they often violate them. In addition, since every driver is a singular
entity, when two vehicles approach the same intersection, the drivers sometimes
miscommunicate their intentions and collide. Self-driving cars, by contrast, will know all the traffic regulations
and never disobey them on purpose, and they could all be connected to one
another. When two such vehicles approach the same junction, they won’t
really be two separate entities, but part of a single algorithm. The chances that they might miscommunicate
and collide will therefore be far smaller.
Similarly, if the World Health Organization identifies
a new disease, or if a laboratory produces a new medicine, it can’t immediately
update all the human doctors in the world. Yet even if you had billions of AI doctors in the
world—each monitoring the health of a single human being—you could still update
all of them within a split second, and they could all communicate to one
another their assessments of the new disease or medicine. These potential advantages of connectivity and updatability are so huge
that at least in some lines of work, it might make sense to replace all humans
with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than
the machines.
This is what is actually happening for
algorithms that I am helping to develop for High Frequency Traders, a hobby for
me a multimillion key success tool for them.
The same technologies that
might make billions of people economically irrelevant might also make them
easier to monitor and control.
All of this leads to one very important conclusion:
The automation revolution will not consist of a single watershed event, after which the job market will settle into some new
equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions. Old jobs
will disappear and new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs will also rapidly
change and vanish. People will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just
once, but many times.
Just as in the 20th century
governments established massive education systems for young people, in the 21st
century they will need to establish massive reeducation systems for adults. But
will that be enough? Change is always stressful, and the hectic world of the
early 21st century has produced a global epidemic of stress. As job volatility
increases, will people be able to cope? By
2050, a useless class might emerge, the result not only of a shortage of jobs
or a lack of relevant education but also of insufficient mental stamina to
continue learning new skills. Let’s travel trough
the future years.
As many people lose
their economic value, they might also come to lose their political power. The same technologies that might make billions of
people economically irrelevant might also make them easier to monitor and
control.
AI frightens many people
because they don’t trust it to remain obedient. Science fiction makes much of
the possibility that computers or robots will develop consciousness—and shortly
thereafter will try to kill all humans. But there is no particular reason to
believe that AI will develop consciousness as it becomes more intelligent. We should instead fear AI because it will
probably always obey its human masters, and never rebel. AI is a tool and a
weapon unlike any other that human beings have developed; it will almost
certainly allow the already powerful to consolidate their power further.
IN ALL THIS high-tech commercial world there is nothing that looks particularly democratic, (except blockchain).
Artificial Intelligence lends itself to surveillance as well as liberty, to new forms of manipulation and covert control as well as new kinds of participation, to skewed, unjust market outccomes as well as greater productivity.
The consumer Society and the open society are not quite synonymous. Capitalism and democracy have a relationship, but it is something less than a marriage
Consider surveillance.
Numerous countries around the world, including several democracies, are busy
building unprecedented systems of surveillance. For example, Israel is a leader
in the field of surveillance technology, and has created in the occupied West
Bank a working prototype for a total-surveillance regime[2]. Already today whenever Palestinians make a phone
call, post something on Facebook, or travel from one city to another, they are
likely to be monitored by Israeli microphones, cameras, drones, or spy
software. Algorithms analyze the gathered data, helping the Israeli security
forces pinpoint and neutralize what they consider to be potential threats. The
Palestinians may administer some towns and villages in the West Bank, but the
Israelis command the sky, the airwaves, and cyberspace. It therefore takes
surprisingly few Israeli soldiers to effectively control the roughly 2.5
million Palestinians who live in the West Bank.
In one incident in October
2017, a Palestinian laborer posted to his private Facebook account a picture of
himself in his workplace, alongside a bulldozer. Adjacent to the image he
wrote, “Good morning!” A Facebook translation algorithm made a small error when
transliterating the Arabic letters. Instead of Ysabechhum (which
means “Good morning”), the algorithm identified the letters as Ydbachhum (which
means “Hurt them”). Suspecting that the man might be a terrorist intending to
use a bulldozer to run people over, Israeli security forces swiftly arrested him[3]. They released him after they realized that the
algorithm had made a mistake. Even so, the offending Facebook post was taken
down—you can never be too careful. What Palestinians are experiencing today in
the West Bank may be just a primitive preview of what billions of people will
eventually experience all over the planet.
Imagine, for instance, that
the current regime in North Korea gained a more advanced version of this sort
of technology in the future. North Koreans might be required to wear a
biometric bracelet that monitors everything they do and say, as well as their
blood pressure and brain activity. Using the growing understanding of the human
brain and drawing on the immense powers of machine learning, the North Korean
government might eventually be able to gauge what each and every citizen is
thinking at each and every moment. If a North Korean looked at a picture of Kim
Jong Un and the biometric sensors picked up telltale signs of anger (higher
blood pressure, increased activity in the amygdala), that person could be in
the gulag the next day.
The conflict between democracy
and dictatorship is actually a conflict between two different data-processing
systems. AI may swing the advantage toward the latter.
And yet such hard-edged
tactics may not prove necessary, at least much of the time. A facade of free
choice and free voting may remain in place in some countries, even as the
public exerts less and less actual control. To be sure, attempts to manipulate
voters’ feelings are not new. But once somebody (whether in San Francisco or
Beijing or Moscow) gains the technological ability to manipulate the human
heart—reliably, cheaply, and at scale—democratic politics will mutate into an
emotional puppet show.
We are unlikely to face a
rebellion of sentient machines in the coming decades, but we might have to deal
with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than
our mother does and that use this uncanny ability, at the behest of a human
elite, to try to sell us something—be it a car, a politician, or an entire
ideology. The bots might identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and
use them against us. We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent
elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to
manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their
prejudices. While science-fiction
thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we
may be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.
The biggest and most frightening impact of the AI
revolution might be on the relative efficiency of democracies and
dictatorships. Historically, autocracies
have faced crippling handicaps in regard to innovation and economic growth. In
the late 20th century, democracies usually outperformed dictatorships, because
they were far better at processing information. We tend to think about the
conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different
ethical systems, but it is actually a conflict between two different
data-processing systems. Democracy
distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many
people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and
power in one place. Given 20th-century technology, it was inefficient to
concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability
to process all available information fast enough and make the right decisions.
This is one reason the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United
States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.
OPINION
Philosophically,
intellectually—in every way—human society is unprepared for the rise of
artificial intelligence. – Henry A. Kissinger
AI developers, as inexperienced in politics and philosophy as I am in law, should ask themselves some of the questions I have raised here in order to build answers into their engineering efforts. The U.S. government in particular should consider a presidential commission of eminent thinkers to help develop a national vision. This much is certain: if we do not start this effort soon, before long we shall discover we started too late
However, artificial intelligence may soon swing the
pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous
amounts of information centrally. In fact, it might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse
systems, because machine learning works better when the machine has more
information to analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate
all the information relating to a billion people in one database, you’ll wind
up with much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have
in your database only partial information on a million people. An authoritarian
government that orders all its citizens to have their DNA sequenced and to
share their medical data with some central authority would gain an immense
advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data
are strictly private. The main handicap
of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all
information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the
21st century.
New technologies will continue
to emerge, of course, and some of them may encourage the distribution rather
than the concentration of information and power. Blockchain technology, and the
use of cryptocurrencies enabled by it, is currently touted as a possible
counterweight to centralized power. But blockchain
technology is still in the embryonic stage, and we don’t yet know whether it
will indeed counterbalance the centralizing tendencies of AI. Remember that
the Internet, too, was hyped in its early days as a libertarian panacea that
would free people from all centralized systems—but is now poised to make
centralized authority more powerful than ever.
Even if
some societies remain ostensibly democratic, the increasing
efficiency of algorithms will still shift more and more authority from
individual humans to networked machines. We might willingly give up more and more authority
over our lives because we will learn
from experience to trust the algorithms more than our own feelings, eventually
losing our ability to make many decisions for ourselves. Just think of the
way that, within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust
Google’s search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: finding
relevant and trustworthy information. As we rely more on Google for
answers, our ability to locate information independently diminishes. Already today, “truth” is defined by the
top results of a Google search. This process has likewise affected our
physical abilities, such as navigating space. People ask Google not just to
find information but also to guide them around. Self-driving cars and AI
physicians would represent further erosion: While these innovations would put
truckers and human doctors out of work, their larger import lies in the
continuing transfer of authority and responsibility to machines.
Humans are used to thinking
about life as a drama of decision making. Liberal democracy and free-market
capitalism see the individual as an autonomous agent constantly making choices
about the world. Works of art—be they Shakespeare plays, Jane Austen novels, or
cheesy Hollywood comedies—usually revolve around the hero having to make some
crucial decision. To be or not to be? To listen to my wife and kill King
Duncan, or listen to my conscience and spare him? To marry Mr. Collins or Mr.
Darcy? Christian and Muslim theology similarly focus on the drama of decision
making, arguing that everlasting salvation depends on making the right choice.
What will happen to this view
of life as we rely on AI to make ever more decisions for us? Even now we trust Netflix to recommend
movies and Spotify to pick music we’ll like. But why should AI’s
helpfulness stop there?
Every year millions of college
students need to decide what to study. This is a very important and difficult
decision, made under pressure from parents, friends, and professors who have
varying interests and opinions. It is also influenced by students’ own
individual fears and fantasies, which are themselves shaped by movies, novels,
and advertising campaigns. Complicating matters, a given student does not
really know what it takes to succeed in a given profession, and doesn’t
necessarily have a realistic sense of his or her own strengths and weaknesses.
It’s not so hard to see how AI could one day make
better decisions than we do about careers, and perhaps even about
relationships. But once we begin to count on
AI to decide what to study, where to work, and whom to date or even marry,
human life will cease to be a drama of decision making, and our conception of
life will need to change. Democratic
elections and free markets might cease to make sense. So might most religions
and works of art. Imagine Anna Karenina taking out her smartphone and
asking Siri whether she should stay married to Karenin or elope with the
dashing Count Vronsky. Or imagine your favorite Shakespeare play with all the
crucial decisions made by a Google algorithm. Hamlet and Macbeth would have
much more comfortable lives, but what kind of lives would those be? Do we have
models for making sense of such lives?
OPINION
This is why the future of retail, it so important and
a core of our new human renaissance, with an eye on the past, but gaining
advantage from the modern technologies.
In my opinion the future commercial centre that will
have more success will be the ones who put the human enlightenment and his
emotions at the centre, therefore like in the old artisans village, the goods
will be made on demand or to measure, and cultural events and museum will be at
the centre of the stage.
Can parliaments
and political parties overcome these challenges and forestall the
darker scenarios? At the current moment this does not seem likely. Technological disruption is not even a leading item
on the political agenda. During the 2016 U.S. presidential race, the main
reference to disruptive technology concerned Hillary Clinton’s email debacle,
and despite all the talk about job loss, neither candidate directly addressed
the potential impact of automation. Donald
Trump warned voters that Mexicans would take their jobs, and that the U.S.
should therefore build a wall on its southern border. He never warned voters
that algorithms would take their jobs, nor did he suggest building a firewall
around California.
So what should we do?
For starters, we need to place a much higher priority on understanding how the human mind works—particularly how our own wisdom and compassion can be cultivated.
If we invest too much in AI and too little in developing the human mind, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might serve only to empower the natural stupidity of humans, and to nurture our worst (but also, perhaps, most powerful) impulses, among them greed and hatred.
To avoid such an outcome, for every dollar and every minute we invest in improving AI, we would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in exploring and developing human consciousness.
More practically, and more immediately, if we want to
prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of small elite,
we must regulate the ownership of data. In ancient times, land was the most
important asset, so politics was a struggle to control land. In the modern era, machines and factories became
more important than land, so political struggles focused on controlling these
vital means of production. In the 21st
century, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset,
so politics will be a struggle to control data’s flow.
Unfortunately, we don’t have
much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far
more difficult task than regulating land or machines. Data are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, they can move at the
speed of light, and you can create as many copies of them as you want. Do the
data collected about my DNA, my brain, and my life belong to me, or to the
government, or to a corporation, or to the human collective?
The race to accumulate data is already on, and is
currently headed by giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook and, in China,
Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these
companies have acted as “attention merchants”—they capture our attention by
providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and then they
resell our attention to advertisers. Yet their true business isn’t merely selling
ads. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense
amounts of data about us, which are worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers—we are their
product.
Ordinary people will find it
very difficult to resist this process. At present, many of us are happy to give
away our most valuable asset—our personal data—in exchange for free email
services and funny cat videos. But if,
later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they are
likely to have trouble doing so, especially as they may have come to rely on
the network to help them make decisions, and even for their health and physical
survival.
Nationalization of data by
governments could offer one solution; it would certainly curb the power of big
corporations. But history suggests that
we are not necessarily better off in the hands of overmighty governments.
So we had better call upon our
scientists, our philosophers, our lawyers, and even our poets to turn their
attention to this big question: How do you regulate the ownership of data?
Currently, humans risk becoming similar to
domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of
milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less
resourceful. We are now creating tame humans who produce enormous amounts of
data and function as efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but
they hardly maximize their human potential. If we are not careful, we will end
up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on
themselves and on the world.
If you find these prospects alarming—if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship or some similarly degraded form of society—then the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands, and also find ways to keep distributed data processing more efficient than centralized data processing.
These will not be easy tasks. But achieving them may be the best safeguard of democracy.
In a few days I will be testimonial in some events, from Sunnyvale to Milan, speaking about different arguments related to innovation, sustainability and internationalization.
In all of them I see a red thread that links every moment of my life lately and that we can call Serendipity.
“This discovery I made by a talisman [a procedure achieving results like a charm] … by which I find everything I want … wherever I dip for it. This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip.
He explained that this name was part of the title of “a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip[1]: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of….”
Being curios and open minded is not so obvious, how you can understand who is?
An open mind person has almost always an open heart
An open heart has almost always shining and charming eyes
Charming eyes has almost always a gentle attitude
A gentle attitude has no envy
No envy means you can appreciate your fellows
Having fellows means you are not alone
Being Social minded means you know the meaning of giving back
Giving back is the secret of happiness
If you recognize yourself in this description you are a lucky person like me.
What are you waiting for? Join the club 🙂
[1] .[From the characters in the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, who made such discoveries, from Persian Sarandīp, Sri Lanka, from Arabic Sarandīb, ultimately from Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpaḥ : Siṃhalaḥ, Sri Lanka + dvīpaḥ, island; see Dhivehi.]
Blockchain Just Became Obsolete. Why the Future of traceable ownership can be 1trueID®,
considered the 1trueID® infrastructure Blockchain looks obsolete. 1trueID® show a software app, platform, DDNA that develop the social consensus algorithm: an entirely new distributed “own it℗” patented ledger technology, (when public), that is much more cost-effective (no proof-of-work), faster (like a credit card transaction), safer (similar standards of a digital passport or a contactless card), more efficient (no stale blocks) and mathematically fairer than the classic blockchain.
This is most probably the future of the ownership in a decentralized technology.
What about Blockchain Technology?
Considered the greatest technological innovation since the internet: Blockchain technology emerged in response to the collapse of several banking institutions in 2008 with the release of a whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto titled: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”
“…blockchain technology facilitates peer-to-peer transactions without any intermediary such as a bank or governing body …”
Blockchain is simply a database that is public (no one owns it), distributed (no centralized server), is continuously updated, and is secured by the art of cryptography.
What is 1trueid® and Why is it Better?
1trueid® is a different way to distributed ledger technology system that eliminates the need for massive computation and unsustainable energy consumption like those of Bitcoin.
Most importantly, it is able to reach a social consensus, thanks to his ”own it℗” patented feature
Why we call it blockchain and beyond:
Our Bitcoin is the DDNA
Our Node are smartphones
Our Miners are the makers
Our validators is the community of the owners
Ok our platform is not open source purists may be right, but who would like to give up his ownership in an open context?
So our platform is simply the regulator, non the validator, therefore cannot be open, at the same time, the transactions are distributed and public.
Why it is better?
Faster: limited only by bandwidth, as of now Bitcoin is limited to 7 transactions per second.
More Fair: mathematically proven fairness (via ownership social consensus) meaning no individual can manipulate it, you could duplicate the code, (as you can do with a contact less credit card), but the social ownership validation reveal the fake to the system and the community.
In the blockchain world, a miner can choose the order for which transactions occur in a block, can delay orders by placing them in future blocks, even stop them entirely from entering the system.
In the 1trueid® social consensus scheme, time ownership prevents an individual from affecting the ‘’own it’’ order of transactions.
Once an event occurs, everyone knows about it practically in real time. Only the effects of the transaction are necessary in storing, everything else can be discarded. This shrinks the huge amount of storage currently needed (Bitcoin: 60GB) to a infinitesimal fraction, allowing smartphones to act as a node.
Improved Security:The NSA‘s Skipjack algorithm used in its Fortezza program employs 80-bit keys, 1trueid use 128-bit keys: No member can prevent the community from reaching a consensus, nor can they change the consensus once it has been reached. The Advanced Encryption Standard published in 2001 uses a key sizes of 128 bits, 192 or 256 bits. Many observers consider 128 bits sufficient for the foreseeable future for symmetric algorithms of AES‘s quality until quantum computers become available
100% Efficient: No mined block ever becomes stale. In the blockchain, transactions are put into containers (blocks) that form a single, long chain. If two miners create two blocks at the same time, the community will eventually choose one and discard the other. In 1trueid®, every digital DNA when used become social none are discarded.
Inexpensive: avoids proof-of-work (PoW), meaning it does not have to waste computations to slow itself down, therefore the expensive, custom hardware is no longer necessary. In the blockchain, if new blocks arrive too quickly they can be discarded. This is why Bitcoin is currently PoW, as this artificially slows down the mining process – hence the expensive hardware needed to mine. With 1trueid® , every member can create a digital DNA whenever they want.
Updated: The social community work as our own consensus stamp. While Ethereum is looking at PoS with Casper, our social platform share the ownership. 1trueid® uses a protocol called “Own it℗” to achieve the ownership. The own it feature act with a Smartphone as a track and trace validation, which can be defined as calling any random DDNA and telling that node that it is a valid code. In distributed ledger technology the “baseline” or minimum bandwidth required is that the transactions go to every node. 1trueid® attach a small additional amount of information, which contains the last person that interacted with the code,
What happens if the server crash: plain and simple, our system has the encrypted information resident on the object and the validation on secure encrypted servers constantly backed up. The coding space is minimal therefore redundancy security system creates trust. If you lose your personal computer what happens to your valuable bitcoins? With 1trueid® having the code on a physical object and the validation on secure servers you are always safe, so we can consider 1trueid® the perfect mix among a virtual and a physical currency.
From ELF <<“When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.”
— George Washington Carver
Design is a key differentiator in driving business success and customer engagement. In a study conducted by the Design Management Institute reviewing business performance for design-driven companies as compared to the S&P Index over a decade (2004-2014), design-driven companies consistently outperformed the S&P by 219%.>>
And if you like numbers, take a look at these. Design-led companies reported:
41% higher market share
46% competitive advantage overall
50% more loyal customers
70% digital experiences beat competitors
Take Apple as an example, it wasn’t always the mega-success that it is today. In 1997, Steve Jobs conducted a major company overhaul. He cut several product lines and pushed the company toward developing a distinctly Apple experience. To this day, all of the “i” products’ look, feel, and user-friendliness set Apple apart from its competitors.
Design thinking showed us that Apple was a company with a soul and vision.
Design is the new black
The speed of innovation is only getting faster and it’s because of the internet. It’s permeating every business. Take television and film, i.e. House of Cards was bought by Netflix somewhat because Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, looked at the data of Netflix users’ streaming behavior and concluded that there was an audience for Kevin Spacey.
Everything that any profession does—from research and development, to strategy, to content creation—can gain a soul only through design thinking. This is why I love design.
Images in this post are considered to be in the public domain since found on the web and media therefore supposed to be copyright-free images – it’s not intended from the author of the post to violate any copyright right infringement laws, or to offend anyone; in the case you advise a violation, would you advise me and I’ll promptly remove them. The post it’s also an expression of my personal opinion, and do not intend as well to have any commercial purpose.
Secondo l’Ansa, pare che qualcuno abbia presentato un bottone 4.0 rivoluzionario, ma, questa tecnologia e brevetto è già stato annunciato da BerBrand sette anni fa e da 1trueid poi, anche in conferenza stampa ad Eataly di Milano:
2010BerBrand 1° premio SMAU su tecnologia Rfid inserita in un bottone e nella supply Chain
2016 la conferenza stampa, c/o Eataly (in discussione i vari articoli)
2017l’evoluzione Blockchain, (in discussione i vari articoli)
2017 selezionati all’interno dell’Accenture Fashion Hub di Piazza Gae Aulenti,
2018 sarà bellissimo vedrete, annunceremo qualcosa di unico al mondo, come nostro stile
Centinaia di migliaia di “bottoni” o meglio tag intelligenti sono già in commercio nel solo sistema moda con tecnologia 1trueid, utilizzata dai migliori brand di alta gamma, sia per anticontraffazione, che per il customer engagement, in fase di sperimentazione per le nuove lavatrici del futuro, ma anche utilizzata in ambiti particolarmente smart come per la camicia su misura di Alessandro Gherardi.
Curioso anche vedere come il servizio inserisca in fotografia normalissimi bottoni, qualche verifica in più avrebbe di certo aiutato.
Certo, può capitare uno sbaglio, del resto le conferenze stampa le facciamo per questo, il mondo si evolve velocemente, essere informati richiede un’attenzione importante, ma è anche vitale tutelare le società veramente innovative che, grazie alla ricerca e importanti investimenti, creano valore e lavoro.
Born Ahead
English Version
According to Ansa, the leading wire service in Italy, and one of the leaders among world news agencies, it seems that someone presented a revolutionary button 4.0, but, this technology and patent has already been announced by BerBrand 7 years ago and by 1trueid® then even at a press conference at Eataly in Milan:
2010 BerBrand 1st SMAU prize on Rfid technology inserted into a Button and Supply Chain
2016 the press conference, c / o Eataly (discussing the various articles)
2017 evolution Blockchain, (discussing the various articles)
2017 selected within the Fashion Hub Accenture of Piazza Gae Aulenti,
2018 will be beautiful you will see, we will announce something unique in the world, as our style
Hundreds of thousands of “buttons” or better smart secure tags 1trueid® are already on the market just on fashion system, worn by top-of-the-range brands, both for anti-counterfeiting and customer engagement, being tested for IOT washing machines, but also used in particularly smart areas such as Alessandro Gherardi’s custom shirts.
It is also curious to see how the service puts in the picture a normal button; a better verification would certainly help.
Of course, everyone can make a mistake, this is also why we make press conferences, the world evolves quickly, being informed requires important attention, and it is vital to protect truly innovative companies that, thanks to research and important investments, create Value and work.
Images in this post are considered to be in the public domain since found on the web and media therefore supposed to be copyright-free images – it’s not intended from the author of the post to violate any copyright right infringement laws, or to offend anyone; in the case you advise a violation, would you advise me and I’ll promptly remove them. The post it’s also an expression of my personal opinion, and do not intend as well to have any commercial purpose.
Ortega did things his way rather than follow in the footsteps of fashion industry leaders in Paris, Milan, or New York. That decision clearly paid off. And it’s a great example of success achieved through following and trusting your intuition.
Good things come to those
who wait and are strongminded
With a net worth in excess of $66 billion, Amancio Ortega is the richest man in Europe and the wealthiest retailer in the world thanks to his control of the Spanish fashion behemoth Inditex. Ortega — who started out as a delivery boy for a local clothing store at 14 — turned from a small-town dress shop into one of the largest fashion empires on the planet.
It took a decade for Ortega to found Zara’s holding company Inditex and open his first shop. Today, Inditex is one of the world’s biggest fashion groups.
Even though 10 years may seem like an eternity when establishing a business, it clearly paid off. Being patient gives you the chance to wait, watch, and know when to act in all aspects of your life. Instead of acting inappropriately or irrationally, with patience you can step back, regroup, and make the best decision possible.
Noblesse oblige
Most entrepreneurs are extroverts, but that is by no means necessary to succeed. Many great entrepreneurs are introverts and Amancio Ortega is one of them. Little is known about the retail conglomerate, because he makes a lot of effort to avoid having to talk to the press. He once said: “You must appear three times in the newspapers: when you are born, when you get married, and when you die.” Don’t be discouraged if you aren’t the life of the party, because you can still run a profitable business.
Redraft attitude
Around the age of 12, Ortega witnessed his mother’s getting rejected for credit at a grocery store. The realization of his family’s poverty was a driving force for Ortega. He left school immediately and began working so that he and his family would never be put in that situation again. Sometimes we forget why we wake up every morning and sit in traffic for hours, or why we left a cushy job to launch a startup that is on the brink of failure.
Remembering why you make those sacrifices is what forces us to achieve our goals and dreams.
Extraordinary ventures needs life experience and wisdom
Sometimes we are led to believe that you have to be successful at an early age, much like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. But Ortega was almost 40 years old when he founded Zara. While that’s not ancient by most standards, it’s not your typical twenty- or thirty something millionaire story. It’s refreshing to know that it’s never too late for you to achieve your dreams and ambitions like Ortega did.
Giving Back
many donations can be mentioned, but I just selected two of them, he has donated in 2012 20 million euros to charity in a single donation, bringing praise from Spanish fundraising professionals. This is seen as unusual philanthropy practice in Spain, where more discreet donations are the norm. The 20 million euros donation from the Spanish billionaire via the Amancio Ortega Foundation to Caritas Spain has been described as unprecedented in the history of the Spanish wing of the church charity…Caritas has said the foundation run by Amancio Ortega is donating €20 million for food, medicines and schools materials.
Following the Haiti earthquake, Amancio Ortega’s Inditex sent two million euros of emergency reconstruction relief as cash, not clothes.
…and the Foundation where you can clearly read <<Important: The President and Founder Amancio Ortega Gaona has no profiles or perform any activity on social networks.>>
Without any favorable conditions in 2008, immediately after the subprime crisis that still last and in a sector that relies on marketing yet restricts quality, I decided to fight to the top relying on distinguish and sustainable products and patented innovations.
Having we achieved an outstanding reputation in the business to business sector we now started our retail venture offering ultra-luxury items to a fair value, and confidently to open the first flagship store within the next two years.
Our “business to consumer” items immediately seized the attention of the Big and we resist to the various tactful and hostile avanches we often receive.
Louis Vuitton Paris fashionMen spring / summer models were wearing our exclusive and patented frame obvioulsy with a different and exclusive design. The same year the ”king Eider” model it has been nominated among the best innovative frame at Silmo d’Or. The Financial Times dedicate an article in their style section.
And now…we need real talents and visionary people looking for the ‘’new old robust economy’’ for our next to come retail chain that will be …In Our Way !
Images in this post are considered to be in the public domain since found on the web and media therefore supposed to be copyright-free images – it’s not intended from the author of the post to violate any copyright right infringement laws, or to offend anyone; in the case you advise a violation, would you advise me and I’ll promptly remove them. The post it’s also an expression of my personal opinion.
Is now the time of the Luxury for all? Don’t worry and stay calm reading this article till the end, yep I’ll reveal you what is going to happen in the next decades from my point of view, and it counts.
The clothing chain H&M, one of our valued customers, launched a collection in collaboration with the Balmain haute couture brand: in the catwalk we saw Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner, followed by a party where they sang the Backstreet Boys. Not bad isn’t it?
Are we living the new era of luxury for all? Definitively yes at least when we saw the spot of the lidl deluxe line and the Carlo Cracco holy potato we realize it is born the so called “popular chic.”
A change maker has surely been the internet law of attraction of opportunities that from the low cost offers stretched to affordable luxury, allowing to exclusive hotel and restaurant chains to discretely benefit from the last minute consumers increasing demand. Today your neighbor’s room may claim that he’s spent a 99$ coupon bought on line instead of your 500$ black VISA special deal, (shit it happened to me), but who cares, at the end it’s nice to feel sometimes a little ordinary isn’t it? (grrr)
Now we witness the phenomenon exactly opposite of regular luxury, that occasionally “falls” to the ground especially when misleading. It is the “popular chic”, also said “brands to starved” (correct I wrote “starved” without any snobbery; all of us are hungry).
Someone said: “You have to take the moneys where they are, by the poor’s. They have little, but they are a lot.“ It is for this reason that very popular low-income malls have built prosperous economic empires, i.e. serving regular hamburger with less than 1 euro. However, even these brave defenders of the rights of the poor are now lured by the Ulysses sirens of the luxury & high quality products.
So in Italy, suddenly at McDonald’ s menu one year ago appears the Gualtiero Marchesi selection, the sandwich with the Canadian lobster McLobster, the one with the burger meat angus McAngus and one with the Supreme angus burger meat with bread baked on stone (perhaps are the stones that the workers used to launch against McDonald ‘s CEO in Chicago, who knows). Lidl Deluxe line is another milestone of the “popular chic”. Once, who was shopping at the so-called discount stores was a no-Logo protester’s, or a non-ideological indifferent to brands, now ravioli filled with roe cost only 1.29 euro. The slogan is: “I do not need much to enjoy the luxury.”
The mission of elevating the status of their customers is now fashionable at all stores. Think at the IKEA design everyday is becoming coolest and some pieces cannot be distinguished alongside those of the premium brand Kartell .
The popular clothing chain H&M as anticipated, has just launched in New York a limited edition collection created in collaboration with the French high fashion brand Balmain, a huge success besides hysteria, really out of control , the point is that , those who have secured a place in the front row in H&M stores have not purchased stuff at low cost prices; in fact , what has characterized the garments designed by Olivier Rousteing , artistic director of the French fashion house , was not only the similarity with the clothes representative of the Balmain style, but also prices , far away from the universe H&M . A total look consists of dress (€ 499), coat (€ 179), boots (€ 249), bag (€ 199) and necklace (€ 79) all together far exceeds the 1,000 euro.
The success of the capsule, is nothing new. But, unlike previous collections in collaboration with Marni, Versace, Roberto Cavalli, Alexander Wang, Stella McCartney, Karl Lagerfeld, Jimmy Choo (to name a few), prices have soared to the point of wondering whether the game is worth the candle . The cost of clothing Balmain X H&M promptly sold on eBay is definitively unusual, an embroidered jacket is put up for auction to 3,000 dollars even surpassing the cost of the “real” Balmain.
After shopping, a customer of the H&M store expressed its satisfaction at the New York Times: “I did not sleep, but it was worth it, I have everything that I had chosen. I had never done it before, but I really think that Balmain is the brand of our generation “. A generation that, (as happened in Seoul), seems willing to stand one week before in line outside the stores of the Swedish brand.
And now….and just for connoisseurs the revelation, sssshhhh it’s so secret 😉
Mass Consumers 2030, disruptor and disrupted thanks to technologies like 1Trueid™ will evolve from fashion victims to contributors, involved individuals, advocate of what’s behind the label, makers;
HNWI Consumers 2030: will look more and more for indisputable products, with an instantly recognizable value, a true identity and an ethical and transparent supply chain, and they could also and easily produce them by themselves when not available.
Customers advocacy 20xx? Uh they all will become Superlativa contributors and citizens “SORRY BUT I COULDN’T RESIST THE TEMPTATION ^-^”
Images in this post are considered to be in the public domain since found on the web and media therefore supposed to be copyright-free images – it’s not intended from the author of the post to violate any copyright right infringement laws, or to offend anyone; in the case you advise a violation, would you advise me and I’ll promptly remove them. The post it’s also an expression of my personal opinion, and do not intend as well to have any commercial purpose.
Fringed by luxuriant stretches of white sands, the northwest Spanish archipelago of Cies is nicknamed the ‘Galician Caribbean’ by the locals. And it is little wonder that they keep the beauty of these three islands quietly to themselves – happy to let tourists head to the ‘Costas’ instead. Catch the ferry from the mainland town of Vigo, and you’ll have nine beaches to choose from. Disembark on a small jetty at the longest, Rodas, running over half a mile between Monteagudo and Faro islands and flop straight onto the sand. Cooling off depends on your mood – waters around the Cies islands range from denim blue Atlantic froth perfect for surfing to clear green waves that lap the shore like a gentle metronome.
Who says you need palm trees and warm seas for a spectacular beach? In the northern tip of the Scottish Hebridean Isle of Skye, Claigan Coral Bay’s white sands and turquoise seas are an incongruous surprise after a short hike over moorland, past sheep and Highland cattle. OK, it might not be warm enough to get your bikini on, but in summer you’ll definitely be able to sit in a T-shirt and turn your head up to the sun in peace. Or search for tiny cowrie shells on the beach – local legend has it if you find 12 you’ll have a happy year. That might include sitting next to a celebrity at the rustic yet Michelin-starred The Three Chimneys restaurant, a 20-minute drive away – or quick helicopter ride for A-list fans that range from Madonna to Barbra Streisand or more simply to me.
In Greek legend, Icarus flew too close to the sun, coming down to earth after his wings melted, on the North Aegean island of Ikaria. Lucky him, as he would have found one of the most beautiful unsung heroes of the Greek beach world – Seychelles – waiting for him. As the name suggests, it’s a dream confection of blue waters, white sands and dazzling limestone cliffs, set on the south-west coast and reached from the tiny village of Manganitis through a tunnel and down a steep path. If you’ve got the commitment, then you’ll be rewarded with an idyllic place to put up your umbrella. Take a bottle of the local wine – there are no facilities here – sit back, relax and thank the Gods.
Images in this post are considered to be in the public domain since found on the web and media therefore supposed to be copyright-free images – it’s not intended from the author of the post to violate any copyright right infringement laws, or to offend anyone; in the case you advise a violation, would you advise me and I’ll promptly remove them. The post it’s also an expression of my personal opinion.
If you recognize yourself in this description you are a lucky person like me.
Blockchain Just Became Obsolete. Why the Future of traceable ownership can be 1trueID®,
“own it℗” patented ledger technology, (when public), that is much more cost-effective (no proof-of-work), faster (like a credit card transaction), safer (similar standards of a digital passport or a contactless card), more efficient (no stale blocks) and mathematically fairer than the classic blockchain.
What is 1trueid® and Why is it Better?
Why we call it blockchain and beyond:
In the 1trueid® social consensus scheme, time ownership prevents an individual from affecting the ‘’own it’’ order of transactions.
Great companies in the past as 
The speed of innovation is only getting faster and it’s because of the internet. It’s permeating every business. Take television and film, i.e. House of Cards was bought by Netflix somewhat because Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, looked at the data of Netflix users’ streaming behavior and concluded that there was an audience for Kevin Spacey.
BerBrand 1° premio SMAU su tecnologia Rfid inserita in un bottone e nella supply Chain
Noblesse oblige
Redraft attitude
Extraordinary ventures needs life experience and wisdom
Giving Back
Louis Vuitton Paris fashion
The clothing chain H&M, one of our valued customers, launched a collection in collaboration with the Balmain haute couture brand: in the catwalk we saw Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner, followed by a party where they sang the Backstreet Boys. Not bad isn’t it?
So in Italy, suddenly at McDonald’ s menu one year ago appears the Gualtiero Marchesi selection, the sandwich with the Canadian lobster McLobster, the one with the burger meat angus McAngus and one with the Supreme angus burger meat with bread baked on stone (
Lidl Deluxe line is another milestone of the “popular chic”. Once, who was shopping at the so-called discount stores was a no-Logo protester’s, or a non-ideological indifferent to brands, now ravioli filled with roe cost only 1.29 euro. The slogan is: “I do not need much to enjoy the luxury.” 
Fringed by luxuriant stretches of white sands, the northwest Spanish archipelago of Cies is nicknamed the ‘Galician Caribbean’ by the locals. And it is little wonder that they keep the beauty of these three islands quietly to themselves – happy to let tourists head to the ‘Costas’ instead. Catch the ferry from the mainland town of Vigo, and you’ll have nine beaches to choose from. Disembark on a small jetty at the longest, Rodas, running over half a mile between Monteagudo and Faro islands and flop straight onto the sand. Cooling off depends on your mood – waters around the Cies islands range from denim blue Atlantic froth perfect for surfing to clear green waves that lap the shore like a gentle metronome.
Who says you need palm trees and warm seas for a spectacular beach? In the northern tip of the Scottish Hebridean Isle of Skye, Claigan Coral Bay’s white sands and turquoise seas are an incongruous surprise after a short hike over moorland, past sheep and Highland cattle. OK, it might not be warm enough to get your bikini on, but in summer you’ll definitely be able to sit in a T-shirt and turn your head up to the sun in peace. Or search for tiny cowrie shells on the beach – local legend has it if you find 12 you’ll have a happy year. That might include sitting next to a celebrity at the rustic yet Michelin-starred 
In Greek legend, Icarus flew too close to the sun, coming down to earth after his wings melted, on the North Aegean island of Ikaria. Lucky him, as he would have found one of the most beautiful unsung heroes of the Greek beach world – Seychelles – waiting for him. As the name suggests, it’s a dream confection of blue waters, white sands and dazzling limestone cliffs, set on the south-west coast and reached from the tiny village of Manganitis through a tunnel and down a steep path. If you’ve got the commitment, then you’ll be rewarded with an idyllic place to put up your umbrella. Take a bottle of the local wine – there are no facilities here – sit back, relax and thank the Gods.