iterooting

ITER

 

Only recently have I’ve heard about this cool (but it isn’t really cool… it is actually quite hot) project.

They are building the biggest magnet ever existed in the world to try to replicate the way the sun creates energy… (this is how an economist boils down to a very basic form the complexity of even trying to explain what ITER is all about…)

They are only trying to creating a sustainable unlimited source of energy… small potatoes 🥔

I am ITERooting for them!

Check them out!

One More Year

A great song to start 2021 – click here to listen…

One whole year – click to watch video clip

Do you remember we were standing here a year ago?
Our minds were racing and time went slow
If there was trouble in the world we didn’t know
If we had a care, it didn’t show
But now I worry our horizon’s bear nothing new
‘Cause I get this feeling and maybe you get it, too
We’re on a rollercoaster stuck on its loop-de-loop
‘Cause what we did one day on a whim
Has slowly become all we do
I never wanted any other way to spend our lives
I know we promised we’d be doing this ’til we die
And now I fear we might
Oh, now I fear we might
But it’s okay, I think there’s a way
Why don’t we just say one more year?
(One more year)
Not worrying if I get the right amount of sleep
(One more year)
Not caring if we do the same thing every week
(One more year)
Of living like I’m only living for me
(One more year)
Of never talking about where we’re gonna be
(One more year)
One more year
Of living like the free spirit I wanna be
We got a whole year
(One more year) Fifty-two weeks
Seven days each
(One more year) Four seasons, one reason
One way, one year
(One more year)
One year, one year
From today (From today)
From today (From today)
I never wanted any other way to spend our lives
Now one of these is gonna be the last for all time
For all time
One more year

building times

Marc Andreessen just wrote recently a great post about what society (US centric) should be doing differently… He is one of the best Venture Capitalists in activity and with a great view of what we need to tackle in our collective future.

In a word: build

In a couple of more words: if we build what is really needed – more and better housing, transportation, hospitals, universities / schools for all, we as a society will evolve.

The article itself – click here

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.

Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*…

read the rest…

 

backcasting

One of the best articles I’ve read in a long while…

Great concept that makes us all think that we should be looking at our reality in a different manner!

BACKCASTING RULES!

How to build a breakthrough …the secret of Backcasting

“I don’t care, I don’t care, so call me crazy. We can live in a world that we design.” — from the Greatest Showman

The future doesn’t happen to us; it happens because of us

READ HERE THE REST OF MIKE MAPLES JR.‘s ARTICLE

TED talks about you in the future

A new decade in the making

Soon, we enter a new phase…

It is a great time to reflect on your goals for the next year, and perhaps for the next ten.

Below are five great TED Talks, that can help prepare you to be the person you want to be this coming decade:

What Makes A Good Life? Lessons From The Longest Study On Happiness by Robert Waldinger

Inside The Mind Of A Master Procrastinator by Tim Urban

How Craving Attention Makes You Less Creative by Joseph Gordon-Levitt

How To Build Your Confidence—And Spark It In Others by Brittany Packnett

Your Elusive Creative Genius by Elizabeth Gilbert

20 by 20

we decided at Bright Pixel to ask 20 people to try and guess what 2020 will be all about…

I was one of the lucky “bastards” to write about the trends that we will looking for in 2020…

20by20 site

My two cents below…

What is a trend? A general direction in which something is developing or changing. Or, simply defined also as… a fashion. So, a trend can be fleeting or here to stay. You will never know.
Perhaps the best way to try to predict 2020’s trends is to look back.
For example, twenty years ago, the first camera phones were launched (by Motorola) and now we know for sure that, for the better and worst, they are here to stay and take notice in any tiny detail of our increasingly less private lives, blurring today our assumptions of what is public domain and what is not. The year 2000 also gave us, unfortunately, our first successful reality show – The Big Brother – and that also redefined the boundaries of what is entertainment and of what could be shared with a vast audience. The gaming industry had also a big bump with the launch of Playstation 2 and a set of novelties from Nintendo and others.
If we pick these few examples alone of our not-that-recent past, we can spend hours discussing how they evolved and morphed into new realities now.
A wide array of filters and gimmicks are now available for our collective and instant delight. A full set of businesses were born exploiting our digital presence, from short videos to snapchats and tik toks (the most valuable startup in the world, go figure…), from social media to influencers and other annoying ways to digitally share and supposedly interact with people 24/7.
Not all is bad in having an enhanced ability to digitally interact or define our digital self. We have more immersive ways of interacting (virtual, augmented and mixed reality, to name some new realities…) and engage with other people and entities in several contexts – companies like Didimo (one of the great portuguese startup examples) will help us have a better experience in several contexts of our lives.
For example, our digital self will be able to do a lot more online in several retail environments, that for professional reasons I tend to follow closely. Who would believe in the year 2000 that buying clothes, shoes or almost anything that you can think of online… would become the norm? Or that we have today people paying absurdities for digital-only clothing? And that perhaps make-to-order retail models that promote a more personalised retail experience whilst reducing inefficiencies and, hopefully, other eco-conscious trends will start to pick up more and makes us a bit less fast consumer oriented over time.
Advances in how we manage our digital presence also will be key for several other areas of our lives – from healthcare to education, mobile and immersive gaming to other types entertainment (where the content wars will be on the rise, by the way, between the deep-pocketed streaming services, that are killing our once beloved traditional content providers and distributors (TiVo was born in the 2000’s!).
Our digital existence also brings us other tremendous challenges in 2020 and years to come… how should we manage and protect our data? To what extent should we explore the power of AI in analysing our data and what are the ethical implications around everything that we will do and have sitting around in our digital worlds? Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence are just two taglines for a full array of trends around this existential issue of having this new resource to explore, protect and manage – our digital oil, called data. All of the companies within our portfolio are exploring in some way or manner this brave new world around our digital oil. They are the oil prospectors of the 2020’s.
Then, looking back, we also had the hype of the blu-ray discs in 2000… Is 5G our 2020 blu-ray equivalent? Or perhaps blockchain will also prove to be our digital blu-ray perfect example… we will always have fleeting fashions for our collective satisfaction. Enjoy 2020 while it lasts.

 

Beta Future

A great post from an inspiring builder studio that I had the privilege to visit some years back. before co-founding Bright Pixel.

John Borthwick, betaworks founder and CEO, just shared recent a post that I am still processing… I’ve read and re-read it a couple of times now… It’s truly worthwhile…

Next things we are thinking about at betaworks

next things
next things

A distributed layer of trust

ML and human machine collaboration

Next gen mobile and compute

New cities

New ways of living and working

New generation, new tribes = new brands

Synthetic media

Participatory media, gaming, and live