Tag: long reads

Managing Risk or: How to Stop Worrying and Avoid It Altogether

Risk In Digital Strategy —Is your strategy too risky?

Even the largest budgets for digital projects pale in comparison with the amount spent on operating costs by a blue chip company. As a result, we all strive to do more with less, to make small budgets deliver substantial outcomes. Yet many of us ignore the simplest thing we could do to make our digital budgets work twice as hard  by thoroughly accounting and planning for risk.

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Who Is The Zuckerberg Of Traffic?

Beat traffic, together —Beat traffic, together

On a closed course in Brooklyn, the Department of Transportation (DOT) is testing a fleet of cars that can’t crash into each other. At the same time in Hokkaido, Nissans traveling down slippery mountain roads know when and where other Nissans have spun out or applied their anti-lock brakes. And tucked away at BMW’s test tracks in Stuttgart, motorcycles are predicting weather, avoiding intersection collisions and coordinating turns across oncoming traffic.

Each of these examples relies on a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) network where cars speak to each other through sensors and short-range communication devices. In short: talking cars. But not of Knight Rider’s cybernetic-supercar ilk; a V2V network is more like Facebook for traffic — a public square where surrounding cars become your “friends” and everyone on the same highway becomes your “network.” Read more

Digital Mimicry and Lateral Thinking

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NASA, from Flickr —NASA, from Flickr

Making awesome things on the Internet requires the right inspiration. Often, we look to the newest sites and startups for ideas, asking ourselves “what if we made ‘startup x’ for our industry?” Suppose we tracked, tagged, and detailed these sources of inspiration. Could such a database revolutionize the way we discover ideas?

A few months ago, I came across a site from the Biomimicry Institute called AskNature. Some insanely intelligent people have compiled a database of 1400 “strategies” that organisms use to survive against challenges in nature.

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