Smart machines will replace millions of jobs within 15 years

People will adapt to smart machines in their lives.

Coming to the business world: smart machines. But don’t tell that to the CEO’s. Sixty-percent of CEOs surveyed by Gartner Research say the emergence of smart machines capable of absorbing millions of middle-class jobs within 15 years is a “futurist fantasy.”

 

 

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Google is killing off the keyword, unless you pay for it

Web marketing has been completely turned upside down.

Google announced back in October 2011 that it was going to start blocking valuable data about which keywords consumers use to discover your content. By encrypting all searches, Google would instead dump visits from natural search into the nebulous “not provided” category in web analytics software.

 

 

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New record as online ad revenues jump 18% to $20B in first 6 months of 2013

Apparently, new certainties in life are death, taxes, and Internet ad revenues going up.  Online ad revenues in the U.S. jumped 18 percent from 2012′s numbers to hit a new record, $20.1 billion, just for the first half of 2013. Mobile revenues were the fastest-growing, soaring 145 percent to $3 billion, and digital video ads, crucial to the growth of visual media online such as YouTube, rose 24 percent to $1.3 billion.

 

 

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The Rise of Fat Venture Capital

Andrew Chen: In 2007, before YCombinator and AngelList had changed the industry, I worked in a nondescript office park in the heart of the venture capital industry off Sand Hill Road. Amid the leafy sprawl of buildings next to 280 and Stanford University, billions of dollars were and are invested out of the fancy offices of VC/PE firms you’ve never heard of. The whole industry has been shrouded in opaqueness since it was created decades ago, built on relationships from business schools, professional networks, and investor referrals. In 2007, I worked at a big firm as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and did my best to make sense of this world.

 

 

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GE reveals vision of what our homes will be like in 2025

GE rolls out their vision of the future.  Sometimes we often wind up with a bunch of design concepts that have zero chance of making it to market because those design concepts are  usually designed for “the home of 2050” or some other far-off date that nobody’s really thinking about yet. With GE’s “Home 2025” design concepts, they have made it their goal to stay within the realm of possibility. (Photos and video)

 

 

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Nest reinvents the smoke detector

Nest

The smoke detector screams, people panic, arms and hands flail and someone with a towel furiously fans away smoke in the kitchen. Then you need a chair to reach the ceiling to hold down that impossibly tiny red button, which never seems to silence the wailing device. So you rip out the batteries–and maybe don’t put them back for days or weeks. (Video)

 

 

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Relationship between hours worked and productivity: Chart

Some research shows that higher pay does not, on net, lead workers to do more.

The English philosopher, Bertrand Russell, was not a fan of work. In his 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness”, he reckoned that if society were better managed the average person would only need to work four hours a day. Such a small working day would “entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life.” The rest of the day could be devoted to the pursuit of science, painting and writing.

 

 

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The shifting global business landscape

Where and how the world does business is changing. For the last thirty days,emerging markets have been a source of low-cost but increasingly skilled labor. Their fast-growing cities are filled with millions of new and increasingly prosperous consumers, who provide a new growth market for global corporations at a time when much of the developed world faces slower growth as a result of aging. But the number of large companies from the emerging world will rise, as well, according to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). This powerful wave of new companies could profoundly alter long-established competitive dynamics around the world.

 

 

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India seeks to regulate booming surrogacy industry

India’s booming surrogacy industry sees thousands of infertile couples hire the wombs of local women to carry their embryos through to birth.

British restaurateur Rekha Patel, dressed in a green surgical gown and cap, cradled her newborn daughter at the Akanksha clinic in northwestern India as her husband Daniel smiled warmly, peering in through a glass door.

 

 

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