Alaina Percival never envisioned a career in technology. But after a successful career in marketing and brand management that took her around the world, the 34-year-old quit her job, learned to code, and changed careers. Today she runs Women Who Code, a nonprofit mentoring and education group focused on increasing the number of women in all areas of the technology industry. Percival talks to Cosmopolitan.com about feeling the gender gap in tech and the importance of a good challenge.
With little ceremony and only two days before Christmas, Google filed an antitrust law against Visa and MasterCard for setting “supracompetitive” interchange rates from 2004 to 2012. This is but one more volley in the Battle Royale between big companies like Wal-Mart, Target, and Macy’s and major players in the payments industry.
Over the past year we’ve delved into a variety of different topics on FuturistSpeaker.com and naturally some have been more popular than others. Sometimes it’s the headlines, other times the graphics, but in the end it’s the subject matter and content that will determine which ones rise to the top.
Overall, we’re still finding a pervasive fear over jobs, privacy, and the economy, and a strong desire to understand what comes next. Our confidence in government has plummeted and the newest evil villain is artificial intelligence gone awry.
On the positive side of the equation, both flying drones and robots are hot, even though both have serious downsides. The Internet of Things is gaining in popularity along with its magical junior categories of enchanted objects and smart homes. The sharing economy is becoming a more defined niche and tiny homes are an emerging category that will soon be replaced with 3D printed disposable houses.
Even though Bitcoin hasn’t been a good investment in 2014, it’s been a banner year for cryptocurrencies in general. No, we still haven’t minted any cryptocurrency billionaires just yet, but as national currencies become increasingly dysfunctional, with security holes affecting nearly everyone, new opportunities are just around the corner.
At the DaVinci Institute, our work on Micro Colleges are paving the way for future generations to reboot their careers quickly to better match the emerging talent needs of business and industry.
With that in mind, here are the 2014 columns that attracted the most attention over the past 12 months.
PayPal announced several partnerships, recently, aimed towards enabling certain PayPal merchants to be able to accept bitcoin as a form of payment from their customers. This was a significant announcement on multiple fronts as many had wondered if and what PayPal’s foray into the cryptocurrency space would be.
According to a new study, the U.S. is quickly losing its appeal to the world’s most talented immigrants. Stanford and the University of Washington researchers have culled a large dataset from LinkedIn and found that the the number of Ph.D.s choosing the U.S. as their home base fell by nearly half (29 percent in 2000 vs. 18 percent in 2012).
College is stressful enough without being blindsided by the true cost of attending
Many of the students now applying to U.S. colleges and universities have almost no idea what it will really cost to go there, if they get accepted. Save the jokes about these kids needing to do their homework. This is not the fault of prospective students—or their families.
If transparent pricing is the key to a healthy market, the U.S. higher education industry should be in an iron lung. Sticker prices for university tuition and fees have surged roughly 1,200 percent since 1978, far outpacing the overall 280 percent inflation over the same period. The average cost of a year of private school tuition is $25,000, with the full cost of many top schools topping $60,000.
Big data analytics answers the question of what the most profitable industries are.. The most profitable sector in the United States is electrical equipment manufacturing, according to Powerlytics, a big data analytics company that offers financial insights into millions of businesses.
They have built terminal 3 of Singapore’s airport and the The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line aka Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway. Aqualine is a bridge–tunnel combination across Tokyo Bay in Japan. It connects the city of Kawasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture with the city of Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture, and forms part of National Route 409. With an overall length of 14 km, it includes a 4.4 km bridge and 9.6 km tunnel underneath the bay—the fourth-longest underwater tunnel in the world.
In the coming year, mobile will continue to strengthen its hold on the industry, smart data will outshine big data, and real-time marketing will become an achievable goal.
With just a few weeks left in 2014, it’s time for some of my annual digital marketing predictions for the upcoming year.
Corporate venture capital is picking up speed in the investment industry, as large companies start setting aside funds for external investment in fledgling companies or startups.
Tech giants like Intel, Dell and AMD all have strong track records with their proprietary funds, and more companies like Microsoft and Salesforce are now entering the venture-fund game. During the past four years more than 475 corporate venture funds have started, bringing the worldwide total to more than 1,100, according to Global Corporate Venturing.
With this surge comes a lot of uncertainty. How will corporate venture-capital players influence the funding ecosystem? What do entrepreneurs need to know when choosing between corporate and traditional venture-capital partnerships?
Do you work for a firm where managers think employees really have to work (what is called) “full time”? That forty hours per week (or whatever is considered “full time” in your profession) is really a necessity? Perhaps you are one of those people with that conviction yourself — that in your job it is really not possible to work “part time.”
Of course you are wrong: working five out of seven days is really just as arbitrary as six days, or three – or twenty-eight for that matter. Chopping up the total amount of work that needs to done in your firm into blocks that suit our human physiology has nothing to do with the actual work. If the total amount of work that needs to be done in a firm in one week equals 20,000 hours, it is just as arbitrary to chop that up into 500 40-hour work weeks as it is to chop it up into 800 blocks of 25 hours. A five-day work week consisting of eight-hour days happens to be the social norm in many of our societies at present, but I have long thought that a company that disrupts that kind of social norm in its industry could potentially build a momentous competitive advantage out of it.
America’a middle class has stagnated because the upward talent flow got clogged
Jim Tankersley – America lost its exceptional economy because too many Americans stopped doing the most exceptional things they could. Too many middle-class workers were forced into low-skill, low-paying jobs. Too many people born poor were knocked off course on their way to gaining more valuable skills. Too many American elites flocked to Wall Street and K Street, where they got rich at the expense of the overall economy. Not enough entrepreneurs took risks and built new businesses.
These trends run in stark contrast to how Americans built decades of shared prosperity in the postwar era: by investing in themselves and clearing paths for others to get ahead, too.
