Customer Service ⯀  

Want to increase your business's market share? In a free market economy, there's always competition between businesses offering the same or similar products. This isn't necessarily bad as it encourages businesses to improve their products and differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Futurism  

In his new book leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what’s next for the world: the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next ten years, and how we can navigate them.

Innovation expert Alec Ross explains what’s next for the world: the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next ten years, and how we can navigate them.

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While Ross was working as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State, he traveled to forty-one countries, exploring the latest advances coming out of every continent. From startup hubs in Kenya to R&D labs in South Korea, Ross has seen what the future holds.

In the new book, The Industries of the Future, Ross shows what changes are coming in the next ten years, highlighting the best opportunities for progress and explaining why countries thrive or sputter. He examines the specific fields that will most shape our economic future, including robotics, cybersecurity, the commercialization of genomics, the next step for big data, and the coming impact of digital technology on money and markets.

"In a world growing more chaotic, Alec Ross is one of those very rare people who can see patterns in the chaos and guidance for the road forward. He has an unusual diversity of expertise that allows him to apply multiple lenses to the world's challenges and dream up the kind of innovative solutions that are changing the world," says Google CEO, Eric Schmidt.

Far from a Utopian vision, Ross projects that, "unlike the previous wave of digital-led globalization and innovation, which drew enormous numbers of people out of poverty in low-cost labor markets, the next wave will challenge middle classes across the globe, threatening to return many to poverty."

"The future is already hitting us, and Ross shows how it can be exciting rather than frightening."

Ross addresses the toughest questions: How will we adapt to the changing nature of work? Is the prospect of cyberwar sparking the next arms race? How can the world’s rising nations hope to match Silicon Valley in creating their own innovation hotspots? And what can today’s parents do to prepare their children for tomorrow?

Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and The Innovators writes, “How can we prepare our children—and ourselves—to succeed in a world of robotics, globalization, and digitally driven markets? In this valuable book, Alec Ross analyzes what it will take to survive and even thrive. The future is already hitting us, and Ross shows how it can be exciting rather than frightening.”

The book explores what interventions we can make in our children’s lives to best prepare them for success in a world of increasing change and competition. Parenting is the most important job that a person can have, and our children will grow up to inherit a world that looks much different from our own. We can draw from the wisdom of those profiled in these pages to prepare both ourselves and our children for what’s coming in the next economy—the economy that is beginning now.

Ross blends storytelling and economic analysis to give a vivid and informed perspective on how sweeping global trends are affecting the ways we live. Incorporating the insights of leaders ranging from tech moguls to defense experts, With chapters including, "Here Come the Robots," "The Future of the Human Machine," and "The Most Important Job You Will Ever Have," The Industries of the Future takes the intimidating, complex topics that many of us know to be important and boils them down into clear, plainspoken language. This is an essential book for understanding how the world works—now and tomorrow—and a must-read for business people in every sector, from every country.

By 33rd Square

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Innovation  

Tesla Motors has recognized by Forbes, which has put Tesla on the top of its list of most innovative companies in the world.

Ever since it was founded back in 2003, Tesla Motors has had a reputation as an innovative company that is poised to disrupt the century-old auto business, thanks to their advanced electric drive technology that has proven to be superior to the technology developed by other automakers that have been involved in the car building game for much longer. Now, the electric-car maker's commitment to innovation has been recognized by Forbes, which has put Tesla on the top of its list of most innovative companies in the world.

Forbes has released its annual list of the World's Most Innovative Companies, with Tesla appearing in it for the first time this year and earning the top spot in its first appearance. The list features 100 companies, with most of the top ten companies coming from the pharmaceutical industry, and Tesla being the only automotive company on the entire list. The main reasons why Forbes ranked Tesla Motors as the world's most innovative company include its ability to disrupt an entire industry and its unusual business model that set it apart from other automakers.

Tesla Founder Elon Musk

Tesla's innovation was measured using a methodology that revolves around innovation premium, which is defined as the difference between a company's enterprise value and short-term projected revenues. Based on analysts' predictions, Forbes' researchers determine a company's projected revenues and measure how innovative it is. This means that the companies on this list are ranked by their future growth potential, which is driven by innovation.

“Most innovation rankings are popularity contests based on past performance or editorial whims. We set out to create something very different with the World’s Most Innovative Companies list, using the wisdom of the crowd. Our method relies on investors’ ability to identify firms they expect to be innovative now and in the future,” said researchers Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen with Forbes.

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The immensely popular Model S has certainly helped boost Tesla's reputation as an innovative company even further. The luxury sedan is considered the best all-electric car on the market, and Forbes has deemed it as one of the main factors helping the company disrupt the auto industry. The magazine notes that the Model S can be called the world's best car thanks to its long driving range that is not matched by any other electric car currently available for purchase, and its excellent safety ratings. What's more, it can be ordered online, with the automaker delivering it to the customer's home, and its performances can be enhanced via wireless software updates, which no other car is capable of. The fact that Tesla continuously improves the performances of the Model S and makes changes to the car's interior, as well, makes the company that much more innovative.

Finally, Forbes believes that Tesla is perfectly positioned to dominate the future car market that is expected to center entirely on electric vehicles, thanks to the fact that the company already has a great competitive advantage provided by its superior electric drive technology and revolutionary business model.

By Jordan Perch

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Author Bio - Jordan Perch is an automotive fanatic and “safe driving” specialist. He is a writer for DMV.com, which is a collaborative community designed to help ease the stress and annoyance of “dealing with the DMV.”

 Superintelligence  

Baidu CEO and chairman Robin Li interviewed Bill Gates and Elon Musk at the Boao Forum, last month. The discussion ranged from entrepreneurship to philanthropy, from "summoning the demon" of artificial intelligence to the pros and cons of technocratic government, to automated driving, and more.

In the session, "Dialogue: Technology & Innovation for a Sustainable Future" during the 2015 Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) in Boao, China, last month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk were jointly interviewed by Baidu CEO Robin Li.

In the video above, (it is not the greatest quality, but content-wise is very good), Gates and Musk each discuss some of their early challenges in creating their companies and gaining incredible wealth.

When asked how he manages his multiple companies, Musk replies, "I wouldn't really recommend this.  It's not good for quality of life."

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In term of artificial intelligence, Gates stated that he would highly recommend Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence. During the interview Gates echoed Musk’s concerns with future superintelligence safety, with Musk noting that a good analogy would be “if you consider nuclear research, with its potential for a very dangerous weapon: releasing the energy is easy; containing that energy safely is very difficult. And so I think the right emphasis for AI research is on AI safety.”

"We've essentially been building the content base for the superintelligence."

"We have a general purpose learning algorithm, that evolution has endowed us with," comments Gates. "It's running in an extremely slow computer," he states while pointing at his own head. "It has very limited memory size, [no] ability to send data to other computers—we have to use this funny mouth thing here, whenever we build a new one, it starts over, it doesn't know how to walk...."

"As soon as this algorithm—of taking experience and turning it into knowledge—which is so amazing, and we have not done in software—as soon as you do that, it's not clear you'll even know when you're just at the human level," he continues. "You'll be at the superhuman level almost as soon as that algorithm is implanted in silicon."

As Watson demonstrated, such an intelligence can then go forward and read all the content of the internet.  "We've essentially been building the content base for the superintelligence." Gates wonders how other people cannot see this as a huge challenge for humanity in the not-to-distant future.


SOURCE  Adam Ford

By 33rd Square

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 Innovation  

Peter Thiel talks with Tyler Cowen about stagnation, company names, chess, favorite TV shows, and especially innovation.

Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen, both bestselling authors, are among today’s top global thought leaders and influential innovators. Watch as these two engage in a serious dialogue on the ideas and policies that will shape the future of innovation and progress in the coming years and decades.

In the conversation, Thiel discusses how he thinks we will leave the “great stagnation,” whether the AI hype is justified, how he would boil his thought down to the smallest number of dimensions, whether NYC is over- or underrated, why globalization is likely to decline and what that means for different regions, the parts of the Bible which have influenced him most, “the Straussian Jesus,” to what age he thinks he will live, why Japan is special, how his German background matters, his favorite opening chess move, how and why company names matter, and even his favorite TV show, Game of Thrones.

"There’s no straightforward formula for innovation."

"I think we’ve had a lot of innovation in computers, information technology, Internet, mobile Internet in the world of bits. Not so much in the world of atoms, supersonic travel, space travel, new forms of energy, new forms of medicine, new medical devices, etc. It’s sort of been this two-track area of innovation," Thiel states.

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When asked, where the breakthroughs that will get the economy out of stagnation are, Thiel replies:

AI feels slightly overhyped. Biotech, a lot could happen. It feels heavily regulated. But if you’ve got self-driving cars, that would be a significant innovation which would change a decent amount at the margins. There’s some regulatory challenges with it, but it’s sort of right at the intersection of the kinds of things that could happen.

I think the most natural hope is that information technology starts to broaden out and starts to impact this world of atoms. Then we’re going to have this question about whether the technology outpaces the politics or vice versa.

According to Thiel, "There’s no straightforward formula for innovation. It’s much easier to do horizontal progress, which I describe as globalization, copying things that work going from one to n, versus vertical progress, technology, doing new things, going from zero to one."

Peter Thiel is among the most impressive innovators of the past two decades. As co-founder of Paypal and seed-funder for Facebook, Thiel has been instrumental in the conception and growth of some of today’s most entrepreneurial and innovative companies. In his latest best-selling book, Zero to One, Thiel explains how to build a better future by capitalizing on innovation. A staunch optimist, he maintains that progress can be achieved anywhere the human mind is able to think creatively. Thiel describes how entrepreneurial thinking leads to innovation, which builds something new and moves the mark from zero to one.

Tyler Cowen is a world-renowned professor of economics, co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution, co-founder of the award-winning online educational platform Marginal Revolution University, and chairman of the Board at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Bloomberg Businessweek profiled Cowen as “America’s Hottest Economist,” Foreign Policy named Cowen as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and an Economist survey counted Cowen as one of the most influential economists of the last decade.


SOURCE  Mercatus Center

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 Invention  

Can invention be good for the environment?  Here are five examples of green technologies that may have a big impact.

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reserving the environment is on everyone's mind. Lofty goals of restoring endangered animal populations and returning waterways and the air we breathe to a healthier state are in the headlines. However, it's not necessary to search for sea turtle nests or pick up trash along a distant river to have a positive effect on the planet's ecology. These five innovations are sure to reduce our environmental footprint right where we live.

The Yellow School Bus Goes Green

Jonny Cohen wasn’t your average 12-year-old. On his way home one day, the science buff started thinking about how environmentally unfriendly school buses are. School buses only get four to six miles a gallon and cost $6,500 in diesel fuel per vehicle a year. Jonny came up with a solution ingenious in its simplicity: affix a Plexiglass cover over the windshield to reduce drag. Five years and several modifications later, Jonny’s brainchild has been shown to improve fuel economy by 10-20%.

At a cost of $30, the GreenShield sounds like a win-win situation for schools, the environment, and education: money saved could be channeled back into learning. While approval from the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency remains an obstacle, Jonny and his team are determined to make green school buses a reality.

A Laptop Made from Bamboo

ASUS is no stranger to environmentally-friendly computers, but the U-series may be the best one yet. Bamboo makes up the frame and even the trackpad, reducing the ecological impact of the laptop’s disposal. However, quality is not sacrificed for environmental friendliness: the devices boast Intel processors and have USB 3.0 connectivity as well.

A Really Green Way to Clear the Air

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Plants are expert air purifiers, removing carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, and other undesirables from our inner environments and releasing oxygen in exchange. Capitalizing on this quality, the ANDREA: Plant-based Air Purifier
takes in air via a fan, sends it through the greenery’s leaves and roots, through the soil, and out again into the living or working space. The icing on the cake? Your favorite plant can become an active partner in keeping the air breathable.

Green Communication

Samsung has produced a mobile phone that is a true ecological wonder. It’s solar-powered, but that’s only the beginning. The Blue Earth is made from recycled water bottles, and it features a pedometer that informs you how much less CO2 you’ve released into the environment by walking rather than driving.

Showering Green

That daily shower is a household’s biggest water and energy waster. This fact led Peter Brewin, an English industrial-design student, to invent a shower that does not merely recycle water; it’s a waste disposal marvel. To meet regulations that stipulate that shower water must be drinkable, the inventor developed a small-scale treatment plant that purifies and reuses 70% of the liquid.

Since Brewin’s system heats much less water, it runs on 40-70% less energy. And the bigger picture is even more exciting: an average household might go through up to 32,000 fewer gallons of water a year. That translates into a community treatment facility saving of more than 200 kilowatt-hours of energy annually.

Protecting and preserving our environment for ourselves and generations to come is within our power. It only takes a little dedication and a few great ideas to make the planet a healthier, more beautiful place.



SOURCE  Information credited to King Recycling & Waste Disposal Inc waste disposal in Brampton, ON.

By Kara Masterson

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 Technological Unemployment  

Andrew McAfee spoke recently at the New America Foundation on capitalism and what people and governments need to do this century to adjust to the new paradigm of technological unemployment.

Andrew McAfee, coauthor of The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, spoke recently on capitalism and what people and governments need to do this century to adjust to the new paradigm of technological unemployment.  The talk took place at the New America Foundation.

The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States.

McAfee talks about what the book, written with Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age covers mainly in it's conclusion.

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"It feels to me like we are in a little bit of Charles Dickens world these days," says McAfee. "It's simultaneously the best of times and the worst of times."

The best of times have to do with the extraordinary exponential technological progress in areas like artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing and medicine. "We've got computer systems now that can beat any human at chess, Jeopardy!, and soon I believe medical diagnostics," he claims.  McAfee attests that the key technical innovators he deals with tell him that these developments are all just the warm-up act for what is to come.

"I don't think we are heading into a science fiction world," he says.  "I think we are heading into a world that leaves science fiction behind. Keep in mind, George Jetson drove his vehicle to work."

"It feels to me like we are in a little bit of Charles Dickens world these days. It's simultaneously the best of times and the worst of times."

Despite this new wonderful technology, the economic trends point out the Dickensian worst of times for many.  The historically large middle class in America is disappearing, and this process parallels the advancement of technology. Job growth is not getting the country out of the Great Recession at any appreciable rate.

He writes on his blog, "Automation and deindustrialization might be creating a ‘silicon ceiling’ on growth — a situation in which even low wages are no longer an attractive alternative to technology. If so, the global shift away from labor and toward capital will only accelerate."

This impression, states McAfee is correct and it helps him understand broad indicators of disenfranchisement like the Occupy movement and the Tea Party.  McAfee warns about extreme moves to the left or right of the political spectrum to remedy the situation.

"What we need to do is return to two things," he says: innovation and inclusion.  Apart from technical innovation, McAfee suggests that innovation in complementary areas are needed.  Regulations and laws seem to protect the status quo instead of propelling people forward.  For instance, he tells about how in three states it is now illegal to purchase a Tesla vehicle from their showrooms.

"We need to tax differently too," says McAfee, complaining about the barriers that taxes on employment create.  The barriers also exist for new immigrants as well.

In the area of education, he says, "We used to be the world leader at this.  Now it feels like we are doing a pretty good job of turning out the employees we really needed just about a century ago in the era of assembly lines."

McAfee is the associate director of the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management, studying the ways information technology affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete, and at a higher level, how computerization affects competition, society, the economy, and the workforce. He was previously a professor at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

What do you think?  What kind of innovation do we really need in the coming years?


SOURCE  New America Foundation

By 33rd Square

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 Exponential Technology  

Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO X Prize Foundation spoke recently at the 2014 Global EDGE conference on how technology and innovation dramatically accelerate business objectives.

Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO X Prize Foundation spoke recently at the 2014 Global EDGE conference on how technology and innovation dramatically accelerate business objectives.

"We haven't seen any of the innovation that's going to unfold over the next 20 years."

In the talk Diamanis, co-author of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, looks at his trademark themes of exponential growth and some of the key technologies that are undergoing this rapid development.

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"I believe that we are entering a world in which any problem can be solved," says Diamandis. "Where the biggest challenges are the world's biggest business opportunities, that today we haven't seen any of the innovation that's going to unfold over the next 20 years."

As this recording preceded the announcement of Human Longevity Inc. by Diamandis, Craig Venter and Robert Hariri, the question and answer section of the talk is particularly interesting.

 

SOURCE  YPO

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 Economics  

Economist Joseph Stiglitz writes that there is enormous enthusiasm for technological innovation with many attempting to replicate the ingenuity that they regard as America’s true comparative advantage. But there is a puzzle: it is difficult to detect the benefits of this innovation in GDP statistics.

E choing what Erik Brynjofsson and Andrew McAfee base a chapter on in their latest book, The Second Machine Age, Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz recently wrote for Project Syndicate how GDP data does not reflect the impact of innovative technologies.

In terms of GDP, Stiglitz and others are dumfounded; why doesn't innovation seem to be reflected in the statistics?

Stiglitz writes:

In a simpler world, where innovation simply meant lowering the cost of production of, say, an automobile, it was easy to assess an innovation’s value. But when innovation affects an automobile’s quality, the task becomes far more difficult. And this is even more apparent in other arenas: How do we accurately assess the fact that, owing to medical progress, heart surgery is more likely to be successful now than in the past, leading to a significant increase in life expectancy and quality of life? 

In what Brynjolfsson and McAfee call the Superstar economy, innovation tends to profit the select few, with the results not necessarily translating into monetary benefits for all.  Witness the divergence of productivity and GDP statistics over the past 10-15 years.  Previously the data sets tracked each other side-by-side for the previous 200 or so years.

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The long-written about phenomenon of technological unemployment may really be starting to emerge.  In the past, post-recession economies would rapidly make up for the job losses incurred, now we are well into the so-called 'jobless recovery.'  What's more, the phenomenon is accelerating along with exponentially-growing technology.

Martin Ford, who wrote about the changing economy in his, The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, says, our current economic model where rich people bring their capital and everyone else brings their labor may no longer work when the capital, in the form of robots and computers, is actually the labor too. Ford is also convinced the transition is coming and coming quickly. 

Stiglitz continues, "One cannot avoid the uneasy feeling that, when all is said and done, the contribution of recent technological innovations to long-term growth in living standards may be substantially less than the enthusiasts claim."

Stiglitz is a University Professor at Columbia University, was Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. His most recent book is The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future.

What do you think?  Is GDP an obsolete measure of the economy now?


SOURCE  Project Syndicate, Top Image -REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

By 33rd Square

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 Innovation  

A new patent mapping system, the Patent Overlay Mapping system, considers how patents cite one another may help researchers better understand the relationships between technologies — and how they may come together to spur disruptive new areas of innovation.

E veryone always wants to know, "What's the next Big Thing?" To help answer that question, researchers, policy-makers and R&D directors study patent maps, which provide a visual representation of where universities, companies and other organizations are protecting intellectual property produced by their research. But finding real trends in these maps can be difficult because categories with large numbers of patents – pharmaceuticals, for instance – are usually treated the same as areas with few patents.

Now, a new patent mapping system that considers how patents cite one another may help researchers better understand the relationships between technologies – and how they may come together to spur disruptive new areas of innovation. The system, which also categorizes patents in a new way, was produced by a team of researchers from three universities and an Atlanta-based producer of data-mining software.

The full Patent Overlay Mapping system patent map above shows 466 technology categories and 35 technological areas. Each node color represents a technological area; lines represent relationships between technology categories; labels for technological areas are placed close to the categories with largest number of patent applications in each area

“What we are trying to do is forecast innovation pathways,” said Alan Porter, professor emeritus in the School of Public Policy and the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the project’s principal investigator. “We take data on research and development, such as publications and patents, and we try to elicit some intelligence to help us gain a sense for where things are headed.”

Samsung Patent Map - Image Source - Luciano Kay

Patent maps for major corporations, like the one for Samsung above, can show where those firms plan to diversify, or conversely, where their technological weaknesses are. Looking at a nation’s patent map might also suggest areas where R&D should be expanded to support new areas of innovation, or to fill gaps that may hinder economic growth, he said.

Innovation often occurs at the intersection of major technology sectors, noted Jan Youtie, director of policy research services in Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute. Studying the relationships between different areas can help suggest where the innovation is occurring and what technologies are fueling it. Patent maps can also show how certain disciplines evolve.

“You can see where the portfolio is, and how it is changing,” explained Youtie, who is also an adjunct associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy. “In the case of nanotechnology, for example, you can see that most of the patents are in materials and physics, though over time the number of patents in the bio-nano area is growing.”

The patent mapping research, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, will be described in a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). In addition to Youtie and Porter, the research was conducted by former Georgia Tech graduate student Luciano Kay, now a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California Santa Barbara.

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“The goal for this research was to create a new type of global patent map that was not tied into existing patent classification systems,” Kay said. “We also wanted an approach that would classify patents into categories or clusters in a graphical representation of interrelated technologies even though they may be located in different sections and levels of the standard patent classification.”

The International Patent Classification (IPC) system is based on a hierarchy of eight top-level classes such as “human necessity” and “electricity.” Patent applications are further classified into 600 or so sub-classes beneath the top-level classes.

Critics note that the IPC brings together technologies such as drugs and hats under the “human necessity” class -- technologies that are not really closely related. The system also puts technologies that are closely related – pharmaceuticals and organic chemistry, for instance – into different classes.

The new Patent Overlay Mapping system does away with this hierarchy, and instead considers the similarity between technologies by noting connections between patents – which ones are cited by other patents.

“We completely disaggregated the patient classification system and looked at all the categories with at least a thousand patents,” Youtie explained. “We think our map gets closer to measuring the ideas of technological similarity and distance.”

Maps produced by the system provide visual information relating the distances between technologies. The maps can also highlight the density of patenting activity, showing where investments are being made. And they can show gaps where future R&D investments may be needed to provide connections between related technologies.

The researchers produced a series of patent maps by applying their new system to 760,000 patent records filed in the European Patent Office between 2000 and 2006. The data came from the PatStat database, and was analyzed using a variety of tools, including the VantagePoint software developed by Search Technology of Norcross, along with Georgia Tech and Intelligent Information Services Corporation.

One surprise in the work was the interdisciplinary nature of many of the 35 patent factors the researchers identified. For instance, the classification “vehicles” included six of the eight sections defined by the IPC system.  Only five of the 35 factors were confined to a single section, Youtie said.

Because the researchers adopted a new classification system, other researchers wanting to follow their approach will have use a thesaurus that translates existing IPC classes to the new system. That conversion system is available online.



SOURCE  Georgia Tech

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 Ray Kurzweil  

At the recent Launch: Silicon Valley conference, 33rd Square favorite Ray Kurzweil gave an interesting talk, including his history of entrepreneurship.

At the recent Launch: Silicon Valley conference, 33rd Square favorite Ray Kurzweil gave an interesting talk.

Kurzweil is known as one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." PBS selected him as one of the "sixteen revolutionaries who made America."

Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

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Among Kurzweil’s many honors, he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds nineteen honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.

Kurzweil has written seven books, five of which have been national best-sellers including The Singularity Is Near and his latest book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed have been New York Times Bestsellers.

He was recently appointed as Director of Engineering at Google.

Full of his usual anecdotes and examples, in this talk, Kurzweil also looks at his history in entrepreneurship.

Particularly great in this video is the question and answer session at the end.



SOURCE  SV Forum

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