I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, trying to figure out where the next big wave of change is going to hit. I lived through my first in the 80s, with the personal computing revolution. That gave way to others in the 90s & oughts: webs 1 and 2.0. Here in the [...]

I’m not as prodigious (or, indeed, as good) of a writer as Frank. His piece today was both beautiful and spot on. As such, my thoughts here will skew a bit more personal. It is a strange thing to mourn the death of someone whom you have never met. Having witnessed September 11, 2001 from [...]

Today I starting thinking about the binary status of social networking.1 The idea of distinctly marking someone as a “friend” or “not a friend” has seemed too simplistic and dissonant to me (and to many others) when compared with our real-world experiences making, maintaining, and losing these friendships. This got me thinking about what friendship [...]

We’ve seen the web transform commerce again and again; from e-commerce 1.0, to algorithmically targeted advertising, to flash mob coupons. Now we’re seeing the beginnings of a new transformation taking place, and it may be the most radical shift yet. It’s fundamentally altering our assumptions about what commerce is, what we buy and who we buy it from.

This past friday Gill Wildman and Nick Durrant of CMU stopped by for a full day workshopping with us. We started the day by sharing what we wanted to be when were kids, then imagined our futures and considered how our thesis projects could bridge the gap in this timeline. When I was a kid [...]