January 24, 2012

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Kickstarter - Funding to Turn Passions into Businesses (Forbes) I tend to agree with sentiment - crowd funding is becoming feasible. Nevertheless, it can be a very brutal experience for those who try it and fail, so... Beware of your expectations. Giving money is the utmost expression of giving attention, in a way, but it is also crossing a border between non-rivalrous goods and rivalrous goods. Kickstarter - Funding to Turn Passions into Businesses - Forbes "I’m a huge fan of the Kickstarter service and have backed several projects because I believe in what they are doing. The reason I’m a huge fan is they make it possible for a new company to get off the ground without angel or venture capital investment. More so, you can test a concept with little risk (on all sides) and tweak before you start manufacturing. This is enormously important in this economy, perhaps in any economy, because it is the enabler of an idea that myself and many others have hoped for. Kevin Kelly, of Wired fame and many other accomplishments, wrote a post a few years back called 1,000 True Fans and it he explains how an artist, inventor, creator, maker could build a viable following and thus a business by finding 1,000 True Fans. This is not far off given the trajectory of Kickstarter..." Related articles Must-read: Spotify's Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music - Forbes (but are they licensed to kill?) (mediafuturist.com) Kickstarted: How one company is revolutionizing product development (adafruit.com)
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Audi's Future: Self-Driving Cars, Dual HUDs, LTE Some smart stuff by Audi, see below. Clearly, a car than can be both self-driven or driven by me, and maybe does not have a tailpipe (it would be crucial, in my view, to be fully electric rather than hybrid), and is fully connected to all kinds of digital services, will be very popular. Just think of the possibility of facilitated car-sharing using social networks - how much traffic reduction could we achieve with that? And better yet, maybe the car becomes our small private office and we don't actually drive much in it, at all;). Either way, car companies are becoming lifestyle providers, in a way. And selling stuff becomes... selling a service. Audi's Future: Self-Driving Cars, Dual HUDs, LTE | News & Opinion | PCMag.com Within that time period, or within the next decade, Audi also hopes to be able to launch so-called ITS-G5 or automotive WLAN technology into something it calls “street preview”. Using a 5.9-GHz wireless radio, cars would talk to themselves in clusters, reporting their own traffic information. The technology also could improve safety, warning other vehicles automatically as cars approach an intersection. Audi executives also said that they’re showing off a dual “contact-analog” heads-up display at CES, which provides an augmented-realit view of the environment - for example, painting a directional arrow directly over the intersection, and adjusting its size and positioning as the car gets closer. Pedestrians would be shown using night vision mode, and the distance to the car ahead would also be shown. The passenger, meanwhile, will have their own heads-up display, a more conventional model. Audi said its prototype allows the passenger to “swipe” the driver’s display over to the passenger, allowing that person to see what the driver sees. Not surprisingly, Audi’s vision also includes a self-driving car, of...

Gerd Leonhard

Keynote Speaker, Think-Tank Leader, Futurist, Author & Strategist, Idea Curator, some say Iconoclast | Heretic, CEO TheFuturesAgency, Visiting Prof FDC Brazil, Green Futurist

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