Categories: Articles

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #249

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

Can Predictive Technology Make Us Less Predictable? – Forbes. “I’m worried about how machine optimization feeds us pablum, encouraging us all to take the path more trod. But, as this piece points out, machines can’t choose what’s unexpected unless they know what’s expected — and eliminate it.” (Alistair for Hugh).
Acid Machine. “If you made electronic music, you love the 303 and the 909. You may even have used Propellerhead’s Rebirth tool, a software homage to Roland‘s classic music-making tool. Now there’s a web version. Go make something!” (Alistair for Mitch).
Large Hadron Collider Scientists Hope to Make Contact with Parallel Universe. – Second Nexus. “The number of sentences in this article that are mind-bending is… mind-bending. Here is one: ‘We predict that gravity can leak into extra dimensions, and if it does, then miniature black holes can be produced at the LHC.'” (Hugh for Alistair).
Why Is Mason Reese Crying? – Wiretap. “The CBC radio show Wiretap, by Jonathan Goldstein, is one of the few remaining glimmers of hope on the once-great Canadian radio dial. How his show has survived CBC management is a total mystery. Here’s a meditation on what YouTube says about us, fame and lost childhood.” (Hugh for Mitch).
How Super Angel Chris Sacca Made Billions, Burned Bridges And Crafted The Best Seed Portfolio Ever – Forbes. “If you play in the startup, tech, Silicon Valley space, then the name ‘Chris Sacca‘ is a known entity. I had heard about him for years, but he was a shadow. I never saw him in the media. I didn’t know what he looked like. I knew that he worked at Google, became friends with a lot of people and had early money in places like Twitter and Uber. Then, a few years back, I saw this episode of Kevin Rose‘s Foundation featuring Sacca. I’ve written about this story and thought about him quite a bit. I was really taken by his story and how he tells it. We actually wound up connecting after I wrote about him, and I liked him even more. It’s funny, I am often asked what I think about a person. My standard answer is: they are super nice and kind… but keep in mind that I don’t work with them or have to sleep with them…” (Mitch for Alistair).
What it’s like to sell your startup for $120 million before it’s even launched. – Business Insider. “Things happen in the business world, and I often wonder if we give pause to really reflect on what just happened. In the past few weeks, there is battle brewing of epic proportions (like the one we saw between MySpace and Facebook back in the day). It is for the live streaming of video content that can be shared (easily) in places like Twitter. The contenders are Meerkat (which came out of the gates strong and became all the buzz at SXSW this past year). And now, Twitter just launched Periscope. The thing about Periscope is that the app wasn’t created by Twitter. It was actually bought by them in January of this past year for $100 million. Not a typo. Someone developed an app that wasn’t even in-market that got scooped up by Twitter for over $100 million. That’s something to stop and think about. We often dream of coming up with a million dollar idea. How does a one hundred million dollar idea sit with you? This is the story.” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.