Adam Ludwig

In a recent report, a committee appointed by the National Research Council issued a recommendation that the federal government fund research on geoengineering as a means to address global warming. Geongineering, sometimes known as “Plan B,” encompasses technologies that seek to counteract climate change. During a session at Techonomy in 2012, Harvard physicist David Keith said, “If you want to actually reduce the risks to many of the people who will suffer real climate impacts in the next decades, including some of the poorest people in the world, this is essentially the only thing you could do.”

Where is the Internet taking us, and how do we keep it secure? There’s no shortage of people ready to offer up opinions on such questions, but few who are truly qualified to answer them. Fortunately we asked someone who is—Fadi Chehadé, CEO of ICANN, the public-benefit corporation tasked with keeping the Internet stable. Chehadé calls the Internet a “platform for human solidarity” that enables us to form networks with “people we’ve never met” to share ideas, concepts, and resources—and ultimately build consensus.

Technologist and author Jaron Lanier wants to reframe the debate about income inequality, starting with semantics. He takes exception to the notion that income equality would ever be a good thing. “To really make incomes equal, there would have to be some sort of force that would pound people down and say, We will all be equal!” said Lanier during a talk at Techonomy 2014 in Half Moon Bay, Calif. Rather, Lanier sees inequality as an inherent dimension of a market economy, noting that “any world of freedom is going to create variation of outcomes.” The problem, however, lies in how these outcomes are spread across society.

Young people aren’t the only ones who are starting to think in new ways about car ownership and how they get around. According to Ken Washington, VP of research and advanced engineering at Ford, “the population boom that is happening in mega-cities is leading us to think about mobility differently.” Moving from point A to point B depends increasingly on context, Washington explained during a Techonomy 2014 discussion entitled “Man, Machine, and How the Future Works.”

Do intelligent machines threaten to not only to steal our jobs, but to rob us of the pleasure of driving? Ford VP of Research and Advanced Engineering Ken Washington says that while “technologies are maturing at an unprecedented pace,” robots won’t be coming for our jobs, or for our steering wheels, any time soon. With the emergence of the Internet of Things and sensor technology, “autonomous capabilities are no longer just things of science fiction,” says Washington. However, he adds, “this notion that one day your’e going to wake up and go the dealer and buy an autonomous car is flawed.”

With 200,000 employees across 30 countries, Flextronics is probably the biggest company you’ve never heard of. The American electronics-manufacturing giant is the second largest manufacturer of any kind in the world, after only Taiwan’s Foxconn. At CES 2015 in Las Vegas, Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick spoke with Flextronics President Mike Dennison about the next phase for manufacturing—it isn’t just for making things, but for driving systemic change in society. As the Internet of Things evolves into a set of systems that will create a new landscape for both business and consumers, the real challenge will be to integrate innovation, networks, and software development. Flextronics partners with its customers not just to build things, but to design and build the systems that those “things” fit into.

“Imagine an education system that’s built around unleashing the power of the individual,” says Philip Zelikow, professor of history at the University of Virginia and visiting managing director at the Markle Foundation. Zelikow envisions a new paradigm where someone can get the training and education they need even if it means starting classes in the middle of a traditional semester. Does that mean students will just pop online to get the credits they need? Not necessarily. “The future may be more likely a mixture of online plus people,” says Zelikow, with “navigators” helping to guide students through online options and pair them with real-world tutors.

Crowdsourcing predates the Internet, but Web platforms like Wikipedia supercharged the concept, giving it global currency and making it an increasingly indispensable business strategy. “Using the intelligence and wisdom and ideas from everybody anywhere on the planet—that’s really exciting to me,” says Bill Gross, founder and CEO of Idealab, a tech incubator that bills itself as a “company factory.” Gross sees crowdsourcing as a driving force in competitive new companies, and a powerful tool for established ones. He points to Amazon as a company that harnesses value from the feedback of its millions of users.

Reid Hoffman knows a thing or two about combining entrepreneurial audacity with savvy risk-assessment. He co-founded LinkedIn in 2003, and his venture and angel investments with Greylock Partners include Airbnb, Facebook, Flickr, Mozilla, and Zynga. "One of the key things is maintaining a sense of youthful optimism in terms of the fact that you can make a difference," Hoffman counsels. But he adds that young entrepreneurs also have to "think crisply about how you navigate risk."

How do scientists working on radical new ideas translate ingenuity into sustainable business models? And how do entrepreneurs find the science they might need to create a breakthrough biotech product? Lab coats have to brush up against business suits. Breakout Labs, a seed fund project of Peter Thiel's Thiel Foundation, makes it happen. The fund seeks to help early-stage science and technology companies "break out" of the lab and into the business world with grants of up to $350,000. This helps companies achieve “very specific scientific milestones,” says Breakout Labs Executive Director Lindy Fishburne.

What do you do as a manager when the conventional means of motivating your sales team—competitions, prizes, inspirational speeches—fall flat? How can you leverage technology to help rally and focus your team around company initiatives, product launches, and winning new business? LevelEleven CEO Bob Marsh set out to tackle these questions when he was at his former job as head of sales operations at consumer engagement platform HelloWorld. Before long, what began as an in-house project evolved into a promising product. “After about six months, we had signed up a dozen paying customers, including the Detroit Pistons and Comcast, so we knew we were on to something,” says Marsh.

How can a better understanding of evolution help us improve human health? Renowned bio-chemist Floyd Romesberg of the Scripps Research Institute can think of a few ways. For one, cancer cells evolve and grow by “out-competing” neighboring cells, a process Romesberg calls “evolution just run faster than we’re used to.” We spoke to Romesberg at our recent Techonomy Bio event in Mountain View, Calif. He says understanding how our genomes have evolved will give us insights into the genetic diseases we get, and help us treat them. But to fully comprehend the evolutionary process, we have to look at proteins. “Understanding how proteins function is absolutely essential to our understanding of life,” said Romesberg.

For would-be borrowers with little credit history, getting a loan can be a nightmare. But one important group of applicants are young, well educated, and entrepreneurial—and would probably be favorable credit risks. Techonomy asked Dave Girouard to respond to questions about how lending platforms like Upstart can help investors and borrowers alike.

Speech recognition has been around a lot longer than Siri, but Apple’s dulcet-toned digital assistant helped bring the technology to a mass audience, and inspire futuristic visions like the one voiced by Scarlett Johanssen in “Her.” Adam Cheyer, one of the co-founders of Siri (acquired by Apple in 2010), says speech recognition is poised to become more widely used and more sophisticated.

Voice-recognition technology helps users interact with their computing devices. But Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer believes that if you recognize people's voices in another sense—when they advocate for change in society—you can help them do something even more important. Cheyer is a software engineer, artificial intelligence expert, and entrepreneur. He’s also a founding member of the social campaign platform Change.org.

Is technology the most democratizing force mankind has ever seen? That's how technologist and serial entrepreneur Julie Hanna sees it. We spoke with Hanna at a recent Techonomy dinner salon in San Francisco. She asserted that tech tools have leveled the playing field and "enabled globally fair access on a mass scale." But she says there's a lot more to do about what she calls "the global opportunity crisis we face, where half the planet's population is living on less than $2 a day."

Even the head of an audiobook juggernaut has to admit that certain books were meant to be read on the page rather than listened to on headphones. For Audible founder and CEO Donald Katz, that book is “The Sound and the Fury,” which he describes as “one of the most complex and beautifully constructed pieces of literature” and a primer on the “music in language.”

Since introducing one of the first digital audio players in 1997, Audible (now owned by Amazon) has become the biggest name in audiobooks. “It really is seen as a service now,” says Audible founder and CEO Donald Katz of the surging audiobook phenomenon. We spoke to Katz at the recent Venture for America Summer Celebration in NYC. He ticked off some of the benefits enjoyed by the growing legions of audiobook consumers: “They get to work smarter than the guy in the next cube; they have storytelling in their lives on a consistent basis.” Most importantly, he said, they’ve found a valuable way to spend the millions of hour per week Americans spend in traffic.

The technology-driven eyewear company Warby Parker has bigger fish to fry than disrupting an industry and hooking up consumers with hip, inexpensive glasses, although it’s done a pretty good job of that so far. “We started Warby Parker with two goals in mind,” said company co-founder David Gilboa at a recent Venture for America event. The first goal was to transform “a $65 billion industry that had been ripping consumers off for decades … by creating our own vertically integrated brand.” In so doing the company is able to offer glasses for $95 that, according to Gilboa, would normally sell for $500-$600. Warby Parker’s second goal, said Gilboa, is to prove that a for-profit business can have “a massive positive impact in the world.”

Warby Parker has used tech tools to shake up the eyewear industry, making high quality glasses available to consumers for a fraction of what they used to pay. Meanwhile, insurgent carmaker Tesla is changing the way people think about driving, but has run into regulatory roadblocks in its attempt to subvert traditional distribution models. At the recent Venture for America Summer Celebration, we asked Warby Parker co-founder David Gilboa for his thoughts on Tesla and its founder Elon Musk. Unsurprisingly, Gilboa is a fan. "[Musk] is one of the most brilliant thinkers alive, and one of the biggest thinkers alive," he said.

Donald Katz, founder and CEO of audiobook pioneer Audible, can go on at length about why listening to books is a virtue for readers and society. That's not surprising, since his company (now owned by Amazon) effectively created the mass listening phenomenon, and dominates it in the U.S. Katz says that by listening to literature, “a lot of people who just don’t have enough time to read now effectively read and ingest beautifully-arranged words.” We spoke with him at the recent Venture for America Summer Celebration in NYC. He argues that audiobooks aren’t just a supplement for adults who are short on time. “A lot of kids are turned on to reading itself or the concept of long, immersive experiences” through audiobooks, he said.

What do you do if you’re an artist in need of supplies, but you happen to be broke? Creative people have been pooling and exchanging resources for generations. Now, the emerging Internet-enabled sharing economy makes it easier than ever to swap, say, legal advice for lumber. That’s the kind of transaction that OurGoods, a new resource-sharing platform for artists, actually facilitates. OurGoods also serves “designers, technologists, makers, farmers, and activists,” said co-founder and activist Caroline Woolard when we talked to her at the recent Sharing Economy Summit at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “Artists have a lot of skills and also education, but don’t necessarily have money to pay each other to get their work done,” said Woolard. But OurGoods doesn’t just aim for one-off online bartering. Its greater goal is to build what Woolard calls “cross-class trust networks” that “enable a kind of trust-building that leads to social justice.”

The sharing economy is rooted in the idea that at any given moment, the things that people own—their tools, their cars, and sometimes even their homes—are sitting idle, ready to be used by someone who needs them. The Internet is a natural marketplace for matching these assets with consumers, in many cases providing a revenue stream for the owners who sell or rent them. For those motivated more by giving than by profit, now there’s a platform for selling their unwanted stuff and seamlessly donating the proceeds to charity. By streamlining charitable donations, WebThriftStore provides an essential service for non-profits, which often don’t have the infrastructure to process in-kind donations, let alone the resources to run a physical store.

With mobile connectivity more and more ubiquitous, could we be entering a post-mobile age? eBay's Devin Wenig thinks so, and says it will increasingly define the global marketplace. "The physical and digital worlds are coming together in incredibly interesting ways," Wenig told us at a recent Techonomy dinner salon in San Francisco. Retail is turning stores into virtual shopping and shipping centers, said Wenig, while platforms like Uber and Airbnb use tech to link data to the physical world. The fear that online retailers like eBay could decimate physical retail is being upended, according to Wenig. Instead, small merchants and service providers are learning to use tech and data to broaden their distribution and become more competitive. "Some call it collaborative consumption, some call it the merger of physical and digital. Whatever you call it," said Wenig, "the change ... has been astounding."

For insight into big emerging tech trends, look beyond Silicon Valley and Alley, said McKinsey's Michael Chui at a recent Techonomy dinner salon in San Francisco. The developing world is about to jump into the innovation economy. "Only half of the people that we can possibly connect in the world are actually connected." Once those people get connected, he believes, the world will see double the innovation it sees today, as potential innovators in now-developing countries get online. This expansion of connectivity will be enabled by the global mobile revolution, or what Chui called "the proliferation of form factors"—ranging from tablets and phablets to appliances and cars. Chui pointed to education, healthcare, and public services as sectors of the economy with the greatest potential to gain efficiency as they are transformed by tech.

Hackers will try any point of entry they can find to access private data. In a recent interview with Techonomy, RSA Security’s Art Coviello said that the number of vulnerable access points—or what he calls the “attack surface”—is growing rapidly, with the number of digitally controlled devices connected to the Internet expected to reach 200 billion by the end of this decade. The New York Times reports that hackers recently breached the computer networks of a large oil company by implanting malware in the online menu of a Chinese restaurant favored by the company’s employees. With increasingly sophisticated hackers targeting a proliferating volume of corporate data, our pervasive connectivity—through everything from heating and cooling systems to accounting software and even vending machines—presents a constant challenge to security experts.

Last year we profiled Web engineering company 10up (which developed this website). Aside from its near-fanatical devotion to all things WordPress, one of the hallmarks of 10up is that it’s a distributed company—its 60-plus full-time developers and project managers live and work all over the country. That model is catching on, with “virtual” companies becoming more and more common in the tech sector. Some, like Mozilla, Basecamp, and Upworthy, are fast-growing software or media companies. Others are developers, marketers, digital designers, or online learning platforms. “Web based” best describes all of the companies that made a list compiled by job search site FlexJobs (which has the distinction of appearing on its own list), but each blend offline and online collaboration in different ways and to varying degrees.

Techonomy hosted a salon dinner in San Francisco, in partnership with BlackBerry, and we took a few guests aside for further insight. We asked them, among other things, our usual—how is tech innovation changing society? Michael Chui of McKinsey Global Institute celebrated having such conversation in the Bay Area, noting its world-class universities and venture capitalists, adding up to a “cauldron of interpersonal connections” that spur innovation. But with more and more people coming online, Chui foresees developing countries playing an increasing role in a more global cauldron of innovation. BlackBerry’s John Chen thinks the future is in the machine-to-machine interconnectivity, as software and devices help make our lives “more automated, more information driven.”

Techonomy hosted Ben Medlock, CTO and co-founder of Britain's SwiftKey, in our Manhattan offices for a short video interview. It was the first episode of a new online series we call "Three Questions from Techonomy." Medlock talked about his company, the growing importance of AI, and how tech is changing the world. This modest CTO has a company with outscale success—now on about 150 million smartphones globally, including most Samsung phones. His software autocompletes typing on the Android keyboard, and is the state of the art in keyboard technology. The company recently completed a $20 million funding round with venture capital firms Accel and Index Ventures.

Just how bad is China’s air pollution? A recent M.I.T. study concluded that a huge swath of the Chinese population is losing an average of five years in life expectancy due to pollution. The Chinese government is getting serious about the issue, and not just because the thick smog actually interferes with domestic surveillance efforts. China's pollution has become a source of national embarrassment and outrage, with Chinese scientists comparing it to a nuclear winter. The government is now escalating the use of drones to fight its recently declared “war on pollution.” In a plan reminiscent of the futuristic geo-engineering discussed at Techonomy 2012, aircraft disperse chemicals that freeze pollutants, making them fall to the ground. But what becomes of this solidified smog, not to mention the chemicals, once it's been scrubbed from the sky?

Once your Internet company has amassed over 1 billion subscribers around the world, what’s your next move? The most obvious answer is to figure out how to leverage your extraordinary user base to generate revenue. But Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions for Facebook have always been more complex than simple profit motive. For starters, he’s not content connecting just 1 billion people. As he told Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick this Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, “Our vision isn’t to try to connect one-seventh of the world; it’s to try to connect everyone.” In order to do that, Facebook has to rally other billion-user companies to its cause. “We have to form these partnerships because no one company can change the way that the Internet works by itself,” said Zuckerberg.

Jeff Stewart believes he can figure out if you will repay your debts by studying who you know and what they say about you. For him, it's better than a credit score. Stewart is CEO and co-founder of Lenddo, which gives small loans to borrowers in developing countries based on information it gleans from their accounts on Facebook and other social networks. Stewart was running two earlier companies when he and his New York-based partners noticed something odd: their hardworking and educated employees in other parts of the world were often unable to secure loans. Why, he wondered, would local lenders ignore such eligible, middle-class consumers in emerging economies? Finding out proved an irresistible challenge.

Five months ago, Gabriella Gomez-Mont launched Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad, or Laboratory for the City, under the auspices of recently elected mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera. The Laboratorio, as its name suggests, is an experimental program to foster civic innovation and urban creativity, which Gomez-Mont hopes can heal the social divisions in her city. Techonomy spoke (in English) with Gomez-Mont, who is speaking at Techonomy 2013 about her incipient efforts to harness Mexico City’s youth and energy to improve civic life.

If you enjoyed Trae Vassallo's recent post about how she uses Google Glass to be a more efficient mom, you'll love author Gary Shteyngart's account of puttering around New York, basking in the awe factor of the futuristic eyewear. Shteyngart entered a Twitter contest to become one of the first "Google Explorers" to try out Glass. (His winning tweet, "#ifihadglass I could dream up new ideas for the TV adaptation of my novel Super Bad True Love Story," earned him the privilege of paying $1,500 for the product.) After some basic training at the Glass Explorers "Basecamp," Shteyngart hit the streets, along with several hundred other Explorers in New York City.

John Hagel is a regular contributor for Techonomy and a director with Deloitte. He and John Seely Brown, co-chairs of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, recently published a report tackling one of Techonomy’s central themes: How can institutions adapt to exponential technology change and reorganize themselves for “scalable efficiency?” Techonomy's Adam Ludwig interviewed Hagel by email about the key ways organizations can foster an innovative environment for learning and transformation.

At Techonomy, we’re fascinated by the potential of 3D printing technology (also known as additive manufacturing) to transform domestic manufacturing by creating efficiencies and opportunities for producers both large and small, from industrial fabricators to DIY makers. For answers to all our 3D printing questions, we spoke with Terry Wohlers, industry analyst, author, and president of Wohlers Associates, Inc. He told us about the future of 3D printing, industry obstacles, and whether or not we will someday see entire houses constructed by 3D-printed layers of concrete.

While America celebrated the anniversary of its independence, our erstwhile colonizers celebrated the possibility of energy independence. July 4th marked the official opening of the London Array, the world's largest offshore windfarm. Situated in the outer Thames Estuary off the Kent and Essex coasts, the facility boasts 175 turbines capable of powering two thirds of the homes in Kent. In a statement, British Prime Minister David Cameron said that the project demonstrates that "Britain is a great country to come and invest in, and it's meant jobs for local people and it means clean, green energy for half a million homes in our country." These are not empty words. Britain's newest windfarm represents an impressive convergence of international innovation. It is owned by Denmark's Dong Energy, Germany's E.On, and Masdar of Abu Dhabi, and has the capacity to power 470,000 homes.

Samsung appears to be gearing up for an Internet of Everything economy. Already a leading producer of smartphones and LED televisions, the consumer electronics giant is preparing to expand its reach into home appliances. Samsung's CEO of Consumer Electronics Boo-Keun Yoon told Steven Bertoni of Forbes that his company is ready to push into a market worth $280 billion globally. With U.S. the housing market reaching solid ground, and China still building at a feverish pace, Samsung wants to equip the wave of new homes with dishwashers and ranges.

Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick appeared yesterday on Bloomberg TV to comment on Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to angry investors at Facebook's first shareholder meeting. Kirkpatrick asserts that Facebook's formidable reach will ultimately bolster its long-term outlook, citing the use of Facebook by organizers of protests in Turkey as an example of the social network's pervasiveness. Zuckerberg's involvement in the FWD.us campaign for immigration reform, says Kirkpatrick, reinforces how Facebook "has put itself at the center of global developments." But can the company turn around its Wall Street fortunes by figuring out a way to monetize mobile ads?

Designers have used 3D-printing websites like Shapeways to manufacture and market their wares for several years now, while some intrepid DIY makers have taken production into their homes by investing in desktop 3D printers from New York-based MakerBot. But 3D printing machines have yet to make their way into mass-market retail stores. Until now. Last week Staples announced that it will sell the Cube 3D printer, made by South Carolina-based 3D Systems Corp., in select stores. Priced at $1,299, the machine sells for almost half the cost of Makerbot's Replicator 2.

Steve Jurvetson, a VC friend of Techonomy's at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ordered a humanoid "Baxter" robot from Rethink Robotics and shared these shots of taking it out of the box and plugging it into the wall. Right out of the box, Jurvetson programmed Baxter by moving its arms. On his first try, he taught the robot to move cups across a table, reporting that Baxter was able to persevere even as people placed cups in random locations on the table. "It learns what its hands can do by looking at them against the table as background," writes Jurvetson.

Repatriating U.S. manufacturing jobs isn't just about bolstering the economy. There are practical business problems associated with outsourcing production abroad. It's not uncommon for shipments of products made in countries like China to arrive with defects, which can be hard to rectify from the other side of the world. In a report on WNYC's New Tech City, Matthew Burnett, a small business owner in Brooklyn, says quality control wasn't the only issue he ran into when he used foreign companies to manufacture parts for his designer watch company—language barriers and time-zone differences hampered routine communications. When Burnett started his next company, a clothing line, he decided he only wanted to make his products in the U.S. That way he could order smaller batches and call up the factory directly if there were any problems.

Jerry Paffendorf and Dan Gilbert have radically different visions of urban renewal, but both seek to leverage the depressed Detroit real-estate market to spur entrepreneurship and opportunity. Paffendorf, a refugee from the Silicon Valley startup scene, created a website called "Why Don't We Own This?" which offers prospective buyers an information-rich online map of auction property. The idea behind the site is to encourage innovators to buy and renovate inexpensive properties to use for creative or entrepreneurial endeavors.

Tracking down the perpetrators of Monday's Boston Marathon bombing will depend in part on determining the techniques they used, an aspect of the investigation that will rely heavily on evidence gathered from videos and photos of the crime scene. The New Yorker's Paige Williams spoke with former crime-scene analyst and Boston University School of Medicine instructor Adam B. Hall about the types of clues investigators will be looking for, and why. Forensic chemistry, explains Hall, lets investigators put together chemical evidence in crimes that involve drugs, arson, and explosives. To learn about the devices used in the Boston attack, Hall says investigators will be collecting every piece of evidence they can.

The Dutch design studio Moniker wants you to help animate its new music video. Featuring the music of Light Light, the project, called "Do Not Touch," records the movement of users' pointers as they collectively "behave" in response to onscreen images and instructions. At last view, 41,446 pointers (and counting) have participated in the video. The experience is surprisingly meditative, despite the antics of anarchist pointers who refuse to follow instructions. The highlight is simultaneously watching and participating as thousands of arrows form a smiley face.

Consumers may be going mobile more rapidly than just about anyone in the computing industry could have predicted. Two new reports show sales of desktop and laptop machines dropping sharply in the first quarter of 2013. First-quarter shipments of PCs were down 14 percent worldwide from the same period last year, according to International Data Corp., with Gartner Inc. tallying an 11 percent decline. The numbers may vary, but the consensus is clear: more and more consumers are flocking to mobile computing.

Independent inventors of consumer products are about to get access to the resources of a $245 billion industrial technology business. In a partnership with the Manhattan-based product-development startup Quirky, GE will open up a trove of more than 30,000 patents and technologies to Quirky’s crowdsourced collaborators. The goal is to create a co-branded line of app-enabled, connected devices that leverage industrial-grade technologies for use in the home in applications such as health, security, water, and air.

The day after Facebook's big announcement about its new Home interface for Android phones, Techonomy CEO David Kirkpatrick fielded questions on Yahoo! Finance about the implications of Facebook's latest play for the mobile market. An essential component of the app, said Kirkpatrick, is that it surfaces SMS and messaging as the top layer of the user experience, demonstrating Facebook's insight into how people are communicating. Are users ready for this new level of interactivity on their mobile phones? Maybe not all American users, said Kirkpatrick, but Facebook is looking abroad to places like Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, and India, where Facebook is "growing like crazy."

Techonomy CEO David Kirkpatrick appeared on Bloomberg TV yesterday to comment on Facebook's ambitions to amplify its presence in the mobile market. Kirkpatrick dispelled rumors that Facebook intends to launch a new phone, but said the company has plans to release a layer of software that will appear on the home screens of specific HTC smartphones. According to Kirkpatrick, this represents "the beginning of a whole series of Facebook initiatives in mobile that will probably lead ultimately to a lot more people having a home Facebook screen when they turn on their phone all over the world."

Girls Who Code is a Manhattan-based nonprofit aimed at teaching high school girls software programming, public speaking, product development, and other skills that prepare them to launch careers in the tech sector. It's one of a number of recent initiatives designed to encourage young women to set their sights on jobs in the often male-dominated world of tech. Programs like Hackbright Academy, Girl Develop It, Black Girls Code, and Girls Teaching Girls Code seek to bridge the gender gap in tech by offering hands-on computer science instruction for students on the verge of making decisions about their future studies.

Revitalizing manufacturing is essential to U.S. economic recovery, but it’s not clear yet how this new phase might look. One thing is certain: it won’t look anything thing like manufacturing did 15 or even 5 years ago. PARC CEO Stephen Hoover has spoken at Techonomy events about how innovations like 3D printing and crowdsourcing can drive a paradigm shift in manufacturing. But can a new American manufacturing approach also be eco-friendly? Techonomy spoke with Chris Park, a principal at Deloitte who helps clients with their environmental, social, and sustainability performance, about how next-generation manufacturing technology could reduce environmental impact and bring jobs back to the U.S.

As part of a campaign to help drivers learn more about how to optimize their fuel usage, Ford announced its Personalized Fuel-Efficiency App Challenge at last week's New York International Auto Show. The app will address what Ford officials say is the number one concern among drivers. By creating a platform designed to share information through social media, Ford believes it can empower drivers to improve their personal fuel efficiency.

The cyberattack that temporarily paralyzed the American Express website last week highlighted the escalating frequency and brazenness of strikes aimed at global financial institutions. In the past six months, similar attacks hit JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, while another disabled computers at banks and television networks in South Korea. As predicted by Arthur W. Coviello at the Techonomy 2012 conference last November, the perpetrators of these attacks appear to be more focused on disruption than on fraud.

In a talk last January at Learning Without Frontiers, Ray Kurzweil speculated that one day 3D printers will be able to self-replicate by printing parts to make other 3D printers. Kurzweil, now Director of Engineering at Google and a speaker at last year's Techonomy conference, thinks 3D printing could have a paradigm-shifting impact on how we manufacture all kinds of things—from automobiles to the highways that they drive on. Fueled by this vision, students at the Singularity University, which Kurzweil founded, are working on creating 3D-printable buildings. Now, the Dutch firm DUS Architects plans to use a mobile printing facility called the KamerMaker to build the first 3D-printed canal boat.

Could crowdsourcing transform the porn industry the same way it's shaken up product development, photography, and venture capitalism through online platforms like Quirky, Shutterstock, and Kickstarter? Cindy Gallop, a former ad executive and 2003 Advertising Woman of the Year, certainly hopes so. Last August, Gallop launched the website MakeLoveNotPorn.tv in an effort to subvert the way people consume sex online. Her crusade started with a 2009 TED talk in which she described her frustrations dating younger men, who she said tended to mimic hard core pornography during sex rather than seeking genuine physical connection. Gallop wants to dispel the stigma and embarrassment attached to frank sexual expression, and offer an antidote to the impersonal fetishization rampant in the most widely-consumed pornography.

Following our first Techonomy Detroit conference last fall, we profiled Venture for America, a program that places young tech entrepreneurs at start-ups throughout the country, targeting cities like Detroit, New Orleans, and Las Vegas that are still grappling with economic recovery. We also profiled an innovative Detroit startup called Are You a Human, which offers a secure and entertaining alternative to CAPTCHA authentication technology, designed to verify that someone using a website is a real persona and not a robot with bad intentions. Max Nussenbaum, a Venture for America fellow who was placed by the program at Are You a Human, was among several VfA fellows who attended Techonomy Detroit. In his Huffington Post blog about his experiences in Detroit, Nussenbaum argues that the city is a greenfield for innovation and experimentation.

Hamadoun Touré, Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union, spoke at Techonomy 2011 about why broadband access should be a universal human right. Now, Touré's United Nations agency is partnering with British Airways to look for ways to match emerging talent with new jobs in tech. The two organizations have formed the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and launched an initiative, called "UnGrounded," that aims to identify the engineering, science, and tech skills most needed for today's job market, and create opportunities for training and talent discovery. The project will literally take off this summer when a group of CEOs, founders, and investors use an 11-hour transcontinental flight as a high-altitude hackathon, taking them from San Francisco to London, where they will present their ideas at ISD's Decide Now Act (DNA) Summit.

Zipcar was a harbinger of the new sharing economy, but according to Arun Sundararajan of The Harvard Business Review, because the company has to maintain a fleet of vehicles, its business model is really no different from an old-fashioned rental car company. Sundararajan points to two upstarts, RelayRides and GetAround, that mobilize a true peer-to-peer marketplace, with fleets of cars owned and operated (and parked) by a community of users. Their reputation-based approach can be traced to Airbnb and other resource-pooling companies like SnapGoods and TaskRabbit.

As part of the roll-out for its newly developed voice-recognition tool, Google has unveiled a nifty little feature that allows users to add subtitles to silent film clips. Open PeanutGalleryFilms.com in Chrome (it won't work in other browsers) and play around with it, with that caveat that the functionality is still a work in progress. Users have to verbalize punctuation, and proper nouns can yield comical results akin to texting auto-fill gaffes. Google's voice recognition is an important step toward making our computers actually listen to us when we scream at them. Speech control is also likely to be integrated into Google Glass, so you can now look forward to talking to your eyewear.

Clayton Christensen's model of business disruption posits that new players can topple industry giants by attacking the low end of a market and building towards competitiveness at the higher margin. But this once-groundbreaking model may already be obsolete. In a recent Harvard Business Review report, Larry Downes and Paul F. Nunes argue that the pace of disruption is happening much faster these days, requiring industry leaders to take more radical precautionary measures. They cite as an example the GPS equipment market, which was upended by smartphone apps before manufacturers had a chance to adapt, with Garmin losing 70% of its market capitalization in the two years after navigation apps were introduced.

Can untrained gamers help solve tough scientific puzzles? Some scientists and researchers are starting to think so. In fact, there are problems that professional scientists admit they are helpless to solve without the help of the "crowd." EyeWire is a game designed by a team at MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department to help chart nerve connections in the brain. "We need an army of people to go out and explore that jungle," said neuroscientist Sebastian Seung, the team's leader, in an NPR report. "Why not engage the public? It's a great adventure. What could be more exciting than exploring the brain? [It's] much more exciting than any artificial video game." About 35,000 players have already registered at eyewire.org to look at images of neurons in the eye and figure out how they're connected.

We've already seen 3D-printed guitars, motorcycles, and even stem cells. Is 3D printing ready to disrupt the auto industry? It could happen sooner than you think. The Urbee 2, a lightweight three-wheeled, two-passenger vehicle designed to be constructed from 3D-printed materials, is the brainchild of engineer Jim Kor. Using ABS plastic and Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM)—an automated, additive process that prints all of the car's parts in about 2,500 hours—Kor and his team have created a prototype at the on-demand 3D-printing facility RedEye.

New York University's new Center for Urban Science and Progress is launching an initiative to develop sensor and data-crunching technologies aimed at creating a smarter, more efficient city. With partners including I.B.M., Cisco, Xerox, and the New York City government, the center will research and deploy the kind of smart-city technologies already being implemented in cities like Stockhom and Singapore to better manage urban infrastructure, with an emphasis on quality-of-life improvements like noise reduction and traffic abatement.

Last November, Techonomy contributor Gabriel Mizrahi wrote about how North Korea's strict prohibition of Internet access effectively quashes any hopes there for the kind of popular uprising seen in the Arab Spring. "This is the golden age of grassroots regime change," wrote Mizrahi. "Unless, of course, you [live] in North Korea." Until now, only a select group of government officials in Pyongyang could access the Web. Meanwhile, the mobile network Koryolink, which was developed by the Egyptian firm Orascom, has over 1 million North Korean subscribers, none of whom can pick up foreign networks or call outside the country. But in March North Korea will begin allowing Internet searches from laptops and mobile devices, as reported in the New York Times IHT Rendezvous blog. There's just one hitch. Only foreigners will have the privilege of accessing the 3G mobile Internet service to be offered by Koryolink.

A new report produced by a consortium of Detroit-based organizations uses a wide range of analytics to document the revitalization of the 7.2 square miles that comprise the city's Greater Downtown area. Drawn from local surveys and data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, among other sources, the report details population and tourism figures, business distribution, and demographics on income, housing, ethnicity, and education. Some of the findings hint at the dynamics behind Detroit's resurgence.

At last year's Techonomy Detroit conference, salesforce.com's Vivek Kundra, who from 2009 to 2011 was the first U.S. Chief Information Officer, lamented the disconnect between an education system that attracts the world's best and brightest and an immigration system that prevents them from working here legally. "It is broken," said Kundra. "It makes absolutely no sense when we educate some of the smartest people in the world with advanced degrees and then ask them to leave the country and go start up companies elsewhere." A recent article by Kevin Sullivan in The Washington Post highlights this conundrum with a profile of two MIT inventors, Anurag Bajpayee and Prakash Narayan, whose water-decontamination technology has attracted serious interest from investors, but whose visas both expire soon.

The "Made in NY" advertising campaign has been touting the city's efforts to grow and energize local film and television production. Now, Mayor Bloomberg has launched a "We Are Made in NY" initiative that supports the city's burgeoning tech scene by offering online resources that help nurture startups and match employers with qualified applicants. The program is also asking local tech startups to submit 60-second introductory videos to give a behind-the-scene look at what they do. Along with initiatives like the Code for America partnership and the planned Cornell NYC Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, this new campaign bolsters the mayor's strategic reinvention of New York as "New Tech City."

The 3Doodler, a new 3D printing pen from the toy and robotics company WobbleWorks, lets users transform sketches into three-dimensional objects. The pen, currently in development thanks in part to a successful Kickstarter campaign, emits ABS plastic instead of ink. Once plugged in, the device lets you draw on a surface and peel away the plastic after it cools and solidifies. You can then build on an framework by drawing three-dimensional designs in the air. The company has demonstrated the pen by creating jewelry, fridge magnets, and a mini Eiffel Tower. If the 3Doodler delivers as advertised, back-of-napkin sketches will soon turn into impromptu prototypes.

After confronting his daughter's alcohol and drug addiction, and supporting her through a torturous recovery, healthcare entrepreneur Peter Loeb wanted to help others who struggle with addiction. With his daughter, Loeb launched Lionrock Recovery, a two-year-old startup that uses secure videoconferencing technology to help addicts free themselves of chemical dependency.

Last year, Techonomy held a one-day conference in Detroit to tackle the issues of jobs, urban revival, and U.S. competitiveness in the global economy. While Detroit continues its road to recovery, thanks in part to a burgeoning tech startup scene nurtured by investors like Detroit Venture Partners and entrepreneurship accelerators like Bizdom, another Midwestern city afflicted by the loss of manufacturing jobs is also mounting a tech-enabled recovery. In Cleveland, Ohio, companies like Explorys, which helps healthcare systems manage and analyze their data, are helping to put the city on the map as a locus for quality jobs in the tech sector.

Humans are intelligent, yet unpredictable. Robots are programmed to be predictably logical. Can they get along? These days they don't have much of a choice, as robots increasingly perform human tasks and work with human teams. As reported in SmartPlanet, researchers at MIT are examining ways to establish trustworthy and efficient relationships between humans and robots, using a cross training approach to team building. Their research shows that teams in which a robot and its human partner swap roles on different days become more efficient.

In their recent comments on "60 Minutes," and at the Techonomy 2012 conference, MIT economists Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssonn may have given the impression that robots are poised to swipe the jobs of U.S. workers. As reported in The New York Times, robotics experts assembled at the Automate 2013 trade show in Chicago offered a different outlook. Henrik I. Christensen, Chair of Robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that while he agrees that automation could make certain types of jobs obsolete, it will also create new, higher-paying jobs. The International Federation of Robotics reinforced this argument with the release of findings from a report that predicts the robotics industry will help create 1.9 million to 3.5 million jobs by 2020.

Technology has enabled us to collect and analyze unprecedented amounts of data. As Ray Kurzweil commented at the Techonomy 2012 conference, "The kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more intelligently searchable information than the President of the United States did 15 years ago." But how do we go about storing all of this data? Hard drives and the Cloud require an electricity supply, while other storage devices such as disks or magnetic tape deteriorate over time. The answer to this archiving conundrum may lie in our DNA. As reported on NPR, scientists at the European Bioinformatics Institute have successfully stored all of Shakespeare's sonnets on tiny particles of DNA.

Removed from her family and forced to live as an orphan when she was just eight, Techonomy participant and Geomagic CEO Ping Fu endured the brunt of China's Cultural Revolution before ascending to the heights of American tech entrepreneurship. When she isn't blazing trails in the field of 3D printing and advanced manufacturing, or serving on President Obama's National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, she apparently finds time to write books. Her new memoir, "Bend, Not Break," chronicles her youth in China, her improbable immigration to the U.S., and her rise as an inspiring voice for pioneering women in tech.

With Beijing suffering its worst levels of air pollution on record, news that China was the world's biggest investor in clean energy in 2012 may offer a ray of hope—hopefully one that can cut through the thickening smog. As reported at SmartPlanet, a year-end study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows that Chinese investment in clean energy reached $67.7 billion in 2012, up 20 percent from 2011.

Globalization is an easy culprit for the recent wave of U.S. unemployment, with domestic jobs shipped overseas to be replaced by cheap labor, often without adverse impact on the quality of a company's products or services. Apple is just one high-profile example of this trend. But automation and robotics may be contributing even more to our stubborn unemployment figures. Paradoxically, robots could also help bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. The Jan. 13 broadcast of 60 Minutes featured several Techonomists to help explain how this might happen.

Techonomy hosted the SuperSession "New Network Effect Changes Everything" at CES yesterday, featuring Rodney Brooks of Rethink Robotics, Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas, and Ericsson President and CEO Hans Vestberg. Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick moderated the discussion, which explored the impact of a networked society on consumers, businesses, and industries ranging from farming to manufacturing, to automotive.

The Canadian company Carbon Engineering, formed in 2009 with partial funding from Bill Gates, has developed technology to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A pilot plant for capturing the gas will open by the end of 2014, reports The New York Times. While the process is aimed primarily at cleaning up the environment, there may be a profit opportunity as well. The oil industry could purchase captured carbon dioxide to inject into oil fields to help extract additional oil, a widely used procedure that Howard J. Herzog, a senior research engineer at MIT, says poses little environmental risk. As oil becomes scarcer, demand for carbon dioxide will likely increase.

The futurist Alvin Toffler predicted the rise of telecommuting, calling the home office an "electronic cottage" that could enhance family and community cohesion. A growing segment of today's workforce telecommutes—in a variety of ways and with varying frequency. But, as reported by Slate's Evgeny Morozov, research indicates that the outcomes of tech-enabled remote work arrangements are decidedly mixed. A Deloitte report about a flexible work pilot program at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management concluded that both employees and their managers had a hard time evaluating performance, and that the quality of work suffered. And while the insurance giant Aetna allows 47 percent of its employees to work from home, those workers tend to be heavier, spurring the company to hire an online personal trainer.

Retailers big and small are trying to chip away at Amazon's growing competitive edge, in some cases even if it cuts into their own profits. A number of stores and e-commerce sites now offer same-day delivery as a way to ward off Amazon's incursion into the realm of immediate gratification—one of the few remaining advantages of brick-and-mortar shopping. With Amazon hinting at expanded same-day shipping services, small companies like Shoptiques, along with bigger fish like Walmart, Macy's, and Target, are exploring ways to offer same- or next-day delivery to their online customers.

E-commerce stalwarts are beginning to see the virtues of opening brick-and-mortar retail stores. Andy Dunn, CEO of formerly online-only apparel company Bonobos, told The New York Times that he was losing about half of his would-be customers because they wanted to touch the merchandise before making a purchase. So in 2012 his company opened six retail stores, where the average transaction is double the average online transaction, according to Dunn. Piperlime, Gap's online spinoff, and Warby Parker, an eyeglass company, are opening stores too, and EBay and Etsy are trying out temporary stores. These retailers are not abandoning lessons learned through their online operations: they tend to carry less inventory and employ fewer staff members, treating their new locations more like showrooms than traditional retail outlets.

Reviving U.S. manufacturing could mean more than creating new jobs; it has the potential to spur a more innovative and sustainable economy. As reported in The New York Times, economic theorists are warning that a diminished U.S. manufacturing base could dampen innovation and long-term growth. Experts theorize that keeping researchers and manufacturing workers in close proximity, rather than sending production overseas, is a path to increased productivity. A General Electric battery plant in upstate New York is putting this theory into real-world practice.

In one of the latest runaway crowdfunding success stories, the Swedish creators of the lifelogging device Memoto, hoping to raise $50,000 through Kickstarter, wound up raising more than $540,000 in just a month. Clearly, something about their project captured donors' imaginations. The stamp-sized camera clips to users' lapels and takes a high-res photo every 30 seconds. Built-in GPS and accompanying software enable users to see a timeline of their activity when they plug in the device to recharge. Memoto is the newest tool for acolytes of the growing "Quantified Self" movement, which aims to use technology to process the endless stream of data that is a human life. When Gordon Bell spoke about his lifelogging habits at Techonomy 2012, he was wearing a similar camera developed by Microsoft Research on a string around his neck.

Last year, a 75-year-old woman in the former Soviet republic of Georgia hacked through a cable with a shovel while scavenging for scrap metal, inadvertently crippling Internet service in that country and in neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan. Accidents like this have happened on a smaller scale in the U.S., and the loss of Internet connectivity in the wake of Superstorm Sandy had a paralyzing effect on businesses in New York and elsewhere. But, as Rachel Maddow pointed in the opening segment of her November 29 broadcast, governments are realizing that shutting off the Internet on purpose is a powerful political weapon.

The 12-day World Conference on International Telecommunications will convene representatives from 190 countries next week in Dubai. It's the first such assembly since 1988. Since then, the Internet has become a central driver of business and economic growth. Among the main topics of discussion: who maintains and pays for the Internet and what will become of network neutrality? As reported by Andrew Nusca of SmartPlanet, there are hints that Russia will seek to disrupt the established oversight of the Internet, posing a potential new threat to its apolitical expansion. Also at stake: extending Internet access to the 4.5 billion people in the world who don't have it. At Techonomy 2011, International Telecommunications Union Secretary General Hamadoun Touré asserted that access to broadband should be an international right. (See video.) Will the stakeholders that govern the Internet be able to broadly mandate this right?

Ray Kurzweil is a leading thinker, inventor, and futurist known for his track record of accurate predictions. In this video, shot in Kurzweil's office near Boston, he talks to Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick about Watson, IBM's artificial intelligence computer system that famously defeated Jeopardy champions on the TV game show. Kurzweil explains Watson's human-like intelligence by referencing the Turing Test, an assessment that measures a machine's ability to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

Next week's Techonomy conference in Tucson, Ariz., will feature Ray Kurzweil, a leading thinker, inventor, and futurist known for his track record of accurate predictions. On November 13 Kurzweil is releasing a new book, How to Create a Mind, which applies neuroscience research to the possibilities of super-intelligence. In this video, recorded in Kurzweil's office near Boston, he talks to Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick about how his exponential perspective of the future is different than the typical linear perspective. Thinking exponentially, Kurzweil says, has allowed him to predict the future of information technology.

Many tech and media businesses have been disrupted by power loss and connectivity issues in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. But several companies, like the social media optimization service SocialFlow, are fortunate to have fully operational offices. In addition to being able to offer uninterrupted service to clients, they've been generous with their good fortune by opening their offices to entrepreneurs who need space and resources. The workspace sharing hub PivotDesk has stepped up to create a dedicated page for entrepreneurs affected by the storm. "Entrepreneurial communities thrive when people give before they get," reads the site, which lists available office spaces at tech companies throughout New York and New Jersey.

When I checked my email this morning, my mother, who lives in France, had sent me links to two Instagram photos of the blackout and flooding in lower Manhattan. Some of the most visually stunning impressions of Sandy's impact have been shared via Instagram. According to Forbes.com's Steve Bertoni, even before the storm made landfall, there were 300,026 photos shared on the mobile site under #sandy; 183,003 tagged #hurricanesandy, and 27,564 under #frankenstorm (along with 1,467 photos tagged #huricanesandy, for those whose spelling gets shaky when the wind blows). As power remains out and cell networks stay up, Bertoni predicts Instagram, along with Twitter and Facebook, may prove "one of the key links to the outside world to millions of stranded people."

Facebook has "finally gotten religion about the need to really focus on revenue and profit," says Techonomy Founder David Kirkpatrick in a recent interview on Bloomberg TV. Facebook has always focused more on its product and user satisfaction than monetization, but Kirkpatrick thinks it's taken the company too long to recognize that "everything is going mobile." Still, he believes mobile ads will be an effective revenue stream for the company. "Everybody's in the first inning of figuring out mobile advertising," he says. "This is a gold mine, but the problem is you've got to convince consumers that it's OK to get more data about them, because if you do, you can give them information that they perceive as useful."

Refugees from London's financial sector are flocking to the the city's burgeoning startup scene, launching lean, Web-based companies that capitalize on public mistrust of banking institutions, and use tech tools to trim costs and improve customer service.

In an effort to curb pollution one block at a time, the Chicago Department of Transportation is developing what it calls "the greenest street in America." A two-mile stretch of Blue Island Avenue and Cermak Road in the industrial Pilsen neighborhood, which sees heavy truck traffic, is made with pavement that both recycles air and is made from recycled materials. The "photocatalytic cement removes nitrogen oxide gases from the air through a catalytic reaction driven by UV light," as reported on SmartPlanet. The street also incorporates bioswales, rain gardens, and permeable pavements, designed to keep polluted water out of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan and divert rainfall from the sewers. According to the CDOT, 60% of the project's construction waste was recycled.

This election season has predictably amplified the argument that taxation and regulation suffocate growth and innovation. But Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston argues an opposing theory: that "corporate socialism" stifles innovation, and that the subversion of competitive markets is responsible for depressed domestic wages. As Exhibit A, he asserts that near-monopolies in the cable, Internet, and phone markets mean that in many areas of the U.S. connectivity speeds are both slow and expensive by world standards.

The 3D printing company Shapeways today cut the ribbon on its new manufacturing facility in New York's Long Island City, a ceremony attended by Mayor Bloomberg and Empire State Development President and CEO Kenneth Adam. The 25,000 square foot "Factory of the Future" is set to go into operation in January 2013 and will house 30 to 50 high definition, industrial sized printers, according to the company's website.

As the medical industry strives to integrate new technology to improve services and outcomes, venture capital funding for healthcare IT has tripled in the last three years, according to a story by WNYC's Mary Harris. Now, the federal government is preparing to pump $29 million into efforts to digitize healthcare records, with Obamacare ready to penalize providers who don't conform. But Ross Koppel, professor of sociology and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has doubts about just how efficient and cost-effective the transition to digitized record-keeping will be.

Before the Techonomy Detroit conference in September, we talked to Venture for America founder Andrew Yang about how his new program is attracting young talent to startups in Detroit and elsewhere. Like a Teach for America for wannabe entrepreneurs, Venture for America matches the best and the brightest young graduates with startup companies in struggling cities. Ultimately the program hopes to help reinvigorate the American economy and entrepreneurial spirit, says Yang.

In an interview with WNYC's Jeremy Hobson, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo elaborates on the heightened role that Twitter now plays in society—particularly relevant given the explosion of tweets surrounding the presidential and vice-presidential debates. "We used to have a filtered, one-way view of events in the world from the media," says Costolo. "America's perspective of it, or the world's perspective of that event, would be seen through the lens of the way that the media described it to them."

The Stasi, the police arm of the East German government that crumbled in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, attempted to destroy millions of documents chronicling decades of spying on its own citizens. While many of the files are unrecoverable, Germans still want to know as much as much as they can about what they contained—over 70,000 have applied for access to the Stasi archives, prompting an effort to reconstruct shredded files. As reported by NPR's Philip Reeves, the German government is using technology to piece together the remnants, many of which were torn by hand in the last panicked days of the East German regime.

Facebook is still formulating ways to leverage its massive user base (which just surpassed one billion) to create new models for ad revenue. The launch this summer of its own ad exchange was a step in that direction, albeit one that draws on precedents established by Web publishers like Yahoo and AOL. How does the Exchange actually work? Peter Kafka of AllThingsD asked Triggit CEO Zach Coelius to lay out the basics. Judge for yourself how successful he is in translating ad-tech speak into plain English.

The U.S. could be poised to emerge as a leader in a new global digital economy. But Zoe Baird, President of the Markle Foundation, believes that the presidential candidates must do more to articulate a vision of what a tech and data-driven economy will look like.

The 2012 Techonomy conference will be held Nov. 11-12, so the results of the presidential election are certain to loom large. One aspect of electoral politics that's been transformed by the influence of tech and the Internet is polling—and its amplified impact on the national discourse.

STEM skills aren't just for job-hunters in tech fields. As reported in SmartPlanet, Dr. Richard Larson of MIT believes that STEM literacy goes far deeper than understanding numbers, formulas, and gadgetry.

Despite raising $41 million prior to launch, the much-hyped mobile/social/photo startup Color hit a wall once they released their app. Why? As Matthew O'Brien of The Atlantic explains, building something that people don't know they want and then making them want it is a messy process.

At Techonomy we've heard tons of buzz about social product development company Quirky since our Techonomy Detroit conference, where company founder Ben Kaufman gave a high-spirited, enthusiastically received talk just weeks after finalizing a $68 million round of VC funding. But some wonder about the likelihood that other companies could easily copy the Quirky model.

Could tech make having a stiff drink good for the environment? As reported by David Worthington at Smartplanet, Tulibardine distillery in Scotland has partnered with energy startup Celtic Renewables to turn whiskey byproducts into butanol based biofuel, so booze hounds can feel they're doing their part to save the planet. The project, which repurposes sugary waste produced during the distillation process, represents an eco-friendly—and cost-cutting—trend in the spirits industry.

There's a lot of enthusiasm about crowdfunding's potential as an engine for innovation. But not all crowdfunding is created equal. Case in point: the Elevation Dock for the iPhone received $1.5 million in funding from its Kickstarter campaign, but missed its projected April shipping date. The dock still hasn't been delivered, and the release of the iPhone 5 now raises compatibility issues, leaving backers with little to show for their investment.

According to Chris Anderson of the Guardian, we are entering a Third Industrial Revolution: the age of Makers. Characterized by bottom-up innovation, the Maker movement harnesses the Internet, crowdsourcing, and new manufacturing technologies to make things for the many, by the many.

One interpretation of the skills gap is that the knowledge acquired to earn a college degree is becoming obsolete faster than ever before. But, according to research by William D. Eggers, John Hagel, and Owen Sanderson of Deloitte, workers in fields that require a college education aren't the only ones whose career opportunities are becoming harder to define. So-called blue-collar worker now also have to keep up with rapidly evolving technology, as new jobs require skills like fluency in CAD blueprints or LEED certification requirements.

In a recent Gallup poll ranking overall public perception of a wide range of U.S. industries, the computer industry topped the list, with a net 64 percent positive response. The oil and gas industry ranked dead last, with a net -39 percent. No big surprise there. What is surprising—and refreshing—is that healthcare and education were the top two industries in improvement in positive ratings over last year.

The recession has amplified discussion about the skills gap, accompanied by speculation that 21st century jobs will require college degrees and advanced skills training still inaccessible to many. This compounds worries about a growing barrier to entry into America's middle class. But, as reported by Jeff Tyler on American Public Radio's Marketplace, a study from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce concludes that there are 29 million openings for jobs that pay between $35,000 and $72,000 but don't require a bachelor's degree. The surprising finding should be welcome news in much of the country, with the possible exception of New York City, where $35,000 hardly translates into a middle-class lifestyle.

As reported by Richard McGregor in the Financial Times, one voter whose name, age, and address were published in the "Obama for America" app, which helps canvassers target doors to knock on, was decidedly nonplussed about having his personal information downloadable by anyone with a smartphone. "Everything is an invasion of privacy these days," he said. "If I got excited about it, I would have had a coronary by now." Others are less sanguine about the ways the Obama campaign is using technology, and data culled from social media, to micro-target voters. But both campaigns have tools that tell them a lot more about voters than their ages and addresses, and they're using them to "slice and dice" the voting population in a way Barack Obama could have never envisioned when he gave his seminal 2004 convention speech.

Tim Smith of Skidmore Studio says that he's so excited to speak at Techonomy Detroit, he's already picking out what shoes to wear. More importantly, he's already formulating his slant on the session he'll appear in, "Is Detroit the Next Berlin?" moderated by Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review. Smith questions the premise of using the success or failure of other cities as a benchmark for what we should expect from Detroit. Detroit, he believes, is incomparable, and must strive to define success on its own terms. Smith unabashedly proclaims that he'll debate anyone who argues otherwise.

Quirky has come a long way. Its roots lie in the distracted musings of inattentive high school student Ben Kaufman. Think of him now, instead, as wunderkind inventor. The New York-based social product design company, founded by Kaufman in 2009, last Wednesday raised a stunning $68 million in a venture round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins.

Twitter's chief lawyer, Alexander Macgillivray, believes that defending free speech is smart business. The company has been tenacious in its efforts to keep governments' prying eyes away from its users' content, and is still resisting a Manhattan court order to turn over the account activity of an Occupy protestor. "We value the reputation we have for defending and respecting the users' voice," says Macgillivray. But Twitter may soon face pressures, both financial and regulatory, that render such customer-facing idealism inoperable. Industry observers wonder how the company will navigate corporate responsibility in an Internet era.

As he prepared for the 2007 Macworld Expo, 19-year-old inventor Ben Kaufman wondered how he could ever top the buzz his company, Mophie, had generated at the 2006 event. Instead of shooting for another iLounge Best of Show award with a clever new iPod case, he decided to invent a product on the spot—and enlisted total strangers to help him do it. Now 25, Kaufman is CEO of the consumer product company Quirky, which is transforming manufacturing by letting consumers decide what gets produced.