This book demonstrates the inevitability of a continuously growing role of data in our society and it stresses that this role does not need to be threatening: to the contrary, collection and analysis of data can help us prevent traffic jams, suppress epidemics, or produce tailor made medicine. The authors sketch the contours of a new information society, in which everything will be measured from our heartbeat during our morning run to the music we listen to and our walking patterns through...

A New York Times Bestseller. A “fascinating” (Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times) look at how digital technology is transforming our work and our lives.In recent years, Google’s autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM’s Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies—with hardware, software, and networks at their core—will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than ...

A revelatory exploration of the hottest trend in technology and the dramatic impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large.Which paint color is most likely to tell you that a used car is in good shape? How can officials identify the most dangerous New York City manholes before they explode? And how did Google searches predict the spread of the H1N1 flu outbreak?The key to answering these questions, and many more, is big data. “Big data” refers to our bur...

The New York Times–bestselling author describes how current trends will create an era when anything and everything is available for almost nothing.In The Zero Marginal Cost Society, New York Times–bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin uncovers a paradox at the heart of capitalism that has propelled it to greatness but is now taking it to its death—the inherent entrepreneurial dynamism of competitive markets that drives productivity up and marginal costs...

“Magisterial. . . . Draws an elegant and illuminating parallel between the late-19th-century electrification of America and today’s computing world.”—SalonHailed as “the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement” (Christian Science Monitor), The Big Switch makes a simple and profound statement: Computing is turning into a utility, and the effects of this transition will ultimately change society as completely as the advent of cheap elec...

The online economy offers challenges to traditional businesses as well as incredible opportunities. Chris Anderson makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can succeed best by giving away more than they charge for.Known as "Freemium," this combination of free and paid is emerging as one of the most powerful digital business models. In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how it can b...

**Why doesn’t the explosive growth of companies like Facebook and Uber deliver more prosperity for everyone?What is the systemic problem that sets the rich against the poor and the technologists against everybody else?**When protesters shattered the windows of a bus carrying Google employees to work, their anger may have been justifiable, but it was misdirected. The true conflict of our age isn’t between the unemployed and the digital elite, or even the 99 percent and the 1...

In their 2007 bestseller, Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams showed how mass collaboration was changing the way businesses communicate, compete, and succeed in the global marketplace. In 2010, they released Macrowikinomics which examines the growing power of the principles of wikinomics and how businesses and communities are altering the way our financial institutions and governments operate; how we educate our children; and how the health-care, newspaper, and energy industries ...

Can we master the technologies we create before they master us? A "punchy and provocative" assessment by one of Silicon Valley's sharpest observers ( Financial Times).WTF? can be an expression of amazement or of dismay—and today's technology elicits both reactions. In this book, Tim O'Reilly, dubbed "the Oracle of Silicon Valley" by Inc. magazine, explores the upsides—and potential downsides—of today's WTF? technologies.What is the future wh...

This "brilliant and provocative" (Walter Isaacson) guide shares nine principles to adapt and survive the technological changes shaping our future from the director of the MIT Media Lab and a veteran Wired journalist.The world is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history. The tools of our modern existence are getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, transforming every aspect of society, from business to cultur...

World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work.Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developm...

Government Alone Can’t Solve Society’s Biggest ProblemsWorld hunger. Climate change. Crumbling infrastructure. It’s clear that in today’s era of fiscal constraints and political gridlock, we can no longer turn to government alone to tackle these and other towering social problems. What’s required is a new, more collaborative and productive economic system. The Solution Revolution brings hope-revealing just such a burgeoning new economy where players from a...