Catching Up On Readings: Latin America’s Tech Hubs

This feature on Tech Crunch looks at Latin America’s most promising tech hubs in Colombia. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. >>>

The Path I Chose Lets Me Create Art for Art’s Sake

It must have been 1988. I was assembling my college applications that winter. One of the teachers in school whom I had requested a recommendation letter from sat with me in an empty classroom.

“What do you want to do?” Mrs. Bhattacharya asked, curious what my infinitely fertile brain was cooking. I had a reputation in school as a troublemaker. In a conservative all girls’ school in 1980s Calcutta, the notion of out-of-the-box thinking hadn’t caught on yet.

“I plan to study Computer Science, then run my own business,” I declared.

I could see that the answer didn’t please her. “What about your femininity? What about all your talents in dance, painting, writing?” she asked.

Cut to November 2014. >>>

Catching Up On Readings: A Brief History of Failure

The New York Times Magazine in its Innovations Issue presents a gallery of technologies that we lost or an invitation to consider alternate futures. Some of what might have been is fantastical: a subway powered by air, an engine run off the heat of your palm. Some of what we lost, on the other hand, is more subtle, like a better way to bowl or type. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. >>>

Catching Up On Readings: Insights Channels For Innovation

This HBR feature outlines seven insight channels that would-be innovators can tap into for valuable ideas for business opportunities and growth. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. >>>

Catching Up On Readings: Breakthrough Tech Investment

This Financial Times article carries Google Co-founder and CEO Larry Page’s views that there is not enough investment in breakthrough technologies that could change the lives of people. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. >>>

Catching Up On Readings: Assimov on Creativity

MIT Technology Review has recently published a 1959 article by sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov on how people get ideas. The article, relevant even today, says idea formulation requires isolation, because creativity is best nurtured alone and that group sizes to discuss ideas should be limited to five. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

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Catching Up On Readings: Tackling Skills Shortage

This feature in The Atlantic points out the massive number of vacancies that are unfilled due to a chronic shortage of skills in the US and evaluates addressing the problem through apprenticeships similar to the model followed in Germany. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. >>>

Catching Up On Readings: Cloud Computing and IP

Today’s New York Times has a feature that says that cloud computing is forcing us to reconsider intellectual property. It also links to an interesting or rather provocative paper by Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley raising the question—”How will our economy function in a world where most of the things we produce are cheap or free?” For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. >>>