With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”? That is the big question of Tim Wu’s pathbreaking book.As Wu’s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century—radio, telephone, television, and film—was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBC’s founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter.Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empire—a progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alike—Wu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of today’s great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internet’s future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out.Part industrial exposé, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age, The Master Switch is a stirring illumination of a drama that has played out over decades in the shadows of our national life and now culminates with terrifying implications for our future.

    Some businesses--like home exercise company Peloton, video conference software maker Zoom, and Amazon--woke up to find themselves crushed under an avalanche of consumer demand. Others--like the restaurant, travel, hospitality, and live entertainment industries--scrambled to escape obliteration.But as Scott Galloway argues, the pandemic has not been a change agent so much as an accelerant of trends already well underway. In Post Corona, he outlines the contours of the crisis and the opportunities that lie ahead. Some businesses, like the powerful tech monopolies, will thrive as a result of the disruption. Other industries, like higher education, will struggle to maintain a value proposition that no longer makes sense when we can't stand shoulder to shoulder. And the pandemic has accelerated deeper trends in government and society, exposing a widening gap between our vision of America as a land of opportunity, and the troubling realities of our declining wellbeing.Combining his signature humor and brash style with sharp business insights and the occasional dose of righteous anger, Galloway offers both warning and hope in equal measure. As he writes, Our commonwealth didn't just happen, it was shaped. We chose this path--no trend is permanent and can't be made worse or corrected.

    The Google Story takes you deep inside the company's wild ride from an idea that struggled for funding in 1998 to a firm that rakes in billions in profits, making Brin and Page the wealthiest young men in America. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, this fast-moving narrative reveals how an unorthodox management style and culture of innovation enabled a search engine to shake up Madison Avenue and Wall Street, scoop up YouTube, and battle Microsoft at every turn. Not afraid of controversy, Google is expanding in Communist China and quietly working on a searchable genetic database, initiatives that test the founders' guiding mantra: DON'T BE EVIL.

    It has also often required oppressive and incomprehensible mathematics. Game Theory at Work steers around math and pedagogy to make this innovative tool accessible to a larger audience and allow all levels of business to use it to both improve decision-making skills and eliminate potentially lethal uncertainty.This proven tool requires everyone in an organization to look at the competition, guage his or her own responses to their actions, and then establish an appropriate strategy. Game Theory at Work will help business leaders at all levels improve their overall performance in:NegotiatingDecision makingEstablishing strategic alliancesMarketingPositioningBrandingPricing

    Though this tech is still in its infancy, to those on the inside, it is the future. VR will change how we work, how we experience entertainment, how we feel pleasure and other emotions, how we see ourselves, and most importantly, how we relate to each other in the real world. And we will never be the same.Peter Rubin, senior culture editor for Wired and the industry’s go-to authority on the subject, calls it an "intimacy engine." While once we needed another person to feel the sensations of closeness, trust, vulnerability, confidence, and titillation, VR will give us the ability to induce these sensations by ourselves for the first time in human history. This metamorphosis, Rubin argues, is going to have a powerful impact on relationships that will ripple throughout our society and our individual lives.A journey into this uncertain future and a glimpse at the cultural implications and promises of a new reality, Future Presence explores a host of complex questions about what makes us human, what connects us, and what is real. Offering a glimpse into the mind-blowing things happening in universities, labs, and tech companies around the world, Rubin leads readers on an entertaining tour of the weirdest, wildest corners of this fascinating new universe. Describing this book as "half travelogue and half crystal ball", Rubin will:Introduce readers to the creators and consumers of VR technologyShow readers what an experience is like inside the current VR devicesExplain how this technology will upend everything we know about human connection in the futureAt once the incredible, inevitable story of virtual reality’s rise and a look towards the future of our fantasies, Future Presence is a deeply personal examination of what connects us, and an analysis of what relationships, empathy, and sex could look like—sooner than we think.

    In the next ten years, change will happen even faster. As Hillary Clinton's Senior Advisor for Innovation, Alec Ross travelled nearly a million miles to forty-one countries, the equivalent of two round-trips to the moon. From refugee camps in the Congo and Syrian war zones, to visiting the world's most powerful people in business and government, Ross's travels amounted to a four-year masterclass in the changing nature of innovation. In The Industries of the Future, Ross distils his observations on the forces that are changing the world. He highlights the best opportunities for progress and explains how countries thrive or sputter. Ross examines the specific fields that will most shape our economic future over the next ten years, including robotics, artificial intelligence, the commercialization of genomics, cybercrime and the impact of digital technology. Blending storytelling and economic analysis, he answers questions on how we will need to adapt. Ross gives readers a vivid and informed perspective on how sweeping global trends are affecting the ways we live, now and tomorrow.

    After a cataclysmic global run of thirty years, it has given birth to the age of the telecosm - the world enabled and defined by new communications technology. Chips and software will continue to make great contributions to our lives, but the action is elsewhere. To seek the key to great wealth and to understand the bewildering ways that high tech is restructuring our lives, look not to chip speed but to communication power, or bandwidth. Bandwidth is exploding, and its abundance is the most important social and economic fact of our time.George Gilder is one of the great technological visionaries, and the man who put the 's' in 'telecosm' (Telephony magazine). He is equally famous for understanding and predicting the nuts and bolts of complex technologies, and for putting it all together in a soaring view of why things change, and what it means for our daily lives. His track record of futurist predictions is one of the best, often proving to be right even when initially opposed by mighty corporations and governments. He foresaw the power of fiber and wireless optics, the decline of the telephone regime, and the explosion of handheld computers, among many trends. His list of favored companies outpaced even the soaring Nasdaq in 1999 by more than double. His long-awaited Telecosm is a bible of the new age of communications. Equal parts science story, business history, social analysis, and prediction, it is the one book you need to make sense of the titanic changes underway in our lives. Whether you surf the net constantly or not at all, whether you live on your cell phone or hate it for its invasion of private life, you need this book.It has been less than two decades since the introduction of the IBM personal computer, and yet the enormous changes wrought in our lives by the computer will pale beside the changes of the telecosm. Gilder explains why computers will empty out, with their components migrating to the net; why hundreds of low-flying satellites will enable hand-held computers and communicators to become ubiquitous; why television will die; why newspapers and magazines will revive; why advertising will become less obnoxious; and why companies will never be able to waste your time again.Along the way you will meet the movers and shakers who have made the telecosm possible. From Charles Townes and Gordon Gould, who invented the laser, to the story of JDS Uniphase, the Intel of the Telecosm, to the birthing of fiberless optics pioneer TeraBeam, here are the inventors and entrepreneurs who will be hailed as the next Edison or Gates. From hardware to software to chips to storage, here are the technologies that will soon be as basic as the air we breathe.

    The New York Times bestseller that introduced the business world to a future that s already here -- now in paperback with a new chapter about Long Tail Marketing and a new epilogue.Winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for Best Business Book of the Year.In the most important business book since The Tipping Point, Chris Anderson shows how the future of commerce and culture isn t in hits, the high-volume head of a traditional demand curve, but in what used to be regarded as misses -- the endlessly long tail of that same curve.

     The next ten years will be a time of massive transition. The wars in the Islamic world will be subsiding, and terrorism will become something we learn to live with. China will be encountering its crisis. We will be moving from a time when financial crises dominate the world to a time when labor shortages will begin to dominate. The new century will be taking shape in the next decade. In The Next Decade, George Friedman offers readers a pro­vocative and endlessly fascinating prognosis for the immedi­ate future. Using Machiavelli’s The Prince as a model, Friedman focuses on the world’s leaders—particularly the American president—and with his trusted geopolitical insight analyzes the complex chess game they will all have to play. The book also asks how to be a good president in a decade of extraordinary challenge, and puts the world’s leaders under a microscope to explain how they will arrive at the decisions they will make—and the consequences these actions will have for us all.From the Hardcover edition.

    In Rise of the Robots, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford argues that this is absolutely not the case. As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making “good jobs” obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries—education and health care—that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself.In Rise of the Robots, Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work, and we must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what accelerating technology means for their own economic prospects—not to mention those of their children—as well as for society as a whole.

    In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others, to work as they did in the 20th century.The Future of the Professions explains how 'increasingly capable systems' -- from telepresence to artificial intelligence -- will bring fundamental change in the way that the 'practical expertise' of specialists is made available in society.The authors challenge the 'grand bargain' -- the arrangement that grants various monopolies to today's professionals. They argue that our current professions are antiquated, opaque and no longer affordable, and that the expertise of their best is enjoyed only by a few. In their place, they propose six new models for producing and distributing expertise in society.The book raises important practical and moral questions. In an era when machines can out-perform human beings at most tasks, what are the prospects for employment, who should own and control online expertise, and what tasks should be reserved exclusively for people?Based on the authors' in-depth research of more than ten professions, and illustrated by numerous examples from each, this is the first book to assess and question the relevance of the professions in the 21st century.

    Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon; socialize on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. They have produced an unstable and narrow culture of misinformation, and put us on a path to a world without private contemplation, autonomous thought, or solitary introspection--a world without mind. In order to restore our inner lives, we must avoid being coopted by these gigantic companies, and understand the ideas that underpin their success.Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer science--from Descartes and the enlightenment to Alan Turing to Stuart Brand and the hippie origins of today's Silicon Valley--Foer exposes the dark underpinnings of our most idealistic dreams for technology. The corporate ambitions of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, he argues, are trampling longstanding liberal values, especially intellectual property and privacy. This is a nascent stage in the total automation and homogenization of social, political, and intellectual life. By reclaiming our private authority over how we intellectually engage with the world, we have the power to stem the tide.At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. There have been monopolists in the past but today's corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. They're monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making. Until now few have grasped the sheer scale of the threat. Foer explains not just the looming existential crisis but the imperative of resistance.

    A thorough exploration of the changes taking place in the Chinese economy, the book explains how much of the Western consumerist culture is built on the back of cheap Chinese factory labor, and warns that the era is coming to a close. Readers will learn why the cheap labor pool is beginning to dry up, what that means for the rest of the world, and how businesses will have to adapt to stay afloat. This updated second edition includes new statistics, the latest news on the Chinese economy, and additional case studies that illustrate the ways in which China has developed--into a brand-new potential market.China's social, political, and economic evolution will affect the entire world. Rising incomes are building pressure on the global commodities market, inflation is only just beginning, and consumers are experiencing sticker shock as cheap labor is becoming harder to find. The End of Cheap China explains the factors driving these changes, the impact that can be expected, and the opportunities that constitute a major silver lining for businesses panicking about the coming paradigm shift. Readers will:Discover the eight mega-trends changing China, and how far the ripples will spread Learn how rising costs in China will dramatically affect the American way of life Examine the rise of Chinese consumption, and the friction it engenders Consider the changes businesses must make to remain profitable in a changing world The global marketplace is evolving, and it's up to businesses to keep pace with the changes. The End of Cheap China provides a roadmap for navigating these changes, helping businesses lead the charge toward a more affluent global economy.

    Start-Up Nation addresses the trillion dollar question: How is it that Israel -- a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources-- produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada and the UK? With the savvy of foreign policy insiders, Senor and Singer examine the lessons of the country's adversity-driven culture, which flattens hierarchy and elevates informality-- all backed up by government policies focused on innovation. In a world where economies as diverse as Ireland, Singapore and Dubai have tried to re-create the "Israel effect", there are entrepreneurial lessons well worth noting. As America reboots its own economy and can-do spirit, there's never been a better time to look at this remarkable and resilient nation for some impressive, surprising clues.

    Everybody knows mobile is the future, and every business wants in, but what are the elements of mobile success? SC Moatti, a Silicon Valley veteran, has created a unique Mobile Formula that makes it easy for any business to develop a strategy for creating mobile products that count. Moatti argues that we so identify with our mobile products that we expect from them what we wish for ourselves: an attractive body, a meaningful life, and increasing competence and ability. So the Body Rule dictates that mobile products must appeal to our sense of beauty but beauty in a mobile world is both similar to and different from what it means offline. The Spirit Rule says mobile products must help us address our deepest needs, both as individuals and as members of communities. And the Mind Rule explains that businesses that want to succeed in mobile need to continually analyze the user experience and use that data to refine and improve their products. Great mobile products replicate and amplify human behavior and interaction, writes Moatti. They don't replace human relationships; they enhance them. A strategy manual rather than a technical treatise, Mobilized includes case studies from mobile pioneers such as Facebook, Uber, Tinder, WhatsApp, and more. The market is full of how-to books for programming apps, but no works examine what is required for business success in the mobile era. Until now."