When I look at Kickstarter, I see small businesses that have been funded by their customers. I see the acceleration of this shift away from the industrial manufacturing ideology to more of a maker economy. And I also see an idea so powerful that the company name has become a verb.
The lightbulb, the most humble and illuminating of all technologies, when combined with a network connection, transforms itself from being a bulb into a wake-up alarm, a mood alteration mechanism, and in some cases, a cupid's assistant.
From analog film cameras to digital cameras to iPhone cameras, it has become progressively easier to take and store photographs. Today, we don't even think twice about snapping a shot.
By now, we all know that our every move online can be tracked and traced, and that, ideally, services learn from and adapt to customers based on an artful deployment of that data.
QR codes have always been a kind of half-measure, a useful but inelegant transitional technology; the ultimate goal is augmented reality.
It is becoming harder for us to stay on top of the onslaught - e-mails, messages, appointments, alerts. Augmented intelligence offers the possibility of winnowing an increasing number of inputs and options in a way that humans can't manage without a helping hand.
Augmented reality is the 'boy who cried wolf' of the post-Internet world - it's long been promised but has rarely been delivered in a satisfying way.
Ideally, Facebook would take all our clicks and information and would magically give us everything we want, without us even knowing we want it.
Google came of age when search was inefficient and cluttered, and made it simple and easy to find what you wanted online.
Facebook needs to maintain its vise-like grip on our attention to become a conduit of not only advertising but also commerce, so that it can take a cut of everything.
We live in crazy times - that is true - and things have gotten crazier, but it still doesn't feel like the turn of the century.
Looking back, Google's success came from the fortuitous timing of being born at the cusp of the broadband age. But it also came about because of the new reality of the Internet: a lot of services were going to be algorithmic, and owning your own infrastructure would be a key advantage.
People pay little attention to banner ads - in fact, everyone dislikes them - and that leads to infinitesimally small click-through rates that make marketers unhappy.
Technology is now part of the social fabric; it is what is causing dislocation. It is the cause of fear amongst all of us.
Uber, like Google, is taking a highly disorganized business - in its case, private transportation such as taxicabs and private limousines - and ordering it neatly.
Echoes of the iPhone are everywhere. Xiaomi's phones and Google's new Pixel are designed to fool you into thinking that they just might be an iPhone.
Social sharing of photos - landscapes, selfies, latte-foam art - can spark conversations and deeper engagements.
In the simplest terms, a fast-growing company can't keep growing at the same fast rate forever. It eventually has to slow down.
As someone who has been wrong often, I can tell you one thing for sure: hindsight reminds you of your follies every day.
I don't think I had a role model. I just was very inspired by an article which I read in Forbes magazine around the information superhighway and the Arpanet and stuff like that. To me, that intuitively made sense, and when I decided to come to the U.S., I knew exactly what I wanted to go and write about.
