A peek into biohacking - trying to extend human lifespan to beyond 100 years
Silicon Valley pros
see a century of human life as a 20th-century limitation. If we went from a
TRS-80 to an iPhone in 30 years, we can surely double human life using big data
and self-quantification. What is the body if not another piece of hardware waiting
to be hacked? Isn’t it time that death got disrupted?
Renting clothes - the next
big disruption!! ;-)
Rental is going
strong, with Rent the Runway, the pioneer in this area, now 10 years old and
profitable. The global online clothing rental market is expected to grow
annually by over 10% for the next four years, according to MarketWatch. And the
fashion resale market has been expanding a breathtaking 21 times faster than
traditional retail over the past three years, Fortune reports. Millennials and
Gen Zers, in particular, enjoy frequenting thrift and consignment stores,
shredding the last remnants of social embarrassment about such places and
remaking their image into trendy shopping destinations.
Rent the Runway, an
online service that rents out designer clothes and accessories, was a major
leap toward bringing the sharing economy into the fashion business. Today, the
company’s subscription base has crossed 11 million members.
How Technology is Hijacking
Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist
Magicians start by
looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s
perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing
it. And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your
psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in
the race to grab your attention.
Here is another reason for
trying to be wealthy ;-)
According to a new
study, wealthy men and women don’t only live longer, they also get eight to
nine more healthy years after 50 than the poorest individuals in the United
States and in England. Though education level and social class had some effect,
neither was found to be nearly as significant as wealth. Additional study is
required to understand why wealth in particular is such a strong indicator of
how long someone lives unimpaired, but it was most likely a function of having
access to funds when you have ill health. Additionally, poverty has been linked
to higher stress levels, which has implications for health.
How to lose a monopoly?
Learn from Microsoft and IBM
A big rich company,
a company that dominates the market for its product, and a company that
dominates the broader tech industry are three quite different things. Market
cap isn’t power.
IBM ruled mainframes
and Microsoft ruled PCs, and when those things were the centre of tech, that
gave them dominance of the broader tech industry. When the focus of tech moved
away from mainframes and then PCs, IBM and then Microsoft lost that dominance,
but that didn’t mean they stopped being big companies. We just stopped being
scared of them.
For both IBM and
Microsoft, market power in one generation of tech didn’t give them market power
in the next, and anti-trust intervention didn’t have much to do with it. It
doesn’t matter how big your castle is if the trade routes move somewhere else.
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