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The Big Disruption A Totally Fictional But Essentially True Silicon Valley Story
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Book Synopsis The Big Disruption: A Totally Fictional But Essentially True Silicon Valley Story by : Jessica Powell
Download or read book The Big Disruption: A Totally Fictional But Essentially True Silicon Valley Story written by Jessica Powell and published by Medium Editions. This book was released on 2019-04-03 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel ever published by the digital platform Medium, The Big Disruption surpassed 100,000 readers in its first two weeks online and was described by Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times as "a zany satire [whose] diagnosis of Silicon Valley's cultural stagnancy is so spot on that it's barely contestable."
Download or read book Literary Paris written by Jessica Powell and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries Paris was the destination of writers from the provinces and from across the ocean, and the city swiftly became an integral part of the lives and work of those who went there. Literary Paris profiles thirty writers and the apartments, cafes, bistros, theaters, museums, and other places central to their daily lives and featured in their work. Literary Paris opens with Moliere, whose farces lampooning man's vanity and hypocrisy delighted the royal courts. In the next century, we glimpse the destitute Zola, so hungry that he ate sparrows caught on his windowsill, and the perpetually bankrupt Balzac who, hoping to evade creditors, required friends to give a secret phrase-"Apple season has arrived" or "I come with lace from Belgium"-to gain admittance into his quarters. Among the twentieth-century writers profiled are Georges Simenon, creator of wildly popular detective novels, who in Paris began an affair with the sensational Josephine Baker; F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, instead of finding the "new rhythm" he sought, burned through his money and talent in the City of Light; as well as Henry Miller, George Orwell, James Baldwin. Women writers include the scandalous Colette; George Sand, friend of Lizst and lover of Chopin; and the sophisticated New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner. Great city landmarks are here, including Notre Dame Cathedral, where Quasimodo imprisoned Esmerelda in Victor Hugo's masterpiece, and the Louvre, where in 1911 the Mona Lisa vanished in a scandal that ruined the poet Guillame Apollinaire. Also featured are the beloved cafes integral to the city's culture, such as Café Flore, where Simone de Beauvoir claimed a spot by the stove each morning to write while her lover, Jean-Paul Sartre, was off at war.
Download or read book AI Superpowers written by Kai-Fu Lee and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction -- China's Sputnik moment -- Copycats in the Coliseum -- China's alternate Internet universe -- A tale of two countries -- The four waves of AI -- Utopia, dystopia, and the real AI crisis -- The wisdom of cancer -- A blueprint for human co-existence with AI -- Our global AI story
Book Synopsis A Particular Kind of Black Man by : Tope Folarin
Download or read book A Particular Kind of Black Man written by Tope Folarin and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **One of Time’s 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer** An NPR Best Book of 2019 An “electrifying” (Publishers Weekly) debut novel from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uneasy assimilation to American life. Living in small-town Utah has always been an uncomfortable fit for Tunde Akinola’s family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can’t escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black won’t come off. As he struggles to fit in, he finds little solace from his parents who are grappling with their own issues. Tunde’s father, ever the optimist, works tirelessly chasing his American dream while his wife, lonely in Utah without family and friends, sinks deeper into schizophrenia. Then one otherwise-ordinary morning, Tunde’s mother wakes him with a hug, bundles him and his baby brother into the car, and takes them away from the only home they’ve ever known. But running away doesn’t bring her, or her children, any relief; once Tunde’s father tracks them down, she flees to Nigeria, and Tunde never feels at home again. He spends the rest of his childhood and young adulthood searching for connection—to the wary stepmother and stepbrothers he gains when his father remarries; to the Utah residents who mock his father’s accent; to evangelical religion; to his Texas middle school’s crowd of African-Americans; to the fraternity brothers of his historically black college. In so doing, he discovers something that sends him on a journey away from everything he has known. Sweeping, stirring, and perspective-shifting, A Particular Kind of Black Man is “wild, vulnerable, lived…A study of the particulate self, the self as a constellation of moving parts” (The New York Times Book Review).
Book Synopsis What Tech Calls Thinking by : Adrian Daub
Download or read book What Tech Calls Thinking written by Adrian Daub and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." --The New York Times Book Review From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley's ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.
Book Synopsis Big Bang Disruption by : Larry Downes
Download or read book Big Bang Disruption written by Larry Downes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It used to take years or even decades for disruptive innovations to dethrone dominant products and services. But now any business can be devastated virtually overnight by something better and cheaper. How can executives protect themselves and harness the power of Big Bang Disruption? Just a few years ago, drivers happily spent more than $200 for a GPS unit. But as smartphones exploded in popularity, free navigation apps exceeded the performance of stand-alone devices. Eighteen months after the debut of the navigation apps, leading GPS manufacturers had lost 85 percent of their market value. Consumer electronics and computer makers have long struggled in a world of exponential technology improvements and short product life spans. But until recently, hotels, taxi services, doctors, and energy companies had little to fear from the information revolution. Those days are gone forever. Software-based products are replacing physical goods. And every service provider must compete with cloud-based tools that offer customers a better way to interact. Today, start-ups with minimal experience and no capital can unravel your strategy before you even begin to grasp what’s happening. Never mind the “innovator’s dilemma”—this is the innovator’s disaster. And it’s happening in nearly every industry. Worse, Big Bang Disruptors may not even see you as competition. They don’t share your approach to customer service, and they’re not sizing up your product line to offer better prices. You may simply be collateral damage in their efforts to win completely different markets. The good news is that any business can master the strategy of the start-ups. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes analyze the origins, economics, and anatomy of Big Bang Disruption. They identify four key stages of the new innovation life cycle, helping you spot potential disruptors in time. And they offer twelve rules for defending your markets, launching disruptors of your own, and getting out while there’s still time. Based on extensive research by the Accenture Institute for High Performance and in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs, investors, and executives from more than thirty industries, Big Bang Disruption will arm you with strategies and insights to thrive in this brave new world.
Book Synopsis More Awesome Than Money by : Jim Dwyer
Download or read book More Awesome Than Money written by Jim Dwyer and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Four NYU undergrads wanted to build a social network that would allow users to control what they shared about themselves. They were hoping to raised 10k in 30 days and their project was called Diaspora. Their 2010 Kickstarter campaign ended the first day with three backers. They raised 20 times their goal and had support from around the world. But as the months wore on and the money wore out, they couldn't get there--coding failures, bad business decisions, over-reach and under-organization, and the inevitable conflicts of personality and goals. And when one of the four committed suicide in the fall of 2011, they found out how much they had all been on their own all along"-- $$c Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Samsung Rising written by Geoffrey Cain and published by Currency. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An explosive exposé of Samsung that “reads like a dynastic thriller, rolling through three generations of family intrigue, embezzlement, bribery, corruption, prostitution, and other bad behavior” (The Wall Street Journal). LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD Based on years of reporting on Samsung for The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and Time, from his base in South Korea, and his countless sources inside and outside the company, Geoffrey Cain offers a penetrating look behind the curtains of the biggest company nobody in America knows. Seen for decades in tech circles as a fast follower rather than an innovation leader, Samsung today has grown to become a market leader in the United States and around the globe. They have captured one quarter of the smartphone market and have been pushing the envelope on every front. Forty years ago, Samsung was a rickety Korean agricultural conglomerate that produced sugar, paper, and fertilizer, located in a backward country with a third-world economy. With the rise of the PC revolution, though, Chairman Lee Byung-chul began a bold experiment: to make Samsung a major supplier of computer chips. The multimillion- dollar plan was incredibly risky. But Lee, wowed by a young Steve Jobs, who sat down with the chairman to offer his advice, became obsessed with creating a tech empire. And in Samsung Rising, we follow Samsung behind the scenes as the company fights its way to the top of tech. It is one of Apple’s chief suppliers of technology critical to the iPhone, and its own Galaxy phone outsells the iPhone. Today, Samsung employs over 300,000 people (compared to Apple’s 80,000 and Google’s 48,000). The company’s revenues have grown more than forty times from that of 1987 and make up more than 20 percent of South Korea’s exports. Yet their disastrous recall of the Galaxy Note 7, with numerous reports of phones spontaneously bursting into flames, reveals the dangers of the company’s headlong attempt to overtake Apple at any cost. A sweeping insider account, Samsung Rising shows how a determined and fearless Asian competitor has become a force to be reckoned with.
Download or read book Valley of Genius written by Adam Fisher and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the most important book on Silicon Valley I've read in two decades. It will take us all back to our roots in the counterculture, and will remind us of the true nature of the innovation process, before we tried to tame it with slogans and buzzwords." -- Po Bronson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift and Nurtureshock A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley -- from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way. Rarely has one economy asserted itself as swiftly--and as aggressively--as the entity we now know as Silicon Valley. Built with a seemingly permanent culture of reinvention, Silicon Valley does not fight change; it embraces it, and now powers the American economy and global innovation. So how did this omnipotent and ever-morphing place come to be? It was not by planning. It was, like many an empire before it, part luck, part timing, and part ambition. And part pure, unbridled genius... Drawing on over two hundred in-depth interviews, Valley of Genius takes readers from the dawn of the personal computer and the internet, through the heyday of the web, up to the very moment when our current technological reality was invented. It interweaves accounts of invention and betrayal, overnight success and underground exploits, to tell the story of Silicon Valley like it has never been told before. Read it to discover the stories that Valley insiders tell each other: the tall tales that are all, improbably, true.
Download or read book Bad Blood written by John Carreyrou and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-21 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The gripping story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos—one of the biggest corporate frauds in history—a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley, rigorously reported by the prize-winning journalist. With a new Afterword covering her trial and sentencing, bringing the story to a close. “Chilling ... Reads like a thriller ... Carreyrou tells [the Theranos story] virtually to perfection.” —The New York Times Book Review In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.5 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work. Erroneous results put patients in danger, leading to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. All the while, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings—from journalists to their own employees.
Book Synopsis Abolish Silicon Valley by : Wendy Liu
Download or read book Abolish Silicon Valley written by Wendy Liu and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good. Former insider turned critic Wendy Liu busts the myths of the tech industry, and offers a galvanising argument for why and how we must reclaim technology's potential for the public good. "Lucid, probing and urgent. Wendy Liu manages to be both optimistic about the emancipatory potential of tech and scathing about the industry that has harnessed it for bleak and self-serving ends." -- Naomi Klein, author of On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal "An inspiring memoir manifesto...Technologists all over the world are realizing that no amount of code can substitute for political engagement. Liu's memoir is a road map for that journey of realization." -- Cory Doctorow, author of Radicalized and Little Brother Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. What's not to love about Silicon Valley? These days, it's hard to be unambiguously optimistic about the growth-at-all-costs ethos of the tech industry. Public opinion is souring in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, and the workplace conditions of Amazon workers or Uber drivers. It's becoming clear that the tech industry's promised "innovation" is neither sustainable nor always desirable. Abolish Silicon Valley is both a heartfelt personal story about the wasteful inequality of Silicon Valley, and a rallying call to engage in the radical politics needed to upend the status quo. Going beyond the idiosyncrasies of the individual founders and companies that characterise the industry today, Wendy Liu delves into the structural factors of the economy that gave rise to Silicon Valley as we know it. Ultimately, she proposes a more radical way of developing technology, where innovation is conducted for the benefit of society at large, and not just to enrich a select few.
Download or read book Troublemakers written by Leslie Berlin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed historian Leslie Berlin’s “deeply researched and dramatic narrative of Silicon Valley’s early years…is a meticulously told…compelling history” (The New York Times) of the men and women who chased innovation, and ended up changing the world. Troublemakers is the gripping tale of seven exceptional men and women, pioneers of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s. Together, they worked across generations, industries, and companies to bring technology from Pentagon offices and university laboratories to the rest of us. In doing so, they changed the world. “In this vigorous account…a sturdy, skillfully constructed work” (Kirkus Reviews), historian Leslie Berlin introduces the people and stories behind the birth of the Internet and the microprocessor, as well as Apple, Atari, Genentech, Xerox PARC, ROLM, ASK, and the iconic venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the space of only seven years, five major industries—personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic—were born. “There is much to learn from Berlin’s account, particularly that Silicon Valley has long provided the backdrop where technology, elite education, institutional capital, and entrepreneurship collide with incredible force” (The Christian Science Monitor). Featured among well-known Silicon Valley innovators are Mike Markkula, the underappreciated chairman of Apple who owned one-third of the company; Bob Taylor, who masterminded the personal computer; software entrepreneur Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public; Bob Swanson, the cofounder of Genentech; Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer behind the first successful video game; Fawn Alvarez, who rose from the factory line to the executive suite; and Niels Reimers, the Stanford administrator who changed how university innovations reach the public. Together, these troublemakers rewrote the rules and invented the future.
Book Synopsis Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by : Mike Isaac
Download or read book Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber written by Mike Isaac and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a SHOWTIME® original series starring Emmy winners Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Kyle Chandler and Academy Award nominee Uma Thurman. Now streaming – Only on SHOWTIME. Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Fortune, Bloomberg, Sunday Times A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice “If you want to understand modern-day Silicon Valley, you need to read this book.” —John Carreyrou, New York Times best-selling author of Bad Blood Hailed as the definitive book on Uber and Silicon Valley, Super Pumped is an epic story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history. Backed by billions in venture capital dollars and led by a brash and ambitious founder, Uber promised to revolutionize the way we move people and goods through the world. What followed would become a corporate cautionary tale about the perils of startup culture and a vivid example of how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong.
Download or read book History Has Begun written by Bruno Maçães and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular consensus says that the US rose over two centuries to Cold War victory and world domination, and is now in slow decline. But is this right? History's great civilizations have always lasted much longer, and for all its colossal power, American culture was overshadowed by Europe until recently. What if this isn't the end? In History Has Begun, Bruno Maçães offers a compelling vision of America's future, both fascinating and unnerving. From the early American Republic, he takes us to the turbulent present, when, he argues, America is finally forging its own path. We can see the birth pangs of this new civilization in today's debates on guns, religion, foreign policy and the significance of Trump. Should the coronavirus pandemic be regarded as an opportunity to build a new kind of society? What will its values be, and what will this new America look like? Maçães traces the long arc of US history to argue that in contrast to those who see the US on the cusp of decline, it may well be simply shifting to a new model, one equally powerful but no longer liberal. Consequently, it is no longer enough to analyze America's current trajectory through the simple prism of decline vs. progress, which assumes a static model-America as liberal leviathan. Rather, Maçães argues that America may be casting off the liberalism that has defined the country since its founding for a new model, one more appropriate to succeeding in a transformed world.
Download or read book Snow Crash written by Neal Stephenson and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1994-10-27 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE 30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH NEW, NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED MATERIAL After the Internet, what came next? Enter the Metaverse - cyberspace home to avatars and software daemons, where anything and just about everything goes. Newly available on the Street - the Metaverse's main drag - is Snow Crash. A cyberdrug that reduces avatars in the digital world to dust, but also infects users in real life, leaving them in a vegetative state. This is bad news for Hiro, a freelance hacker and the Metaverse's best swordfighter, and mouthy skateboard courier Y. T.. Together, investigating the Infocalypse, they trace back the roots of language itself to an ancient Sumerian priesthood and find they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination. In this special edition of the remarkably prescient modern classic, Neal Stephenson explores linguistics, computer science, politics and philosophy in the form of a break-neck adventure into the fast-approaching yet eerily recognizable future. 'Fast-forward free-style mall mythology for the twenty-first century' William Gibson 'Brilliantly realized' New York Times Book Review 'Like a Pynchon novel with the brakes removed' Washington Post 'A remarkably prescient vision of today's tech landscape' Vanity Fair
Book Synopsis Albion's Seed by : David Hackett Fischer
Download or read book Albion's Seed written by David Hackett Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-14 with total page 972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.
Book Synopsis Hamlet on the Holodeck, updated edition by : Janet H. Murray
Download or read book Hamlet on the Holodeck, updated edition written by Janet H. Murray and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated edition of the classic book on digital storytelling, with a new introduction and expansive chapter commentaries. I want to say to all the hacker-bards from every field—gamers, researchers, journalists, artists, programmers, scriptwriters, creators of authoring systems... please know that I wrote this book for you.” —Hamlet on the Holodeck, from the author's introduction to the updated edition Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck was instantly influential and controversial when it was first published in 1997. Ahead of its time, it accurately predicted the rise of new genres of storytelling from the convergence of traditional media forms and computing. Taking the long view of artistic innovation over decades and even centuries, it remains forward-looking in its description of the development of new artistic traditions of practice, the growth of participatory audiences, and the realization of still-emerging technologies as consumer products. This updated edition of a book the New Yorker calls a “cult classic” offers a new introduction by Murray and chapter-by-chapter commentary relating Murray's predictions and enduring design insights to the most significant storytelling innovations of the past twenty years, from long-form television to artificial intelligence to virtual reality. Murray identifies the powerful new set of expressive affordances that computing offers for the ancient human activity of storytelling and considers what would be necessary for interactive narrative to become a mature and compelling art form. Her argument met with some resistance from print loyalists and postmodern hypertext enthusiasts, and it provoked a foundational debate in the emerging field of game studies on the relationship between narrative and videogames. But since Hamlet on the Holodeck's publication, a practice that was largely speculative has been validated by academia, artistic practice, and the marketplace. In this substantially updated edition, Murray provides fresh examples of expressive digital storytelling and identifies new directions for narrative innovation.
