Today we begin with a profile of Sean Parker in Vanity Fair. Parker, of course, hacked into military databases, founded Napster, then Plaxo, and was the president of Facebook – all by the time he was 26. (“Parker, a svelte, wavy-maned clotheshorse, is a uniquely quirky figure in the annals of 21st-century business. At age 30, he is already worth close to a billion dollars, thanks mostly to the cache of Facebook stock he still owns. An autodidact who barely finished high school, he is nonetheless almost painfully cerebral”)
Also, from Apple’s alumni: although Apple is very much business- and engineering-driven, how Steve Jobs’ presence ensures that design is part of Apple’s culture (“A product’s design success also depends on whether you perceive design as merely a decorative skinning of the product once its developed or as an inherent part of the product development process. I get calls all the time from companies who are launching in 8 weeks, the product is in development, and they need a designer to come in to apply some look and feel to it. This is the antithesis of how Jobs works.”)
Finally, could Somaliland become the world’s first cashless society? It may well have to; one dollar = 34 of the highest-denomination Somaliland shilling notes, and money is literally moved around in wheelbarrows. (“… the (country’s) major mobile carrier has launched a service where cash is completely bypassed. Mobile banking in Africa is nothing new and is far more advanced in the West or Asia, but Somaliland can take this to a further level because the country itself doesn’t officially exist. The state itself runs on a budget of only $40 million dollars so entrepreneurship and innovation is vital to keep the country going”)
In non-tech, we read about a contention that Westerners are probably the world’s ‘weird’ folks, the outliers, not those in non-Western, far-off societies. Edward Said would approve. (“…questioning whether we can know anything about humanity in general if we only study a “truly unusual group of people” — the privileged products of Western industrial societies, who just happen to make up the vast majority of behavioural science test subjects.”)
Then, in the Wall Street Journal, the incongruity of India both doling out and receiving massive amounts of aid. (“… aid budgets are typically fixed in advance and have to be allocated across countries. Therefore, the allocation of aid dollars is a zero-sum game. Every dollar we receive is a dollar not sent to a country that is truly in need such as in sub-Saharan Africa)
Finally, why are ‘green-certified’ buildings wasting so much energy? Turns out that measuring ‘green’ is fraught with loopholes. (“Instead of selecting energy-minded features like efficient mechanical systems, developers often reach for the low-hanging fruit… paints that have low levels of volatile organic compounds… cabinets made from rapidly renewable wood… recycle their construction waste or increase airflow throughout the building… none of them prevents an occupied building from guzzling fuel and pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for years to come”)