Teenager Sells App For $40 Million And Why You Should Care

Yes, this is the kid who made 40 million bucks with an app that summarized things.

A few months ago an 18 year old kid from England, sold his app for 40 million dollars to Yahoo. Which makes me ask: How many young people do you know that have projects like his? Creating a website? Starting their own blog? Creating an app? (this 12 year old did). Online staffing firm oDesk.com recently surveyed their users on their views of being an employee in the workplace.

• 72 percent of users at “regular jobs” responded with saying they wanted to be entirely independent.
• 58 percent identified themselves as entrepreneurs.

The fact of the matter is, everyone is/wants to be an entrepreneur now. The internet changed everything and it now costs virtually nothing to set up a business.

Want to open an online store? Cool. Snap a few pics on your iPhone, open a shopify account, link your Paypal and you could be making those extra bucks to pay off those pesty college loans within a few hours. The consequences are tiny. In fact these days we’re raised with the notion that failing is a good thing. The scarce job market and uncertain economy encourages our generation to do just that bit extra for themselves.

Cloud based devices are changing the way we work. 63% of millenials have smartphone and as a result, we have the opportunity to work with live, real-time collaborative data everywhere we go. Tools like Google Drive and Dropbox allow you to do just that. We can write documents, post a twitter update and have skype calls… all while sitting butt-naked on the toilet with an iPhone. This generation expects the same freedom with their job in the workplace (although maybe not on the office toilet).

Teenager Sells App For $40 Million And Why You Should Care

Did you think I was joking?

My message as a member of this new breed to you Generation X’ers, Baby boomers and C-level execs that are working with, or will begin working with millenials in the near future, is to recognize the changes that are happening. Understand these changes and take full advantage so you can attract and keep the very best people on your team.

Give them more independence. For crying out loud, we spend more time alone with the internet than we do talking to people. If you want the best out of them, Let them be entrepreneurial. Let them take some initiative and they’ll reward you for it.

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How the man who inspired 'Memento' changed our understanding of memory

Henry Gustave Molaison was a man who couldn't make memories. Better known to neuroscientists as "HM", the late Molaison suffered from seizures as a young man and struggled to lead a normal life, but things took a dramatic shift after he received a lobotomy in August 1953. Doctors removed large chunks of HM's temporal lobes and most of his hippocampus, on the assumption that these regions were responsible for the patient's neurological problems. The operation did cure HM's seizures, but it left him in a unique case of anterograde amnesia; he could remember his childhood and his personality remained unchanged, but he could not form new memories.

As Steven Shapin writes in a piece for the New Yorker this week, the operation left HM in a constant state of discovery and confusion, but it also gave scientists remarkable new insight into how the brain processes and stores memory.

"The operation could not have been better designed if the intent had been to create a new kind of experimental object that showed where in the brain memory lived," Shapin writes. "Molaison gave scientists a way to map cognitive functions onto brain structures. It became possible to subdivide memory into different types and to locate their cerebral Zip Codes."

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Google’s Kurzweil details his intricate plan for cheating death

As we’ve noted before, Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil devotes a lot of his life to postponing death. Kurzweil, the brilliant 65-year-old inventor and futurist, is dead-set on living long enough to be immortal, although getting himself to that point has proven to be a lot of work in and of itself. In an interview with Maclean’s, Kurzweil reveals how he’s built himself a “bridge” to immortality by making sure his body holds together long enough for life-lengthening technology to really mature.

“In the last two health books I co-wrote, we talk about a bridge to a bridge to a bridge,” he explains “I can never say, ‘I’ve done it, I’ve lived forever,’ because it’s never forever. We’re really talking about being on a path that will get us to the next point. People sometimes ask me, ‘You take a lot of supplements. Do you really think it will make you live hundreds of years?’”

At this point, the Maclean’s interviewer asked Kurzweil how many supplements he takes a day and he replied “about 150.” Kurzweil says that all these supplements are keeping his body healthy enough for him to reach his ultimate goal of living long enough to reach the “nanotech revolution.” At this point Kurzweil says “we can have little robots, sometimes called nanobots, that augment your immune system” and can “be reprogrammed to deal with new pathogens.”

It should be noted that Kurzweil has also predicted in the past that by the late 2020s, we’ll be able to eat as much junk food as we want because we’ll all have nanobots injected into our bodies that will provide us with all the proper nutrients we need while also eliminating all the excess fat we’ll gain.

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Randi Zuckerberg Wants to Teach Children Not to Use Facebook So Much

There might be some awkward moments around the Zuckerberg family Thanksgiving table this year. Because Randi Zuckerberg, thekaraoke-singing, reality-show-producing sister of Facebook CEO Mark, is coming out with a children's book that amounts to a passive-aggressive swipe at the obsessive social-media culture her brother's company helped create.

Randi's book Dot, which goes on sale on November 5, is about a little girl named Dot who can't stop fidgeting with her phone. "Dot loves technology. A LOT. She’s obsessed with her devices (sound familiar?), but with a little push, she’s reminded that life’s a little bit richer when you look up from the screen," Randi writes on her blog.

If it sounds odd that the sister of an Internet mogul whose goal is turning the world into a bunch of Facebook-using smartphone addicts would write a children's book that urges people to put down their phones and experience real life, well, it is. It would be like Mario Batali's sister writing a low-carb cookbook.

Luckily, Randi has also written a book for adults, Dot Complicated, which is coming out at the same time as Dot. Dot Complicated is less a tale about device addiction as it is a memoir — a "personal and professional story with a fresh guide to understanding technology and how it influences and informs our lives online and off," according to the book's website. So she's not totally out of the Zucker-fold.

Still, just to keep her family allegiances intact, she may want to think about writing a sequel to Dot, in which Dot, cut off from the world around her by her parents' draconian no-Facebook rules, is thrust into a depressing spiral of social isolation, and is saved only when a good Samaritan pulls her from her home, Harry Potter–style, and restores her access to Graph Search, enabling her to partake once more in the world's glorious open exchange of personal information.

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Hands On With HP's Chromebook 11 And Thinkpad's Chromebook For Education

I love Chromebooks. I’ve used them as my primary laptop since last year when Samsung released their exynos powered Macbook Air lookalike.

When I bought my first Chromebook it was an experiment. At first, I was nervous about not having Microsoft MSFT +0.11% Word because I’m an academic. Could I survive with justGoogle GOOG +13.8% Docs? When not blogging, I write stuff with footnotes, quotes and complex grammar. Unlike most people, I actually do use a lot of the specialized features in Word. So, when I made the switch to ChromeOS, I kept my old Apple AAPL +0.87% laptop hooked up as a desktop–huge monitor, external keyboard, and the magic trackpad.

Now, I use that computer only about once every few weeks. Turns out almost everything I do on a normal basis can be done in a browser.

When Google and HP announced the Chomebook 11 last week, I ordered one immediately. It was the micro USB charger that convinced me. Carrying around just one charger for every device is a kind of emancipation.

When the HP Chromebook arrived, I was immediately struck by the packaging. There’s a story in it. This box isn’t just for shipping. It also begins a relationship. Like a proposal, or an engagement, the packaging asks me to commit to this machine. The white curves mimic the aesthetic of the computer. I was excited for the slick plastic curves before I had even seen the real thing.

The corner-less cardboard box is also reminiscent of a giant pill capsule. It reminds me of The Matrix. By being a consumer of this Chromebook I’m crossing a threshold into the Cloud–away from the tangible, material reality of physical memory and into an ethereal, virtual, and untethered experience.

There’s a mythology of freedom that surrounds Chromebooks. We’re freed from the burden of bloatware, freed from the long wait of the typical start-up time, freed from updates and upgrades, freed from the data back-up anxiety, freed from troubleshooting.

Then, on the other side, we’re reminded that the liberty of the cloud comes with the internet’s shackles. I’m reminded of Randy Newman’s great song, “Rednecks”–I’m free to be put in a cage. Like most computing products, each new sovereignty comes with a flipside. When I sign into this Chromebook, my data becomes available to Google. No more privacy. All the immunity that comes with anonymity is gone.

Oddly, the internet is the only place I can think of where being caught in a web is considered a good thing–where a net promises freedom more than it signals imminent capture.

Imagery like this manifests out of the collective unconscious with intention. There’s meaning behind it. It is not just a superficial accident. There’s a reason we didn’t name this new networked reality the World Wide Tapestry. The cloud is not just an intertwining. A network is not a braid. Not knitting. Not crocheting. Not intermingling.

On the contrary, nets and the webs are technologies of prey. The only freedom is the predator’s ability to capture and feed. Devouring spiders and patient fishermen reign here. They bait their spoils with aesthetics, beauty, and perhaps the promise of a tasty worm.

What’s most thought-provoking, however, is that we’re not fooled. We are all aware of the dangers. And yet, we jump in willingly. We are excited to see how reality looks on the other side of this transition. What will it mean when the privacy of personal identity–the individual self as we know it–is devoured completely? We want to know, and so we let ourselves be caught.

In this case, we’re lured in by shiny new hardware.

The HP Chromebook 11 is hot temptation. The attractive smooth white case feels good to touch. I keep discovering myself rubbing the sides while I’m reading blogs. I’m fondling it, petting it. It just feels good.

The glossy screen is pure pleasure to look at. They say that this particular IPS display is not as high resolution as the one on the Pixel Chromebook, but honestly, it is stimulating enough.

As promised, the sound is both rich and crisp. Much stronger than any of the other Chromebooks.

The trackpad is just as responsive as the Samsung’s. And the keyboard is feels slightly better; there’s a little more spring in these chiclets.

From a sensory standpoint, this HP Chromebook trumps all the other cheap ones. In terms of performance, the HP Chromebook 11 struggles when I have too many browser windows opened. But that seems true of all the budget Chromebooks.  I haven’t tried the Pixel, but I’ve used the Samsung, the Acer , and the Lenovo Thinkpad.

Among all the options I have tried, the Lenovo Thinkpad X131e Chromebook foreducation has the best performance. That’s not surprising, it has a Thinkpad keyboard, Trackpoint nipple navigation, and a better processor than all the others. However, it is also big and heavy because it is built ruggedly for schools–“to withstand enthusiastic typing, bustling group work, and everyday school adventures.” I use it at home when I’m more or less stationary. I wouldn’t want to carry it around in my messenger bag. It is just not built for mobility beyond classroom use. The X131e is not designed for consumers, it is only available to institutions. Still, I fantasize that one day Lenovo will build a thin X series Thinkpad Chromebook for everyday use. I’d pay a premium price for it quicker than I’d buy the Pixel.

For now, the HP Chromebook 11 is my everywhere computer. It is cheap enough that I can throw it in a bag and travel without worrying that it might be damaged.

I bought the one with green trim. It is pretty. It is light. It does everything I need.

And it is guiding me, for better or worse, into the next phase of human consciousness.

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