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• Customer Centricity

  In five years, what will fundamentally change the customer experience as we know it today?

  This Conversation on the Future of Business is brought to you by SAP & MIT Technology Review Custom. 

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• The Real Privacy Problem

  As Web companies and government agencies analyze ever more information about our lives, it’s tempting to respond by passing new privacy laws or creating mechanisms that pay us for our data. Instead, we need a civic solution, because democracy is at risk.

  In 1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled “The Future Computer Utility,” the essay speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would provide “information processing … the same way one now buys electricity.”

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• A Tale of Two Drugs

  Today’s medicines can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The story of how two companies set prices for their costly new drugs suggests that the way we determine the value of such treatments will help decide the future of our health-care system.

  In January 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Kalydeco, the first drug to treat the underlying cause of cystic fibrosis, after just three months of review. It was one of the fastest approvals of a new medicine in the agency’s history. Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which discovered and developed the drug, priced Kalydeco at $294,000 a year, which made it one of the world’s most expensive medicines. The company also pledged to provide it free to any patient in the United States who is uninsured or whose insurance won’t cover it. Doctors and patients enthusiastically welcomed the drug because it offers life-saving health benefits and there is no other treatment. Insurers and governments readily paid the cost.

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• Why This Might Be the Model T of Workplace Robots

  A mobile, one-armed robot that costs $35,000 is headed for research labs and maybe even some workplaces.

  According to Melonee Wise, the manual laborer of the future has only one arm and stands just three feet, two inches tall. Such are the vital statistics of UBR1, a $35,000 mobile robot unveiled today by Wise’s startup company Unbounded Robotics.

• Sound Off on Customer Centricity

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• Graphics Chips Help Process Big Data Sets in Milliseconds

  A new database tool dramatically improves processing speeds using technology that’s already in your computer.

  New software can use the graphics processors found on everyday computers to process torrents of data more quickly than is normally possible, opening up new ways to visually explore everything from Twitter posts to political donations.

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• How Hollywood Can 
Capitalize on Piracy

  After spending millions of dollars on legal fees, film studios should stop suing downloaders and take better advantage of what they do.

  Jack Valenti, the late president of the Motion Picture Association of America, once warned that a new form of distribution might kill his industry. It would empty theaters and drain studio coffers. Why would anyone venture out to multiplexes when films could be disseminated virtually free and viewed in the convenience of your own home?

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• As We May Type

  New outliners and authoring tools are machines for new thoughts.

  In 1984, the personal-computer industry was still small enough to be captured, with reasonable fidelity, in a one-volume publication, the Whole Earth Software Catalog. It told the curious what was up: “On an unlovely flat artifact called a disk may be hidden the concentrated intelligence of thousands of hours of design.” And filed under “Organizing” was one review of particular note, describing a program called ThinkTank, created by a man named Dave Winer.

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• So Far, Smart Watches Are Pretty Dumb

  Smart watches risk becoming just another irritating gadget unless their makers learn to use AI and sensors to take advantage of the fact that they’re worn all day.

  A century ago, banker Henry Graves Jr. and industrialist James Ward Packard embarked on a decades-long competition to acquire the watch with the most “complications”—a term used to denote any feature beyond simple time-telling. Their rivalry culminated in the creation of a gold pocket watch known as the Graves Supercomplication, designed and built by the Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe. Its 24 complications included sunrise and sunset times in New York City and a chart of the city’s night sky. Graves paid about $15,000 for the watch in 1933 (roughly $270,000 in today’s money); at auction in 1999, it sold for $11 million.

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• Leading Economist Predicts a Bitcoin Backlash

  Economist Simon Johnson says governments will feel the urge to suppress the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

   

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• AOL Cofounder Frets That the U.S. Could Lose Its Entrepreneurial Edge

  AOL cofounder Steve Case makes the case for American entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley.

  Entrepreneurs made America the leader of the free world, and only entrepreneurs can keep it there.

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