Technology

Does Bitcoin herald a revolution in how we will create, exchange and spend money? Launched in 2009 by an anonymous developer, Bitcoin saw a c.1300% spike in value since the beginning of 2013, before recent steep falls suggested it might be a bubble. The Atlantic noted that starting your own currency is "not as complicated as it sounds.

So are we all really being watched over by "machines of loving grace"? If you've never seen the documentaries by Adam Curtis, full as they are of quirky and strangely compelling arguments, patterns and links between the seemingly unlinked, then sit back, ingest a huge pinch of salt, take it all in and think for yourself.

Stanford tutors taught a class, attended by 175 students in situ - and over 150,000 via an interactive webcast.  Key learnings included: invite students to comment in online fora; don't leave the videos online, but run the class at a set time; emulate the one-on-one experience as far as possible.

World Bank data showed that, in developing countries, 30% of those under the age of 25 use the Internet, compared to 23% of those 25 years and older.  However, 70% of the under 25-year-olds-a total of 1.9 billion-are not online yet: a huge potential if developing countries can connect schools and increase school enrollment rates.

A major study examined how people are using the Internet now and how they want to use it in the future.

The Future of Internet Experiences

As ever, Dilbert distills perfectly the essence of an increasingly serious issue, i.e. how much privacy are we willingly and unknowingly trading away in our rush towards ever more "intelligent" devices.

While traceability often deals with issues like product recalls and contaminated food, new product tracking apps aim to protect not consumers, but manufacturers: specifically, the children and adults who make the products we buy.

If we wonder what the television-watching experience will be like 20 years from now, we can begin to sense how our lives are on the verge of shifting into a whole new gear.

Will watching TV still be a communal experience?  Will we be looking at a device, or will the image be projected?  Or will it appear on some sort of digital wallpaper?  Will it be portable?  Will it be 2D, 3D, or perhaps 4D or 5D? Will it be interactive, reactive, immersive, or participative?

A leading futurist addresses these and many more questions in "Eight Great Explosions in Video".