Below is a keynote talk by Benedict Evans about what’s going on in tech today and what may happen in the next ten years. It covers: the growth of mobile; S-curves; Google / Apple / Facebook / Amazon (who knew Amazon had so many employees?); machine learning; autonomous vehicles/impact to cities; mixed reality; crypto-currencies; and so on.
For those of you interested in crypto-currencies – and that appears to be everyone these days – it’s interesting to hear how Evans describes their current position at the beginning of the curve: “The tech works, but what’s the use case?” This is not to say the potential isn’t huge. It is. Automated trust. Distributed and programmable money. But the future is still unclear.
If you can’t see the video below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVYDkPidXrU&w=560&h=315]
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Sunset in Toronto by Daniel Fernandes on 500px
If you’re a regular reader of Architect This City, you’ll know that I generally like to include at least one photo with every post. Sometimes I run out of time and I don’t always do that, but that is at least the intent.
You might have also noticed that my go-to for stock photography is 500px. That is the case for a few reasons.
I find the photos to be of higher quality than any other service. I can easily “embed” them into my posts while giving appropriate credit to the author and linking back to 500px. The company was founded by a good friend of mine and snowboarding compadre. And the company is made in Toronto.
That’s why it’s exciting to report that yesterday the company announced an additional $13M in funding (Series B). To date the company has raised $23M of outside funding, from some big names like Andreessen Horowitz. This is great for the everyone in the company, and I believe it’s great for this city.
Why is that?
Well, here’s a video from the New York Times’ Cities For Tomorrow conference, where Andrew Ross Sorkin and Fred Wilson talk about creating startup hubs. It’s about 20 minutes long and well worth a watch.