Part 1 of 4: Marc Gunther just reviewed Force of Change, the story of Walmart’s conversion to sustainable business practices. When the world’s largest public corporation makes any big change, it’s noteworthy. But this change could very well help save the world. It’s not just the direct environmental impact of Walmart’s new business practices, but the ripple these changes make in the ...

The web has changed a lot of things about the way we consume media. It’s flipped our primary communications infrastructure from a one-way, to a two-way flow of information – and that change in the way we communicate is redefining who we are. Businesses and organizations of all types need to understand that their customers and other stakeholders are no ...

One day it dawned on me that my romantic relationships felt a bit like two hearts on a teeter-totter. Staying out on the edge was exciting and fun, but love at the center is more mellow and sweet - it's deeper. It is the stuff of the soul and I can no longer really imagine a world without it.

The latest issue of Wired has an interview with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on his latest venture – Square. If you’re not familiar with Square, it’s a simple way for merchants to accept credit card payments through a little device that plugs into their phone. Square has now shipped a half million card readers and is already processing over $3 million a ...

Just as I suspected: cooperation isn’t all fluffy white bunnies.

If you are interested in cooperative studies or just want to build a more collaborative culture in your place of work, watch the below 20 minute talk by Martin Nowak. It’s based on his (and Roger Highfield’s) new book: SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. Nowak starts the talk with an overview of the key milestones ...

I just finished reading Lisa Gansky’s The Mesh and there’s much to like about the book. There are a few places where it gets a bit repetitive, but she does share lots of interesting anecdotes and she’s telling an interesting and very important story here – the story of better sharing through technology. The mesh is the interconnectedness of all that surrounds ...

The Wikipedia community is well aware of the criticisms of its reliability. So that’s why I was so interested today to stumble on a relatively new article rating system within Wikipedia. You can see it in action on the Dan Gillmor page, and here’s a close-up shot of the ratings:   First word of this move toward article ratings in Wikipedia ...

We are sitting at the edge of the age of robots. Over the last year, a couple of interesting things happened that will greatly speed up the evolution of robots. Last year, hackers rather quickly figured out that they could reuse a Microsoft Xbox Kinect 3D sensor as a low-cost form of machine vision – that’s right, technology to help ...

The Next Web has an good article on the startup Gigwalk – a kind of Amazon Mechanical Turk meets Yelp or foursquare. It’s an interesting idea, especially in times like these when so many people are looking for incremental, low-barrier income streams. It’s no secret that the rise of mobile devices is creating an explosion of local apps and services. ...