“In the establishment-skewering tradition of Voltaire, Cervantes and Jonathan Swift we now have a voice for our own digital age.” Newsweek.com
Speaking:
Dan is represented by the Lavin Agency in Toronto.
Speech Options:
What Would Steve Do: The 8 Simple Secrets to Apple’s Success
Over the past 15 years Apple has gone from being nearly bankrupt to being the biggest company in the world, with a market value approaching half a trillion dollars. How did they do it? Newsweek Technology Editor Dan Lyons, author of the critically acclaimed book, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, and one of the world’s top experts on all things Apple, explains the simple principles that enabled Steve Jobs to lead Apple through the most amazing comeback in corporate history. In a talk that is equal parts stand-up comedy and business school case study, Lyons tells an engaging tale that captures the spirit of Steve Jobs and leaves his audience with eight rules that can be applied in any organization or industry. Why did Steve Jobs shun focus groups and trust its own taste instead? How does Apple evoke such strong responses from its fans and get thousands of people to line up outside Apple stores, turning each new product release into a kind of cultural event? Who was the little-known mentor who guided Steve Jobs in the early years of Apple and created the three words that have guided Apple’s marketing philosophy since its origins? Why does Apple dare to take risks while its competitors play it safe? How is that other companies sell products, while Apple sells an experience? What drove Steve Jobs to be such a fanatical perfectionist? Lyons spent five years writing the world’s most popular Apple-centric blog, “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs,” and hopes that the legacy of Steve Jobs will inspire a new generation of innovators and risk-takers who will dare to “think different.”
The Social-Mobile Revolution
By 2013 there will be 1 billion smartphones on the planet, and by the end of this decade that number may soar to 5 billion. What happens when almost everyone on the planet is constantly connected to the Internet, and to each other, via social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+? What’s being created is a new mass medium that changes virtually everything about our society. This new platform, with its ubiquitous, constant, peer-to-peer connections, is disrupting established industries, forcing us to rethink the definition of friendship and privacy, and utterly reinventing the way we entertain ourselves. Games like Farmville and Mafia Wars may be inane but people are devoting huge amounts of time and spending billions of dollars playing them. Apps like Foursquare are turning life itself into a kind of real-time video game. (In Silicon Valley this is called “gamification.”) Sites like YouTube and Facebook have become performance spaces, almost a new kind of TV where everyone can be part of the show. In this entertaining and insightful talk, Newsweek Technology Editor Dan Lyons explores the profound social implications and huge opportunities created by this new medium, and wonders, Are we ready for this?
Zuckerberg’s Panopticon
In 1785, British philosopher Jeremy Bentham devised a new kind of prison. He called it a panopticon. The panopticon consisted of a round building with a central watch tower. A viewing mechanism in the tower enabled any prisoner to be watched at any time, without his knowledge.The idea was that prisoners would never know when they were being watched and so would have to assume they were being watched at all times. Thus they would behave themselves, and a large prison population could be controlled with very few guards. In some ways this is what the Internet is now becoming. The only way to be a member of Facebook, for example, is to sacrifice all of your privacy and to assume that everything you do is being watched, somewhere, by someone. We are living in Mark Zuckerberg’s digital panopticon. And it’s not just Facebook. An entire multibillion-dollar industry is being built around targeted advertising and a business model in which service providers make money by gathering and reselling personal information about users. Of course we all have the option of simply getting off the Internet. But few people will take that route. Instead, we’ll stay online, and most of us will slowly adapt to a new reality. In a remarkably short period of time, our entire notion of privacy will be radically transformed. What are the implications, both positive and negative, of living in a world like this? How do we deal with a world in which our personal information has been turned into a form of currency, and used to pay for online services? How do we know how much we’re actually paying, and whether we’re getting a good deal? In this talk, Newsweek Technology Editor Dan Lyons offers a humorous, insightful and somewhat cynical take on the grand bargain we are making as we enter the age of the social Internet.