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"Talking about the future of work, says Canterbury University wearable computing expert Professor Mark Billinghurst, remember when there was a girls' typing class at school? Ah yes, 3Gen clattering away on heavy upright typewriters between classes on Pitman shorthand and bookkeeping. The nation stocking up on its supply of secretaries. All that effort training for something and not seeing the changes already coming. In the 1970s they might have got, what, a decade or so's use out of those skills? And now the pace of technological advance is approaching warp speed. As Billinghurst, head of Canterbury's Human Interface Technology lab, asks, who the heck is going to have the job they originally trained for in another 20 years?"

"After nearly a half-century of digital technology advancement -- fueled by years of steady exponential gains from potent digital growth factors like Moore's Law and Gilder's Law -- businesses are still at the crossroads when it comes to applying technology to their business. Despite decades of largely automating existing processes instead of fundamentally rethinking what they do in digital terms, our organizations are now facing a horde of native digital 'gazelles' -- and now a growing bow wave of collaborative economy startups -- that are threatening not just disruption, but even potential elimination altogether."

"Today, Owyang-who is so enthusiastic about the notion that he left Altimeter to found Crowd Companies, which focuses exclusively on the trend-released the first noteworthy research into the state of the collaborative economy. If I hadn't been convinced of the significance of this trend, "Sharing is the New Buying" would have pushed me over the edge. (Late last year, Neville Hobson and I interviewed Jeremiah about his new venture for our podcast. You can hear the interview here.)"

"Now the zero-marginal cost revolution is beginning to affect other commercial sectors. The precipitating agent is an emerging general-purpose technology platform - the internet of things. The convergence of the communications internet with the fledgling renewable energy internet and automated logistics internet in a smart, inter-operable internet-of-things system is giving rise to a third industrial revolution."