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"Not all those young companies will survive, but the habit of hiring online seems baked in; 64 percent of respondents said at least half of their work force would be online by 2015, and 94 percent predicted that in 10 years most businesses would consist of online temps and physical full-time workers." One more thing: it seems that the educational degree is not considered as being 'very important' when hiring online help. Quentin Hardy (Bits, The New York Times) concludes 'In the future, having a degree may be helpful, but having a reputation will be even better.' Taking this one step further, rating systems such as Klout (not necessarily Klout itself) could become a very important part of your social capital. Of course, such reputation measures could be organized by the major online staffing companies -  like eBay for instance uses its famous reputation system.  Reputation as social capital will translate this way into financial capital - and could be a crucial data point for financial companies which could use these data to decide about your creditworthiness...

The Third Industrial Revolution: How the Internet, Green Electricity, and 3-D Printing are Ushering in a Sustainable Era of Distributed Capitalism

The famous sociologist Manuel Castells in an interview by Paul Mason (BBC):  "With Facebook and with all these social networks what happened is that we live constantly networked. We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality, meaning the internet networks, the images are a fundamental part of our reality. We cannot live outside this construction of ourselves in the networks of communication." Ever wondered why people try to redefine themselves by nationalism, regionalism, membership of small subcultures, even though the world is globalizing fast? I think Castells has some anwers on that too:  "The more we are connected to everything and everybody and every activity, the more we need to know who we are. Unless I know who I am, I don't know where I am in the world, because then I am a consumer, I am taken by the market, I am taken by the media. "And therefore people decide that they are going to be different. But to do that, they have to identify themselves as individuals, as collectives, as nations, as genders, all these categories that sociologists have already constructed time ago." Castells explains how people in this crisis engage in co-operative or non-profit work. It's a kind of 'non-capitalism'.  Putting now on my list: his new book Aftermath. 

"By way of introduction, we turn to Vivek Wadhwa over at Forbes last month. The technology entrepreneur explained eloquently why China stands to lose so much more than anyone else if automation keeps advancing. Indeed, forget about real estate bubbles and mis-allocated capital, the rise of automation could be the greatest Chinese black swan of all."

'We're in the middle of a revolution caused by the near collapse of free-market capitalism combined with an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in consciousness about what freedom means.'

"Britain plans to make it easier for technology firms to list their shares in London, the government said on Thursday, in an attempt to stem the flow of high-growth companies heading across the Atlantic in search of capital." Interesting. Countries in a competition to keep their tech wizards at home. But how important are stock markets for innovation? And nation-states? Don't think too fast stocks and nation-states are something of the past...