What can we learn from Japan, Korea and China about how to create a high-tech society without putting ourselves out of a job?

How will their economic models protect their people against predicted unemployment generated by AI?

Recurrent Patterns host Vaclav Vincalek speaks with LightStream Research Financial Analyst Scott Foster about what he’s learned from decades of working in Asia.

Twitter, the decade plus old company is still trying to define what it is and how to make money. It is trapped in a business model of providing free service in exchange for our souls and friends.

The CEO is here to formulate a clear vision and strategy. Then, they have to empower people to execute on it. The CEO is here to build a team. They’re not there to understand the limits of algorithms.

The weather isn’t just a topic for chatting around the water cooler. Thanks to Big Data, it is becoming big business.

That’s why IBM recently bought the Weather Channel for reported $2 billion. And it is also another manifestation of big data creating opportunities for companies to capitalize on.

You’ve probably heard about ‘Big Data’ and ‘Predictive Analytics.’ These are the big buzz words floating around today. These terms sound very technical, futuristic even… and expensive.

Perhaps you were informed that you need to start a project that incorporates these concepts, but you have no idea why or how you would embark on such a mission.

There’s been much talk about the cloud as the best solution for meeting today’s changing needs of technology in the industry. Though most IT Directors are advocates of moving to the cloud not everyone’s heads are in the clouds.

For many, moving away from on-premise storage and access is a bit unsettling. Data security and privacy is high on the list of concerns. Their concerns about service providers stem from possible use of data, ownership and regulation.

Facebook is now ready to dominate the online world of business with the latest announcement from its F8 conference. The company made it very clear that having 1.35 billion active users and allowing them to share bad selfies and cat videos is not their end game. I’m shocked. Really. True, Facebook is making some good money from advertising but hey – that’s just for the cash flow. Their strategy is to dominate businesses within the social networking site as well as all of its users. Don’t worry, Mark Zuckerberg said he’d be gentle.

Microsoft recently announced that anyone in China who has a copy of the Windows 7 Operating System (and up), legitimate or illegitimate, will be able to upgrade for free to the new Windows 10 version. The estimated number of users, who would be able to take the advantage of this offer, would be in the hundreds of millions!

Why would Microsoft do such a crazy thing as giving their operating system away for free?

Amazon, the global warehouse for universe of goods, is promised us next-day delivery – hey wait, that’s yesteryear’s news. Although many current online retailers still struggle with this, with Amazon that chestnut of a promise is from so many years ago now. Not to be discouraged, Amazon has upped the ante several times. First, the internet giant started with same day delivery – and just how did they do that? Amazon created distribution centres where the highest volumes of purchases are and thanks to their Big Data analytics, the company was able to predict the most desired items to stock in each of those centres.

This is a lesson about greed, bad communications and stupidity. Somewhere deep inside the executive offices of computer giant Lenovo, somebody had an ingenious plan: Let’s extract more money from our customers.