Lisa Gansky

Some of history's cleverest business minds understood the power of share platforms, from the aggressive titans who made fortunes building the nation's railroads, to Conrad Hilton, who created the first premier brand of international hotels.

Cities are ripe for redesign, and many are already well on that path. Cloud-based networks that provide easy and inexpensive access to and tracking of services like transportation, energy, waste management, bill pay, citizen engagement and more are testing and enriching their services.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

While we may blame the Internet for the ease with which conspiracy theories proliferate, the net is really much more culpable for the way it connects everything to almost everything else. The hypertext link, as we used to call it, allows any fact or idea to become intimately connected with any other.