Internet neutrality is a big deal. It enables you, or anyone else, to complete at a true level playing field with large corporations. Support Net neutrality Early last year Mark Zuckerberg had pushed to break net neutrality in India. It failed! Read here more about Facebook’s biggest setback in the Guardian. Now the FCC has a plan to destroy net neutrality in the USA. It’s up to us to stop it.

My company driver had collected me from the airport. It was a hot sunny afternoon and the air conditioner of the Toyota was blowing softly. I was on my way to my office and we were driving along the busy Airport Road. Suddenly my driver felt the need for some commentary as if pretending he was a tourist guide. “On the right you can see the jail which houses our Managing Director” he informed me with somewhat of a smile on his face.

I have scraped data and created algorithms for our family travel website. It was therefore with more than an average interest that I listened to William Uricchio of MIT talk at THINK 2013 about algorithms and their effect on social conversion. Uricchio started with explaining that the media has seen a tremendous change in the last few years – a few companies own 80 percent of the media while on the other hand, there has also been a decentralisation as a result of the internet.

For those of us dealing with risk management, and who doesn’t these days, here is a link to the 2013 World Economic Forum Report on Global Risks. This year’s findings show that the world is more at risk as persistent economic weakness saps our ability to tackle environmental challenges. The report highlights severe income disparity followed by unsustainable government debt (chronic fiscal imbalances) as the top two most prevalent global risks.

Earlier in the day Bob Geldof had stated that China has uplifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Can this be sustained or not? Jonathan Fenby, founding partner of Trusted Sources, the emerging markets research and consultancy firm, spoke on this topic at THiNK 2012. Jonathan Fenby (Photo courtesy Thinkworks Pvt Ltd) Fenby started with saying that there is a large shift to domestic consumption but “water levels are dropping at catastrophic rates” and China has to make its agriculture work.

As a CEO one has to be prepared for any wild card event, an event which rarely happens but one which could affect your business in a major way. Prof. Ian Lipkin of Colombia University started day 3 of the THiNK 2012 talking about just this. The risk of a viral pandemic is real and increasing. Most of the diseases are zoonotic i.e. they originate in animals.

The plane is cruising at some 560 miles per hour somewhere over Pakistan. I am flying back to India after a meeting at head office in the Netherlands. I wonder if there are any drones around and subconsciously look outside as if I would be able to spot one in the dark. It amuses me that the military call Unmanned Aerial Vehicles drones as male honey bees don’t sting. The MQ-1 Predator drone, used a lot in Pakistan, flies at a medium altitude of 30,000ft, something I am doing right now.

In the old days it was common for an anchor man to be referred to as ‘Our man in..‘. It became even more common with Graham Greene’s 1958 novel “Our man in Havana”. Longman’s dictionary also refers to the term as “a man who is the representative of a country or organization in a particular place.” I am trained as a zoologist (BSc) in Sydney, a Financial Controller (Masters) in Amsterdam, and an Information Security auditor (CISA) in cyberspace.

Pff isn’t it annoying if you cannot find a particular article or email? I just searched all over the place for a reference to the YouTube clip I had watched yesterday but to no avail. At least until eventually I stumbled upon the story. To my delight it was even a better version as this one showed the graphs. The talk had been on the emerging economies and whether they will overtake the western world.

Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. There is no other word to describe how the world is scrambling to deal with the WikiLeaks information and in particular with its founder Julian Assange. There is no cohesive response as everybody is shooting from the hip, often totally ignorant about the legal issues at stake. The latter is even unclear to the legal community due to the novelty and the international character of the case. No surprise therefore that legal human rights heavy weight lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC is going to defend Mr Assange.

This article in the HBR is an interesting one. In my opinion it is a matter of time before a country like India will shorten the gap with the West. Already major reforms are initiated in the education sector to make it more application driven. That, coupled with poor infrastructure, is the main reason why it’s lagging behind. (IT) Industries without (much) infrastructural demand are doing very well. What is killing innovation?