guard that information. The company hosting my VeeMe might have an incentive to see to that there are no “unofficial” (or even “pirate”) VeeMes out there.
Marketers and others don’t get to copy that database, they just get to interact with it. They provide stimuli and VeeMe provides responses. There will be big business in building and maintaining VeeMes. I need excellent security and privacy services—I can’t afford to get my VeeMe stolen or hacked. VeeMe will most certainly be living in the cloud.
I don’t know how long it will take until VeeMe becomes as real as you and me. But the storage and other technologies are coming together; Big Data is accumulating rapidly; we are seeing the arrival of virtual assistants, like Siri, Google Assistant, or MyCyberTwin. We may see a whole ecosystem emerging, probably with the companies presiding over Big Data at the core. That may mean Google, Facebook, or new players that manage to acquire control over access to the data about us.
It’s going to be a new economy, and there will be giant stakes: huge business potential, new ways of doing work and performing transactions, a new realm of ethics and public policy—everything from privacy and security to entirely new problems we can’t imagine today
You and I might think that VeeMe sounds much too spooky for anyone to want to have one. To tell you the truth, it sounds quite scary to me. But I think we will change our minds, step by step, as our digital assistants get better and better at mimicking our behaviors. If our VeeMes are useful, they will make us competitive, and then market forces will push us even more towards cloning ourselves in order to increase our capacities.
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Author: David Nordfors
David Nordfors is active in the field of science, innovation, and society. He is the CEO and co-founder of IIIJ. As the initial Director of Research Funding of the Knowledge Foundation (KK-stiftelsen) he designed and implemented the Swedish research funding system for university colleges, which broke down the earlier distinct borders between the universities and colleges as research environments and introduced a formula for collaboration between university and industry that became a standard. He was the first to offer colleges of art the opportunity to head proposals for research and innovation consortia, proposing that innovation may be driven by the meeting between artistic creativity, technology and business.
Nordfors was the founding Executive Director of the Center for Innovation and Communication at Stanford University, where he headed the Innovation Journalism Fellowship program. He is an adjunct professor at IDC Herzliya, Israel, and a visiting professor at Tallinn University, the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (Tech Monterrey) in Mexico, and the Deutsche Welle DW-Academy. He was Special Advisor to the Director General at VINNOVA, the Swedish National Agency for Innovation Systems.
Nordfors is on the Poynter Institute National Advisory Board and on the Advisory Boards of Serendipity Innovations, Discern Analytics, the Center for International Media Ethics, and the Black & Veatch Global Marketing Advisory Board. He was named to the World Economic Forum Innovation 100 in 2009, and was a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Media in 2009 and Journalism in 2010. He headed the first symposium about the Internet in the Swedish Parliament in 1994. David has a PhD in Computational and Experimental Quantum Molecular Physics from Uppsala University, Sweden, where he was appointed as doctoral student by Nobel Laureate Kai Siegbahn.
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