End of Aging ~ de Grey on the Key to Longevity...

FORA spots The End of Aging: Aubrey de Grey's Key to Longevity...

Cities for People ~ Jan Gehl in Melbourne...

FORA.tv shares ABC's presentation of Jan Gehl in Melbourne speaking about Cities for People. Note especially his skewering of Brasilia and other examples of "Bird S#!t Architecture";-)

Cloudy Disruptions ~ McNamee on Future IT...

Thanks to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at Business Insider (and Dan Frommer at SplatF) for spotlighting Facebook Investor Roger McNamee Explaining Why Social Is Over, that we're in the post-PC era, social is now a feature, HTML5 is key enabler, vast mobile experience improvement needed, Google index-search no longer so dominant, and more...

Emerging Markets Century ~ van Agtmael's Idea!

Fascinating to read more about Antoine van Agtmael, the investor-banker most-famous for having coined the term "Emerging Markets" as alternative to "Third World" or "Developing Countries". The Economist's Schumpeter writes in An Emerging Challenge that van Agtmael...

"...was uncomfortable with the banking industry’s contempt for the developing world. (One of his bosses at Bankers Trust once told him, “There are no markets outside the United States.”) But he was equally unhappy with the World Bank’s obsession with state-driven development. He became an evangelist for the power of private investment to turbocharge growth. But how could you persuade wary bankers to invest in the third world? He had a eureka moment after making an investment pitch to Salomon Brothers: why not replace the depressing-sounding phrases used to describe poorer countries with the more upbeat “emerging markets”? Almost 30 years later Mr van Agtmael remains as bullish about emerging markets as ever. [...Indeed] just as the West once underestimated the potential of emerging markets, now it underestimates the power of the region’s corporate champions, Mr van Agtmael believes. These companies are no longer content to be mere followers. They have built global brands."

See here van Agtmael speaking on his book titled The Emerging Markets Century...

Edge of Chaos ~ Niall Ferguson on Empires...

Economic historian and author Niall Ferguson speaks about Empires on the Edge of Chaos...

"Throughout history the rise and fall of empires isn't slow or cyclical, as we like to think, but arrhythmic... it mostly happens very, very suddenly. America is a superpower on the edge of chaos [...] U.S. debt levels and its unwillingness to address the problem, has put it in the same category as other great empires which have collapsed throughout the ages."