In a recent TechCrunch editorial (http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/23/the-next-secrets-of-the-web/), commentator Nir Eyal discusses how success is built in the Digital Age. He cites Peter Thiel, Stanford University professor, who teaches students to focus on the things which people keep secret. Those secrets provide insight into what the next Big Thing (such as Facebook or LinkedIn) will be.

According to Thiel, secrets about humans are the ones which will lead to a big payday. The discovery process used to take a lot of money and time. However, companies such as Dropbox are changing the rules. They don't spend very much money on R&D. Instead, they design new interfaces to create new user behaviours. Eyal sees this new process as the wave of the future. What companies need to keep in mind is that they will only succeed if they build up a network effect, meaning that each additional user on the network increases the value to all other users.

What do the entrepreneurs among us have to say about this? And what's the next big secret that's awaiting discovery? Promise I won't tell...

There are so many exciting new things being developed at a very rapid acceleration rate with great innovative thinking. Without going into some of the trends into great detail (more to come in new articles to be posted to this forum shortly), here is an interested TEDTalk around the entire Opensource movement:

youtu.be/UoBUXOOdLXY

Designer, educator and Arduino cofounder Massimo Banzi talk is around the open source hardware and maker movement.

The Arduino, licensed under GPL and Creative Commons, is an open-source electronics prototyping platform that is a mashup of open source technologies. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Banzi calls the Arduino “the equivalent of sketching on paper, done with electronics.” In this talk, he explains what the Arduino is, how it is empowering the maker movement, and then runs through quite a few of the maker projects that incorporate the versatile platform. Here are some of the less-commercial and very interesting projects he mentioned:

- Students sending satellites into orbit
- A cat feeder that recognizes which cat from a chip
- A quadcopter that can transport items from one African village to another
- The “Enough Already” device that will mute the TV when an overexposed personality is mentioned
- An NYU project who allows handicapped kids to play video games
- A glove that understands sign language gestures and turns them into sounds and writes the words on a display
- The “txtBomber” contraption made up of multiple spray cans that lets you roll a political message on a wall
- “Botanicalls,” a unit that goes into a planter so the plant can tweet how it feels
- A chair that tweets when somebody sitting on it passes, well, check the presentation out.

So in summary, we are living in a very exciting world with unlimited possibilities. Get involved and start innovating now!