Podcast appearances and mentions of laurel ruma

There's probably no such thing as perfect privacy and security online. Hackers regularly breach corporate firewalls to gain customers' private information, and scammers constantly strive to trick us into divulging our passwords. But existing tools can provide a high level of privacy—if we use them correctly, says Mashael Al Sabah, a cybersecurity researcher at the Qatar Computing Research Institute in Doha.   The trick is understanding something about the weaknesses and limitations of technologies like blockchain or digital certificates, and not using them in ways that could play into the designs of fraudsters or malware-builders. Successful privacy is “a collaboration between the tool and the user,” Al Sabah says. It requires “using the right tool in the right way.” And testing new technology for privacy and security resilience requires what she calls a “security mindset.” Which, Al Sabah explains, is necessary when assessing new technology. “You think of the different attacks that happened before and that can happen in the future, and you try to identify the weaknesses, threats and the technology.”   There is an urgency to better understanding how technology works with allegedly anonymous technology. “People cannot be free without their privacy,” Al Sabah argues. “Freedom's important for the development of society.” And while that may be all well and good for folks in Silicon Valley obsessed with the latest cryptocurrency, the ability to build funding structures for all is part of her focus. Al Sabah explains, “Aside from privacy, cryptocurrency can also help societies, specifically the ones with under-developed financial infrastructure.” Which is important because, “There are societies that have no financial infrastructure.”   Al Sabah made a splash in the media in 2018 by co-authoring a paper demonstrating that Bitcoin transactions are a lot less anonymous than most users assume. In the study, Al Sabah and her colleagues were able to trace purchases made on the black-market “dark web” site Silk Road back to users' real identities simply by culling through the public Bitcoin blockchain and social media accounts for matching data. More recently, Al Sabah has also been studying phishing schemes and how to detect and avoid them.   “There's more awareness now among users of the importance of their privacy,” Al Sabah says. And that needs to now evolve into teaching security best practices. “So, while we cannot stop new attacks, we can make them less effective and harder to achieve by adhering to best practices.” Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, editorial director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. This podcast was produced in association with the Qatar Foundation. Show notes and links UNICEF Crypto Fund “Google's top security teams unilaterally shut down a counterterrorism operation,” MIT Technology Review, March 26, 2021 “Your Sloppy Bitcoin Drug Deals Will Haunt You For Years,” Wired, January 26, 2018 “Your early darknet drug buys are preserved forever in the blockchain, waiting to be connected to your real identity,” Boing Boing, January 26, 2018 “In the Middle East, Women Are Breaking Through the STEM Ceiling,” The New York Times, sponsored by the Qatar Foundation

In a recent survey, “2021 Thriving in an AI World,” KPMG found that across every industry—manufacturing to technology to retail—the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing year over year. Part of the reason is digital transformation is moving faster, which helps companies start to move exponentially faster. But, as Cliff Justice, US leader for enterprise innovation at KPMG posits, “Covid-19 has accelerated the pace of digital in many ways, across many types of technologies.” Justice continues, “This is where we are starting to experience such a rapid pace of exponential change that it’s very difficult for most people to understand the progress.” But understand it they must because “artificial intelligence is evolving at a very rapid pace.” Justice challenges us to think about AI in a different way, “more like a relationship with technology, as opposed to a tool that we program,” because he says, “AI is something that evolves and learns and develops the more it gets exposed to humans.” If your business is a laggard in AI adoption, Justice has some cautious encouragement, “[the] AI-centric world is going to accelerate everything digital has to offer.” Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, editorial director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. This podcast episode was produced in association with KPMG. Show notes and links “2021 Thriving in an AI World,” KPMG

There’s nothing new about conspiracy theories, disinformation, and untruths in politics. What is new is how quickly malicious actors can spread disinformation when the world is tightly connected across social networks and internet news sites. We can give up on the problem and rely on the platforms themselves to fact-check stories or posts and screen out disinformation—or we can build new tools to help people identify disinformation as soon as it crosses their screens. Preslav Nakov is a computer scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute in Doha specializing in speech and language processing. He leads a project using machine learning to assess the reliability of media sources. That allows his team to gather news articles alongside signals about their trustworthiness and political biases, all in a Google News-like format. “You cannot possibly fact-check every single claim in the world,” Nakov explains. Instead, focus on the source. “I like to say that you can fact-check the fake news before it was even written.” His team’s tool, called the Tanbih News Aggregator, is available in Arabic and English and gathers articles in areas such as business, politics, sports, science and technology, and covid-19. Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, editorial director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Qatar Foundation. Show notes and links Tanbih News Aggregator Qatar Computing Research Institute “Even the best AI for spotting fake news is still terrible,” MIT Technology Review, October 3, 2018

The digital revolution is here, but not everyone is benefiting equitably from it. And as Silicon Valley’s ethos of “move fast and break things” spreads around the world, now is the time to pause and consider who is being left out and how we can better distribute the benefits of our new data economy. “Data is the main resource of a new digital economy,” says IT for Change director Parminder Singh. Global society will benefit because the economy will benefit, argues Singh, on decentralization of data and distributed digital models. Data commons—or open data sources—are vital to help build an equitable digital economy, but with that comes the challenge of data governance. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not produced by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. “Not everybody is sharing data,” says Singh. Big tech companies are holding onto the data, which stymies the growth of an open data economy, but also the growth of society, education, science, in other words, everything. According to Singh, “Data is a non-rival resource. It's not a material resource that if one uses it, other can't use it.” Singh continues, “If all people can use the resource of data, obviously people can build value over it and the overall value available to the world, to a country, increases manifold because the same asset is available to everyone.” One doesn’t have to look very far to understand the value of non-personal data collected to help the public, consider GIS data from government satellites. Innovation plus the open access to geographic data helped not only create the Internet we know today, but those same tech companies. And this is why Singh argues, “These powerful forces should be in the hands of people, in the hands of communities, they should be able to be influenced by regulators for public interest.” Especially now that most of the data is now collected by private companies. IT for Change is tackling this with a research project called “Unskewing the Data Value Chain,” which is supported by Omidyar Network. The project aims to assess the current policy gaps and new policy directions on data value chains that can promote equitable and inclusive economic development. Singh explains, “Our goal is to ensure the value chains are organized in a manner where the distribution of value is fairer. All countries can digitally industrialize at if not an equal piece, but an equitable pace, and there is a better distribution of benefits from digitalization.” Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, editorial director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next.  This podcast was produced in partnership with Omidyar Network. Show notes and links “Unskewing the Data Value Chain: A Policy Research Project for Equitable Platform Economies,” IT for Change, September 2020 “Treating data as commons”, The Hindu, Parminder Singh, September 2, 2020 “Report by the Committee of Experts on Non-Personal Data Governance Framework,” Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India “A plan for Indian self-sufficiancy in an AI-driven world,” Mint, Parminder Singh, July 29, 2020

Tim O’Reilly, the “Oracle of Silicon Valley,” wants to shift the conversation about data value to focus on the harm that tech giants are inflicting against us with our own data. It’s “time to wake up and do a better job,” says publisher Tim O’Reilly—from getting serious about climate change to building a better data economy. And the way a better data economy is built is through data commons—or data as a common resource—not as the giant tech companies are acting now, which is not just keeping data to themselves but profiting from our data and causing us harm in the process. “When companies are using the data they collect for our benefit, it's a great deal,” says O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media. “When companies are using it to manipulate us, or to direct us in a way that hurts us, or that enhances their market power at the expense of competitors who might provide us better value, then they're harming us with our data.” And that’s the next big thing he’s researching: a specific type of harm that happens when tech companies use data against us to shape what we see, hear, and believe. It’s what O’Reilly calls “algorithmic rents,” which uses data, algorithms, and user interface design as a way of controlling who gets what information and why. Unfortunately, one only has to look at the news to see the rapid spread of misinformation on the internet tied to unrest in countries across the world. Cui bono? We can ask who profits, but perhaps the better question is “who suffers?” According to O’Reilly, “If you build an economy where you're taking more out of the system than you're putting back or that you're creating, then guess what, you're not long for this world.” That really matters because users of this technology need to stop thinking about the worth of individual data and what it means when very few companies control that data, even when it’s more valuable in the open. After all, there are “consequences of not creating enough value for others.” We’re now approaching a different idea: what if it’s actually time to start rethinking capitalism as a whole? “It's a really great time for us to be talking about how do we want to change capitalism, because we change it every 30, 40 years,” O’Reilly says. He clarifies that this is not about abolishing capitalism, but what we have isn’t good enough anymore. “We actually have to do better, and we can do better. And to me better is defined by increasing prosperity for everyone.” In this episode of Business Lab, O’Reilly discusses the evolution of how tech giants like Facebook and Google create value for themselves and harm for others in increasingly walled gardens. He also discusses how crises like covid-19 and climate change are the necessary catalysts that fuel a “collective decision” to “overcome the massive problems of the data economy.” Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, editorial director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. This podcast episode was produced in partnership with Omidyar Network. Show notes and links “We need more than innovation to build a world that’s prosperous for all,” by Tim O’Reilly, Radar, June 17, 2019 “Why we invested in building an equitable data economy,” by Sushant Kumar, Omidyar Network, August 14, 2020 “Tim O’Reilly - ‘Covid-19 is an opportunity to break the current economic paradigm,’” by Derek du Preez, Diginomica, July 3, 2020 “Fair value? Fixing the data economy,” MIT Technology Review Insights, December 3, 2020

A solar-powered autonomous drone scans for forest fires. A surgeon first operates on a digital heart before she picks up a scalpel. A global community bands together to print personal protection equipment to fight a pandemic. “The future is now,” says Frederic Vacher, head of innovation at Dassault Systèmes. And all of this is possible with cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and a virtual 3D design shop, or as Dassault calls it, the 3DEXPERIENCE innovation lab. This open innovation laboratory embraces the concept of the social enterprise and merges collective intelligence with a cross-collaborative approach by building what Vacher calls “communities of people—passionate and willing to work together to accomplish a common objective.” This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not produced by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.  “It’s not only software, it's not only cloud, but it’s also a community of people’s skills and services available for the marketplace,” Vacher says. “Now, because technologies are more accessible, newcomers can also disrupt, and this is where we want to focus with the lab.”   And for Dassault Systèmes, there’s unlimited real-world opportunities with the power of collective intelligence, especially when you are bringing together industry experts, health-care professionals, makers, and scientists to tackle covid-19. Vacher explains, “We created an open community, ‘Open Covid-19,’ to welcome any volunteer makers, engineers, and designers to help, because we saw at that time that many people were trying to do things but on their own, in their lab, in their country.” This wasted time and resources during a global crisis. And, Vacher continues, the urgency of working together to share information became obvious, “They were all facing the same issues, and by working together, we thought it could be an interesting way to accelerate, to transfer the know-how, and to avoid any mistakes.”  Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next.  This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with Dassault Systèmes.  Show notes and links  How Effective is a Facemask? Here’s a Simulation of Your Unfettered Sneeze, by Josh Mings, SolidSmack, April 2, 2020  Open Covid-19 Community Lets Makers Contribute to Pandemic Relief, by Clare Scott, Dassault, The SIMULIA Blog, July 15, 2020 Dassault 3DEXPERIENCE platform Collective intelligence and collaboration around 3D printing: rising to the challenge of Covid-19, by Frederic Vacher, STAT, August 10, 2020

2020 has created more than a brave new world. It’s a world of opportunity rapidly pressuring organizations of all sizes to rapidly adopt technology to not just survive, but to thrive. And Andrew Dugan, chief technology officer at Lumen Technologies, sees proof in the company’s own customer base, where “those organizations fared the best throughout covid were the ones that were prepared with their digital transformation.” And that’s been a common story this year. A 2018 McKinsey survey showed that well before the pandemic 92% of company leaders believed “their business model would not remain economically viable through digitization.” This astounding statistic shows the necessity for organizations to start deploying new technologies, not just for the coming year, but for the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not produced by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. Lumen plans to play a key role in this preparation and execution: “We see the Fourth Industrial Revolution really transforming daily life ... And it's really driven by that availability and ubiquity of those smart devices.” With the rapid evolution of smaller chips and devices, acquiring analyzing, and acting on the data becomes a critical priority for every company. But organizations must be prepared for this increasing onslaught of data. As Dugan says, “One of the key things that we see with the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that enterprises are taking advantage of the data that's available out there.” And to do that, companies need to do business in a new way. Specifically, “One is change the way that they address hiring. You need a new skill set, you need data scientists, your world is going to be more driven by software. You’re going to have to take advantage of new technologies.” This mandate means that organizations will also need to prepare their technology systems, and that’s where Lumen helps “build the organizational competencies and provide them the infrastructure, whether that’s network, edge compute, data analytics tools,” continues Dugan. The goal is to use software to gain insights, which will improve business. When it comes to next-generation apps and devices, edge compute—the ability to process data in real time at the edge of a network (think a handheld device) without sending it back to the cloud to be processed—has to be the focus. Dugan explains: “When a robot senses something and sends that sensor data back to the application, which may be on-site, it may be in some edge compute location, the speed at which that data can be collected, transported to the application, analyzed, and a response generated, directly affects the speed at which that device can operate.” This data must be analyzed and acted on in real time to be useful to the organization. Think about it, continued Dugan, “When you’re controlling something like an energy grid, similar thing. You want to be able to detect something and react to it in near real time.” Edge compute is the function that allows organizations to enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and this is the new reality. “We're moving from that hype stage into reality and making it available for our customers,” Dugan notes. “And that's exciting when you see something become real like this.” Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. This podcast episode was produced in partnership with Lumen Technologies. Links “Emerging Technologies And The Lumen Platform,” Andrew Dugan, Automation.com, Sept 14, 2020 “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond,” Klaus Schwab, The World Economic Forum, Jan 14, 2016 “Why digital strategies fail,” Jacques Bughin, Tanguy Catlin, Martin Hirt, and Paul Willmott, McKinsey Quarterly, Jan 25, 2018

Ask Stefan Jockusch about what a factory might look like in 10 or 20 years, and the answer might leave you at a crossroads between fascination and bewilderment. Jockusch is vice president for strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software, which develops applications that simulates the conception, design, and manufacture of products such as a cell phone or a smart watch. His vision of a smart factory is abuzz with “independent, moving” robots. But they don’t stop at making one or three or five things. No—this factory is “self-organizing.” “Depending on what product I throw at this factory, it will completely reshuffle itself and work differently when I come in with a very different product,” Jockusch says. “It will self-organize itself to do something different.” Behind this factory of future is artificial intelligence (AI), Jockusch says in this episode of Business Lab. But AI starts much, much smaller, with the chip. Take automaking. The chips that power the various applications in cars today—and the driverless vehicles of tomorrow—are embedded with AI, which support real-time decision-making. They’re highly specialized, built with specific tasks in mind. The people who design chips then need to see the big picture. “You have to have an idea if the chip, for example, controls the interpretation of things that the cameras see for autonomous driving. You have to have an idea of how many images that chip has to process or how many things are moving on those images,” Jockusch says. “You have to understand a lot about what will happen in the end.” This complex way of building, delivering, and connecting products and systems is what Siemens describes as “chip to city”—the idea that future population centers will be powered by the transmission of data. Factories and cities that monitor and manage themselves, Jockusch says, rely on “continuous improvement”: AI executes an action, learns from the results, and then tweaks its subsequent actions to achieve a better result. Today, most AI is helping humans make better decisions. “We have one application where the program watches the user and tries to predict the command the user is going to use next,” Jockusch says. “The longer the application can watch the user, the more accurate it will be.” Applying AI to manufacturing, Jockusch says, can result in cost savings and big gains in efficiency. Jockusch gives an example from a Siemens factory of printed circuit boards, which are used in most electronic products. The milling machine used there has a tendency to “goo up over time—to get dirty.” The challenge is to determine when the machine has to be cleaned so it doesn’t fail in the middle of a shift. “We are using actually an AI application on an edge device that's sitting right in the factory to monitor that machine and make a fairly accurate prediction when it's time to do the maintenance,” Jockusch says. The full impact of AI on business—and the full range of opportunities the technology can uncover—is still unknown. “There's a lot of work happening to understand these implications better,” Jockusch says. “We are just at the starting point of doing this, of really understanding what can optimization of a process do for the enterprise as a whole.” Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. This podcast episode was produced in partnership with Siemens Digital Industries Software.

[Sponsored] AI advancements today are pointing to improvements everywhere you look. But it’s a confluence of technologies—cloud, 5G wireless, smart devices, and more—that will usher in the greatest results, predicts Dell Technologies’ John Roese. If you need a reason to feel good about the direction technology is going, look up Dell’s CTO John Roese on Twitter. The handle he composed back in 2006 is @theICToptimist. ICT stands for information and communication. “The reason for that acronym was because I firmly believed that the future was not about information technology and communication technology independently,” says Roese, president and chief technology officer of products and operations at Dell Technologies. “It was about them coming together.” Close to two decades later, it’s hard not to call him right. Organizations are looking to the massive amounts of data their collecting and generating to become fully digital, they’re using the cloud to process and store all that data, and they’re turning to fast, new wireless technologies like 5G to power data-hungry applications such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. In this episode of Business Lab, Roese walks through this confluence of technologies and its future outcomes. For example, autonomous vehicles are developing fast, but fully driverless cars aren’t plying are streets yet. And they won’t until they tap into a “collaborative compute model”—smart devices that plug into a combination of cloud and edge computing infrastructure to provide “effectively infinite compute.” “One of the biggest problems isn't making the device smart; it's making the device smart and efficient in a scalable system,” Roese says. So big things are ahead, but technology today is making huge strides, Roese says. He talks about machine intelligence, which taps AI and machine learning to mimic human intelligence and tackle complex problems, such as speeding up supply chains, or in health care, more accurately detecting tumors or types of cancer. And opportunities abound. During the coronavirus pandemic, machine intelligence can “scale nursing” by giving nurses data-driven tools that allow them to see more patients. In cybersecurity, it can keep good guys a step ahead of innovating bad guys. And in telecommunications, it could eventually make decisions regarding mobile networks “that might have a trillion things on them. That is a very, very, very large network that exceeds human's ability to think.” Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. This podcast episode was produced in partnership with Dell Technologies. Show notes and links Technical Disruptions Emerging in 2020, by John Roese The Journey to 5G: Extending the Cloud to Mobile Edges, EmTech Next 2020 Meet John on Twitter, @theictoptimist The Fourth Industrial Revolution and digitization will transform Africa into a global powerhouse, by Njuguna Ndung’u and Landry Signé

[Sponsored] The coronavirus pandemic has led to enhanced collaboration, spurred innovation, and increased the use of digital technologies. Telehealth enables doctors to safely connect with patients virtually and to monitor them remotely, whether in different cities or just down the hall. And smarter and smaller medical devices are producing better outcomes for patients—a disruption is sensed, like low blood sugar or a too rapid beating heart, and a therapy is applied, in real time. All of this is aided by improved processing capabilities and data—lots of data, which means AI. And today’s guest is Dr. Laura Mauri, who is the Vice President of Global Clinical Research and Analytics at Medtronic. And she knows all about how data can help drive better patient outcomes, improve the patient experience, and provide valuable information for doctors and medical device creators. Dr. Mauri is an interventional cardiologist and one of the world’s leading experts on clinical trials, but, as she says, the success of a clinical trial really does come down to the patient experience, and how it's improved. Dr. Mauri also has great hope for healthcare and technology. And although she cautions that this work is not simple, you can literally see progress happening—which is the outcome we all want. Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, director of insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. Produced in partnership with Medtronic. Show notes and links “Unlocking the power of data in healthcare” A Q&A with Dr. Laura Mauri Open-Source Release Allows Coventor to Be Produced Worldwide Virtual training, remote monitoring solutions provide safety and support

In this episode, we look at the need to secure the internet of things, physical workspaces, and the products companies make. From planes to children’s toys to oil rigs, more connected devices are vulnerable to attack than ever before. Ken Munro is an internet-of things security researcher, penetration tester, and writer with two decades of experience in the security industry. He is also the founder of security services company Pen Test Partners. Munro helps expose the vulnerabilities in items we use every day, and he discusses some of the most important skills that cybersecurity experts can have, why companies are at risk for physical security breaches, and something he calls “supersystemic flaws.”  Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. Music is by Merlean, from Epidemic Sound. Ken Munro, on Twitter Ken Munro, Pen Test Partners “Kids Tracker Watches: CloudPets, exploiting athletes and hijacking reality TV,” Pen Test Partners Security Blog “Think you’ve had a breach? Top 5 things to do,” Pen Test Partners Security Blog  “Internet of Things Security,” a TEDx presentation by Ken Munro

As the new year (and new decade) begins, one thing is certain: cybersecurity will continue to have an increasing impact on business, for better or worse. In this episode, we hear from Stephanie Balaouras, a cybersecurity expert who has spoken to thousands of customers over her 15 years at Forrester Research. She is the vice president and group director of security and risk research, as well as infrastructure and operations research. Balaouras makes the case that all businesses should have a chief information security officer, or CISO, as the world of cyberthreats becomes more intricate and perilous. "Even companies that have a CISO should take a hard look at how high in the organization they report," Balaouras says. "Do they have the right budget? Do they have enough staff? Have you given them the right span of control?" Balaouras also reviews some of the biggest cybersecurity trends in 2019 and makes predictions for 2020. Business Lab is hosted by Laurel Ruma, director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. The show is a production of MIT Technology Review, with production help from Collective Next. Music by Merlean, from Epidemic Sound. From the sponsor Cybersecurity isn’t only about stopping the threats you see, it’s about stopping the ones you can’t see. That’s why Microsoft Security employs over 3,500 cybercrime experts, and uses AI to help anticipate, identify and eliminate threats. So you can focus on growing your business, and Microsoft Security can focus on protecting it. Learn more at //Microsoft.com/Cybersecurity. https://www.forrester.com/Stephanie-Balaouras https://go.forrester.com/blogs/category/cybersecurity/ https://go.forrester.com/blogs/a-cisos-guide-to-leading-change/ https://www.forrester.com/report/The+Biggest+Trends+Shaping+Enterprise+Risk+Management+In+2020/-/E-RES148895 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNYcRa1JWuA

In this episode Kendall, Rachel, and Laurel Ruma discuss: * Learning how to talk to strangers by working on a farm * Accepting that there is stuff that is out of your control and moving on from it instead of getting hung up on it * The real value of forcing yourself out of your comfort zone and encountering people who are different from you * Things that Kendall finds creepy * Getting involved in Twitter wars is a terrible idea * Being "the voice of reason" among her peer group * Coaching employees about what's appropriate to discuss on social media * Getting Bill O'Reilly's hate mail (!) * The power of sideways leadership in communicating major changes from management * How leadership applies to working with your customers as well as your employees * Having to dial back her extroversion to not freak out your introverted customers :) * Acknowledging imperfection in oneself * Laurel's interests: BABES – Boston Area Beer Enthusiasts Society, Scandinavian Noir literature, and She Geeks Out * Kendall's poor taste in beer :) * Laurel's plan for when she wins the lottery :) Find Laurel on social media as "laurel@oreilly" Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music

In which we sit down with Laurel Ruma to deconstruct the underlying economics of the craft beer industry and related questions. We talk about its parallels to the tech industry, valuations of breweries and the industry, what the future holds and terroir. If you like craft beer or if you don't like craft beer, this podcast is for you.  Host: Stephen O'Grady, @sogrady, RedMonk Guest: Laurel Ruma, @laurelatoreilly, O'Reilly Media Links: Beer in Vermont, important to the economyhttp://www.shelburnenews.com/2016/03/03/beer-vermont-important-economy/ According to a recent report by the Vermont Brewers Association, the state’s craft beer industry has an annual economic impact of approximately $199 million and generates over 1,500 jobs. When including money stemming from craft beer tourism, that number swells to over $270 million—more than the annual economic impact of maple syrup in Vermont ($226 million-UVM Proctor Maple Research Center). Women to get their own beer; will they want it? USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/05/21/women-get-but-they-want-their-own-beer/83857942/ "And many women seem to be finding flavorful beers on their own. Females are big fans of sour ales and wild ales, preferring them 75% more than men do, Nielsen found in a recent survey. Women are also 55% more likely to prefer herb/spice brews and 20% more likely to preferred blonde or golden ales, Nielsen found." Anheuser-Busch InBev Divesting Its Stake in World's Largest Beer Brewergeneral/2016/03/07/anheuser-busch-inbev-divesting-its-stake-in-worlds.aspx "While Anheuser-Busch and Miller dominate more than 70% of the U.S. beer market..."   Is Constellation Brands Inc. the New King of Craft Beer? http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/08/04/will-ballast-point-topple-samuel-adams-as-face-of.aspx According to Sands, Ballast Point is the fastest-growing craft beer in the U.S., with depletion rates of more than 60% in the quarter. Depletions are sales from distributors to retailers and are considered a reliable proxy for consumer demand. Why the Definition of Craft Beer is Important https://mathofcraft.com/2014/03/30/definition-of-craft/ It is dangerous, of course, to read too much into share price, but the tight correlation of craft beer as a search term and the market valuation of the Boston Beer Company certainly suggests a relationship between the two. Podcast Information: Available on Google Play, iTunes, Pocketcasts and Stitcher. Visit on Soundcloud by going to hark.tech. Feedback: hark@redmonk.com Sponsorship: sales@redmonk.com

What happens when you combine two risk-taking government employees, an active developer community, and a bus schedule? Unlimited amounts of innovation, improved customer service, praise for an embattled government agency, and a model for building a government/citizen developer partnership. Hear how the Massachusetts Department of Transportation learned from TriMet that open is better. Laurel Ruma is the Gov 2.0 Evangelist at O'Reilly Media and co-chair of the Gov 2.0 Expo. She joined the company in 2005 after working for five years at various IT analyst firms in the Boston area. Laurel is also co-editor of Open Government, published by O'Reilly in 2010.