ShareVision Blog

Halloween is the much-loved cultural holiday filled with the odd tradition of going to stranger’s homes and asking for candy. However the trick aspect of trick or treating seems to have been lost and candy acquisition is the sole remaining goal. Ask any six year old! I can’t help but imagine that when I was six, and if our entire neighborhood of kids had been on Twitter Halloween night, how our candy intake could have been efficiently maximized with tweets about where the good candy scores were and what spooky places we should avoid. So how many of your tweets end up like those nasty nameless molasses toffees, unwanted and left at the bottom of the pile?

Four years ago this week saw the Occupy Wall Street movement gain credible motion through out the western world. Cries of “enough” to the bankers and politicians about the burden of loans, debt and the subsequent bailouts were heard in over 950 cities and in 82 countries by student activists and those who stated they represented the 99%  - aka “the rest of us”.

Image Credit: Collaborative Consumption

Five years ago I was living in South America and working in international development through the non-profit organization CUSO International. Early on in my placement, our group met two travellers passing though the capital, one from France and one from Spain. Their stated goal was to travel the world without any money.  That’s right…with absolutely no money at all. To accomplish this they were “couch surfing” and using the “sharing community” and giving back in kind by sharing their philosophy with those who would listen. All they owned was a single small backpack full of clothes and a wi-fi dependent laptop each. We were all both amazed and a bit appalled by them.

When asked by retail stores, hotels, gas stations, movie theatres, and other seldom-frequented commercial businesses for my email address, for many years I have responded with: “Before giving you my email, what can you tell me about your privacy policy?”

Mad Max Fury Road, the recent epic sci-fi blockbuster, has some pretty impressive adaptive equipment on display throughout the film. It got me to thinking about other Hollywood portrayals of adaptive equipment, and curious about how far have we actually come in 2015, with their real life counterparts. How much of the Sci-Fi Hollywood technologies shown in films and on TV, are actually possible now? Remember Geordie La Forge from Star Trek the Next Generation? That’s right, the visually impaired character who had those rad eighties looking glasses than enabled him to see. Have they, or something like them been invented yet? Well yes it seem they have, and they can be purchased… for a price. http://esighteyewear.com/what-is-esight

During a water cooler conversation about music recently with a much younger coworker, (a 21 yr old millennial) I mentioned an encounter with a pop music icon of my youth, (I’m a Gen X.) He then made it quite clear that he had never heard of said pop star, which besides making me feel really old and outdated, apparently absolutely astounded my other older coworker (a baby boomer) and had him proclaim “How can that be even be possible?…. in this, the internet age...for you to not have heard of him?….Wow!"