It is often the most modest media that prove successful, adaptable, and resilient over the long term. Such is the case of the podcast, a mode of communication born in the early 2000s, derived from radio, whose monthly US audience has now grown to around 90 million and whose global audience reaches well into the hundreds of millions. Even more striking are the numbers behind the numbers: a content production pipeline, for instance, that counts…
Read more
Tag: Piaggio Fast Forward
What comes after mobility? Or, rather, what comes after mobility when the word is understood, much as it has been during most of the course of the 20th century, as automobility? According to a manifesto that I wrote in the late summer of 2016, the answer is MOVABILITY. Movability is a word I encountered in the course of research in the Piaggio archives in Pontedera. Apparently coined by an advertising agency in the 1960s, it…
Read more
Alongside our rethinking of Asimov’s Laws, the PFF team has also been actively engaged in rethinking SAE International’s “Taxonomy and Definitions for Terms Related to On-Road Motor Vehicle Automated Driving Systems”: its six-level classification system to describe the levels of driver intervention and attention required to drive a vehicle. These extend from level 0 in which an automated system communicates with the driver without, however, assuming control of the vehicle, to level 5 in which…
Read more
Isaac Asimov’s 1950 classic I, Robot is remembered for many things, but especially for its formulation of the “Three Laws of Robotics” (sometimes referred to as “Asimov’s Laws”). They run as follows: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect…
Read more
It’s easy to poke fun at some of the tics and tropes that have come to define TED over the course of its 32 years of “spreading ideas that matter.” But the fact remains that TED has had an enormous impact and the TED stage is one of the world’s leading communications and innovation platforms, now fully global, interconnected with a multiplicity of television, radio, and web-based channels, and followed by audiences that number in the…
Read more
A celebration of the Piaggio Group’s 130 years of history was held on March 23rd in Milan’s Teatro Vetra with an emphasis on its present and future plans. Speakers included Roberto Colaninno, president and CEO of the IMMSI holding company, to which the Piaggio Group belongs, and Stefano Belisari (“Elio” of the Italian band Elio e le Storie Tese). The centerpiece of the celebration was the limited edition volume FuturPiaggio (though the tantalizing presence of…
Read more
As many friends are aware, since June 2015 I have been leading a new venture that seeks to pioneer smart approaches to the mobility of people and things: Piaggio Fast Forward. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near MIT and Harvard, the startup is a development partner of the Piaggio Group, the largest European manufacturer of two-wheel motor vehicles and one of the world leaders in its sector. The Piaggio Group product range includes e-bikes, scooters, and…
Read more
