Breakpoint Book

The Most Important Decision You Need To Make When Building A Network – Interview with Jeff Stibel

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Lane Wood was about to turn 30, and he was in a full-on identity crisis. He had recently left charity: water where he worked directly with the founder, Scott Harrison, and A-list celebrities to bring clean drinking water across the planet.

It had been an amazing, life-changing experience; especially for a former pastor from rural Oklahoma.

However, on a winter night in 2011 at a Union Square cafe in New York City, he confided in a close friend and nervously wondered, “What happens when my email doesn’t end in charitywater.org? Have I built real relationships or have I just increased my social media follower number?”

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Which relationships do we deepen, and which ones do we let fizzle or never form?

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For Jeff Stibel, a 40-year-old brain scientist, the Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., and the author of Breakpoint, the answer lies in other types of networks that share similar properties.

In Jeff’s words, “The goods news is that we can look to biology and biological networks such as ants, bees, and even termites to tell us what happens in networks as a whole. We can see that there are very consistent, predictable cycles. Those cycles drive not just biological networks but business networks, economic networks, and social networks.”

Read the whole article on Forbes where it originally appeared.

The Future of Facebook and the Internet | Interview with Jeff Stibel

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Breakpoint author Jeff Stibel speaks with Rick Van Cise of KOMO radio about the how the world’s largest social network, Facebook, can take proactive measures to reach equilibrium after its breakpoint instead of following the likes of Friendster and Myspace into obscurity.

Furthermore, he notes that though the internet is not going anywhere, how we access and use it will. Our relationship with the internet has already begun to change, thanks largely to the popularity of apps, and will only continue to as technology progresses.

For reference, How Facebook Can Avoid a Slow, Painful Death is the Wired article mentioned during the interview.

Communication: from early man’s grunts to languages and Facebook, Twitter and Smartphones!

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Sigmund Freud had it right when he said, “The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”

Currently the internet attempts to make sense of 8,512 computer languages, dozens of HTML-based web languages, and nearly 6,500 active spoken human languages.

Communication originates from the brain. We communicate within our minds using electricity electrical neuronal spikes. This is the starting point of any forms of communication. We know what it sounds like: neuronal spikes sound like static crackling. This is the fundamental building block of language. If we can take this and map it to the fundamental building block for how the internet and computers communicate, we’d have the foundations to make translations at the root level of thought. Computers and transistors communicate using the same electrical currents that neurons do.

Language tends to form before the breakpoint and this is a primary reason why so many companies are rushing to hire linguists: they see the opportunity but they also know it may slip away.

Here’s a really cool article and infographic that traces communication right from 6000 B.C  -early drum beats, the postal system, telephones to communication as we know it today:

Evolution of Communication Infographic

For Press Inquiries or Speaking Engagements, Contact: Heather Herndon / HHerndon@dandb.com / 310-919-2290