Nick Bilton
About Nick Bilton
Speech topics
I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works
How will we communicate with customers and tell stories about our industries in the next two or 20 years? How will our compulsion to constantly multitask and our byte-sized culture affect business and society? Nick Bilton reveals why organizations that stay on the cutting edge of the technology curve have a significant advantage over others in reaching consumers and growing their business.
In a presentation that is both visionary and practical, Bilton examines how the Internet is creating a new type of consumer, why social networks are essential anchoring tools, and how great storytelling and extended relationships will enable businesses to engage with customers in new ways. He also gives audiences a peek into emerging technologies—everything from flexible displays to telepresence to cars that drive themselves—that will change the way we work and live.
Speaking videos
Books by Nick Bilton
“American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road” (2017)
In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye. It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts. The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet. Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.
“Hatching Twitter” (2013)
By 2013 Twitter boasted close to 300 millionactive users around the world. In barely six years, the service has become a tool for fighting politicaloppression in the Middle East, a marketing musthavefor business, and the world s living room duringlive TV events. Today, notables such as the pope, Oprah Winfrey, and the president of the United Statesare regular Twitter users. A seventeen-year-old with amobile phone can now reach a larger audience thanan entire crew at CNN. Bilton s unprecedented access and exhaustiveinvestigating reporting drawing on hundreds ofsources, documents, and internal e-mails haveenabled him to write an intimate portrait of fourfriends who accidentally changed the world, andwhat they all learned along the way."
“I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work & Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted” (2011)
Are we driving off a digital cliff and heading for disaster, unable to focus, maintain concentration, or form the human bonds that make life worth living? Are media and business doomed and about to be replaced by amateur hour? The world, as Nick Bilton—with tongue-in-cheek—shows, has been going to hell for a long, long time, and what we are experiencing is the twenty-first-century version of the fear that always takes hold as new technology replaces the old. In fact, as Bilton shows, the digital era we are part of is, in all its creative and disruptive forms, the foundation for exciting and engaging experiences not only for business but society as well. Both visionary and practical, I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works captures the zeitgeist of an emerging age, providing the understanding of how a radically changed media world is influencing human behavior:
At a glanceNick Bilton
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