Carpe Data: CONNECT

Have you ever had the feeling you were being guided down a specific path in life? A real, deep in your guts, crap in your pants inclination? What if you came to believe you were placed on this earth to do something that would change everything? What would you do? What would you be willing to do?

Everything is connected. This much Jim Ryan figured out at a young age. But he also foresaw the application of this physical property in the digital world—a calling to connect every person on the planet to each other and to the collective intelligence of human kind. Through the realization of this vision, each of us can now do more, get more, access more than ever before thanks to a device we hold in our hand. But like many great discoveries, this new connectivity has a dark side.

In this fast-paced, introspective memoir, written by one of the world’s defining players in the mobile revolution, Ryan takes us along on his quest to deliver what he first imagined in 1987; something he called the Total Interactive Communications Device (the TIC)—something we have all come to know as the smartphone.