If anybody knows how to talk back to Facebook, it’s Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, America’s largest and most powerful advocacy group for kids. Steyer is the author of the new book, Talking Back to Facebook: The Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age, which includes an introduction by Chelsea Clinton and presents parents, teachers and politicians with a very practical and realistic strategy for managing the social media activities of children.

“It’s a conversation we need to have,” Steyer told me when he came into our San Francisco studio to talk about what he calls social media’s “epochal change”. Social media, he insists, is changing the cognitive development of kids, encouraging narcissism and changing the way their brains develop. It’s time Silicon Valley – particularly Google, Apple and Facebook – take leadership on this critical issue, he told me. But it’s not just technology companies that need to recognize the destructively transformational impact on kids. Everybody – from parents to teachers to politicians – need to learn to talk back to Facebook, he insists. Which is why, of course, he wrote his book.

But is Jim Steyer right? Do we really need to be having that conversation about Facebook with our kids?

The marketing executive Ken Segall not only worked closely with Steve Jobs for years at both Apple and NeXT, but he was also the creative guy who came up with the iMac name. And he’s just written a book about the product marketing lessons he learned from Jobs – an instant best-seller called Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success.

So what, exactly, defines “Insane Simplicity”? I asked Segall when he came into our New York studio. His answer will please Apple fanboys as much as it will irritate the Android crowd. It’s all about having the corporate processes in place to eliminate clutter, Segall explained to me. “There are zero committees at Apple,” Jobs liked to boast. And it’s this absence of corporate bureaucracy, Segall suggests, that distinguishes Apple from other technology companies like, perhaps, Google.

So is Segall right – can simplicity be legislated by the absence of corporate structures? Or is insane simplicity, in truth, the result of an insanely obsessive CEO like Steve Jobs who never settled for anything less than perfection?

It was 6:30 on Sunday morning, August 9th, 2007 when Ted Morgan, the Boston based CEO of a little location technology start-up called Skyhook Wireless, got a totally unexpected call from an absolute stranger in California.

Who calls a complete stranger at 6:30 am on a Sunday morning – especially from California, where it was 3:30 am?

Only one man, of course. Steve Jobs. And Jobs was calling Morgan to license Skyhook’s technology for his new iPhone. The rest of the successful relationship between Apple and Skyhook, of course, is history – but it’s been captured for posterity in a Harvard Business School case study used by faculty to teach entrepreneurial students how to manage this kind of out-of-the-blue opportunity. Every entering student at Harvard Business School is taught the Skyhook case. But only one or two may be lucky enough to have a similarly magical experience with their start-up.

Morgan and Skyhook are also in the news for quite different reasons. After originally working with Google to provide Skyhook technology for the Android platform, Morgan claims that Google put pressure on Motorola and Samsung which “forced” them to choose Google’s own in-house location technology over Skyhook’s. So Skyhook is now involved in a lawsuit against Google’s supposedly anti-competitive behavior and Morgan told me his side of the story when he came into our San Francisco studio. Given today’s identification of the Google data engineer behind the company’s controversial Street View project, this interview with Morgan, who is one of Google’s most persistent critics on the data and location fronts, is particularly timely.

Personal Democracy Forum CEO Andrew Rasiej told me that most American politicians don’t know the difference between a waiter and a server. Perhaps. But one politician who certainly can distinguish between the two is Anna Eshoo, the Democratic Congresswoman for California’s 14th District, which she has represented since 1993. As Silicon Valley’s representative in DC, Eshoo not only knows her servers from her waiters, but is also well versed in complex technological policy such as spectrum, privacy and SOPA, as well as being a keen observer of the innovation that distinguishes Silicon Valley from the rest of the world.

“IP represents American genius,” Eshoo told me when she came into the TechCrunch studio a couple of weeks ago. And while Eshoo believes that the ingenuity of the American people is “second to none”, she nonetheless thinks that Silicon Valley has much to teach the rest of the country. “Innovation is the calling card of the future,” she said, sounding like the best-selling writer about creativity Jonah Lehrer, and it effects everything we do. Thus, she told me, it’s critical that America gets its technology policy right.

So how, exactly, does creativity work? Jonah Lehrer’s bestselling new book Imagine: How Creativity Works is a lucid attempt to scientifically explain both creativity and imagination. As Lehrer told me when he came into our San Francisco studio last week, his goal is to make sense of that “epiphany” in the shower which results in the insight (what he calls in the book, the thing that “comes out of nowhere”) of a great idea.

Lehrer’s book is, of course, essential for entrepreneurs seeking to come up with that brilliant new idea which will revolutionize the world. Indeed, Lehrer includes entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg with artists like Bob Dylan in his pantheon of creative geniuses. But as Lehrer explained to me, imagination and creativity are increasingly collaborative things which require us to innovate together. “Either we must work together,” he told me, “or we will fail alone.”

So maybe entrepreneurs should consider taking group showers to stimulate that next billion dollar idea.

There are few more articulate or passionate commentators on digital politics than Andrew Rasiej, the founder and CEO of Personal Democracy Media and the organizer of the upcoming Personal Democracy Forum. As Rasiej told me when we talked in New York City earlier this month, the Internet offers the opportunity to create what he calls “we-government” – a much more accountable and transparent form of 21st Century politics than the type of governance that existed in the 20th century. But for this to happen, Rasiej reminded me, politicians need to be able to distinguish between “a server and a waiter” and we need to dilute the impact of money on our political process.

While Rasiej is critical of traditional politicians and political parties, he also recognizes that online activists have much to learn. “It’s a lot easier to say no to something than yes,” he says, suggesting that the real challenge now for digital political networks is to come up with viable policy and organizational alternatives to the status quo. Rasiej also gave me his insights into how social media would have a “massive” impact on the 2012 Presidential election and how even President Obama needs to more fully embrace the democratic nature of online networks.

Andrew Keen interviews Laura Tyson, professor of economics at UC Berkeley.

Daniel Franklin is the Executive Editor of The Economist magazine and one of the sponsors of last week’s excellent Innovation event at UC Berkeley’s Haas School. He is also author of the new book, Megachange: The World in 2050 which imagines the major economic, scientific and political challenges and opportunities to come over the next 40 years. So how important is the Internet, I asked Franklin when we talked last week, in solving some of what he calls “the wicked problems” of the planet? And, I asked him, what can Silicon Valley learn from the rest of the world in terms of coming up with innovative technological solutions to the world’s most pressing problems?

This is the final interview in the series of conversations from the Innovation event. Check out my other interviews from the event including those with Stewart Brand, Clay Christensen, Don Tapscott and Vivek Wadhwa.

All our global institutions — from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization to the International Monetary Fund to the G20 to the G8 — are broken. That’s at least according to Don Tapscott, the best-selling author of Macrowikinomics and a guy committed to “rebooting” the world. So when I sat down with Don last week at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley last week, I gave him 8 minutes to outline how we can rebuild these global institutions in the digital 21st century.

Given his 8 minute limit, Don did pretty well. Arguing that for the first time in human history, we are all being mobilized on the same side, he argued that the real killer app on the Internet is saving the planet. We need to rebuild our institutions around open source technology, wikis, social media and all the other distributed models that are shaping our networked world. And Don has brought together a number of other leading thinkers – Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard and writers Parag Khanna and Richard Florida, for example – to participate in this ambitious project to reinvent the planet in our digital century.

Interested in participating? Don is looking for both volunteers and investors for this project and he invites anyone with an interest in saving the world to contact him on either Twitter or via email (don@tapscott.com).

It’s not just start-ups that radically innovate. Take, for example, Autodesk, the 3D design, engineering and entertainment software giant that, according to its President and CEO Carl Bass, continues to be “incredibly relevant” in the innovation economy. “The most creative people use our tools,” Bass told me about popular Autodesk software like Sketchbook, Pixlr and Instructables, when I talked to him at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley last week. And Bass’ optimism extends to the future where, he told me, all of Autodesk’s products will have migrated online and the cloud, mobile and social will have radically transformed its business. Indeed, in 5 years time, he predicts, computing will become an “abundant resource” thereby providing Autodesk with even richer opportunities to create innovative design, engineering and entertainment software.

This conversation is part of a series that I recorded last week in Berkeley at the Innovation event. Check out my interviews with Stewart Brand, Clay Christensen and Vivek Wadhwa. Tomorrow, I’ll publish interviews about innovation with Don Tapscott and Laura Tyson, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under the Clinton Administration.

Gina Bianchini is best known, of course, as the co-founder and former CEO of Ning, the social community aggregator which Glam Media bought for $150 million last year. And now (ding dong), Bianchini is back with a new start-up, a social software company called Mightybell, which she says is trying to reinvent groups online. “It’s Github for groups,” she told me when I saw her last week at The Economist’s Innovation event in Berkeley. It may be “super early days,” for Mightybell, Bianchini explained, but she is nonetheless hopeful that the start-up, which has a “vast” team of six people, has raised $3.6 million and is still in private beta, will unlock the potential of real life experiences.

My conversation with Bianchini is one of a series of interviews about innovation that I recorded last week at The Economist‘s event. Check out previous interviews with the always controversial Vivek Wadhwa about racism and sexism in Silicon Valley and with Clay Christensen about trying to escape the innovator’s dilemma.

Sexism and racism in Silicon Valley. It’s a debate that doesn’t seem to want to die. On one side are those who believe that Silicon Valley is a genuine meritocracy; on the other, are those who are deeply troubled by the self-evident lack of female and/or black start-up entrepreneurs. And one of the most vocal members of the latter group is the multi-affiliated academic, Vivek Wadhwa, who isn’t shy to take on what he calls the “white boy’s club” in Silicon Valley. But Wadhwa, who spent his first career as a start-up entrepreneur, is no enemy of Silicon Valley. “It’s an amazing place,” he told me when we met last week at The Economist‘s Innovation conference in Berkeley. But what troubles Wadhwa are the smattering of sexists and racists at large venture capitalist firms who, he says, kill the deals that fund minority-led startups. These “arrogant people who think they are gods,” he told me, they are the bigots who are undermining the meritocratic foundations of Silicon Valley.

This conversation with Wadhwa is the third in a series of interviews from the Innovation conference that I will be running all this week. Yesterday, I ran conversations with the legendary innovator Stewart Brand and with Clay Christensen, the inventor of the innovator’s dilemma.

Why do so many great companies fail? Professor Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School argued they fail because of something he called The Innovator’s Dilemma – a term he popularized to describe the way in which smart companies become prisoners of their own innovation. So is it possible to escape the innovator’s dilemma? I had the honor of interviewing Clay at The Economist‘s Innovation event in Berkeley last week where the great man talked to me about how Google might escape the innovator’s dilemma, why he worries about Apple’s future, how to effectively innovate in education and healthcare and why most business school professors get the economy so wrong.

This is the second in a week long series of interviews from the Innovation event. Tomorrow, check out my interviews with Vivek Wadhwa on racism in Silicon Valley and GE marketing chief, Beth Comstock, on the oldest start-up in the world.

There are few more iconic figures in the digital community than Stewart Brand, the effervescent founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Well, The Long Now Foundation and the guy who almost single-handedly connected the counterculture with cyberspace. So it was a real thrill to sit down last week with Stewart at The Economist‘s excellent Innovation event in Berkeley to talk about the origins of the gift economy, what the hippies got wrong (sex, the family & optimism), why the US and Europe have become so timid and how all the innovation is now coming from the south.

This is the first of a series of conversations that I’ll be running all week from the Innovation event. Later interviews will include Clay Christensen on the innovator’s dilemma, Vivek Wadhwa on racism in Silicon Valley and GE’s Beth Comstock on the oldest start-up in the world.

Back in 2009, Chad Mureta was an 18-hour a day real estate salesman living from one paycheck to the next. Driving home after a basketball game one evening, he hit a deer, flipped his truck over four times, mangled his arm and almost killed himself. Then, recovering in his hospital bed, Mureta – who knew nothing about technology or the Internet – was introduced to the app economy by a friend who gave him a newspaper article about how apps can generate significant revenue. When he got out of the hospital, Mureta borrowed $1,800 from his stepfather, built an app called Fingerprint Security Pro which eventually generated $800,000 in revenue. Mureta is now an app entrepreneur and, in good Tim Ferris style, travels around the world as a member of what he calls “the new rich”.

And you can be like Mureta, too! In his new book App Empire: Make Money, Have a Life and Let Technology Work For You, Mureta explains how the app business can transform all our lives. Earlier this month, Mureta came into San Francisco’s TechCrunch TV studio to explain not only how we can all become members of the new rich, but also to give his tips about the hot new areas of the app economy.

Every day, it seems, there is a new scandal about privacy and social networks. And few people have a better understanding of social networks’ threat to our privacy and liberty than the Chicago-based legal scholar, technologist and best-selling thriller writer, Lori Andrews. In her latest book, “I Know Who You Are And I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy”, Andrews argues that social networks like Facebook and Google+ are, indeed, destroying our privacy.

Google and Facebook are “intermediaries for the government”, Andrews told me when she came into our San Francisco studio earlier this month. Much of their business model, she insists, is based on “deception” – particularly, Andrews says, the way in which online aggregators like Google or Axiom are profiting from all of our personal data. But “the pendulum is swinging”, Andrews notes. One the one hand, she says, more and more Internet users are waking up to the threat of social networks; and, on the other, she is encouraged by the emergence of technology startups dedicated to protecting rather than exploiting our privacy.

So is Andrews right: are Google and Facebook really “intermediaries” for the government?

Forget all those stereotypes about repressed, understated Scandinavians. Christian Lanng, the CEO and co-founder of the business software network Tradeshift, is as unashamedly noisy as the brashest Silicon Valley entrepreneur (think a young Viking version of Marc Benioff). And not only has Lanng founded one of the most promising business start-ups in the world right now but, having relocated to the Bay Area earlier this year from his native Copenhagen, he’s also pioneering the idea of a lean intercontinental start-up with offices in Europe, America and Asia.

So why, I asked Lanng when he came into TechCrunch TV’s San Francisco studio earlier this month, did he move from Denmark to Silicon Valley? While Lanng acknowledged the value of the European welfare state in giving him the education to become a top class programmer, he told them that this welfare system “kills the hunger” to make money. America, in contrast with Europe, “creates hunger” for success, Lanng told me.

Lanng also was not shy to promote Tradeshift. “All current business software is crap”, he explained, before detailing how his start-up is using distributed data to solve core problems for many of the world’s businesses. I suspect Lanng is onto something here. The 18 month old Tradeshift has already raised $17 million from investors including PayPal and is being used by more than 100,000 companies around the globe. So keep an eye on Christian Lanng. This is one Scandinavian who isn’t shy to radically change the world.

The technology book of 2012 may have just been published. The book is by George Dyson, it’s called Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe and its a sparkling history of the small team of scientists at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) who developed both the personal computer and the hydrogen bomb. Most of all, this is a book about John (Johnny) Von Neumann, the brilliant Hungarian mathematician who not only was the principal architect of our digital universe but also assembled the scientific team that built the foundations of the computer and the hydrogen bomb.

“They made a deal with the devil,” Dyson explained to me when he came into our San Francisco studio to talk about Turing’s Cathedral. In getting the government to fund the development of the personal computer, Dyson says, Von Neumann was saying: “we will give you this weapon and in exchange we will get the machine.” And therein, Dyson says, lies the origins of our digital universe – a project (the ultimate lean start-up?), he says, that was accomplished by a team of just 12 scientists for under $1 million.

Trust me on this one. There are few people who have given trust and reputation more thought than security expert Bruce Schneier. His latest book, Liars And Outliers, asks the question of how society functions when we can’t trust each other. And Schneier has spent a lifetime thinking through the relationship between trust and reputation in our new information economy.

The Internet both changes everything and nothing about trust, Schneier explained to me when he came into our San Francisco studio. On the one hand, the security guru told me, it allows us to scale trust; but, on the other, he went on, digital technology allows those who abuse trust to do more damage. The Internet is also doing a bad job replicating society, he asserted. with contemporary social networks like Facebook and Twitter being worse environments for building trust between people than 90′s style chat rooms and email.

The good news, at least for entrepreneurs, is that there are huge opportunities for building new companies and products in today’s trust economy.  But, as Schneier warns, trust can only be facilitated when our new digital networks are made more human. So that’s the challenge, then, for the entrepreneur. To build networks that really do reflect the real world and real human beings. To be a true Internet of people.

What is the future of medicine? The distinguished cardiologist and author, Dr Eric Topol, believes that the 20th century medical industry is about to be creatively destroyed by today’s digital economy. We are at the end of the era of doctor-knows-best, Topol told me when we Skyped earlier this month. The “ossified” and “sclerotic” medical establishment, Topol explained, is being replaced by an industry that will radically empower the consumer and patient. And at the heart of this new industry, he explained, is the digitalization of medical data which will enable doctors to know our “operating systems” from the beginning of our lives.

This revolution, Dr Topol, told me, changes everything. While it won’t enable us to live forever, it will enable us to live into our nineties without what he calls the “chronic diseases” of the industrial age. But it also will create new problems, such as safeguarding our personal data, which Topol believes, requires “intensive scrutiny”. Most of all though, he explained to me, today’s creative destruction of medicine offers both venture capitalists and entrepreneurs “limitless opportunities” to build a 21st century medical industry.