RavenWing creates a popular app. Readers can download their favorite horror tales. But the app sends more than eBooks their way. Hungry ravens swarm out of thin air!

When technologies, products, and services converge in radical, creative new ways, a killer app emerges-a new application so powerful that it transforms industries, redefines markets, and annihilates the competition. The steam engine, the cotton gin, and the Model T were all killer apps of their time. Today's killer apps spring from the digital realm: the personal computer, e-mail, and the World Wide Web. Tempted by the promise of such devastating power, companies large and small, from vast multinationals to lean entrepreneurial start-ups, are remaking themselves into organizations that nurture killer apps rather than succumb to them. How is it done? In this groundbreaking new book, strategists Downes and Mui identify the twelve fundamental design principles for building killer apps and offer a progressive guide to transforming your company into a place where killer apps are born. Unleashing the Killer App provides the tools, the techniques, and the proof that you need to incubate the killer app within your organization--and perhaps even release one.

Are you wondering what the next killer app will be? Do you want to know how you can maintain and add to your value during these rapidly changing times? Are you wondering how the word love can even be used in the context of business? Instead of wondering, read this book and find out how to become a lovecat—a nice, smart person who succeeds in business and in life. How do you become a lovecat? By sharing your intangibles. By that I mean: Your knowledge: everything that comes from all the books that I’ll encourage you to devour. Your network: the collection of friends and contacts you now have, which I’ll teach you how to grow and nurture. Your compassion: that human warmth you already possess—in these pages I’ll convince you that you can show it freely at the office. What happens when you do all this? * You become a rich source of information to all around you. * You are seen as a person with valuable insight. * You are perceived as generous to a fault, producing surprise and delight. * You double your business intelligence in one year. * You triple your network of personal relationships in two years. * You quadruple the number of colleagues in your life who love you like family. In short, you become one of those amazing, outstanding people to whom everyone turns, who leads rather than follows, who never runs out of ideas, contacts, or friendship. Here’s the real scoop: Nice guys don’t finish last. They rule!

When Jacob is hired to find lost property, his instinct screams that something stinks. Finn and Victoria bicker while trying to stop a terrorist cell from slaughtering thousands. Ben is being chased across the country by remorseless killers, trying to reach a safe haven that haunts his dreams. As the clock ticks down to midnight, hunters and hunted race to work out what is real in a world where even your own memory cannot be trusted.

From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower “A dazzling history of Western ideas.” —The Economist “Mr. Ferguson tells his story with characteristic verve and an eye for the felicitous phrase.” —Wall Street Journal “[W]ritten with vitality and verve . . . a tour de force.” —Boston Globe Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries. How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic—that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors. Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.

In Killer Apps Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves provide a detailed account of the rise of automation in warfare, showing how media systems are central to building weapons systems with artificial intelligence in order to more efficiently select and eliminate military targets. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of political and media theorists, Packer and Reeves develop a new theory for understanding how the intersection of media and military strategy drives today's AI arms race. They address the use of media to search for enemies in their analyses of the history of automated radar systems, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the development of military climate science, which treats the changing earth as an enemy. As the authors demonstrate, contemporary military strategy demands perfect communication in an evolving battlespace that is increasingly inhospitable to human frailties, necessitating humans' replacement by advanced robotics, machine intelligence, and media systems.

The race is on to construct the first quantum code breaker, as the winner will hold the key to the entire Internet. From international, multibillion-dollar financial transactions to top-secret government communications, all would be vulnerable to the secret-code-breaking ability of the quantum computer. Written by a renowned quantum physicist closely involved in the U.S. government’s development of quantum information science, Schrödinger’s Killer App: Race to Build the World’s First Quantum Computer presents an inside look at the government’s quest to build a quantum computer capable of solving complex mathematical problems and hacking the public-key encryption codes used to secure the Internet. The "killer application" refers to Shor’s quantum factoring algorithm, which would unveil the encrypted communications of the entire Internet if a quantum computer could be built to run the algorithm. Schrödinger’s notion of quantum entanglement—and his infamous cat—is at the heart of it all. The book develops the concept of entanglement in the historical context of Einstein’s 30-year battle with the physics community over the true meaning of quantum theory. It discusses the remedy to the threat posed by the quantum code breaker: quantum cryptography, which is unbreakable even by the quantum computer. The author also covers applications to other important areas, such as quantum physics simulators, synchronized clocks, quantum search engines, quantum sensors, and imaging devices. In addition, he takes readers on a philosophical journey that considers the future ramifications of quantum technologies. Interspersed with amusing and personal anecdotes, this book presents quantum computing and the closely connected foundations of quantum mechanics in an engaging manner accessible to non-specialists. Requiring no formal training in physics or advanced mathematics, it explains difficult topics, including quantum entanglement, Schrödinger’s cat, Bell’s inequality, and quantum computational complexity, using simple analogies.