The irony is that industrial production world-wide is at an all time high, as are corporate profits.

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We enjoyed a World Wide Telescope fly-over of Iceland, the time-lapse photographs from a SenseCam worn by his collaborator, Microsoft's Tim Regan, as he delivered material to the venue and some of the astonishing maps Eric Fischer makes by plotting the location data from Flickr photographs of major cities, along with some astonishing data visualisations.

BBC: It's digital, but is it art?

This is an extraordinary time in the business-technology world as customers are being given a wide range of new and distinctive strategic approaches to evaluate, and as technology vendors are rushing to deliver not only new generations of products but even radically different long-term philosophies.

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And, despite our memories of the slow-dialing modems of the '90s, connecting to the World Wide Web was faster than ever at the time.

CNN: The good ol' days of AOL chat rooms