i am trying to build a jigsaw puzzle which has no lid and is missing half of the pieces. i am unable to show you what it will be, but i can show you some of the pieces and why they matter to me. if you are building a different puzzle, it is possible that these pieces won't mean much to you, maybe they won't fit or they won't fit yet. then again, these might just be the pieces you're looking for. this is summing up, please find previous editions here.

• capturing the upside, by clayton christensen. the notion here is that if you create a new business that tries to position itself at the point in a value chain where really attractive money is being made, by the time you get there it probably will have gone, and you can tell where it's gone in a very predictable way, and that's what i want to try to get at here. over on this side of the world, the money tends to be made by the company that designs the architecture, the system, that solves what is not good enough. because it's functionality and reliability that's not good enough, the company that makes this systems that is proprietary and optimized tends to be at the place where most of the profit in the industry is made. because the performance of that kind of a product isn't dictated by the individual components, of which it is comprised; this is determined at the level of the architecture of the system, and that is where the money is made. but on this side, when it becomes more than good enough and the architecture becomes modular, where the money is made flips to the inside of the product. how are you going to do this? anything you can do, the competitors can just copy instantly because in a nonintegrated word, you're outsourcing from a common supplier base, and when the architecture of the system is modular, and it fits together according to industry standards, the better products are not created through clever architectural design; the performance of the product is driven by what's inside. highly recommended
• seth godin's startup school (transcript), in the summer of 2012 i had an amazing opportunity to spend three days with a group of extremely motivated entrepreneurs - people right at the beginning of building their project, launching their organization. during those three days i took them on a guided tour of some of the questions they were going to have to wrestle with, some of the difficult places they were going through to stand up and say, "this is me. this is what i'm making". highly recommended
• snowden and the future, by eben moglen. when there is no collective voice for those who are within structures that deceive and oppress, then somebody has to act courageously on his own. someone has to face all the risk for a tiny share of the total benefit that will be reaped by all. such a man may be walking the pathway from slavery to freedom. but any such man worthy of the effort will know that he may also be digging his own grave. when there is no union, we require heroism. or we perish for want of what we should have known, that there was neither collective will nor individual courage to bring us. it takes a union to end slavery because a man who decides that the will of the righteous commands us to free slaves will be called a traitor, and they will hang him-more than once. highly recommended
• frank sinatra's 1963 playboy interview, i think i can sum up my religious feelings in a couple of paragraphs. first: i believe in you and me. i'm like albert schweitzer and bertrand russell and albert einstein in that i have a respect for life - in any form. i believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything i can see or that there is real evidence for. if these things are what you mean by god, then i believe in god. but i don't believe in a personal god to whom i look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice. i'm not unmindful of man's seeming need for faith; i'm for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of jack daniel's. but to me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and god go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle. the witch doctor tries to convince us that we have to ask god for help, to spell out to him what we need, even to bribe him with prayer or cash on the line. well, i believe that god knows what each of us wants and needs. it's not necessary for us to make it to church on sunday to reach him. you can find him anyplace. and if that sounds heretical, my source is pretty good: matthew, five to seven, the sermon on the mount