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Pete Cashmore On Mashable's Success And The Next Big Thing

Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable.
Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable.

When he was a 19-year-old living in rural Scotland, Pete Cashmore kept a personal blog about technology.

A few years later, Cashmore’s blog grew into Mashable, an online media company that focuses on innovation and technology. Mashable now has offices and reporters based in New York and San Francisco.

The next devices that will change consumption will be smaller and smaller.–Pete Cashmore

Secret to success

Cashmore says his personal blog became successful because he was able to talk about what technology means to every day people’s lives.

“A lot of people didn’t live in Silicon Valley — like me — but were incredibly interested in what’s the new stuff that’s going to change the world,” Cashmore told Here & Now. “We’re in the middle of this information revolution. It’s kind of like the industrial revolution, you know, every hundred years or so you get this massive wave that comes through and changes absolutely everything. And I was able to talk about it in a way that an outsider would talk about it, and try and make it accessible.”

The next big thing

Mashable has been successful in predicting what the next big thing will be in technology. Cashmore predicts “the next devices that will change consumption will be smaller and smaller.”

Cashmore points to the iWatch from Apple, that would be a smaller, subtler way of connecting people to one another and organizing one’s life. But the beauty of technology is that it’s hard to predict in advance how these devices will be used.

“When these things come out, they evolve new use cases that you hadn’t thought of,” Cashmore said. “Who would have thought that the mobile phone would have become used for so many different things — that you could have so many millions of apps and that you could virtually do anything on it, right? And that it would become so powerful that it would change absolutely every industry.”

More communication

Technology will only tend toward keeping people more and more connected, which Cashmore says is generally a good thing.

“More communication is better,” Cashmore said. “The more we interact not only do we become more tolerant of new ideas and different ways of thinking, we also create more new ideas, because what are ideas if they’re not collisions between people of different backgrounds.”

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Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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