The Ultimate Killer App

How Technology Succeeds

"Creativity is contagious. Pass it on."

- Albert Einstein

"Creativity is all about connecting things."

- Steve Jobs

What makes a technology a "killer app"? That Holy Grail of tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

To answer that question, we first have to understand exactly what defines a 'killer app'.

In The Ultimate Killer App! How Technology Succeeds, Dr. Harrington analyzes different Information Age technologies and applications that have reached killer app status - such as Google search, Facebook, Wikipedia, the mp3 and smartphone - to discover those qualities that put them on the same world-changing status as fire, the wheel, the pencil, the printing press, the telegraph, the automobile, etc.

Examining a wealth of scholarly studies, the author draws out the interaction between human psychology, health, and technology across creative endeavors like music to illustrate how creativity and social connection help satisfy our most fundamental human needs. What he finds is what great innovators and inventors perceive intuitively, that the technologies that enhance our innate human qualities are those that change our world in the most profound ways.

Dr. Harrington then applies this analysis on a greater scale to confirm how the adoption of successful technologies has shaped the institutions of modern civilization: our exchange economy, our educational system, our politics, and our cultural evolution.

This little book is about more than killer apps, it’s about how technology helps make us more human. At the origin of that life, nature developed THE ultimate killer app. Perhaps you can guess what it is.