So who do you trust? Given the decline in trust and the rise of protest movements like the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, the chances are that you trust nobody. So how can we rebuild trust in a world where The Protestor just got made Person of the Year and every traditional source of political and economic authority seems to be in crisis?

The person I most trust about trust is Robert Hurley, a Fordham university business professor who is the author of The Decision to Trust and one of the world’s leading authorities on building high-trust organizations. As Hurley told me when we talked on Skype last week, there is both a generational decline in trust as well as a decline in the actual trustworthiness of leaders and institutions. So what to do? According to Hurley, it’s first recognizing the viral nature of trust in today’s digital world, and then – learning from trustworthy brands like Amazon and Apple – actually delivering on one’s commitments.

If there is a lesson from Robert Hurley to entrepreneurs it’s to beware of the Netflix syndrome. One mistake can ruin a brand’s reputation and destroy its trust with consumers. So operate in a perpetual crisis mode, he recommends. And don’t over-promise. In our radically transparent world, Hurley advises, honesty is really the only way to guarantee the trust of the consumer.

Here’s an interesting little project that, while it’s unlikely to grow into a major product, nevertheless demonstrates the potential of alternative interfaces. Bruno Zamborlin’s Mogees (an abbreviation of “mosaicing gestural surface”) takes input from a contact microphone and analyzes it to determine the placement and direction of gestures on any surface through which vibrations can be detected.

I wrote a while back about how the “finger on a glass touchscreen” wasn’t the be-all and end-all of user interaction. The stylus, for example, has much life left in it. And interfaces we haven’t even thought of will emerge as well. Why not a puck that turns your table into a touchable surface?

It really has to be seen to be understood:

Naturally this demonstration doesn’t speak to the practicality of using it to, say, scroll down a webpage or control a cursor. But don’t you kind of get tired of resting your hand on your laptop, inching your fingers along a patch of plastic or glass to move the next paragraph into view, or some such action? I like the idea of taking gestures off of the device itself and moving them into its vicinity.

And objections to this particular system are ready enough: how would ambient vibrations and music affect it? What about typing? And so on.

But the point isn’t to take this device and apply it in your mind to something for which it wasn’t designed (the Mogees is a sound creation and control device). It’s to take the idea of taking what you have and doing something new with it. What if you could put your iPhone on the table and, if it rang, tap the table once to answer, tap twice for speakerphone, put your whole hand down to silence it, etc?

This particular item may be more suited to Theramin-style musical noodling, but it descends from a larger concept of disengaging the controls for a device from the device itself — of improvising the medium of interaction but retaining the content.

[via Extremetech]

This week’s guest on Speaking Of is no stranger to the world of television. She’s Jesse Draper, creator and host of online talk show, “The Valley Girl Show.” The show profiles entrepreneurs and businesspeople, but in a format not often seen in Silicon Valley: on a pink-themed set, Draper draws her guests out of their shells in fun, light-hearted interviews that focus less on numbers and more on what the guests are like outside of their work lives.

A Silicon Valley native, Draper grew up around entrepreneurs. Her inspiration for The Valley Girl Show came from watching her father’s friends – her heroes – being grilled in television interviews, and noticing that no one was talking about the fun, creative sides of these entrepreneurs. She set out to create an entertaining business talk show, decided to play off of the stereotypical Southern California “valley girl” persona, and ran with the pink.

Now, most guests of The Valley Girl Show know to expect more than a traditional interview. Draper has hula hooped with MC Hammer, eaten escargot with Elon Musk, and played Guitar Hero with the game’s creator. Next up for the show that ends every episode with a dance party: Draper hopes to become the Ellen DeGeneres of business, broadening the show’s appeal to non-businesspeople in the hopes of inspiring anyone to start a company.

As always, we end on Draper’s advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. She’s going places with her “pink talk show,” so take a look as she explains how to take a leap and start a business.