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Sarah Firisen

Sarah Firisen

Sarah Firisen was born in London, England but has lived in New York for 30 years. She has two daughters Anya and Sasha. She has undergraduate and graduate degrees in Philosophy. Sarah's had a variety of roles over her career, most in and around technology, but the thread through them all has been her passion for helping organizations and their people to deliver on and tell their disruption stories. A strategic, creative innovator and storyteller, Sarah is a passionate technologist and very interested in the societal impacts of emerging technologies. Email: [email protected]

Zooming our way to better health – the future of the doctor’s visit

Posted on Monday, Mar 1, 2021 1:30AMMonday, March 1, 2021 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen I just spent two months living on the Caribbean island of Grenada. It’s a wonderful place with a somewhat antiquated healthcare system. To visit Grenada, I had to have a negative PCR test within 72 hours of flying. I was planning to go to a clinic and wait in line, which I’d…

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One good thing about COVID-19, we finally got the tech to work

Posted on Monday, Jan 4, 2021 1:40AMMonday, January 4, 2021 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen This Christmas, I stayed in a Marriott in the town where my kids live. Like most people, my business and personal travel has mostly ground to a halt in the last 9 months. So I was pleasantly surprised by the check-in experience the hotel provided me to allow for social distancing. I’m…

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Innovation in a time of COVID-19

Posted on Monday, Nov 9, 2020 1:30AMMonday, November 9, 2020 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen When I was in my twenties, I didn’t own handbags, I didn’t even have a wallet, I used to stuff my keys and money into a pocket. This was easy when I had one credit card and not a lot of cash. But as I got older, I began to see the…

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A brave new world to live and work in

Posted on Monday, Sep 14, 2020 1:30AMMonday, September 14, 2020 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen I’ve telecommuted from home for many years now. Before COVID-19, I would rarely turn my camera on when I was on video chats. And if I did, I’d make sure to put makeup on and look somewhat professional and put together from at least the waist up. But since lockdown started in…

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Taking virtual education beyond Zoom: How VR and AR can help

Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2020 1:10AMMonday, July 20, 2020 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen I was a Philosophy major in University from 1988-1991 (degrees are 3 years in the UK). To be accurate in British terms, I read Philosophy. Some friends and I would socialize with a group of our professors. We’d often talk and drink late into the night in the living room of one…

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When the Real World turns Virtual…the new reality of office life?

Posted on Monday, May 25, 2020 1:20AMMonday, May 25, 2020 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen Two months ago, COVID lockdown was still new; in the US it was horrific that 3,000 people had died and  I wrote about some possible longer-term technology innovation that might come out of  this crisis.  Fast forward to today and the US has just passed an unimaginable, grim milestone, 100,000 dead. And while…

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Technology in a time of Covid-19

Posted on Monday, Mar 30, 2020 1:20AMMonday, March 30, 2020 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen I’ve been telecommuting on and off for over 17 years. I first started working from home because I’d moved 150 miles away from the company I’d been contracting for over the previous 4 years. Back then, I worked in a small team that was part of a larger team in a huge…

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The Sephora Syndrome

Posted on Monday, Feb 3, 2020 1:25AMMonday, February 3, 2020 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen First off, let me just get this out of the way: we share too much data about ourselves knowingly with companies and they collect, use and share even more than most of us are aware of (read through those lengthy privacy notices recently?). And unless you live in Europe with its pretty…

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The tale of Joanne the Roomba, Or, does work have to be such…work?

Posted on Monday, Dec 9, 2019 1:10AMMonday, December 9, 2019 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen When I moved into a new, larger apartment with my boyfriend a couple of months ago, I decided to buy a Roomba, robot vacuum cleaner. I named her Joanne. I love Joanne, my boyfriend is less of a fan. He finds her hour and a half or so a day moving around…

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The future of knowledge

Posted on Monday, Oct 14, 2019 1:10AMMonday, October 14, 2019 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen This morning I rode an Uber to JFK from my apartment in Queens. I do this regularly and normally don’t worry too much about it, but this morning, there was just something about the driver that concerned me, though I couldn’t put my finger on what. But every time his, very loud,…

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Governing in black and white

Posted on Monday, Aug 19, 2019 1:20AMMonday, August 19, 2019 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen I’ve just come back from a lovely vacation in Ireland. We did a lot of driving and usually had the radio on, often to RTE, the state run station (the equivalent to the BBC in the UK). At least once an hour an advertisement would come on reminding people that they need…

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The jerk in the machine

Posted on Monday, Jun 24, 2019 1:20AMMonday, June 24, 2019 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen Many years ago, my father and I were at a backyard BBQ in New Jersey hosted by someone we barely knew, I think they were somehow connected to my step-mother. At some point, the topic of flag burning came up and, before we knew it, we were engaged in an extremely heated…

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The digital divide – when even the beggars need smartphones

Posted on Monday, Apr 29, 2019 1:20AMMonday, April 29, 2019 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen I was standing in Penn Station the other day waiting for a train and someone passed through begging for change. I’ve lived in New York City long enough that I don’t just start taking my wallet out and going through it in crowded public spaces, but beyond that, I don’t have change.…

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In God and AI we trust?

Posted on Monday, Mar 4, 2019 1:30AMMonday, March 4, 2019 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen My seventy-something year old uncle, who still uses a flip phone, was talking to me a while ago about self-driving cars. He was adamant that he didn’t want to put his fate in the hands of a computer, he didn’t trust them. My question to him was “but you trust other people…

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A future without boredom

Posted on Monday, Jan 7, 2019 1:10AMMonday, January 7, 2019 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen “I’m bored!”. How often I would whine that as a kid. How often my kids would whine that to me. “Go out and play” my mother would reply. I probably said some version of the same thing to my kids. And I usually would go out and play. I’d go to the…

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Amazon is disrupting the publishing world….again

Posted on Monday, Nov 12, 2018 1:40AMWednesday, January 30, 2019 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen Books have always mattered to me. When I was single in my 20s, I mentioned to my then boss that whenever I first visited a date’s apartment I would look at his bookshelves. He didn’t get it. Why did it matter what books a person read? I tried to explain that for…

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Telling your disruption story from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to the Slopes of Enlightenment

Posted on Monday, Sep 17, 2018 12:15AMMonday, September 17, 2018 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen Many years ago in 1991, in my first job out of college, I worked for a small investment bank. By 1994, I was working in its IT department. One of my tasks was PC support and I had a modem attached to my computer so that I could connect to Compuserve  for…

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The automation all around us

Posted on Monday, Jul 23, 2018 12:20AMMonday, July 23, 2018 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen I have a friend who is a travel agent. The days when we all talked on the phone to travel agents in order to book any travel are long gone. These days, for the most part, travel agents, the actual human ones, deal with business travel and high end travel for elites.…

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The Disruption Ecosystem

Posted on Monday, May 28, 2018 1:15AMWednesday, January 30, 2019 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen 30 years ago I moved from the UK to New York City and I gave up my car. I had mixed feelings about doing so at the time – I was only 21 and driving was still a novelty and an expression of independence. When I moved out of New York City…

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Digital remembrance of things past

Posted on Monday, Apr 2, 2018 12:10AMSaturday, January 19, 2019 by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen My grandmother had 7 sisters (and a couple of brothers who died young and none of us remember), my great-grandmother had 10 siblings. This past week, I attended reunions with 22 of the descendents of these ancestors, on two continents (New York and London). At these joyful family gatherings we told stories,…

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