Allan Tate, a member of the CIO Symposium’s speaker / panel team, recently attended Pulse 2014 as part of a one week IBM Redbooks residency program. This program gathers thought leaders from around the world, and prepares them to be authors for IBM’s Thoughts on Cloud blog. This year, the program was run during the Pulse conference, so the residents also covered the sessions using other social media channels, including Twitter (hashtag #ibmpulse). In this first post to the blog, Tate reflects on the conference from the point of view of the book, The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, considering how our times will be shaped by technology that is exponential, digital, and combinatorial.