Welcome to the new rhythm of bcd-W — the story magazine from IWBFD Studios, connecting business, city, and the dots between them, worldwide. Every Wednesday, we bring you the city as it actually is: the people, the experiments, and the tensions shaping urban life right now. Here's what's new, and what we've been reading and writing this week.
bcd-W Has Been Redesigned — A New Rhythm for a Living Magazine
bcd-W stands for something simple and expansive: business, city, dots — connect Worldwide. It's the story magazine of IWBFD Studios, built to trace the lines between people, places, and ideas across the globe. And now, it's changing shape.
Until now, bcd-W Current Today published daily as a newsletter. Going forward, Current Today lives where it belongs — as an always-on web platform, updated continuously as the stories of today's cities unfold.
What arrives in your inbox changes too. We now publish weekly, in two editions, each delivered through both our magazine newsletter and our LinkedIn newsletter:
Wednesday — The City As It Is. The present-day city and the stories inside it: local innovation, communities, the people making urban life work.
Weekend — The City As It Could Be. The future city and the stories inside it: the frameworks, experiments, and imagined places we'll need next.
Same DNA now with a cleaner cadence: read the daily flow on the web, and let the weekly editions bring you the signal, twice a week, wherever you follow us.
Also This Week
Boston vs. Hangzhou: Why the Sequential Innovation Model Is Losing to the Integrated One
The old playbook — research first, then commercialize, then scale — is being outrun. We look at why cities that fuse those stages into one continuous loop are pulling ahead, and what that means for anyone still betting on the linear path.
The Seed and the Soil: Why MICE Becomes More Valuable the More Powerful AI Gets
As AI automates more of what we do, the physical gathering — the conference, the handshake, the room — becomes scarcer and more valuable, not less. A case for why meetings and events are the soil that the seed of technology still needs.
The Island That Was Once Independent Is Running Every Experiment a City-State Needs
An island that was once its own nation is quietly testing everything a modern city-state would need to stand on its own again — from energy to governance. What happens when a place rehearses independence in full view?
Osaka Has Been a Merchant City for 400 Years
The person starting a business here at 52 is not an anomaly — they are the tradition. A look at how a four-century merchant culture makes late-in-life entrepreneurship feel like heritage, not risk, and what aging cities everywhere can learn from it.
Breaking Barriers, Building Family — Santiago Guzmán and the Language of Trust
Across a table in Bogotá, a former Colombian Air Force helicopter engineer told us how he built Latin America's largest crypto festival — not to chase Bitcoin's price, but to shield farmers, retirees, and students from the scammers reaching them first. Crypto Latin Fest became a school, then a family stretching from Colombia to Korea — a living example of business, city, and dots connecting worldwide.
That's the city as it is this week.
On Saturday, we turn toward the city as it could be — our Weekend Edition on future cities, in your inbox and on LinkedIn. See you then.
— Paul, Founder & Storyteller at IWBFD Studios