http://www.ted.com What do you think of people in poverty? Maybe what Jessica Jackley once did: "they" need "our" help, in the form of a few coins in a jar. The co-founder of Kiva.org talks about how her attitude changed -- and how her work with microloans has brought new power to people who live on a few dollars a day.
Wise words, indeed. Soon, maybe they can be applied to the USA , as well ;)
China's censorship can never defeat the internet | Ai Weiwei | Comment is free | The Guardian
Censorship is saying: “I’m the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.” But the internet is like a tree that is growing. The people will always have the last word – even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper. When I was young I became rebellious. My hair got longer and, right before I was about to cut it, my parents said: “Cut your hair: it’s too long”. So then I thought I would keep it for a while, and it became very long. A whole generation of young people are like that now – different from the values of their parents, who just wanted to survive and make money. China may seem quite successful in its controls, but it has only raised the water level. It’s like building a dam: it thinks there is more water so it will build it higher. But every drop of water is still in there. It doesn’t understand how to let the pressure out. It builds up a way to maintain control and push the problem to the next generation.
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Twitter: @gleonhard
Maybe technology will lead us back to being more human, eventually?
Arianna Huffington On The Rise Of Empathy In America | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation
"We are on the cusp of an epic shift,” wrote Jeremy Rifkin in his 2010 book The Empathic Civilization. “The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy.” He makes the case that as technology is increasingly connecting us to one another, we need to understand what the goal of all this connectivity is, and allow humanity to see itself as an extended family living in an interconnected world. The innovators I’ve listed, along with countless others, are the drivers of that worldview..."
This is the slideshow from yesterday's SwissNex event in San Francisco. Hopefully we will have a video available, soon, as well (check my Youtube Channel)
"Data is exploding all around us: every 'like,' check-in, tweet, click, and play is being logged and mined. Many data-centric companies such as Google are already paying us for our data by providing more or less free services. Is data the new oil? TFA CEO Gerd Leonhard leads fellow thinkers Stowe Boyd, Jamais Cascio, and Andreas Weigend in an exchange on where data is going, and how we are going along with it. Data will become a key currency, as it is a virtually limitless, non-rival, and exponentially growing good. Do we need regulations or trust frameworks to deal with it? Can data really be safeguarded in an entirely free-market system governed by commercial interests? What will Generation AO (always-on) share with whom, when, where, and how? And if data is the new oil, how do we avoid wars and global conflicts fought over it...?"
Writes John Battelle: "In seminars, writings, conferences, and speaking gigs around the world over the past couple of years, I’ve started using a phrase when asked my opinion of what a brand’s social strategy might be, in particular when it comes to Facebook. The context is nuanced (I’m a fan of integrating Facebook into your brand efforts), but the point is simple: If you are a brand, publisher, or independent voice, don’t put your taproot into the soils of Facebook. Plant it in the independent web. (A bit more on this can be found here).
Now, that doesn’t mean “don’t use Facebook,” not at all. I think Facebook is an extraordinarily important part of the Internet ecosystem, and having a robust presence there is a critical part of any brand (or company’s) strategy.
But Facebook is a for profit, advertising and data-driven company. If you seat mission critical portions of your business inside its walls, you are driving value to Facebook – and you are presuming the trade, in terms of traffic and virality, will come out on balance favoring you. I wouldn’t count on that. Facebook will always have more data than you do about how consumers use the Facebook platform, and will always be able to leverage that data more effectively...."
John is making some important points here: yes, use Facebook to socialize and contextualize your brand, but don't just plant your trees in Facebook's increasingly walled garden.
Just found this really interesting and thoughtful piece via DataMotive (high-lights, and some links added by me)
"Adam Smith makes a strong and eloquent argument why these silo’s are erroneously seen as a profitable system (by those in control) yet limit the growth of the wealth for all. A more liberal economy would open the door for more specialization and therefore a way higher productivity, for more competition and therefore the push to innovate. More specialization requires a larger “ecosystem” to sell to and to source from in order to get what you need to thrive, aka a large geography/economy to trade with without hindrance. ( The key enabler is trust: without trust the edifice collapses, something we painfully are reminded of these days). The enormous benefit is a much larger wealth for everyone, lifting the boat to unforeseen heights: the title is “The Wealth of Nations”, not “The Wealth of Individuals” and for a very good reason.
This “liberal” (relatively to what was practice in the 1700′s) view is nowadays something like the 11th Commandment, yet in his day and age it must have been revolutionary. Scary for the powers that be: how can anyone believe that relinquishing power and embracing uncertainty will turn out to be a good thing? More precisely, turn out to be a good thing for you yourself? The more amazing it is that this book has been so influential, that it marks a turning point where this more open economic structure became accepted as a generator of wealth for everyone.
We need a new Adam Smith nowadays, one that explains these old maxims again but now framed for the information economy. In my opinion we are still in the 1700′s of the information economy : copyright laws, intellectual property laws and patent laws take us where no law has gone before, only to carve out copyright guilds, create absolute IP monopolies and sustain patent oligarchies that wage ridiculous battles. A mistaken belief that information has monetizeable value and therefore needs to be locked up. The historic lesson seems forgotten that oligarchies and monopolies stifle growth, that we only can grow by building upon each others efforts. Sharing and trading of (in this case) information will lead to an explosion of productivity and wealth for everyone..."
This is as good of a summary as I anything I could provide: in order to prosper in the future, the 'wealth' of nations- and the 'wealth' i.e. scope of the commons - must matter more than the wealth of individuals (or indeed, individual companies or organizations) - we must move from Ego to Eco (as in... networked, not (just) as in 'green) - see this video of my latest talk on this topic.
I recently was invited to chime in on this snappy collection of 2020-predictions done by Amy-Mae Elliott at Mashable, along with some of my peers and esteemed futurist colleagues such as Ian Pearson, Jim Carroll and Dave Evans. Take a look. Here is my piece:
Connecting the Cloud With the Crowd
"By 2020 everything will have moved into the cloud: content, media, health records, education. Connecting the cloud with the crowd will become a huge business. Related to this, access will replace ownership in almost all forms of media. Future media 'consumers' will simply have music, films, TV shows, games, etc. in the cloud, paid 'with attention,' i.e., advertising and data mining (Facebook cloud), subscription (Apple new iTV), and bundles (i.e., with mobile operators). Most importantly, many consumers will not pay for 'content' per se, but for all the added values around the content, such as curation, packaging, design, social connections, interfaces, apps, etc. Finally, all media that is not social and mobile will shrink; all that combines with their current models will prosper."
Thanks to Amy at Mashable - well done!
Read more on my content-cloud ideas. Check out my Future of Content book, via Amazon Kindle.
Absolutely agreed. This is a huge powershift. Get ready to be disrupted. Read more here.
"London, 16 February 2012 - New figures from a study sponsored by Ricoh show that by 2020 the impact of new technology in the workplace will force businesses into a new era of decentralisation. The research , conducted by the Economist Intelligence unit, shows that 63 per cent of business leaders predict a shift towards a more decentralised business model and that responsibility for business decision making will move from centralised management boards towards individual employees. “We believe that businesses will be more process orientated, ensuring that critical information is more centralised and data can be received, stored and retrieved by employees. This will mean decision making can be less hierarchical and allow employees, who are collaborating directly with customers, to make important business decisions, without delay,” says David Mills, Executive Vice President, Operations, Ricoh Europe.
Supporting closer customer collaboration is essential as by 2020, business leaders believe that customers will be the main source of new product or service ideas. Furthermore, 86 per cent of business leaders agree that customers will become an integral part of internal decision-making and that project teams will typically include people from outside the organisation such as customers and business partners... In the future, there will also be a need to consider how experts outside the organisation can input and retrieve information to act on behalf of the business. 85.7 per cent of business leaders agree that project teams will typically include members from outside the organisation (for example, customers, partners, communities)... Mills says, “In the new era of decentralisation it will be essential for businesses to do more to adapt to the digital world, especially as critical information will need to be accessed by employees, many of whom will be working virtually or outside the business..."
Via TFA's chief curator Stowe Boyd • Why Companies Need Futurists, Not Analysts, via FastCompany: Roger Martin, the author of The Design Of Business (on my reading list), makes a great case for futurists:
"Most companies try to be innovative, but the enemy of innovation is the mandate to “prove it.” You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning. You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning..."
Comment: I like this argument ;)
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So true - Don hits the nail on the head: read this interview at Forbes.com. I blogged this before but it's crucial.
“Throughout the 20th century, we created wealth through vertically integrated corporations. Now, we create wealth through networks. We are at a turning point in human history, where the industrial age has finally run out of gas.” – Don Tapscott, Author of Macro-Wikinomics
This is a crucial meme for the next 3-5 years, and one I have written about many times (influenced, among many others, by the great Kevin Kelly - just watch this video), see:
Shaping the networked society (video)
The future of music publishing (impact mag 2008)
The future of IPR and copyright (slideshow)
... and much more
Imagine what this will do to education, marketing and content / media... Eta: 3-5 years.
Behind I.B.M.'s Big Predictions - NYTimes.com
– Powerful mobile devices, capable of precise language translation, will belong to 80 percent of the
world’s population. While this is nearly intuitive, given the ever-lower cost of phones, the real breakthrough will be ubiquitous voice recognition and translation capabilities, which will make the phones highly useful to large populations who are illiterate, or who have languages that aren’t easily written with keypads. (A question is: What would this mean for world markets and politics when ordinary people can easily communicate with each other despite speaking different languages?)
Some good thinking here, below. But still, I wonder if 'exponential growth' is really what we need, going forward, and this is precisely the kind of operating paradigm that worries me about the singularity movement. Any thoughts, anyone?
What Does Technology Look Like in an Age of Abundance? | Endless Innovation | Big Think
"In their new book Abundance (coming to a tablet near you on February 21), Peter Diamandis (Chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation and Chairman & Co-Founder of Singularity University) and co-author Steven Kotler offer a handful of reasons why the future is better than you think. One key reason is the Rising Billion – the world’s newest one billion, empowered by mobile technology, are about to come online for the first time ever. An average smart phone user in Sub-Saharan Africa now has more computing power than the U.S. President did 25 years ago. Another key reason is the appearance of the DIY Innovator, capable of transforming off-the-shelf technologies into an instrument for radical social change in areas that once were the exclusive domain of NGOs and governments. As Diamandis points out, the key to a future of Abundance is the ability of technology to generate exponential growth, rather than linear growth. Linear growth is what gives you something like Angry Birds for Facebook. Exponential growth is what gives you a radically new technology platform capable of changing the world. In a world now measured in terms of billions of potential consumers, iterating 30 times (2^30) with an exponential technology takes you to that magic one billion mark. As a proponent of the coming Singularity, Diamandis understands how exponential change in one field - such as computing - can lead to exponential change in fields ranging from energy to biotechnology to artificial intelligence"
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Brands are publishers, the people formerly known as consumers can go direct. Welcome to the
networked society;)
Brands Want Content Curator Jobs | Digiday
"There’s little doubt that brands can amass sizable audiences of their own nowadays. Show me a chief marketing officer who isn’t interested in an owned, earned, paid media model — often in that order — and I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. It’s been four and a half years since Nike marketing chief Trevor Edwards plaintively said, “We’re not in the business of keeping media companies alive.” Translation: We can build direct connections with audiences, thank you very much. The devil is in the details. Brands aren’t set up to be publishers. They don’t necessarily understand the editorial process or have the stomach for the length of time it takes to build an audience. Take AmEx’s OpenForum, for instance. It took four years to get 1 million people aboard, and now it gets about 150,000 unique visitors per month. They have the resources to build and cultivate an audience others may not. Additionally, OpenForum was put on the shoulders of the end-user: small-business owners. These business owners are able to communicate and share ideas with one another, but they must be American Express Cardmembers. AmEx recognized the need to provide small-business owners with a connection platform and information that will help their business succeed..."
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