If you are in Sao Paulo Nov 5, please be sure to join me for this event. The video below outlines some of the topics I am planning to talk about. See you there!
Entries categorized "Future of Journalism"
October 26, 2012
October 23, 2012
October 20, 2012
October 05, 2012
Webinar invitation: Privacy versus Publicy - the next 3 years. Public debate between Author Andrew Keen and Futurist Gerd Leonhard (October 26 2012)
Please join me for this debate - should be great fun. Andrew Keen - often called the Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley - is a long-time colleague of mine and even though we don't agree on a lot of things he puts forth about in his 2 most recent books (The Cult of the Amateur, and the newest Digital Vertigo) I respect his work a lot - don't miss this; sparks are sure to fly.
Attendance is limited to 100 people so sign up early (and be sure to log-in at least 20 mins before showtime:)
Privacy versus Publicy: the next 3 years. A public debate with Author Andrew Keen and Futurist Gerd Leonhard
Fri, Oct 26, 2012 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM CEST i.e. 12 noon EST, 9am PST, 11 pm Sinagpore etc
Gerd Leonhard aka MediaFuturist is a futurist, keynote speaker,
author and CEO of TheFuturesAgency, based in Switzerland. He is (mostly)
a proponent of what he calls 'The Networked Society', the SoLoMo
internet (social, local, mobile) and freemium business models; and
foresees great opportunities in the global empowerment of creators and
consumers powered by digital technology. His latest book is 'the future
of content and can be found on Amazon see http://www.gerd.fm/focbook
Andrew and Gerd will present some of their key insights for approx.
10-15 minutes each, and will then debate the most crucial issues such as
what privacy means in a connected world, whether 'the crowds' are
actually being empowered or not, what the future role of social media
will be, what the true meaning of a networked society is, and what the
media landscape will look like, in the future.
Get ready for some serious sparring - which will also involve the
participants, both via messages and chat as well as via audio
intervention (upon invitation only).
This seminar will be recorded - please be aware of this fact if you
are invited to speak during the session. You can view some of the
previous recordings here: http://gerd.fm/youtubewebi
This session is limited to 100 people so please sign up early; most
importantly please log-in at least 30 mins prior to the starting time.
More about Andrew:
http://www.ajkeen.com/bio/
https://twitter.com/ajkeen
"Andrew Keen has found the off switch for Silicon Valley's reality
distortion field. With a cold eye and a cutting wit, he reveals the
grandiose claims of our new digital plutocrats to be little more than
self-serving cant. Digital Vertigo provides a timely and welcome reminder that having substance is more important than being transparent.
-- Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
More about Gerd
Leonhard
http://www.gerdfuturist.com ... the canvas:)
CEO www.thefuturesagency.com
The Future of Business blog http://www.futureof.biz/
Videos: http://www.youtube.com/gleonhard
http://www.twitter.com/gleonhard
http://about.me/mediafuturist
September 03, 2012
For my readers in Brazil and Portugal: Conteúdo 2.0: a ‘proteção’ está no modelo de negócio
Thanks to Paula Neves and Flavio Gut
Gerd Leonhard: Conteúdo 2.0: ‘proteção’ está no modelo de negócio (Content 2.0: protection is in the business model) e não na tecnologia (pensamentos sobre o futuro da venda de conteúdo).
Abastecido pelas agitações na indústria da música e, finalmente, com a transformação muito rápida dos livros para o formato digital, há bastante debate em torno do fato das pessoas compartilharem habitualmente isto é, redistribuírem conteúdo digital sem que os usuários paguem por isso. Como se pode monetizar o conteúdo se a cópia é gratuita? Essa pergunta é uma questão chave em todos os sentidos, seja com a música, com livros digitais, noticiários, editoração, TV ou filmes.
Há o medo, claro, de que a partir do momento que um item digital foi comprado por uma pessoa, ele pode ser facilmente encaminhado para qualquer um se estiver num formato aberto, assim reduzindo significantemente a possibilidade de que outra pessoa pague dinheiro real por ele também (claro que o mesmo também é verídico para conteúdo digital supostamente trancado ou protegido – só demora um pouco mais). Não ter mais controle sobre a distribuição = não ter mais dinheiro. Certo?
Read more here
Check out my Kindle book 'The Future of Content'
July 11, 2012
June 22, 2012
Join us on July 19th: free webinar on the Future of Media - Mobile, Social, Cloud... and Paid? With Futurists Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard
Fellow media futurist and Futures Agency colleague Ross Dawson and me are delighted to announce this free webinar on July 19, 2012, at 2pm CET, 1pm UK, 8 am EST, 8pm Singapore & HongKong, 7pm Jakarta time. Attendance is limited to 100 people so sign up early. Emphasis will be on discussion and questions rather than presentations.
The Future of Media: Mobile, Social, Cloud... and Paid? With Futurists Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard
Join us for a webinar on Jul 19, 2012 at 2:00 PM CEST.
Register now!
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/797gl/register/8547917098258049792
Both Ross and Gerd have spend the past 10 years researching, writing and speaking about the future of media & content, and have worked with over 150 clients in 27 countries on many of the key topics such as monetization and new, web-native business models, curation and filtering, the global shift to mobile devices and what it really means for media, the dramatic convergence of Internet and television, the move from media ownership to cloud access (such as in books or print), the future of advertising (and whether it can fund media productions), crowd-sourcing, UGC and social media, and much more. In this free webinar, Ross and Gerd will present 5 key points on the future of media (print, tv, films, music etc) each - approx. 20 minutes in total - and then take questions from the participants (via the chat functions or twitter). The goal is to have an in-depth, ad-hoc conversation that involves the participants as much as possible. You can also ask questions beforehand, via @gleonhard or @rossdawson #futmedia
PLEASE NOTE: attendance is limited to 100 people - sign up early:)
Find out more about Ross Dawson:
http://rossdawson.com/
https://twitter.com/#!/rossdawson
http://www.youtube.com/user/rossdaht2/videos
Find out more about Gerd Leonhard
http://www.mediafuturist.com/
https://twitter.com/#!/gleonhard
http://www.youtube.com/gleonhard
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
May 17, 2012
Words of Wisdom from the World E-Reading Congress 2012 (good review of my talk and preso)
Roger Tagholm at Publishing Perspectives just published a nice review of the World eReading Congress in London, on Tuesday, where I had the pleasure of doing the opening keynote. The 6MB low-res PDF can be downloaded via this link: Download Ereading congress london gerd Leonhard (note: this is quick version, better resolution soon on Slideshare).
Here are the best snippets from Roger's review (and the rest of it is a good overview, as well!)
By Roger Tagholm
"Access not ownership, relationships not transactions and concerns over who owns the channel to market – these were some of the themes of the second World E-Reading Congress which began in London on Monday. Once again, organizers Terrapin had assembled a powerful line-up of speakers who provided a one-stop take on what is happening in the digital space. From “haptic technology” (from the Greek Haptikos, “pertaining to the sense of touch”) to “lean back” readers, this was also the place to get a jargon update and phrase fix.
The View from a Futurist
Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard kicked things off. He believes the debate will soon be about access, not ownership and said that “for those over 30 it’s very hard to understand this switch. There will be some ownership, but it won’t grow. With music, iTunes sales are flat, but streaming is growing. It will happen with books. A Spotify for books will come. If a student wants 300 books, he’ll buy a three-year subscription”. Small examples of that already exist, but Leonhard means on a mass scale, such as that being contemplated in Brazil “where the government is looking to buy 100 million devices for students so they don’t have to buy the physical books”.
He believes there is more to the future than walled gardens and that “humans need meaning, not just cool technology. In the end, meaning is money. Apple has meaning, even though it is a totally walled garden — an oligopoly, a cult.” During the next three to five years he thinks we will see telemedia convergence. “The telecoms industry will realize that it will have to make deals with ISP operators to sell content — so that if you buy this SIM card, for example, you can get ten books.
“For the consumer, access to content will become much cheaper. We cannot force the consumer to pay the same for digital as physical. Technology owners reads more, so why penalize them? We need to innovate now to keep them.”
Sharing, he maintained, should be “non-negotiable. Sharing does not create economic damage.” Publishers must engage with their customers; attitudes to piracy must be rethought (“piracy happens when motivation meets opportunity”); and publishers must build value around content “because payment works if the context is right — if there is a reason, people will pay.”
Added note: "Duncan Edwards, President and CEO of Hearst Magazines International, took an entirely different view on pricing. “We have discovered that, because of the ease of use, people are prepared to pay as much — or even more — for the digital versions of our magazines.”
Really? Not sure that maybe that have just discovered their own desire to get as much as before, and found some willing fans - rest assured, this won't last. Look at iTunes and the music industry:) People will not continue to buy songs for €1 every time they are interested. Unsustainable, imho:=)
April 05, 2012
My contribution to Mashable's 9 Bold Predictions for the Digital World of 2020
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.
October 24, 2011
Announcing my new Kindle book "The Future of Content"
Today is a very big day for me. My new Kindle book "The Future of Content" just went online at Amazon, and is already gaining a lot of traction. You can view a very short video greeting about the book on my GerdTube channel (Youtube:)
Of course I would be very happy if you would consider buying the book for yourself (only $3.90, Kindle-only) but beyond that it would be really great if you could help me spread the word via rating and / or 'liking' the book on the Amazon.com page, tweeting about it or just forwarding this mail to some friends that may be interested.
As you probably know, I have published my last 3 books as free pdfs (which are quite popular) but really wanted to try something new with this book; after all reading on the Kindle is a much better experience than reading a PDF, and thus is, to quote Kevin Kelly, one of those "New Generatives" :)
"The future of content" will also be available in dead-tree-versions aka print, via my Lulu store, soon - please stay tuned. Happy reading!
Gerd Leonhard
(Media Futurist and CEO of The Futures Agency),
Basel / Switzerland
http://twitter.com/#!/gleonhard
My public Amazon / Kindle profile
(sharing all my book highlights there)
Update October 25 2011: this nice review may be helpful:
Increases brain power for content creators, October 25, 2011This review is from: The Future of Content (Kindle Edition)
"I challenge you to expand your brain and read this book. What Gerd Leonhard is always doing is informing the global brain (or the collective brain) in ways that help us all get where we're trying to go. He builds the buildings in front of us.
This collection points toward several compelling answers for content creators. As a writer who is already swimming in the changing currents of "content," I found it intensely informative. Leonhard shores up my courage to continue embracing a digital world without DRM, and ebook prices "for the masses." He makes the all-important concept of curation crystal clear. If you are providing any kind of content in print or on the web, it's relevant. If you want to stay on the front edge of content creation and publishing, it's basic. I'm making this book mandatory reading for my epublishing circles"
Amazon Kindle German Store
Amazon Kindle French Store
Amazon Kindle UK Store
ABOUT "THE FUTURE OF CONTENT"
Futurist Gerd Leonhard has been writing about the future of content i.e. music, film, TV, books, newspapers, games etc, since 1998. He has published 4 books on this topic, 2 of them on music (The Future of Music, with David Kusek, and Music 2.0). For the past 10 years Leonhard has been deeply involved with many clients in various sectors of the content industry, in something like 17 countries, and it’s been a great experience, he says. “I have learned a lot, I have listened a lot, I have talked even more (most likely:) and I think I have grown to really understand the issues that face the content industries - and the creators, themselves - in the switch from physical to digital media.”
This Kindle book is a highly curated collection of the most important essays and blog posts Leonhard has written on this topic, and even though some of it was written as far back as 2007 - “I believe it still holds water years later. I have tried to only include the pieces that have real teeth. Please note that the original date of each piece is shown here in order to allow for contextual orientation.” Leonhard’s intent to publish this via the amazing Amazon Kindle platform, exclusively, and at a very low price, is to make these ideas and concepts as widely available as possible while still trying to be an example of what digital, paperless distribution can look like, going forward.
September 01, 2011
Great video by Tiffany Shlain: connected Creativity (MIPTV)
Can't wait to see her new movie. "Honoured by Newsweek as one of the "Women Shaping the 21st Century," Tiffany Shlain is an award-winning filmmaker, founder of The Webby Awards and co-founded the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Her award-winning new feature documentary " Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology" premiered at Sundance 2011. Tiffany Shlain's keynote will be followed by a screening of "Connected: An autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology" (Official Selection 2011, Sundance Film Festival)"
August 02, 2011
New video: "Friction is Fiction" explained
This video summarizes the key messages of my 2009 book "Friction is fiction" (free PDF). The bottom line is that in a networked and digital society we can no longer merely rely on FRICTION i.e. planned hurdles and carefully placed obstactles to enforce payments or otherwise get paid for something. Most traditional friction points - whether in media / content, communications / marketing or business and commerce - can now be easily bypassed (see free music streaming vs itunes, Youtube / Netflix vs cable-tv, whatsapp vs sms etc), and this trend will only accelerate. IMHO I think it will suit us better to get used to it now, i.e. we may want to lessen our dependence on friction and increase our efforts to monetize based on radical user empowerment. Think Zappos not Barnes & Noble. Be sure to watch this related video recorded at TedXWarwick on the same topic.
December 30, 2010
The Wikileads debate: Jaron Lanier's TheAtlantic piece (and some responses)
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about what my position on Wikileaks i.e. Cablegate should be. Some of the best - and also most thought-provoking - insights have come from a recent, hotly contested piece on TheAtlantic.com, written by computer scientist, virtual reality pioneer and musician Jaron Lanier (who I have met once or twice in the past).
I am not sure I agree with everything that Jaron says (in fact, I don't - I hope to publish my own take on these issues soon) but he makes some very valid points about openness and the future of the Internet that I think really merit our consideration and made me think, so I figured I should share them with you (all snippets are quotes from his piece, highlights are mine):
- "The Internet can and must be redesigned to reflect a more moderate and realistically human-centered philosophy...openness in itself, as the prime driver of events, doesn't lead to achievement or creativity.
- A sufficiently copious flood of data creates an illusion of omniscience, and that illusion can make you stupid. Another way to put this is that a lot of information made available over the internet encourages players to think as if they had a God's eye view, looking down on the whole system.
- To me, both right wing extremist leaks and Wikileaks are for the most part resurrections of old-fashioned vigilantism...vigilantism has always eroded trust and civility, but what's new online is the sterile imprimatur of a digital ideology that claims to offer automatic betterment. But if there's one lesson of history, it is that seeking power doesn't change the world. You need to change yourself along with the world. Civil disobedience is a spiritual discipline as much as anything else.
- You need to have a private sphere to be a person, or for that matter for anything creative to happen in any domain. This is the principle I described as "encapsulation" in You Are Not a Gadget.
- Imagine openness extrapolated to an extreme. What if we come to be able to read each other's thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me.
- I used to think that an open world would favor the honest and the true, and disfavor the schemers and the scammers. In moderation this idea has some value, but if privacy were to be vanquished, people would initially become dull, then incompetent, and then cease to exist. Hidden in the idea of radical openness is an allegiance to machines instead of people.
- I bring this up to say that asking whether secrets in the abstract are good or bad is ridiculous. A huge flow of data that one doesn't know how to interpret in context is either useless or worse than useless, if you let it impress you too much. A contextualized flow of data that answers a question you know how to ask can be invaluable. If we want to understand all the sides of an argument, we have to do more than copy files.
- Random leaking is no substitute for focused digging. The "everything must be free and open" ideal has nearly bankrupted the overseas news bureaus.
- Anarchy and dictatorship are entwined in eternal resonance. One never exists for long without turning to the other, and then back again. The only way out is structure, also known as democracy.
- We sanction secretive spheres in order to have our civilian sphere. We furthermore structure democracy so that the secretive spheres are contained and accountable to the civilian sphere, though that's not easy.
- There is certainly an ever-present danger of betrayal. Too much power can accrue to those we have sanctioned to hold confidences, and thus we find that keeping a democracy alive is hard, imperfect, and infuriating work. The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust.
- A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be: A perfect world for machines"
As an interesting antidote to Jaron, here is a response by Zeynep Tufekci (see her tweets here and her bio here) also via TheAtlantic.com, and my favorite quotes from that piece:
- "Lanier thus conflates the right to privacy of persons with the privilege of non-disclosure that states may sometimes exercise. Raising personhood in this context is irrelevant and dangerous.
- "I give you private information about corporations for free," SNL's Assange quipped, "And I'm a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he's the Man of the Year."
- In my talk about Wikileaks at the Personal Democracy Forum recently, I emphasized that we should not see information by itself as a change agent and that a glut of information, especially without context and political leverage, may not result in meaningful change. That, however, is not an argument for less information.
- During these past weeks, rather than a nerd takeover, I saw the crumbling of the facade of a flat, equal, open Internet and the revelation of an Internet which has corporate power occupying its key crossroads, ever-so-sensitive to any whiff of displeasure by the state. I saw an Internet in danger of becoming merely an interactive version of the television in terms of effective freedom of speech. Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech--it's just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard. Until the Internet, the right to be heard was in most cases reserved to the governments, deep pockets, and corporate media. Before the Internet, trees fell in lonely forests.
- The real cause for concern is the emergence of an Internet in which arbitrary Terms-of-Service can be selectively employed by large corporations to boot content they dislike. What is worrisome is an Internet in which it is very easy to marginalize and choke information.
- What the Wikileaks furor shows us is that a dissent tax is emerging on the Internet.
- We don't have sufficiently-developed laws protecting us as our commons have moved to privately-owned spaces on the Internet. Lanier misses the fact that this is an issue of design, motive and choice.
- I reiterate that one does not need to be a fan of Wikileaks to reject the notion that rather than demand increased transparency and disclosure from institutions with power, we should trust them because trust is a human value. Going back to my starting point, it appears that Lanier is once again conflating human-to-human relations and human-institution relations and suggesting that the same principles should apply to them. A world in which humans don't trust each other is indeed cold and inhumane. A world in which we trust powerful institutions merely on principle is one where we abdicate our responsibilities as citizens and human beings..."
So what do you think? Please comment below.
Update: check out this video: journalist John Pilger in conversation with Julian Assange
August 11, 2010
My recent contribution to the INMA Ideas magazine: "The future of content in a connected economy"
In July, I was invited to do the cover story for the International NewsMedia Marketing Association (INMA) and the latest edition of their Idea Magazine (available to subscribers, here), on the topic of how to monetize content in a digital, networked and mobile world.
The magazine has now been published and INMA allowed me to publish my story on this blog, as well so.... here it is, as a PDF:
Download Gerd Leonhard INMA future of content. Enjoy and spread the word.
July 05, 2010
Jeff Jarvis on New Business Models for News (video)
Great stuff - a must watch! and check out NewsInnovation.com
Gerd Leonhard
Keynote Speaker, Think-Tank Leader, Futurist, Author & Strategist, Idea Curator, some say Iconoclast | Heretic, CEO TheFuturesAgency, Visiting Prof FDC Brazil, Green Futurist
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