I just found this via Marie Germain and Branding 2.0: video of interview with Seth Godin on George Stroumboulopoulos “Strombo”, Canada’s leading late-night talk show. Some really great soundbites here - Seth is one of the people who always, without fail, inspire me.
Check out this video interview with Seth on BehindthebrandTV - it's a very good fit with the topics above, as well.
Nice presentation by Futures Agency colleague Ross Dawson
Ross Dawson and me recently met in Sydney (where I spoke at the Google ThinkTravel event, on The Consumer of Tomorrow) to do some videos together. The first episode is now live on Youtube, on the Future of Money. I think this turned out quite well and provides some interesting brain-teasers. You?
Ross has a good summary of what we discussed:
* The world of money is opening out in a big way today
* Facebook credits are becoming an important alternative currency
* Cash will phase out for digital payments
* The rise of Bitcoin is important in shifting transactions out of the purvey of governments
* In many developing countries mobile phones are becoming the predominant banking platform
* Micro-payments for content could work through social media and dominant platforms such as China’s QQ
* These could flow into crowdfunding for creative endeavors
* Behaviorally we are some way from micro-payments working well
* Money will inevitably shift to the cloud
And don't forget to follow @rossdawson on Twitter!
Via Techcrunch and the brilliant Erick Schoenfeld: "The keys to Amazon’s success are 1) the Internet imposes no limits on how much Amazon can sell; 2) its control of customer accounts and loyalty, and 3) and a growing ecosystem that is helping it cement its place in the world of digital goods as well. It’s instructive to see how Amazon has expanded over the years and moved away from its reliance on books, music, and movies. You also forget that along the way, Amazon piled up $3 billion in losses between 1995 and 2003. Now it’s got $34 billion in annual revenue, and is spitting out $1 billion a year on profits. Who says you can’t spend your way to profitability....."
In this TED@MotorCity (Detroit) video, Lisa Gansky delivers an amazingly similar message to my own, various talks on the 'networked society', the 'open network economy and the future of business' and 'from egosystem to ecosystem'. Great stuff, Lisa. I will add your book THE MESH to my Kindle cue, for sure.
Absolutely brilliant and fascinating stuff by one of my favorite thinkers (and a great influence on my own work), Kevin Kelly. This is one of his most concise talks and he really covers IT ALL in here so... be sure to spend 25 minutes on this video; it's well worth it.
Some key take-aways: "We used to be people of the book, now we are people of the screen. Now we have TV we read and books we watch. We are in the cloud, indeed, but now the cloud is looking back at us, too, and social reading results in social writing. Access not ownership is where all content is going (yes, you have heard that from me before, too:). Flows not pages. New generatives are the new value..."
Great stuff indeed. To download KK's slides go here (thanks to OReilly for making it all available, too!)
This is truly a must-watch video for anyone interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, via TedX Oxford. Steven Berlin Johnson's book (same title as the video) also rocks; it's next in my Kindle cue. I will have the great pleasure of doing an Ericsson-presented panel discussion at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, next week, with him and some more great people. Stay tuned for updates - this should be good!
I just ran across this pretty interesting presentation by JWT Intelligence on Slideshare - take a look. There's loads of interesting stuff in here, and it's presented very nicely. On my end, I will probably not offer any particular predictions for 2011 - it seems like there are so many good ones out there, already (browse my twitter feed for some of them), so, no need to add to the flood of great input, for now. Enjoy.
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):
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:
So what do you think? Please comment below.
Update: check out this video: journalist John Pilger in conversation with Julian Assange
The garbage bin makes a sound when you throw something in, and the amount of garbage collected doubles - make something fun and it will work better is the lesson. Powerful thought. Thanks to Julian Treasure at TheSoundAgency for posting this video.
Since I get so many clients asking me why in the world they should blog - here's the answer, in a nutshell (couldn't have said it better myself). This is also why I will start blogging a lot more, again, very soon. Stay tuned.
Clay's presentation at GoogleTalks is well worth watching.
"The author of the breakout hit 'Here Comes Everybody' reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In his latest book 'Cognitive Surplus' Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last. Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time..."
Didier Marlier, a good friend and Founder of The Enablers Network in Switzerland, fellow professor at Fundacao Dom Cabral in Brazil and team member at TFA / The Futures Agency, has compiled a very important report on the work he has been doing with a top-level, CEO-education series at FDC, called COMn. The report skillfully and succinctly outlines the principles of what we have come to call "The Open Network Economy" and is a must-read for anyone that is interested in The Future of Business. So... download and spread the word: 600K PDF: Didier Marlier on the Open Network Economy FDC CEOs
In addition, here are 2 slideshows and a video I recently published on the same topic. Enjoy.
Peter Spellman is a friend and long-time colleague who works at my Alma Mater, Berklee College if Music, in Boston, and also runs his own company, Music Business Solution. He has written a couple of really powerful and highly recommended books geared towards musicians that want to use the web to propel their career (see below). Peter just send me a PDF with his latest work, a 'psycho-spiritual-musical manifesto' (see image on the left) and I really liked it so I figured I should pass it on to everyone, via this blog: Download Musician 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...Spellman (PDF, 2MB)
Enjoy!
Peter Spellman, M.A. M.Ed., helps musicians apply their entrepreneurial instincts to create success. He is Director of the Career Development Center at Berklee College of Music, and founder of Music Business Solutions (mbsolutions.com), a training resource for music entrepreneurs. He has worked as a booking agent, label director, music editor, artist manager and producer, and performs as percussionist with the ambient-jazz ensemble, Underwater Airport. His newest book, INDIE BUSINESS POWER: A Step-By-Step Guide for 21st Century Music Entrepreneurs, and his other business-building books, are used in over a dozen colleges and universities across the U.S and Canada. More at www.mbsolutions.com/books
PS: another great source of "Music / Musician 2.0" information is the blog of my co-writer David Kusek, here, as well as the BerkleeShares.com site, and the amazing online education platform, BerkleeMusic.com. And then there is my own book, Music 2.0, of course - read the free mobile version here.
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Another brilliant post by Umair Haque via the Harvard Business Review - he spells out a lot of stuff that keeps coming up in my presentations, as well; so here's a bit of a remix of this juicy post, my comments are [...]
"On one side is the old high ground of the industrial era capitalism; on the other, the new high(er) ground of next-generation capitalism. The yawning chasm in between them is the gap between the 20th century and the 21st" [I call this the EGOSystem vs the ECOsystem, see more here and here]
"Currency intervention, breaking Copenhagen, crackdowns , collusion, corruption, coercion, and censorship: China's ongoing bad behavior as global citizen is, when we connect the dots, the gigantic elephant in the world's boardroom. What's driving it? The quest for monopoly, monopsony, and control" [I wrote about something quite similar in my 2007/2008 blog-book "The End of Control", check out the free online chapters here, and a related presentation, here]
"That's yesterday's high ground, and China's focused like a laser beam on it. China's moves are the textbook stuff of b-school's blackest arts. Through larger distribution, fiercer litigation, greater exclusivity, cheaper and faster production, a bigger cash pile, advantage is gained. But the high ground has shifted. The new high ground is an ethical edge. It's
not about having more; it's about doing better. It's not about
protecting exports, pressuring buyers and suppliers, price
discriminating against the powerless, and programming consumers to buy,
buy, buy — it's about making people, communities, and society
authentically better off. It's not about caring less — but caring more.
It's not about ruthlessness. It's about mindfulness" [Couldn't have said it better, myself; here are just a few things I would add: in this new ecosystem that Umair is describing, we will need to develop web-native economic models and entirely new metrics for evaluating them, friction will indeed be fiction (to a very large degree) and the importance of control will be utterly eroded by the steadily increasing power of trust, engagement and transparency]
"The old high ground was built for 20th century economics: sell more junk, earn more profit, "grow" — and then crash. An ethical edge operates at a higher economic level. It is concerned with what we sell, how profits are earned, and which authentic, human benefits "grow." It's a concept built for the economics of an interdependent world" [A key term, imo: an interdependent world, i.e. not a broadcast world but a connected and networked world]
"An ethical edge just might be the ultimate cause of advantage. It's how better distribution, production, marketing, and pricing — all just proximate causes of advantage — ultimately happen. Jim Chanos's investment thesis says: without an ethical edge, new value cannot be created — old value can only be shuffled around (hi, Wall Street)....So here's the single question everyone should be asking. The old high ground is the new low ground. Yesterday's mountain is today's valley. Are you ascending to the new high ground?"
via blogs.hbr.org
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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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