Kevin Kelly is a major influence on my work, and this video from Wired's Network conference is one of his best. Dive in and you'll see why. All of his books are worth reading, as well.
I had a pretty amazing experience, last night, watching AlJazeera's coverage of the mind-boggling and sometimes heart-stopping events in Cairo, and monitoring Twitter (and yes, I contributed a bit, too) at the same time. I recorded this amazing, funny and scary, global stream of tweets, right before Hosni Mubarak was supposed to speak to the Egyptian people, at 10pm local time (in Cairo). Of course, he was late, so within 10 minutes, the hashtag #reasonsmubarakislate started to appear on Twitter and 10s of 1000s of tweets with some pretty funny, sometimes downright scary, and often insightful comments appeared.
To me, this event showed the amazing power of the Internet (and Twitter, in particular) to connect like-minded people and create something pretty amazing, on the fly, together, and for no commercial reason.
When Mubarak finally did appear, live on Egpytian TV, it was seriously disappointing, though. This tweet sums it up the best: Revolution 2.0 meets Dictator 1.0
I used Twitterfall.com to display the feed, btw, and ScreenFlow (on my Mac) to record it. You can watch the entire 19 minutes of the stream here, on my Youtube channel (and there are some more treasures there, for sure).
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.
Everyone in the content industry should watch this demo, below, of what the Wired guys are working on - it's fantastic food for thought; exciting stuff. And just gotta love Scott's Matrix-dude-like, gravely voice in beginning;). Well done, guys.
4 'IF' comments: 1) If the publishers can and will provide very addictive, immersive and interactive experiences at LITERALLY no-brainer prices or via bundled services (big 'if' here) 2) If the media companies and 'rights-holders' decide to get rid of all that crippling and legitimate user-insulting DRM and other technical protection models (remember, Protection is in the Business Model) 3) If the advertisers and brands are really going to fast-track their support for these kinds of new platforms 4) If everybody can finally resist the temptation to make this yet another 'walled garden' competition, albeit with prettier flowers....THEN indeed, we just may have something here. I'll be watching (+).
You may have seen my first announcement on Futerati, back in July 2009. The idea was to list and display the latest updates from those Twitter friends that I like the most, thereby acknowledging how important they are to my work, and directing some attention back to them.
Since then, Twitter has become even more important to me (and to many of my clients, especially in the music industry) because it offers real-time access to many really brilliant people around the world that freely share their thoughts, resources, links, blog posts, pictures, videos and presentations. And what's more: you can actually watch their stuff as it pops up, and talk to them, too!
Miraculously, I have somehow even gone past the 10.000 followers point, myself (not that those numbers really matter, though - keep that in mind) - thanks to all of you, out there.
I have met some really great people through Twitter, and have already booked quite a few speaking gigs through Twitter as well - so the benefits cover the entire spectrum; and yes, they are monetizable (if you should care about that). Here is a screen-shot of the new Futerati:
After the initial launch of Futerati (see the old site, here), I was very fortunate to hook up with NZ programming wiz and Tangerine Works Founder Nick Taylor (via Twitter!) who offered to help us to make Futerati a lot more attractive by actually displaying the images and videos within each tweet, and by turning the whole project into a really fancy feed aggregator and powerful tweet-reader. Nick was joined by my designer and web-master Benjamin Blust (of B2Media) and a really nice, crowd-sourced effort was underway. Thanks, guys!
The new Futerati now features 20+ categories of personally selected futurists, visionaries, bloggers, journalists, authors, VCs, startups, entrepreneurs, thought-leaders, artists, film-makers, technology experts, social media gurus etc. Every single person that is listed here is included because I really value their contributions and because I read their tweets constantly, myself. You can ask to be included but there is no guarantee as to if and when I can add you; right now it's based solely on showing up on my own radar screen.
Because we are still testing quite a few features such as the automatic updates and the importing of images etc, we will provide the public URL on February 1, 2010; however, in the meantime you can request the beta-test link if you want to check it out right away.
Here is a short slideshow:
Amazon rocks, once again. Jeff Bezos made a deal with AT&T for 3G roaming so now I can get my books pretty much anywhere in the world, anytime; and without worrying about my iPhone's battery;). The new 'Kindle wireless reading device' looks set to deliver what I have wanted for five years: access to a large library of books, wirelessly, and (hopefully) at a much lower price, at my fingertips. Plus newspapers, blogs, Wikipedia... I shall report when I have tested it, but in the meantime, below is a quick summary where I see things going in terms of the business model and pricing, for eBooks (and yes, there will be a blog post on this topic very soon).
Update: just added this quick slideshow... enjoy
And here is a video from Amazon which pretty much says it all: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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