Just back home from a very intense couple of weeks of work and travel, and finally able to comment on the call to action by the world’s six largest audit firms on corporate reporting, released on 8 November. The starting point for their initiative is the belief, concisely articulated by KPMG Chairman Mike Rake, that […]
The current issue of BRW, Australia’s largest business weekly magazine, has an interesting article on how technology is changing the Australian media landscape, which is in the throes of a major transition. The article quotes me on the issue of scale in online businesses in Australia, especially relating to the cost of advertising sales. To […]
Conde Nast, the owner of Wired magazine, has just bought the user filtered news site Reddit, according to TechCrunch. After AOL set up Netscape beta as a user filtered news site, this is the second signficant foray of large media into this space. As described in our Future of Media Report 2006, user filtering is […]
Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has just announced that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will establish a completely new working group to work on the development of HTML, in his words “reinventing HTML”. This bold move has been prompted by the too-slow shift from a mark-up system which works reasonably […]
I have been applying scenario planning with clients for the last decade across a variety of industries and environments, including the future of financial services, technology, capital markets, risk management, construction, Internet, Asia, and far more. As I wrote back in 1998 in an article on scenario planning in portfolio and risk management, “The greater […]
I’m just back from a quick trip to South Africa, where I am working with a large organization to help develop their long-term corporate strategy. One of the many insights on this fascinating trip was how mobiles are leapfrogging the Internet across Africa. Across the continent, and even in relatively developed South Africa, fixed broadband […]
I have previously written about blogging and Regulation FD, which is a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation that requires egalitarian dissemination of substantive news that could affect the share price. On the face of it, blogs and RSS are the perfect way to allow perfectly equal access to news by everyone. Yet this is […]
Netflix has just announced a $1 million prize to whoever can improve the accuracy of their movie recommendation engine. To enable people to design an improved recommendation engine, they’ve provided their users’ ratings of 100 million movies, an extremely valuable database. This harkens back to Canadian gold mining company Goldcorp’s initiative, whereby they publicly released […]
This is fantastic. IBM has announced that it will voluntarily publish its patent filings on the Internet. The upside is that it is taking the lead in creating a clearer, less confused, higher quality patent landscape. The (potential) downside is that it exposes its technology directions and strategy to its competitors as they develop rather […]
Back in November 2003 I blogged about a social networking project within Microsoft Research called MyWallop. At the time, fuelled by what I call the first phase of social networking, I speculated that something like this could become an opt-in part of Windows, unleashing an extraordinary ability for people to create useful connections across all […]
