Entries by Ross Dawson

World-leading Australian crowdsourcing platform 99designs gets $35 million, shows depth of Australian tech

As I have written before, Australia is a global hub for crowdsourcing platforms, with the likes of Freelancer.com, 99designs, DesignCrowd, Kaggle, Ideas While You Sleep and many more resident here. We have tapped some of this Australian expertise for our events, notably our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, held last November simultaneously in Sydney and San […]

Charismatic robots can now do stand up comedy and respond to the audience

Heather Knight, also known as Marilyn Monrobot, studies human machine symbiosis and charismatic robots. In addition to her doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute she runs a stack of interesting projects. Here is a video of Heather speaking at TED, demonstrating her robot which does stand up comedy. The audience provided live feedback to […]

Keynote speech in Beijing on How Technology is Transforming Business

In a few weeks I will be in Beijing to give a keynote to the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) annual Company Directors conference. AICD has usually held its annual conference in Australian cities, but when in 2007 it held it in Shanghai they actually had far more attendees than usual. This is now […]

Serendipity is at the heart of today’s emerging society

Serendipity is for me a deeply meaningful word. The more than dozen posts discussing serendipity on my blog include how we created “enhanced serendipity” at an event I ran in 2003 in New York, more details on the story of the word serendipity and how to enhance it, the importance of the “serendipity dial” and […]

Why high performance organizations will thrive on uncertainty and lack of control

I recently gave a presentation at an offsite meeting of the leadership team of a global professional services firm. I was asked to speak about the future of business, and to be provocative, which is usually my objective in that kind of situation – it’s not very valuable if you can’t get people to think […]