Video and notes on the future of the 21st century

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I spoke last night at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, to speak at the last of their GoMA Talks on the 21st century which accompany their current exhibit of 21st century art. The topic was the future of the 21st century, with panellists:

– Antony Funnell, presenter of ABC Radio National’s Future Tense
– Tony Albert, artist
– Ross Dawson, futurist
– Dr Melissa Gregg, Senior Lecturer in Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at Sydney University and author of Work’s Intimacy
– Tim Longhurst, futurist

Here is the video of the full session:

Watch live streaming video from queenslandartgallery at livestream.com

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Ketchum Webinar Series: Tapping the Power of Mobile

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Mobile is shifting to the very heart of media and content. As such, in delving into the future of media over the last few years I have had an increasing focus on the mobile landscape, how to tap its potential, and where it is going.

Starting today, I am co-presenting a three part webinar series on Tapping the Power of Mobile run by leading PR firm Ketchum. Here is an overview of the three sessions, which slices the hefty amount of content, case studies, and insights we will be covering into segments that are each self-contained, but together provide a great foundation for creating value from mobile marketing.

Below is the full description of the webinars, which are for clients and friends of Ketchum, primarily in the Americas and Europe given the session timing. Contact Maegen Noble (see the bottom of the post) for further details.

I’ll share a couple of the insights we cover in the webinar series on this blog along the way.
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Insights into the next phase of crowdfunding: tearing down legal constraints and building reputation systems

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The post I wrote on the weekend, SEC opens the gates to crowdfunding and a new structure of capitalism, was on Techmeme for over 24 hours and was ranked by Topsy as one of the 100 most tweeted links , so this seems to be a topic of general interest.

One of the best things about doing blog posts is that you uncover interesting perspectives, especially through comments and reactions to the post, and thoughts provoked by those. Here are a few follow-on thoughts and references:
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SEC opens the gates to crowdfunding and a new structure of capitalism

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This is significant. While talk doesn’t necessarily lead to action, a significant shift in capitalism could be coming.

On Wednesday US SEC Chairman Mary Shapiro sent a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee. The letter is embedded at the bottom of this post.

Many have focused on the potential from the current SEC review to relax limits on shareholders for private companies, notably the rule that if a private company has 500 investors or more it has to disclose its finances. Changes to this and related rules could have a significant impact on capital raising for private companies.

Few seem to have focused on what I think is potentially a bigger issue from the SEC moves: opening up crowdfunding as a mechanism for equity investment. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece called SEC Boots Up for the Internet Age. The article begins:
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Is this overload? 9.57 zettabytes of information flows in the world’s enterprises

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A recent report titled How Much Information? 2010 Enterprise Server Information written by several UC – San Diego academics says that in 2008 the world’s servers processed 9.57 zettabytes (zettabyte = 10 to the power of 21), or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

A couple of analogies from Physorg illustrate these amounts:

* 9.57 zettabytes is equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.

* By 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system.

This is 12GB of information daily per worker, or 3TB per year. Another study showed that American households consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008, or around 10TB per individual. (Note that not all of the 3.18 billion workers covered in this study work in information-intensive industries or countries.)


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Risks to Gartner’s smartphone forecasts: will Microsoft beat Apple, Nokia execute, and Samsung fail?

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Gartner has just released some very interesting forecasts for smartphone operating system sales until 2015, as below.

In an nutshell, they predict that in 2015 Android will take almost half the market, at 48.8%, and that Microsoft will overtake Apple, with 19.5% share compared to 17.2% for iOS. Nokia’s Symbian platform will fade to virtually nothing, while Research in Motion’s Blackberry will decline somewhat in market share to

The most interesting commentary I’ve seen so far on these predictions comes from Horace Dediu at Asymco, Kevin Tofel at GigaOM, and Larry Dignan at ZDNet.

To take just a few of the many things that could be said about these forecasts:
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Digital Sydney is crowdsourcing its visual identity – submissions close soon!

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Since Sydney is my primary home, I have been delighted to see the local digital, creative, social media, and startup worlds explode over the last few years. There have always been pockets of world-class practice here, but we are now getting to the point where Sydney is starting to rank in the top-tier of digital cities around the world on a number of different levels.

The NSW government was long the least active of the states in supporting the digital and creative industries, however that has shifted significantly recently, with the City of Sydney also picking up the ball in a big way over the last few years.

One of the government initiatives is a formal Digital Sydney program which is currently being launched. They are opting to crowdsource their visual identity, though the crowd is just inhabitants of NSW. A prize of A$10,000 is up for grabs – see the video and details below.

There are already lots of other initiatives and activities in this space, and more all the time. It looks like Digital Sydney will contribute to the great momentum building in the creative and digital spaces in this wonderful city.


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What is the future of the Learning & Development department?

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Last Friday I gave the keynote for the first breakfast seminar run by CADRE, a leading elearning design company, for senior executives of its clients. The topic of my presentation was The Future of Learning, giving a big picture view to kick off their series.

This is a brief description of my presentation:

Challenges for organizations are mounting from intense global competition, empowered consumers, and generational shifts. At the same time, building more effective learning is becoming central to achieving organizational success. This session will use a rich array of examples to look at:
• The driving forces shaping learning in organizations
• What the successful organizations of the future will look like
• Learning in a social network world: the new opportunities
• The context of learning: personalized, mobile, relevant
• Creating the future of learning: key action steps

At the conclusion of my presentation I got the audience to break into groups of 5-6 and assigned them discussion questions.

One of the questions I posed was ‘What is the future of the L&D department?’
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The coolest iPhone4 case in the world?

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At Christmas my darling wife Victoria, who knows me well and has great taste, gave me an awesome case for my iPhone.

It fulfils several functions:
* It prevents dropped calls from the iPhone4 ‘death grip’.
* It is solid enough to protect from being dropped or thrown by our 18-month year old daughter Phoebe, who loves playing with apps on the iPhone but also occasionally tosses the device around.
* It adds to my street cred – whenever I pull out my phone at a geek event the case attracts a flock of admirers.


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Pushstart adds a new start-up seed accelerator to the Australian tech scene

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Today at the excellent SydStart event is the official launch of Pushstart, adding to the increasingly rich network of support available to tech start-ups in Australia.

There are two key elements to Pushstart: a mentor matching service, bringing together a pool of currently over 50 mentors with start-ups through the year, and a Start-Up accelerator, which will offer a small amount of capital, mentoring, and some physical space for a 3 month program.

The reference points for the start-up accelerator are of course the (primarily) US-based Y Combinator and TechStars. 
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