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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Keynote: Building Business in a Connected World

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Tomorrow morning I am giving the keynote at City of Port Phillip’s inaugural Breakfast Briefing session for the year in St Kilda, Melbourne, on the topic of Building Business in a Connected World. Here are event details and registration.

Below are my slides for the presentation, which is almost entirely based on our Success in a Connected World visual framework launched earlier today.

The usual caveats apply – the slides are NOT intended to stand alone but to provide a visual accompaniment to my presentation, so these are shared primarily for those who attended my keynote. However others may still find them useful or interesting.

Note that the presentation is intended primarily for individuals and smaller businesses. It’s a completely different presentation for large enterprise.

Building Business in a Connected World

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List of the 242 most influential publications in the world

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Nate Silver, the political statistician extraordinaire, has turned his attention to publishing. His interest is honed by the fact that his blog is now hosted on the New York Times, which is currently implementing a paywall.

He has done an analysis of the most influential publications, consisting of a simple review of how frequently publications’ names appear in Google News and Google Blogs followed by the word “reported”, to give a representative sample of how often publications are quoted by others.

The full list of the top 242 is below.

A few quick comments:
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Infographic: Building Success in a Connected World

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Last weekend I was musing about the elements of success in a connected world. Something clicked, and I was able to pull out of it a visual representation as below. For my keynote tomorrow morning on Building Business in a Connected World I will just run through this diagram together with commentary on how to approach each of the key elements.

Success in a Connected World
Click on the image for full size

This diagram brings together the foundations of success in a connected world: Relationships, Visibility, and Execution, and how to achieve these.
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11 recommendations to create the future of government

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The Institute of Public Affairs of Australia (IPAA), the professional association supporting senior Australian public service executives, is not prone to rash statements.

Thus it is very encouraging to see its new policy paper, The Future Course of Modern Government, provide some pointed insights and recommendations on how to create the government of the future.

I have put the 11 recommendations provided at the end of the report at the bottom of this post. The full policy paper is absolutely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic.
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