This morning I moderated an AIMIA event on social media and user generated. It was extremely interesting. In the interests of getting this review up I’ll just post very lightly edited notes that I took during the event – you’ll have to make sense of them yourselves. Full details on the event here.
Forum agenda:
• Professional media vs. User generated content
• Social networking vs. Social Media
• The future of Social Networking
Social media and user generated content
Speakers:
Francisco Cordero, General Manager, Australia and NZ at Bebo Inc
Michela Ledwidge, Managing Director, MOD Films
Dominique Hind, General Manager, Mark.
Andrew Cordwell, Director of Sales, Fox Interactive Media
Moderated by:
Ross Dawson, Chairman, Future Exploration Network
Summary thoughts
What struck me the most was how richly the exact topic of social media and user generated content was addressed. What can be seen as buzzwords ended up being precisely about how users created and engaged with increasingly professional content, primarily video, in a social network context. In fact Bebo explicitly describes itself as social media rather than a social network, as it has shifted over the last year or so to be primarily a forum for rich video content.
I have long been deeply interested in crowdsourcing of movie-making (content and funding), having written before about the future of documentaries, A Swarm of Angels and similar topics. I found what Michela Ledwidge of MOD films had to say fantastically interesting – she is clearly on the leading edge of this. The name of her company comes from how mods are the foundation of the gaming industry, with users increasingly coming up with the latest modifications that make the games they play even more interesting. She wants to apply the same idea to films. I had already come across most of the things she mentioned, but not IndieGogo, a crowdsourcing site for independent film-making, a social network that creates extraordinary things by bringing together resources. While I know Blender, the open source 3D animation tool, and in fact spent a Saturday playing with it once, I didn’t know they’ve created completely open source films (animations) that anyone can pull apart and recreate any way they want. These are Pixar-quality films that anyone can modify or work on. I find that extraordinary.
Overall social networks are becoming places for rich content creation, and that’s a great thing. They are also absolutely where people will go to and find content. Content exists in social networks. It’s alive, or should be, and in a way social networks and content are one of the best combinations there is, tapping latent creativity among and between us.
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Living Networks – Chapter 7: The Flow Economy – Opportunities and Risks in the New Convergence
By Ross DawsonDownload Chapter 7 of Living Networks on the Flow Economy
Every chapter of Living Networks is being released on this blog as a free download, together with commentary and updated perspectives since its original publication in 2002.
For the full Table of Contents and free chapter downloads see the Living Networks website or the Book Launch/ Preface to the Anniversary Edition.
Living Networks – Chapter 7: The Flow Economy
Opportunites and Risks in the New Convergence
OVERVIEW: Devices, communications, and industries are all converging into one vast space for doing business. This is the flow economy, in which almost all value is based on the flow of information and ideas. Companies must continually reposition themselves in this flow economy, both to meet new competitive challenges from unexpected quarters, and to take advantage of the massive emerging opportunities.
The Flow Economy Framework
Chapter 7 of Living Networks – Commentary and updated perspectives
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Creating the next phase of entrepreneurial capital
By Ross DawsonI have written and been quoted many times before on the rise of a new layer of capital markets and the segmentation of venture capital. Venture capital certainly will continue to play an important role in years to come, but many major variations on the current model will emerge. One of the most important drivers of change is the far lower capital-intensity of web and technology businesses. With powerful development platforms, ready access to global talent, and speed to market being of the essence, many ventures can get going with minimal capital. The proliferation of less-capitalized companies has been a feature of the entrepreneurial landscape over the last year, supported by a slow drying up of capital from venture firms.
In today’s New York Times an article titled A New Kind of Venture Capitalist Makes Small Bets on Young Firms focuses on Union Square Ventures and in particular Fred Wilson, the new superstar of web VCs. The piece starts out by describing how Etsy, now the leading crafts marketplace, was delighted in Union Square Ventures to find a VC firm willing to take just a 5 percent stake in the company. Most VC firms demand at least 20%, and usually seek strong or dominant influence on the company’s strategy.
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Conversation with Napier Collyns on scenario planning, networks, oil, geopolitics, and noticing what matters
By Ross DawsonI caught up with Napier Collyns in Sydney the other week, after having seen him in both New York and London earlier this year. His highly peripatetic lifestyle means that we’re often not in the same place at the same time, but we’ve managed to cross paths more regularly recently. Napier had just spoken at the Australian Leadership Retreat organized by the Australian Davos Connection on a number of topics including peak oil.
I thought it would be a great opportunity to record a video conversation with Napier. We sat down for an hour after a pleasant lunch and spoke on a wide range of topics, including many aspects of scenario planning and its history and future, Global Business Network, social networks, geopolitics, oil, and how we notice what’s important from an excess of information. The video is below, and a timeline of conversation topics at the bottom of this post.
Conversation: Napier Collyns and Ross Dawson from Ross Dawson on Vimeo.
I’d originally thought we’d create three 10-15 minute self-contained segments on different topics, but that’s not how conversations work. It ended up as a free-flowing discussion over an hour moving far beyond the intended starting points. There were some extremely interesting insights in the conversation, I thought, particularly for anyone interested in scenario planning, so I’ve posted the entire conversation, together with a chronology of conversation topics so you can go to the points of greatest interest to you.
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The Future of Financial Services – the Indian perspective
By Ross DawsonI’m writing at the Vision 2020 Financial Services Sector conference in Mumbai where I’m giving the keynote speech. I’ll post a review of my presentation later, and here will post notes from the interesting speakers and my conversations on the day, combined with my own reflections.
The conference is organized by NDTV Convergence and Wipro. NDTV runs all of the online operations of NDTV, a diversified media company centered on its business TV channel. Wipro is one of the top three IT services companies in India – for each of Wipro, TCS, and Infosys financial services is their largest client sector.
Public sector banks and transformation to a true market economy
India has 23 public sector banks, which means they are owned at least 51% by the government. In most cases these are listed companies with a wide variety of investors. While it is now well over a decade since India began its transition from a largely nationalized economy, there is still a long way to go. There is unlikely to be large scale privatization for the foreseeable future, and in many sectors other than banking there remains major shifts required to move to open market attitudes and competitiveness.
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Social networks help people to get jobs: employer survey
By Ross DawsonCareerbuilder.com has just launched a survey which says that 22% of hiring managers use social networks to screen candidates. The report emphasizes the downside for applicants, saying that one third of hiring managers rejected candidates based on what they found, including drug and alcohol use, inaccurate qualifications, links to criminal behaviour and so on. That’s the stuff that gets the headlines.
Less prominent in the report is that 24% of hiring managers found content on social networks that convinced them to hire a candidate, including solid references and a professional image.
Using social networks to get additional information about candidates is a no-brainer, and think it’s an indictment of the profession that just one fifth of hiring managers use an obvious source of information about applicants. It also should be very obvious to anyone with half a brain today that their social network profiles will be looked at when they’re applying for jobs.
Of course using social networks in screening is just one possible use for social networks in the hiring process. Even the CIA has been using Facebook for recruitment for well over two years, well after leaders in the space such as Ernst & Young (see EY’s Facebook careers page , which has over 18,000 fans (Facebook login required).
Future Exploration Network and IBM are running a Social Network Strategy Executive Roundtable this week for top executives of major organizations. We’ll release a report on the discussions, which will give some great insights on how these and other aspects of social networks in the enterprise are viewed by senior management. The report will be available here in a couple of weeks.
Keynote presentation: Creating the Future of Financial Services
By Ross DawsonAt the 2020 Vision Financial Services conference yesterday I promised I’d have the full content of my presentation here up within days. But my schedule means I probably won’t be able to get it up for a week or so, so for now I’ll just put up the slides. The usual warnings apply – my presentation slides are not meant to be meaningful by themselves, but to accompany my speech, so unless you were there, I suggest you wait until I do the full write up of the presentation.
[UPDATE:] The complete write-up of my presentation Strategy for the Future of Global Financial Services is now up.
24 hours in Mumbai – thought leadership seminar
By Ross DawsonIt’s an extremely busy two weeks. On top of many client deadlines I have four speaking engagements in Australia and one in India this week and next. I’m about to hop on a plane to Mumbai and will be there for 24 hours – unfortunately this time I have to get back as soon as possible though I have a long term plan to do a longer trip around the tech centers in India to speak and find out the best of what’s happening.
The event I’m speaking at has already got quite a lot of attention – see one of a series of press releases that have got on the web below, also from Dishtracking, Indian Television, India Infoonline etc.
At the seminar I will be coming back to one of my key themes – the future of financial services. I have developed a scenario framework for the event that I’ll share later on this blog. If we’re looking out to 2020, then we do need to take a scenario approach, as there are massive uncertainties ranging across geopolitics, the economy, industry structure, volatility, and how technology is applied. I will be extremely interested to hear what financial services leaders in Mumbai are saying, as the sector underpins how India is participating in the global economy. More on this later.
NDTV Convergence and Wipro announce the launch of Vision 2020- Financial Services Sector
India Infoline News Service
‘Mr. Ross Dawson’, internationally renowned keynote speaker and authority on business strategy will be in India to speak at ’Vision 2020- Financial Services Sector’- a thought leadership seminar by NDTV Convergence and Wipro Infotech, the India and Middle East arm of Wipro Ltd. Ross is the CEO of international consulting firm, Advanced Human Technologies, and Chairman of Future Exploration Network, a global events and strategy company.
The seminar will feature eminent speakers from the industry who will be sharing their perspectives on topics like the future of private and retail banking, mergers and acquisitions, and competition and challenges in the financial sector in the Year 2020.
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Summary and notes from AIMIA event: Social media and user generated content
By Ross DawsonThis morning I moderated an AIMIA event on social media and user generated. It was extremely interesting. In the interests of getting this review up I’ll just post very lightly edited notes that I took during the event – you’ll have to make sense of them yourselves. Full details on the event here.
Forum agenda:
• Professional media vs. User generated content
• Social networking vs. Social Media
• The future of Social Networking
Social media and user generated content
Speakers:
Francisco Cordero, General Manager, Australia and NZ at Bebo Inc
Michela Ledwidge, Managing Director, MOD Films
Dominique Hind, General Manager, Mark.
Andrew Cordwell, Director of Sales, Fox Interactive Media
Moderated by:
Ross Dawson, Chairman, Future Exploration Network
Summary thoughts
What struck me the most was how richly the exact topic of social media and user generated content was addressed. What can be seen as buzzwords ended up being precisely about how users created and engaged with increasingly professional content, primarily video, in a social network context. In fact Bebo explicitly describes itself as social media rather than a social network, as it has shifted over the last year or so to be primarily a forum for rich video content.
I have long been deeply interested in crowdsourcing of movie-making (content and funding), having written before about the future of documentaries, A Swarm of Angels and similar topics. I found what Michela Ledwidge of MOD films had to say fantastically interesting – she is clearly on the leading edge of this. The name of her company comes from how mods are the foundation of the gaming industry, with users increasingly coming up with the latest modifications that make the games they play even more interesting. She wants to apply the same idea to films. I had already come across most of the things she mentioned, but not IndieGogo, a crowdsourcing site for independent film-making, a social network that creates extraordinary things by bringing together resources. While I know Blender, the open source 3D animation tool, and in fact spent a Saturday playing with it once, I didn’t know they’ve created completely open source films (animations) that anyone can pull apart and recreate any way they want. These are Pixar-quality films that anyone can modify or work on. I find that extraordinary.
Overall social networks are becoming places for rich content creation, and that’s a great thing. They are also absolutely where people will go to and find content. Content exists in social networks. It’s alive, or should be, and in a way social networks and content are one of the best combinations there is, tapping latent creativity among and between us.
Read more →
Effective governance unleashes the creative potential of Web 2.0 in the business
By Ross DawsonIT Business Edge has just published an interview with me on IT governance for Web 2.0 technologies, a topic I’m spending considerable time on in my consulting work with major organizations. The complete article, Set Policies to Unleash Creativity with Web 2.0 Tools, is available on their website, and the interview is reproduced below.
Hall: Just to make sure we’re on the same page, how do you define Web 2.0 technologies?
Dawson: Basically, they’re technologies that use mass participation to create value for the business. They can be wikis, blogs, social networking, social bookmarking, mashups and other tools, but [the term] also involves the underlying architecture behind those tools.
Hall: So what would IT governance for those tools look like?
Dawson: I look at governance in a broader context as having a full understanding of potential risks, potential benefits and having set-off structured policies and procedures where any risks are minimized and benefits are maximized, with a high degree of transparency and accountability for executives and other people in the organization.
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Keynote speech in India: The Future of Global Financial Services
By Ross DawsonIt has been several years now since I have been to India, where I last ran some executive workshops on high-value relationships for some of India’s largest companies. I will be back in Mumbai next week to deliver the keynote address on The Future of Global Financial Services at the Vision 2020 Financial Services conference, run by Wipro and NDTV Profit, the Indian business news channel. The speaker line-up includes the top executives of many of India’s major banks. I am the only international speaker.
The event is highly focused on the future, creating a vision of what the financial services sector will look like in 2020, and in particular the relationship between banks and their customers in a world transformed by economic growth, social change, and technology.
The overview of my keynote on the future of global financial services is:
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