We’re looking for 3D talent! …to help create a 3D free-form mind mapping tool

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Those who are familiar with my work know that I believe in concept visualization to communicate ideas. In fact I first wrote about the potential of 3D for concept representation and communication 14 years ago, in the late 1990s.

For a while we have been developing specifications and prototypes for what I have been describing as a “3D free-form mind map” that will allow people to create and modify 3 dimensional representations of their thoughts on particular topics, unconstrained by the intrinsic hierarchical structure of a mind map. Users will be able to move around and fly through the 3D “thoughtscapes” they create, and share them with the world in a variety of formats.

I sometimes use the example of my NewsScape, pictured below, as an example of a concept map that anyone would very quickly and easily be able to create in the app.

The NewsScape
Click on the image to see large version
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Thinking about the future: Why predictions usually (but not always) have negative value

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A few days ago I spoke at the opening dinner of a strategy offsite for a professional firm, on the topic of ‘Thinking About The Future‘. It is a very common style of engagement for me, being briefed to set the broadest possible mental frame for executives before their in-depth discussions on directions for the business. The session went extremely well in provoking some very interesting conversations during the evening, and I gather driving new thinking through the rest of the offsite.

Just before I spoke the executive group had heard from a well-known economist who was giving them economic forecasts for the next 10 years.

As such, in my presentation I explained why forecasts usually have negative value. I spent a long time working in financial markets, and I have seen market and economic forecasts tremendously abused.

The most important point is that almost all forecasts will turn out to be wrong. The future is unpredictable. Giving numerical values to future economic or market data can easily shut down useful thinking about the reality of uncertainty and the range of possibilities that may transpire.
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Parallel entrepreneurship goes mainstream

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Back in the 1990s I became enamoured of Bill Gross’s IdeaLab, which was spinning off new web companies initially housed in its own support ecosystem. I loved that it generated and developed its own projects rather than looking outside for ideas.

Since then I’ve closely followed what I’ve thought of as “parallel entrepreneurship”, in contrast to the usual concept of serial entrepreneurship: establishing many ventures rather than doing them one by one.

Despite many leading lights saying that founders should be focused on one venture, I’ve always believed that it is possible – albeit extremely difficult – to launch and run multiple simultaneous ventures.
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The state of influence today: increasing marketing budgets and greater influencer professionalism

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Back in the day, Technorati’s annual State of the Blogosphere reports were the reference guide to what was happening in blogging, before Twitter existed or Facebook was open to the general public.

Illustrating the shifts in the landscape and in Technorati itself, it has just launched the 2013 Digital Influence Report, providing insights drawn from surveys including 6,000 influencers (a term that is unfortunately not defined in the report), 1,200 consumers and 150 brand marketers.

Influence has been a key focus for me for many years, with our activities including our Future of Influence Summit and Influence Landscape. Influence is by now a pretty mainstream frame for much digital marketing, yet in the big picture it is still early days, at least to judge by the Technorati report.

The full Technorati document is well worth a browse. Here are a few of the highlights from the report:

Social is still just 10% of total digital marketing budgets, with 83% of that amount on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Influencer marketing is 0.6% of the total spend.
Technorati13_1
Source: Technorati Digital Influence Report
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The 6 capabilities that drive future business value from Staggeringly Enormous Data

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I recently participated in a panel interview on SkyNews of “some of the brightest minds in business technology”, including futurist Mark Pesce, commentator Brad Howarth, and myself. It’s just come out on the web and having now been able to watch it I think it turned out to be a very interesting discussion.

To see the video click on the image below.

SkyNews_211213

After covering some of the major trends of 2012 towards the end of the panel we turned out attention to what was coming in the year ahead. When asked what I thought needed to be on the business agenda, my response was Big Data, or as I more accurately described it, Staggeringly Enormous Data.
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The future of academic certification: universities, MOOCs, aggregators, and peer reputation

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This morning I gave the opening keynote at the Virtual Universities: Impact on Accounting Education Thought Leadership forum in Adelaide, organized by the Centre of Accounting, Governance and Sustainability at University of South Australia and the Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia. The audience was an invitation-only group of the most senior accounting academics and industry practitioners in the country.

My keynote was on the broad global context for the current changes in education. After looking at major technological, social and structural changes, the future of work, and shifts in learning, I turned to the role of certification and credentials.

The rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has helped bring into focus that universities have to date always bundled together three things:
– Education;
– Certification; and
– Networking.

The rise of Open Courseware and more recently services such as Coursera, Udacity and edX has now broken out (part of) the education piece.
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Analysis: US, Australia social network usage flat, New Zealand now the world’s biggest user of social networks?

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On February 13 I will speak at Air New Zealand’s Social Media Breakfast in Auckland, together with Teddy Goff, Obama’s Digital Director, with an expected audience of close to 1,000.

Air New Zealand ran its first Social Media Breakfast in July last year with Randi Zuckerberg as key speaker, with the exceptional success of the event leading the airline to continue the series with the second breakfast next week. While Air New Zealand is the 36th largest airline in the world, it ranks 6th in its social media presence.

In preparing for the event I have been looking at data on New Zealand’s usage of social media. I was surprised to find that there is a fair chance that New Zealand has the highest rate of social network usage in the world.

Globalsocialmedia_Dec12

The chart above shows a summary of data from Nielsen on the time spent per month on social networks in a variety of countries around the world.
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Judging the best visualizations of the future: Enter the BBC What If? competition

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This year BBC is focusing on the future under the theme What If? and has just launched its What If? Visions of the Future competition.

BBBCWhatIF_GlennHatton
Image source: BBC News/ Glenn Hatton
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What is the future of Learning & Development department?

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Recently 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 future of information infrastructure

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Recently I gave the opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium.

CIO magazine did a nice article titled IIIS: Big Data driving new trends which reviews my keynote and the one immediately after from Steve Duplessie, one of the world’s top analysts on data and storage. It says:

Speaking at the event, co-hosted by Storage Networking Industry Association A/NZ and Computerworld Australia, strategy advisor, author and futurist, Ross Dawson, said “reality mining” — the gathering of data based on the activities of people in a given environment — was a major trend to emerge out of, and contributor to, Big Data.

“If you look at an office environment there is an extraordinary amount of data to look at. For example, what gestures people are making, where are they looking, what conversations are they having, how much are they smiling when they speak to each other?” he said.

“You can literally get terabytes of data out of just a few hours of this. That data is being collected to drive productivity; to design new ways to enhance collaboration and create value inside organisations.”

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