Google Atmosphere: The future of the enterprise and the economy of individuals

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Earlier this year I gave the opening keynote at the Google Atmosphere on Tour events in Sydney and Melbourne.

Below is the 2 minute summary video of the event, giving a flavor for the rich ideas shared on the future of the enterprise.


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Ranking and comparing the world’s top 20 startup hubs

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Earlier this year I wrote about the top 25 startup hubs in the world as ranked by the Startup Genome project.

As I noted at the time, it was based on skewed data from the sample used, but was probably the best available. The project has now released updated and more detailed data ranking the top global startup ecosystems on a wide range of criteria. It makes for interesting reading. You can register to download the full report.

This is considerably better data than the first round, in particular in providing richer comparisons of the differences between the cities in how the startup scene is structured. On the rankings, we think we can do better, and we are planning to launch a framework that will provide insights into the relative performance of startup hubs around the world. For now, the Startup Genome data is the best available, and a great resource for understanding the global startup scene.

Below are quick highlights from each of the top 20 cities. This includes, in addition to brief notes on distinctive aspects of the startup scene, a chart showing performance relative to top-performing Silicon Valley on 8 indices:
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Keynote slides: Creating Massively Successful Networked Organizations

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I have just completed the day two opening keynote at Connected Enterprise 2012, following Brian Solis‘s day one keynote.

Here are my slides for the keynote. As always, the slides are designed to accompany my presentation, not to stand alone, so are provided for the audience at the event and any others who may find them useful nonetheless.

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The global brain is like a child’s brain – let’s nurture it

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In my book Living Networks I wrote about how the networks in which we live are coming to life, making us all part of what we can quite accurately think of as a global brain.

I wrote an extended introduction to the book that went into this concept in depth. However this was not included in the final published book, so I later shared it as an article, Autopoiesis and how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life.

One of the wonderful outcomes of that was that the film-maker Tiffany Shlain, who has long thought on very similar lines, reached out to connect.

Tiffany has just released a marvellous 10 minute movie, Brain Power: From Neurons To Networks, that reflects these ideas. Watch it below, preferably on full screen.


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Design to elucidate complexity: derivatives and the meta-economy

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I just came across the excellent visual presentation at the bottom of this post by information designer Gong Szeto on Design as Derivative: Weapons of Mass Disruption.


Source: Gong Szeto

Financial derivatives are collectively one of the most complex human-created domains, which systemically can have a massive impact in the real world.
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Why conversational skills are needed to create a high-performance, engaged, networked organization

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I have been frustrated recently in having been too busy to blog about all but a handful of the insights generated in my many client engagements over the last months. Fortunately things are close to easing up into the end of the year so I’ll try to cover a bit of the backlog.

This afternoon was the last of 3 Round Table discussions I moderated as part of the 21st anniversary celebrations of the Graduate School of Business of the University of New England. This session’s topic was the art of conversation.

It was a rich discussion, and there was much to take from it. I was interested in the skills we identified that are clearly vitally important to successful organizations, yet often significantly underdeveloped.

Conversation is vital for today’s organizations for many reasons, including:

Customer engagement. We now all understand that markets are conversations, and organizations must have great ability to build real conversations with their customers in a world of social media.
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Celebrating and reflecting on 10 years of blogging

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I just realized I missed my 10th anniversary of blogging. My first post on the Trends in Living Networks blog was on October 5, 2002, beginning:

The emergence of the “living web”: In just the same way as the networks are coming to life, the language that we use to describe this new world is emerging and evolving. In the last few months, the blogging community has started using the term “living web” to describe the flow of information in the networks.


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The imperative of designing and building agility in customer service

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Last week I was involved in two events for cloud-based contact centre application company IPScape, facilitating a media luncheon and hosting a customer event where I did the keynote and moderated a panel of experts.

An article in Computerworld titled Companies ‘still grappling’ with basics of customer service: IPscape reviewed some of the content at the events. The article notes:
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The future of news: automated, crowdsourced, and better than ever

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ABC journalist Mark Colvin last week delivered the Andrew Olle Media Lecture, a prestigious annual lecture on journalism. Mark is a Twitter afficionado as well as journalist with over three decades of experience, making him a great choice for the lecture this year.

The full transcript of the lecture provides rich stories from the history of journalism in Australia, and an incisive view of the present.

On the topic of crowdsourcing, Mark says:
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Slides for Crowdsourcing for Media and Content workshop in New York

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Last Friday in New York, shortly before Sandy shook things up, I ran a Crowdsourcing for Media and Content workshop as part of the Crowdsourcing Week global series of events.

Media is one of the domains which has been the most impacted by crowdsourcing over the last decade, in a wide variety of guises. The intent of the workshop was to dig into the many ways in which crowdsourcing can be applied in creating media and content, and how to do so most effectively.

Below I have shared the slides used in the workshop. They were designed simply to provide some context to the flow of the workshop, and certainly not to stand alone as content, but they may be of some interest even if you did not attend.

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