5 facets of employees’ increasing technology expectations

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Earlier this week I spoke at an excellent event organized by Canon for the CIOs of major organizations. During an extended lunch, a diverse range of ‘celebrities’ including TV personalities, authors, and musicians gave short presentations. I spoke about how the evolving intersection of technology and society is shaping employees’ expectations, particularly in the technology they can use. I wove a broader story about social change and its implications, though I briefly brought out five points on what employees expect from technology.

1. Excellence.
When people go into organizations, they have extremely high expectations of the technology they are given to use. This has been honed by extensive use of intuitive, responsive, flexible consumer technologies, and the reasonable view that organizations should be able to provide technologies that are at least as good as those consumers have access to.
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Humanoid robots get better, walk, run, hop, and help around the house

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Honda, better known for its cars, has just released a new version of its Asimo humanoid robot, as shown below. It can run at a good pace, hop on one foot, and unscrew bottle caps and pour drinks.


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How governments research and communicate about the future

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Governments around the world are increasingly recognizing that they have a responsibility for structured thought and research about the future, both to shape their own initiatives, and to assist companies and institutions in the nation to survive and thrive in times of change.

Examples of government futures groups include:
Egypt: Center for Futures Studies
France: Centre d’Analyse Stratégique
India: Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council
Indonesia: Badan Perencanaan dan Pembangunan Nasional
Mexico: 2030 Vision
Singapore: Futures Group
Sweden: Institute for Futures Studies
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Australia’s continued rise as a global hub for crowdsourcing

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Over just the last few years, Australia has established itself as a global hub for crowdsourcing platforms. Early last year I wrote about the phenomenon, pointing to leading service marketplace Freelancer.com, which is now based out of Sydney (see my interview of its CEO Matt Barrie on Channel 7 last week), 99designs, which recently raised $35 million as the top graphic design competition platform in the world, and DesignCrowd, another top player in the space. I followed up with a post about the innovative ideas broker Ideas While You Sleep.

Now late last week, further news pointing to Australia’s rise as a global crowdsourcing hub. DesignCrowd has raised $3 million to grow the business globally, including shortly hiring 10 new people. CEO Alec Lynch says:
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The potential in a networked world to be more ourselves, towards perfection or destruction

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A nice video titled On the Brink of a Networked Society, shown below, has just been launched by Ericsson. It includes a series of excellent interviews exploring some of the many implications and directions of a connected world, including health, industry structure, how we socialize, and far more. It’s well worth watching.

The single quote in the video that struck me the most was:
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Latest: Equity crowdfunding coming shortly? Congress offers bipartisan support

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Continuing my ongoing coverage of the state of equity crowdfunding, news is just out that a Republican bill proposing that crowdfunding be allowed will get support from the White House. This is not too surprising given the White House recently explicitly supported crowdfunding in the context of the Obama Jobs bill, but is still a relief given there is not much Congress seems to be able to agree on these days.

The bill summary says:
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Siri and the dawn of the era of intelligent agents

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I have recently done a number of interviews on the implications of Apple’s voice assistant Siri. To me, it’s looking very much like Apple has once again brought a technology to market precisely when it is sufficiently mature to impress. Voice control and ‘intelligent assistants’ are far from new, but haven’t been widely used to date simply because they haven’t been good enough.

The launch of Siri a year after the company was acquired by Apple has allowed them to develop what was already excellent technology to the point of being ready for the mass market. As with a number of other Apple releases over the last years, Siri’s launch is changing people’s perceptions of what technology can do, and opening many minds to new possibilities. We always knew we would eventually be able to tell our machines what we wanted them to do and have them respond. That era has begun. Though of course it still has a long way to go.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald features is a nice article titled Siri: can you help make my company better?. It runs through some interesting insights on the state of predictive modelling, and closes with some quotes from me:
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The secrets of BigCommerce’s success

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In the Kochie’s Business Builders program that I hosted on Sunday, I interviewed Matt Barrie of Freelancer.com, and Eddie Machaalani and Mitch Harper of BigCommerce, both fantastic Australian online business success stories.

Following the excellent Freelancer.com interview, below is the interview with BigCommerce’s founders. They recently raised US$15 million from US VC firm General Catalyst Partners in their first external funding round since they were founded.

The interview brings out the reasons for their success: great products and an intense focus on marketing. Their story offers great lessons for any online business.

Here are a few of the insights they shared in the interview:
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Proposal for a new crowdfunding model: Betting to win

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The other day I caught up for a coffee with Ryan Wardell, the founder of Project Powerup, a crowdfunding site focused on startups.

Project Startup uses the classic crowdfunding model used by Kickstarter, Indie GoGo, Sellaband and other crowdfunding platforms for funding creative projects, in which funders are rewarded by receiving products, services, preferential treatment, and feeling good, but no equity.

I have written many times about the limits on equity crowdfunding and what goes beyond, and there is a detailed chapter on equity crowdfunding in my forthcoming book on effective approaches to crowdsourcing.

We discussed the legislation in most developed countries that forbids small equity investments in private companies. Then an idea came to me about how to go about this. I can’t see that I’ll be able to do this myself for the foreseeable future, given our existing project schedule, so I’d like to throw it out there as a gift for whoever would like to take it and do it.
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Techmeme: The power of the headline

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I first wrote about Techmeme over 5 years ago. Today Techmeme remains the reference point for what’s hot in technology news. Bloggers and publishers strive to appear on its pages, not just because of the traffic it drives, but also because the people who visit Techmeme are among the most influential in the business.

Founder Gabe Rivera has just shared some insights into how particular articles are selected as the lead article on Techmeme for a particular breaking story. For the first few years Techmeme used only an algorithm, however it has had human editors to complement the algorithm for almost three years now.

It turns out that one of the reasons to have humans is to select the stories with the most informative headlines. In an aggregator site, headlines are critical, as they need to tell as much of the story as possible. The rise of the web has had a big impact on headline writing, not least for search optimization, but also increasingly for aggregation.

Here are some of Gabe’s tips on how to make your story hit the front page of Techmeme:
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