What would you do if you could solve a major world problem with technology and innovation?

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The Imagine Cup is an initiative by Microsoft in which students from around the world to come up with technology solutions to solve the world’s biggest problems.

This morning at an event at the Powerhouse Museum it was announced that Sydney will host the global 2012 Imagine Cup. They showed a video, as below, of a number of people saying what world problem they would solve.

In the video I said that I would apply technology to learning, to ensure that all children around the world could learn to their fullest capability and fulfil their potential.

It is a great question to ask, because from questions, answers often come. What world problem would you solve with technology and innovation?

3 major shifts in the nature of trust in business relationships

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While the subtitle of my book Living Networks referred to the ‘hyperconnected’ economy, the reality is that living networks are built primarily on human relationships based on mutual knowledge and trust. Here is a brief excerpt from the book about what is changing in the world of trust.

Trust is a business perennial—from the days when chickens were traded for cowrie shells until we start trading with extraterrestrial races, trust has been and always will be the central factor in business relationships. However in the networked world there are three vital shifts in the nature and role of trust.
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Keynote on Success in a Connected World at Think Business next week

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May is going to be a very busy month. I have 10 speaking engagements in Australia and China over the next five weeks, as well as several ongoing consulting projects, and an ever-increasing array of active web projects on our plate.

Next week my one public event will be a breakfast keynote on Friday 13 for Business Enterprise Centre (BEC) St George and Sutherland Shire, at Doltone House Sylvania Waters.

See here for full details and registration (just $33). My topic is:

Success in a Connected World
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Telling the story of how the Osama news came out on Twitter first

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This definitely counts as big news. Osama Bin Laden is dead after over a decade of trying.

Interestingly, in many news outlets the fact that the news leaked on Twitter before President Obama’s announcement to the nation almost rivals the news itself. Just in following my own Twitter stream I knew the news (or at least the rumor) well before it appeared in the mainstream media.

ABC News has compiled a stream of the Twitter messages and mainstream media responses as they came out, as below. They used Storify, a service that just came out of beta last week. Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify, spoke at our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit last year to talk about how it provides a platform for people to collectively tell stories.
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World-leading Australian crowdsourcing platform 99designs gets $35 million, shows depth of Australian tech

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As I have written before, Australia is a global hub for crowdsourcing platforms, with the likes of Freelancer.com, 99designs, DesignCrowd, Kaggle, Ideas While You Sleep and many more resident here.

We have tapped some of this Australian expertise for our events, notably our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, held last November simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco.

The latest news is that design competition platform 99designs, in its first external fundraising, has just received an investment of $35 million from major VC firm Accel Partners. Techcrunch reports that 99designs has been growing at 120% per year, and that the number of design competitions hosted by the firm has doubled in the last four months. While the company didn’t need money, it started to see the potential of investing in growth. According to Techcrunch,
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Charismatic robots can now do stand up comedy and respond to the audience

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Heather Knight, also known as Marilyn Monrobot, studies human machine symbiosis and charismatic robots. In addition to her doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute she runs a stack of interesting projects.

Here is a video of Heather speaking at TED, demonstrating her robot which does stand up comedy. The audience provided live feedback to the robot during its performance, which it used to develop its routine.


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Tablet computers as seen from 1994

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The rise of news on tablets such as the iPad is one of the defining themes of our times. This was foreseen by some, even down to the language that we use. The following video, created by Knight-Ridder in 1994, describes their vision of the future of tablet newspapers.


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Global mobile market shares: who’s winning

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In preparing for the Ketchum Webinar Series on Tapping the Power of Mobile I wanted some data on international differences in mobile operating system shares. I was just about to begin compiling some data from StatCounter when my co-presenter One2One CEO Simon Noel pointed me to a visual created by iCrossing who have done a very nice job of it already.


Click on the image for full size

A few things stand out from this data:
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Keynote speech in Beijing on How Technology is Transforming Business

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In a few weeks I will be in Beijing to give a keynote to the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) annual Company Directors conference. AICD has usually held its annual conference in Australian cities, but when in 2007 it held it in Shanghai they actually had far more attendees than usual. This is now the second time the conference has been held outside Australia, and it promises to be an outstanding event. Of course one of the great things about holding the conference in Beijing is that it exposes the directors of Australia’s leading companies to new horizons if they have not previously been actively engaged in China.

Here is a brief description of my keynote:

How Technology is Transforming Business
The rise of our connected world is transforming business, from how consumers buy and build relationships with companies, to the structure of the supply chain and the nature of global competition. Directors need to understand the emerging technologies that are changing business today, including the dramatic rise of mobile, the power of cloud computing, new elements of the media and marketing landscape, and user-driven computing. Establishing a framework for innovation-led governance enables companies to best take advantage of these shifts.

I will share some of the content I will be covering closer to the time.

Serendipity is at the heart of today’s emerging society

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Serendipity is for me a deeply meaningful word.

The more than dozen posts discussing serendipity on my blog include how we created “enhanced serendipity” at an event I ran in 2003 in New York, more details on the story of the word serendipity and how to enhance it, the importance of the “serendipity dial” and far more.

One of the reasons I love Twitter so much is that it provides a rich substrate for serendipitous connections. A majority of the worthwhile connections I make these days come from Twitter. One of those connections is @AnaDataGirl. We have followed each other and had some conversations for a good while. So I heard multiple times that she did a gem of a presentation at SwitchConf in Oporto, Portugal last week.

Here are her lovely slides – while I’m sure they don’t do justice to the presentation itself they are well worth going through, as they capture some of the key concepts of serendipity and provide some delightful examples.

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