Presentation: Build Your Business with Crowdsourcing

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Today I spoke at Australian Chambers Business Congress on Build Your Business with Crowdsourcing.

Below are the slides from my presentation. Usual disclaimer: these slides are meant to accompany my presentation, not to stand alone. But in fact this time there is a little more detailed content than usual in my slides, as this was intended as a highly practical session on how to approach crowdsourcing.

Build Your Business With Crowdsourcing

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I’ll be fleshing out this content in other posts over the coming months.

Notes from the Australian Institute of Company Directors in Beijing

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I am at the annual conference of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, held this year in Beijing. It is fantastic that Australian company directors are choosing to meet here rather than at home, broadening vistas and opportunities. The Grand Ballroom at China World Hotel is full, with around 500 people here.

While I don’t have access to Twitter from my iPad (I haven’t had time to try to set up a VPN on my laptop yet) I can at least blog, so I might be doing more of that while I am in Beijing this week.

For now, here are my presentation slides for my keynote on How Technology is Transforming Business this morning. These are just a slightly different version of the presentation I shared last week. You can also find a pdf version of the Transformation of Business framework on which the presentation is based.

Transformation of Business – AICD on Prezi

Crowdsourcing among an awesome speaker line-up at Australian Business Congress

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The Australian Chambers Business Congress on 1-2 June is shaping up to be one of the top business conferences of the year in Australia, with an awesome speaker line-up. The Congress is organized by the Australian Chamber Alliance, a consortium of all the major business chambers across Australia.

Speakers include Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Porter, Steve Wozniak, Tony Abbott, Anna Bligh plus an array of some of most interesting people in business in Australia and worldwide.

I will be speaking at the Congress on Friday 3rd about Crowdsourcing.

I will do my best to pack in as many practical insights as I can on how to grow your business using crowdsourcing tools. This topic will be a major focus for me for the rest of the year, so stand by for plenty of content on how to get results from crowdsourcing – the scoop will be at the Congress!

Keynote slides: Building Success in a Connected World

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Tomorrow morning I give the breakfast keynote at Think Business 2011, making it my third keynote this week.

For those attending the breakfast, here are my slides, which go through and flesh out our recent Success in a Connected World framework and also touch on related issues such as personal branding. The usual disclaimers apply: these slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to stand alone. However you may still find them useful!

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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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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Crowdfunding in film takes off: the case of the attack of the space Nazis

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Crowdfunding is the topic of the moment, or maybe it only seems that way from the response to my recent posts on possible changes in regulation on crowdfunding and how the scene is developing.

Movies are probably the endeavor which has attracted the most crowdfunding initiatives, including:
– A Swarm of Angels (which I first wrote about in 2006)
– IndieGoGo (which started with films and has broadened into other creative spaces)
– The Age of Stupid
– Artemis Eternal (click on ‘Begin’ for details)
– BuyaCredit.com
– CinemaShares
and others.

Now a grand new experiment in movie crowdfunding is under way, with the Iron Sky project. The premise of this “dark science-fiction comedy” is that in 1945 Nazis went to the moon, and in 2018 they are coming back… It has all the makings of a cult classic, which is exactly the kind of movie that does well in crowdfunding. Budgets are small (compared to Hollywood), a limited pool of dedicated fans can make the venture profitable, and the crowdfunding process is integrated with building a community that will want to see the movie and spread word to their friends.

Check out the awesome trailer:

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SEC opens the gates to crowdfunding and a new structure of capitalism

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This is significant. While talk doesn’t necessarily lead to action, a significant shift in capitalism could be coming.

On Wednesday US SEC Chairman Mary Shapiro sent a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee. The letter is embedded at the bottom of this post.

Many have focused on the potential from the current SEC review to relax limits on shareholders for private companies, notably the rule that if a private company has 500 investors or more it has to disclose its finances. Changes to this and related rules could have a significant impact on capital raising for private companies.

Few seem to have focused on what I think is potentially a bigger issue from the SEC moves: opening up crowdfunding as a mechanism for equity investment. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece called SEC Boots Up for the Internet Age. The article begins:
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Digital Sydney is crowdsourcing its visual identity – submissions close soon!

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Since Sydney is my primary home, I have been delighted to see the local digital, creative, social media, and startup worlds explode over the last few years. There have always been pockets of world-class practice here, but we are now getting to the point where Sydney is starting to rank in the top-tier of digital cities around the world on a number of different levels.

The NSW government was long the least active of the states in supporting the digital and creative industries, however that has shifted significantly recently, with the City of Sydney also picking up the ball in a big way over the last few years.

One of the government initiatives is a formal Digital Sydney program which is currently being launched. They are opting to crowdsource their visual identity, though the crowd is just inhabitants of NSW. A prize of A$10,000 is up for grabs – see the video and details below.

There are already lots of other initiatives and activities in this space, and more all the time. It looks like Digital Sydney will contribute to the great momentum building in the creative and digital spaces in this wonderful city.


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Keynote: Building Business in a Connected World

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Tomorrow morning I am giving the keynote at City of Port Phillip’s inaugural Breakfast Briefing session for the year in St Kilda, Melbourne, on the topic of Building Business in a Connected World. Here are event details and registration.

Below are my slides for the presentation, which is almost entirely based on our Success in a Connected World visual framework launched earlier today.

The usual caveats apply – the slides are NOT intended to stand alone but to provide a visual accompaniment to my presentation, so these are shared primarily for those who attended my keynote. However others may still find them useful or interesting.

Note that the presentation is intended primarily for individuals and smaller businesses. It’s a completely different presentation for large enterprise.

Building Business in a Connected World

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