On Friday a journalist from the Herald Sun called me to ask for my response to an ‘analysis’ suggesting that $1.4 billion of worker productivity is lost to playing Angry Birds. It seems that my answers turned the story around from what could have been yet another populist headline to Is Angry Birds the new Solitaire or are we flying off the handle a bit too early?
I was quoted:
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Research company Nielsen has just released detailed statistics on online activity, focusing on social networks and blogging, which at 22.5% of time spent online dominate Internet usage, with more than twice the next category games, at 9.8% of time spent. Below are a few highlights and comments from the full report.
Facebook completely dominates the social networking and blogging space, with over 70 times the next most prominent social networking site. Interestingly Tumblr’s dramatic rise (+183% over the last year) has taken it to overtake Twitter in time spent online. However Nielsen’s methodologies look only at website visits and don’t the majority of time spent on Twitter, which is on web and mobile clients. Facebook also dramatically surpasses the amount of time spent on Google, however Google is still mostly not a destination site. Over time initiatives such as Google+ may change that.
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Tomorrow morning I will give the keynote at Mainstreet Australia conference on the topic of Creating the Future of Business.
My slides are below. The usual caveat applies – the slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to stand alone.
While the title of the presentation is Creating the Future of Business, it has been tailored to the conference audience, so after a more general introduction on the driving forces of business, the presentation is really about the future of retail shopping precincts. Here are some of the points I will be making in my keynote.
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The distribution of music taste and consumption has shifted dramatically over the decade years, and will continue to evolve significantly in coming years.
Back before a dozen years ago, radio and MTV exposed people to a limited range of music from label playlists, and the cost of records and CDs made it hard to experiment with new music.
The first big change from that landscape was the widespread availability of online music downloads, which suddenly massively broadened the music libraries of the minority of people who were active downloaders, though didn’t give people an easy way of discovering music they liked that they hadn’t heard before.
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This month’s Qantas Business Radio has a technology focus, including interviews with Nick Leeder, Managing Director of Google Australia, Simon Hackett, Managing Director of Internode, Peter Williams, CEO of Deloitte Digital, Charis Palmer, Editor of Technology Spectator, Ian Hogg, CEO of FremantleMedia Australia, as well as myself.
There are some great insights in the various interviews, and if you’re not going to be on a Qantas flight you can listen to or download the interviews here, though I believe only until the end of August.
My interview was very broad-ranging: we spent some time discussing implications for organizations of a connected world including the role of crowdsourcing and the idea of the global brain, went on to look at how to use the iPad for work and why it is the first technology that is better than paper for many purposes, and finally when newspapers will become extinct around the world.
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How much value do you get from the web? A lot more than you pay for it.
We may quibble about the cost of bandwidth and online services, and in some cases we should, but the reality is the value we get from connectivity and web-based services is massive.
Earlier this year McKinsey & Co released research titled The Web’s €100 billion surplus (registration required). The key findings are shown below.
Source: McKinsey
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The Smithsonian Institute and Pew Research Center recently did a survey of Americans on what they thought would happen by the year 2050.
Good created a nice infographic, below, summarizing some of the data. Click on the image for the full size version.
Image source: Good
The Smithsonian magazine has also created a nice animation from the results.
Here are some of what the American people believe will (or is likely to) happen by 2050:
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Continuing our series of conversations with Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency, and myself, here is the one we kicked off with: what is the role of a futurist?
Here are a few of the topics we discuss:
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The vast majority of my work over the years has been in the business sector, however I am increasingly being pulled into government and the public sector. As I spend more time in the government space, it is becoming increasingly evident to me that the public sector can lead fundamental positive structural shifts in society and the economy, making me keen to put more of my time and attention into this arena.
To help support a number of keynotes and other engagements in the public sector I have created The Transformation of Government Framework, as below. This was first shown this morning when I gave the opening keynote at the Institute of Public Administration NSW annual conference, and I will be using an adapted version for my keynote at the Local Government Association of Tasmania’s annual conference this Thursday, which celebrates their 100th anniversary.
The Transformation of Government framework (click on image for full-size pdf)
The framework is derived from The Transformation of Business framework that I created recently, as some of the driving forces are exactly the same across business and government, while other issues are expressed differently or have different prominence across the domains.
The framework is primarily intended to support my keynotes, workshops, and strategy sessions, though hopefully it will also be useful as a stand-alone to help frame fundamental issues around change in the government space. I will expand on and discuss these key themes in greater detail when I get an opportunity.
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Tomorrow morning I am giving the opening keynote at the annual conference of Institute of Public Affairs New South Wales, on the topic of The Transformation of Government.
Originally I was scheduled to follow the recently elected NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell, but he has had to travel to Beijing, so he will present at the conference after the morning break via Telepresence.
It is actually quite significant for an outsider like myself to be invited to speak at the event, let alone on a big picture view of a rapidly changing world. The title of the conference is The Future Course of Modern Government, mirroring an excellent policy paper of the same name created by IPAA a few months ago. I blogged about the 11 recommendations in the report, which are well worth a read if you don’t have the opportunity to read the entire paper.
The conference is intended to be a landmark event, several months since the NSW government changed after 16 years of Labor incumbency, and anticipating potentially dramatic change in how the state government functions in the years ahead. The themes of the conference – Technology, Innovation, Services Reform, Collaboration – are now squarely on the government’s agenda, and the reason I was invited to give the keynote.
Below is my Prezi presentation to support my keynote. I will shortly release the underlying framework as a pdf.
