Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at the Arab Media Forum in Dubai, on Creating the Future of Arab Media.
My speech and a series of interviews I did afterwards have received broad coverage, including articles in Al Arabiya, Gulf Today, Huffington Post, Emirates 24/7, Zawya, and Gulf News, as well as interviews on Dubai Eye and Dubai One. I thought it was worth reviewing a few of the major points made.
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Tomorrow I am doing the opening presentation at Arab Media Forum in Dubai, the largest and most prestigious conference on media in the Arab world.
The slides to my presentation are below. As always, slides are designed to support my presentation, not to stand alone, but may still be of value even if you didn’t attend my keynote.
In my presentation I cover:
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I have been aware for some years of the various programming languages available for children. This evening I decided to have a go with Scratch with my daughters, as Leda is now almost eight, the bottom of the suggested age range for the language.
I was blown away. Scratch has an extremely wide range of capabilities, ranging from very simple animations through to complex conditional loops, all done through extremely easy rearrangement of colored blocks.
Any child would be immediately drawn into what they can do, and simply by playing, learn the principles of programming. Scratch’s originator MIT’s Mitch Resnick tells the story in this TED talk below.
Yesterday I gave two keynotes at the Congreso Internacional de Retail in Lima Peru.
The first keynote provided a big picture view of the changing world of business, while the second keynote focused on the future of retail.
Here are the slides to my first keynote. The slides to the second keynote are here. As always, my slides are designed to support my presentations, not to stand alone, but may be useful to others.
I am in South America this week, giving keynotes at the sCRM-CEM y Redes Sociales conference in Bogota and the Congreso Internacional de Retail in Lima.
Latin America is a fascinating and exciting region, both culturally and economically. However the region, while highly visible in North America, does not tend to get much attention from the rest of the world.
The dramatic economic rise of China is a dominant theme of this century, with India likely to gain ground on China in coming decades due to demographic shifts. This is drawing pointed attention from business executives around the world to Asia as a growth region. However to a certain degree the rise of China and India, and that of the rest of Asia, are distinct stories.
This first chart shows GDP of the major developing countries in Asia and Latin America (excluding Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea as established economies that are growing more slowly or not at all). China completely dominates in the extent and consistency of its growth. Considerably behind is Brazil, the second of the BRICs, followed by India.
Source: World Bank
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Today I was interviewed on the Daily Edition about virtual reality, in the wake of Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus Rift.
You can click on the image below to watch a video of the segment.
It is staggering that the very old idea of ‘virtual reality’ is finally about to reach its fruition with new technologies such as Oculus Rift, which have low enough latency to fool the brain into believing it is in a new world.
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PewResearch Internet Project has just released a report on Digital Life in 2025 based on expert interviews.
One of the interesting aspects of the report is the ‘theses‘ that they have distilled from the interviews, which they have divided into ‘more-hopeful and ‘less-hopeful’, concluding with one very important piece advice. These are:
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Last week I gave the keynote at the Board Strategy Planning offsite of a major Philippino bank at a beautiful location a few hours outside Manila.
The bank’s board and executive team recognize the need to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the future, so themed their strategy offsite around the future, inviting me to presenting on Creating the Future of Business to kick off the session.
My presentation delved into the essence of technological, societal, and economic structural change today, and the leadership required to succeed in the emerging world.
One of the topics I touched on was demographic change. Demographics in the Philippines is a very different issue than it is in most developed countries, where rapidly ageing populations are at the forefront.
The following chart shows the anticipated demographic profiles of Philippines and Japan in 2050.
Source: Nationmaster
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Today the ever-inspiring John Hagel spoke in Sydney today about passion at work as part of AMP’s Amplify series, organized by Annalie Killian.
The story in summary, told at more length in the Unlock the passion of the Explorer report, is that:
* Technological change is creating ever-increasing pressures and challenges for institutions and individuals;
* In this world the rationale for large organizations to exist is no longer scalable efficiency, but scalable learning;
* The Center for the Edge looked to find examples of “sustained, extreme performance improvement” that reflects this scalable learning;
* What they found in common was deep passion, but a particular type of passion that they dubbed the passion of the “Explorer”
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Today I was interviewed on The Daily Edition about the homes of the future.
Click on the image to watch a video of the segment.
The future of homes is a very rich topic that goes far beyond the usual chatter about internet-enabled refrigerators and integrated entertainment, and we weren’t able to cover much in a TV panel format.
However the main point that I made is that in the future we will have a very real relationship with our homes. Now homes are somewhere that we reside, and while we can shape them to our personalities, it is not currently a two-way relationship.
As we move forward, our relationship with our homes will comprise many elements.
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