“Shoezam” app mimics Shazam to image, identify, and replicate shoes on the street

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This morning I attended the Innovation Bay breakfast on Where to for retail now?.

It was a fascinating discussion, which was definitely useful as I develop my forthcoming Future of Retail framework. (Still working on it, I don’t know when it will be ready for the public, more later.)
Shoesofprey
Michael Fox, founder of the highly innovative and successful Shoes of Prey, spoke about some of what they envisage for the future of retail.

One of their internal initiatives is an app they dub “Shoezam”, which acts like Shazam in that people can take an image of a shoe they like in the street, which the app analyzes so that users can immediately order that shoe for themselves.
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GitHub launches service for open government

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Future of government seems to be the topic of the moment.

After my post yesterday on Citizen sourcing and the future of cities and last week on Four fundamental principles for crowdsourcing in government, I have to report about GitHub launching government.github.com.

GitHub_government

As it happens, in my recent keynote on A Future of Crowds: Implications for Government and Society, I discussed the issue of GitHub as a tool for crowdsourced government.
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Meeting of the Minds: Key future trends with Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard

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When I was in Switzerland recently, esteemed colleague Gerd Leonhard and I recorded a number of video conversations, produced by Jonathan Marks. Following ones on Big Data, the future of privacy, and the future of Switzerland, here is our conversation on Key future trends.

For more conversations about the future see Meeting of the Minds.

After discussing some of the major trends, we go on to discuss our own preferred futures.

Trends and implications that we raise and discuss in the video include:
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Citizen sourcing and the future of cities

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As I noted last week in my post on Four fundamental principles for crowdsourcing in government, one of the most powerful applications of crowdsourcing is in government.

PSFK has just launched a nice report and summary presentation on the future of cities, embedded below.

The third section of the report covers Citizen Sourced aspects of the future of cities, including:
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How technology is enabling the humanity of organizations

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After my recent opening keynote at the SAP Australia User Group Summit on Leadership in Enterprise Technology, I did a video interview for Inside SAP magazine, shown below.

The full transcript of the interview is available on our new publication CIO of the Future.
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As more jobs are automated, how many of us will still have productive work?

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There has been a lot of press the last few days about a paper The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?, published by the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology.

Almost all the coverage has been on the headline figure that 47% of US employment is at risk. However the paper provides many more interesting insights when you examine the detail.
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Launch of CIO of the Future

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Advanced Human Technologies is, among other things, a publisher. To complement our existing ventures and publications, we have been building the platform and capabilities to generate more web publications and soon, more books and reports.

The general theme of our publications is the future, or in some cases what we need to do today to be successful in the future.

The first of our new phase of publications is CIOoftheFuture.com, looking at where the Chief Information Officer role is going.

CIOoftheFuture_500w
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Leadership in enterprise technology must come from all organizational functions

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This morning I gave the opening keynote at SAP Australia Users Group Summit on Leadership in Enterprise Technology.

One of my central themes was that leadership in enterprise technology no longer resides just with the CIO and IT function.

The Future of the CIO is absolutely a critical frame, not least because I believe the CIO has primary responsibility for guiding boards of directors and top executive teams to understand the importance of technology in their organization’s future.
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The crime of the century: stopping the potential of connectivity

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Last week I gave the keynotes at the Sydney and Melbourne relaunch events of Nextgen Group, which has restructured and rebranded with the acquisition of 70% of the group by Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP) from Leighton Holdings. The group provides networks, data centers, and hosting services, including a 100Gbps link between major Australian cities, and is building a submarine fibre cable linking Australia to Singapore.

The theme of my keynote was The Future of a Connected World, showcasing some of most interesting implications and potential of connectivity.

To provide some context for the future I spent a moment looking at the past of connectivity, which unfortunately is not always as happy a story as the future.
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Meeting of the Minds with Gerd Leonhard: The implications of Big Data

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My futurist colleague Gerd Leonhard and I have highly complementary perspectives, so we are finding increasing interest in engaging us together for executive sessions.

When Gerd was in Sydney two years ago we created a series of videos together. After I recently did a keynote in Interlaken, Switzerland, I visited Gerd at his home in Basel where we did another series of videos for his Meeting of the Minds project. Here is the first one in the series, on Big data.

Just a few of the points we cover in our conversation:
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