How technology is transforming events

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One of my speaking bureau just asked me to provide them with a few quick ideas on how technology is changing events, as one of their key clients is having an internal meeting to discuss their future use of technology in events.

I only had 10 minutes free to write something, so it’s far from comprehensive, but I thought worth sharing here.

Before events:
– Connecting with speakers and others attendees
– Identifying who you’d like to catch up with at the event
– Arranging meetings with sponsors or other attendees
– Voting on content to be covered
– Surveys to gain insights into participants and their experiences and views
– Sharing content relevant to the event
– Getting recommendations for people to meet with similar interests, projects etc., using tools such as introNetworks
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Next year your entire desk will be a computer control device

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I have long said that table tops will embed video and that we will use every possible means to interact usefully with computers.

Software and device vendor ExoPC has announced EXOdesk, a computer interface that will be laid on your desk, offering digital keyboards, a variety of colorful keypads, sortable RSS feeds, and even a piano, as shown below.


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Tear the walls down: Jericho and the future of enterprise tech

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Yesterday I gave the keynote on The Future of Information Technology at the Local Government IT2011 conference in Coffs Harbour, which this year had the theme of mobility.

Given the ambitious scope of my keynote title, I covered a lot of territory including fundamental technology shifts and the evolving shape of organizational technology. In looking at how to respond to the forces of the ‘consumerization’ of IT, power to the user, and mobility I raised the ideas put forward by the Jericho Forum. I asked for a show of hands, and no-one had heard of it, which I hope is not representative.

Jericho Forum, as the name implies, is intent on bringinging down the walls that surrounds enterprise technology. The key concept is “de-perimeterization“, which is basically a multi-syllabic way of saying tear down the walls. In a world in which users are anywhere, connecting from any device, it is crazy to try to put up and defend walls. The boundaries of organizations are blurring beyond recognition, which I and others have been saying for over a decade, so it is completely dysfunctional for technology to try to maintain boundaries. As Jericho Forum puts it:
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5 facets of employees’ increasing technology expectations

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Earlier this week I spoke at an excellent event organized by Canon for the CIOs of major organizations. During an extended lunch, a diverse range of ‘celebrities’ including TV personalities, authors, and musicians gave short presentations. I spoke about how the evolving intersection of technology and society is shaping employees’ expectations, particularly in the technology they can use. I wove a broader story about social change and its implications, though I briefly brought out five points on what employees expect from technology.

1. Excellence.
When people go into organizations, they have extremely high expectations of the technology they are given to use. This has been honed by extensive use of intuitive, responsive, flexible consumer technologies, and the reasonable view that organizations should be able to provide technologies that are at least as good as those consumers have access to.
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Humanoid robots get better, walk, run, hop, and help around the house

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Honda, better known for its cars, has just released a new version of its Asimo humanoid robot, as shown below. It can run at a good pace, hop on one foot, and unscrew bottle caps and pour drinks.


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The potential in a networked world to be more ourselves, towards perfection or destruction

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A nice video titled On the Brink of a Networked Society, shown below, has just been launched by Ericsson. It includes a series of excellent interviews exploring some of the many implications and directions of a connected world, including health, industry structure, how we socialize, and far more. It’s well worth watching.

The single quote in the video that struck me the most was:
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Siri and the dawn of the era of intelligent agents

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I have recently done a number of interviews on the implications of Apple’s voice assistant Siri. To me, it’s looking very much like Apple has once again brought a technology to market precisely when it is sufficiently mature to impress. Voice control and ‘intelligent assistants’ are far from new, but haven’t been widely used to date simply because they haven’t been good enough.

The launch of Siri a year after the company was acquired by Apple has allowed them to develop what was already excellent technology to the point of being ready for the mass market. As with a number of other Apple releases over the last years, Siri’s launch is changing people’s perceptions of what technology can do, and opening many minds to new possibilities. We always knew we would eventually be able to tell our machines what we wanted them to do and have them respond. That era has begun. Though of course it still has a long way to go.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald features is a nice article titled Siri: can you help make my company better?. It runs through some interesting insights on the state of predictive modelling, and closes with some quotes from me:
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The secrets of BigCommerce’s success

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In the Kochie’s Business Builders program that I hosted on Sunday, I interviewed Matt Barrie of Freelancer.com, and Eddie Machaalani and Mitch Harper of BigCommerce, both fantastic Australian online business success stories.

Following the excellent Freelancer.com interview, below is the interview with BigCommerce’s founders. They recently raised US$15 million from US VC firm General Catalyst Partners in their first external funding round since they were founded.

The interview brings out the reasons for their success: great products and an intense focus on marketing. Their story offers great lessons for any online business.

Here are a few of the insights they shared in the interview:
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Techmeme: The power of the headline

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I first wrote about Techmeme over 5 years ago. Today Techmeme remains the reference point for what’s hot in technology news. Bloggers and publishers strive to appear on its pages, not just because of the traffic it drives, but also because the people who visit Techmeme are among the most influential in the business.

Founder Gabe Rivera has just shared some insights into how particular articles are selected as the lead article on Techmeme for a particular breaking story. For the first few years Techmeme used only an algorithm, however it has had human editors to complement the algorithm for almost three years now.

It turns out that one of the reasons to have humans is to select the stories with the most informative headlines. In an aggregator site, headlines are critical, as they need to tell as much of the story as possible. The rise of the web has had a big impact on headline writing, not least for search optimization, but also increasingly for aggregation.

Here are some of Gabe’s tips on how to make your story hit the front page of Techmeme:
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Freelancer.com: There has never been a better time to start an online business

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The most recent Kochie’s Business Builders program focused on online business. It started with an interview with me about the big picture, after which I went out to interview two of Australia’s most successful online businesses: Freelancer.com and BigCommerce.

Below are the videos of the interview I did with Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, together with some notes from what he said.

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