Qantas Business Radio: why crowdsourcing will drive the future of organizations

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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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Research: The acceleration of Australian banks’ use of social media

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Financial services is one of the most industries in which the use of social media is the most relevant, not least because customer service is a critical differentiator between highly commoditized offerings. While financial services and banking were traditionally highly relationship-based, the shift to online has significantly eroded those relationships. Social media, used well, provides an opportunity to build relationships in a world in which most financial services are executed online.

In a global context, Australian banks were fairly slow to adopt the use of social media, however more recently a number have become a lot more active as they recognize its fundamental importance to their future.

Vindaya Senadheera, Prof. Matthew Warren, and Dr. Shona Leitch from Deakin University have done some interesting research in their paper A study on how Australian banks use social media.

To analyze the banks’ activity they use the Honeycomb framework of social media which was presented by Kietzmann et al in their paper Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media, which points to the key elements of social media engagement as Identity, Groups, Relationships, Presence, Sharing, Conversations, and Reputation.

Here are a few key points from the research

Twitter:

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Power, patents, competition, and ecosystems: Google’s bid for Motorola Mobility

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Yesterday I was interviewed on ABC TV about Google’s bid for Motorola Mobility.

The interview segments aired were on the value to Google of Motorola’s patent portfolio and the implications for the Android ecosystem.

Below are excerpts from the transcript of the interview on ABC.

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The extraordinary personal value of the web: $140 billion is the tip of the iceberg

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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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Futurist conversations: Thoughts on the future of television

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Continuing our series of conversations between fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here is our session on the future of television.

Here are a few of the ideas we share in the session:
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Reality mining, pervasive data capture, and how Big Data can create value

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On Tuesday I gave the opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium.

CIO magazine did a nice article titled IIIS: Big Data driving new trends which reviews my keynote and the one immediately after from Steve Duplessie, one of the world’s top analysts on data and storage. It says:

Speaking at the event, co-hosted by Storage Networking Industry Association A/NZ and Computerworld Australia, strategy advisor, author and futurist, Ross Dawson, said “reality mining” — the gathering of data based on the activities of people in a given environment — was a major trend to emerge out of, and contributor to, Big Data.

“If you look at an office environment there is an extraordinary amount of data to look at. For example, what gestures people are making, where are they looking, what conversations are they having, how much are they smiling when they speak to each other?” he said.

“You can literally get terabytes of data out of just a few hours of this. That data is being collected to drive productivity; to design new ways to enhance collaboration and create value inside organisations.”

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DARPA offers $42 million for ‘revolutionary’ research on social media analysis

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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (slogan: Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise) is offering $42 million in funding for “revolutionary” research into social media in strategic communication.

The DARPA announcement states:

The conditions under which our Armed Forces conduct operations are rapidly changing with the spread of blogs, social networking sites, and media]sharing technology (such as YouTube), and further accelerated by the proliferation of mobile technology. Changes to the nature of conflict resulting from the use of social media are likely to be as profound as those resulting from previous communications revolutions. The effective use of social media has the potential to help the Armed Forces better understand the environment in which it operates and to allow more agile use of information in support of operations.

The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. In particular, SMISC will develop automated and semi]automated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion to accomplish four specific program goals:
1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.

The New York Times comments:
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Keynote slides: The Future of Information Infrastructure

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This morning I am giving the opening keynote at Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium, organized by the Storage Network Industry Association and Computerworld.

Here are the slides to my keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure.

My usual warning applies: these slides are intended as visual support to my keynote, not as stand-alone slides. In this case they are even more than usually epigrammatic. However I share them for attendees and anyone else who might enjoy them. I will try to write more about some of my key points later.

Keynote: The Future of Information Infrastructure

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The evidence is in: we believe technology will create a better future but not better environment

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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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Futurist conversation: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on the role of a futurist

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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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