Keynote speech in Beijing on How Technology is Transforming Business

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In a few weeks I will be in Beijing to give a keynote to the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) annual Company Directors conference. AICD has usually held its annual conference in Australian cities, but when in 2007 it held it in Shanghai they actually had far more attendees than usual. This is now the second time the conference has been held outside Australia, and it promises to be an outstanding event. Of course one of the great things about holding the conference in Beijing is that it exposes the directors of Australia’s leading companies to new horizons if they have not previously been actively engaged in China.

Here is a brief description of my keynote:

How Technology is Transforming Business
The rise of our connected world is transforming business, from how consumers buy and build relationships with companies, to the structure of the supply chain and the nature of global competition. Directors need to understand the emerging technologies that are changing business today, including the dramatic rise of mobile, the power of cloud computing, new elements of the media and marketing landscape, and user-driven computing. Establishing a framework for innovation-led governance enables companies to best take advantage of these shifts.

I will share some of the content I will be covering closer to the time.

Future of Retail: 10 powerful trends and 1 meta-trend

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I have just come across this – an excellent resource from PSFK on the Future of Retail.

PSFK presents Future of Retail report

View more presentations from PSFK

The report covers 10 major trends:
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Launch of Future of Sex: why we’re doing it

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My company Advanced Human Technologies has recently launched the website Future of Sex (futureofsex.net), which explores the intersection of technology and human sexuality.

A few people have been surprised to see us launch this site, as it is a little different from the topics we usually cover. Here is the background and reasons why we’ve launched the site.
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Ketchum Webinar Series: Tapping the Power of Mobile

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Mobile is shifting to the very heart of media and content. As such, in delving into the future of media over the last few years I have had an increasing focus on the mobile landscape, how to tap its potential, and where it is going.

Starting today, I am co-presenting a three part webinar series on Tapping the Power of Mobile run by leading PR firm Ketchum. Here is an overview of the three sessions, which slices the hefty amount of content, case studies, and insights we will be covering into segments that are each self-contained, but together provide a great foundation for creating value from mobile marketing.

Below is the full description of the webinars, which are for clients and friends of Ketchum, primarily in the Americas and Europe given the session timing. Contact Maegen Noble (see the bottom of the post) for further details.

I’ll share a couple of the insights we cover in the webinar series on this blog along the way.
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Is this overload? 9.57 zettabytes of information flows in the world’s enterprises

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A recent report titled How Much Information? 2010 Enterprise Server Information written by several UC – San Diego academics says that in 2008 the world’s servers processed 9.57 zettabytes (zettabyte = 10 to the power of 21), or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

A couple of analogies from Physorg illustrate these amounts:

* 9.57 zettabytes is equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.

* By 2024 the world’s enterprise servers will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system.

This is 12GB of information daily per worker, or 3TB per year. Another study showed that American households consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008, or around 10TB per individual. (Note that not all of the 3.18 billion workers covered in this study work in information-intensive industries or countries.)


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Risks to Gartner’s smartphone forecasts: will Microsoft beat Apple, Nokia execute, and Samsung fail?

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Gartner has just released some very interesting forecasts for smartphone operating system sales until 2015, as below.

In an nutshell, they predict that in 2015 Android will take almost half the market, at 48.8%, and that Microsoft will overtake Apple, with 19.5% share compared to 17.2% for iOS. Nokia’s Symbian platform will fade to virtually nothing, while Research in Motion’s Blackberry will decline somewhat in market share to

The most interesting commentary I’ve seen so far on these predictions comes from Horace Dediu at Asymco, Kevin Tofel at GigaOM, and Larry Dignan at ZDNet.

To take just a few of the many things that could be said about these forecasts:
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The REAL transformative package: iPad plus wireless keyboard

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The iPad has changed my life. It feels like I have been waiting for it since I became conscious.

However the iPad alone doesn’t do the job. It is the iPad together with a wireless keyboard that has transformed my life.

Two years ago tomorrow I wrote a blog post saying It is totally INSANE that you cannot use an external keyboard on an iPhone. For some completely inane reason Apple crippled the Bluetooth on the iPhone so it couldn’t be used for external keyboards.
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The latest robots are virtually indistinguishable from people

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Almost five years ago now I wrote a post titled Being in two places at the same time which described how Professor Ishiguro, a Japanese roboticist, had created a robot replica of himself so he could give lectures at his university without enduring the commute from his home.

The robot, named Geminoid HI-1 to emphasize that it was his twin, mimicked his expressions and movements. Having this doppelganger meant that he could send it (or indeed multiple versions) out to represent him in the world.

After a sequence of other Geminoids, the state of the art has become startlingly good. The following videos show Geminoid DK, which is the twin of Associate Professor Henrik Scharfe of Denmark’s Aalborg University, designed in collaboration with Professor Ishiguro. Check out the videos.


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Developmental robotics: the cute baby robot who will grow up to be just like you

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We are at the cusp of a new phase of robotics, where some of what has been promised to us for decades will come to fruition. An example of this is the iCub, a humanoid baby robot that can learn, emulating human cognition and development. This is the field of ‘developmental robotics’: creating robots that can learn and develop their capabilities over time.

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Six trends for 2011 and beyond on how businesses can tap the power of the web

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The very dynamic Adam Franklin and Toby Jenkins of Bluewire Media recently did a video interview of me, asking me about the trends driving how the web will shape business.

Here is the video, with a summary of my headline points below. (Also see Bluewire Media’soriginal post of the video , which has my comments written up in greater detail.)

What do you see the future of the web being for businesses?

The fundamental trends include:

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