Tech23: showcasing the best of Australian start-ups

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Rachel Slattery’s second Tech23 event is coming up on 19 August in Sydney, providing a showcase for the best start-ups in Australia.

I was able to spend some of the day at last year’s event, and blogged about the showcase and the SaaS/ In the Cloud session.

I had been thinking that Australia needed a good tech showcase, and after our Top 100 Web 2.0 Apps in Australia list and event I was considering running one. However with Tech23 doing a great job there was no need.

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Thought leadership in technology – five key services to influence clients and increase sales

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It is sometimes difficult to describe what my companies do. That is now a little bit easier, as we have created a flyer describing the key services of Advanced Human Technologies, focused on clients in the technology and media sector. The flyer does not mention our publishing and ventures activities, but covers the kind of consulting we do for vendors. Our Enterprise 2.0 flyer describes our work for corporate clients on implementing Enterprise 2.0.

Thought Leadership in Technology – Advanced Human Technologies

I hope it’s useful for those that want to know more about what we do (or may even want to engage us!).

I will later share some snapshots of what Future Exploration Network and The Insight Exchange are up to, to give a better picture of the group and how it fits together.

Getting perspective: Hand-held business computers are over 20 years old

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Last week I interviewed my old friend Tom Stewart, formerly editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, and currently Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer of Booz and Co, for a piece in CPA Australia’s magazine InTheBlack. I’ll share the article, on the role of financial executives in business strategy, on this blog later in the year.

Tom mentioned the fact that Frito-Lay, the most profitable division of Pepsico, introduced hand-held computers for real-time inventory management back in 1989. I had a look and found a fascinating article from 1990 in the New York Times titled Frito-Lay’s Speedy Data Network, focusing on the information the system provided. It says:

Frito-Lay’s electronic network has already led to a sweeping change in the company’s competitive strategy. As the network developed, the company realized it could now shift from a national marketing strategy to one that emphasized local responses, so-called micro-marketing.

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Tapping the forces of change: Why cloud computing is the future

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Through the month of August I will be doing the keynote address at a five-city Australian roadshow run by Telstra Business. I will open the breakfast events by providing a big picture view of how driving forces in technology, business and society are moving the world towards cloud computing, cloud working, cloud thinking, and cloud strategy.

I will be followed by Hugh Bradlow, Telstra’s Chief Technology Officer, who will provide a more detailed vendor view of cloud computing.

There is no public website for the event; I was told to suggest you contact your Telstra account executive if you’re interested in attending the event.

Below is a brief article I provided Telstra to help promote the event to their customers. I’ll be fleshing out the thinking in this article in some further writing and quite possibly a cloud framework.

Tapping the forces of change

Take a deep breath. As you breathe in, think about the invisible substance that is all around us and sustains us, but we cannot see. Air is vital to us and fuels our energy. In the same way, businesses today are finding that access to a universe of computing resources on tap in the ether around them is helping to keep them healthy and drive their growth. A company’s vitality increasingly depends on how readily it can breathe in this vital resource.

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What the future of newspapers looked like in 1981

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This delightful TV news clip from 1981 shows how people could access newspapers such as San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times on their computer using a dial-up line.

It took 2 hours to download the text of a newspaper, with a $5 cost per hour. One user marvelled at how you could not only read the newspaper online, but also copy it into a document and print it out. It’s particularly interesting to contrast the interface available in the day with, say, a contemporary iPad.

“We’re not in it to make money,” the newspaper people said of their experiments with online newspapers. Evidently.

No more checking in: why public facial recognition may take off

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minority-report-ads.jpgWe all know that processing power has for many years increased exponentially and continues to do so. This essentially means that any processing-intensive task you can imagine will eventually be possible.

Facial recognition happens to be a task that humans are hard-wired to be exceptionally good at. While computers struggled at this for a long time, it is now an entirely viable technology in controlled conditions, as when people are walking through turnstiles or gates.

The facial recognition used at the 2001 Super Bowl was successful enough to apparently nab 19 people with pending arrest warrants, while facial recognition is now commonly used in border security.

It becomes a lot harder when people’s faces are not viewed from the front, however to a large degree that’s where the increased processing power comes in handy.

Mark Cuban says that he has just invested in a company that uses video to identify how many people are in a given area, which can be useful for safety, security, and traffic control.

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Four awesome animations on YouTube

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My one-year old daughter Phoebe has woken up from her afternoon nap so I’m introducing her to YouTube. I spent a lot of time with her older sister Leda on my knee watching YouTube videos a couple of years ago – it’s time for Phoebe to explore the world of online video.

I have a number of favorites that I’ve watched many times, quite often as much for me as for the children. In case you haven’t seen them before, here are these choice morsels – hope you enjoy them!

1. Big Buck Bunny

A collaborative effort to promote the (awesome) open source 3D platform Blender – outstanding!

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Atlassian makes its Enterprise 2.0 ambitions clear – raises $60 million in first ever external funding

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Big news: Australian enterprise software company Atlassian, creators of popular wiki Confluence, project tracking platform Jira and other innovative software, has just raised $60 million from Accel Partners in what Wall Street Journal reports as a ‘growth equity’ round.

Atlassian has been entirely bootstrapped with no external funding to date, making it one of the larger companies in that situation, given its $59 million revenue in the last financial year. The reasons given for the funding round are to fund expansion in Europe and Asia, acquisitions, and to give liquidity to its employees, who all have stock options. Similarly, Microsoft’s CFO at the time of their IPO said that they didn’t need the money but mainly wanted to give their employees a way to participate easily in the company’s success.

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We are as gods – the cycle swings back to techno-optimism and neo-psychedelia

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The opening words of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 were: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

Indeed, the late 1960s were a time of vast optimism for many, based not just on the belief that ancient social strictures could be thrown off, but also that by use of new technologies we could liberate ourselves. The 1970s and then 1980s disabused people of the notion that revolution had truly arrived, as so little of the potential seen in the full flowering of new ideas seemed to have come to pass.

Then in the 1990s there was a smaller renaissance of techno-optimism, I think best captured in Douglas Rushkoff’s book Cyberia (now fully downloadable), which talked of designer reality and technoshamanism. By then Timothy Leary had reinvented himself as a digital apostle, in Chaos and Cyberculture (the full text is here though it doesn’t do justice to what is a highly visual book) describing how computers and connectivity were now the tools of enlightenment.

Today, after a decade of financial greed and excesses analogous to the 1980s, techno-optimism and neo-psychedelia are coming back with a vengeance. A strong indicator is the forthcoming documentary Turning into Gods by Jason Silva – the trailer is below.

TURNING INTO GODS – ‘Concept Teaser’ from jason silva on Vimeo.

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Trend Blend: 4 Infographics showing the major global trends

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At the end of every year media call on futurists to ask them what to expect in coming years, reflecting the appetite from their audiences for future thinking. One of the best ways to feed this desire is with infographics, distilling ideas into an accessible visual representation.

For the last four years a Trend Blend has been produced to close out the year. Each year this has been driven by Richard Watson of NowandNext, with myself and Future Exploration Network participating in the creation of the first three of these.

Below is a compilation of the four Trend Blends. You will see some themes recurring, and other fresh trends emerging over the years. All are intended to be fun and provocative, used both for general entertainment and sometimes for stimulating new thinking in the course of more serious futures and strategy work.

Click on the maps to see the detailed versions.


Trend Blend 2007+ map
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