A belated hooray! iPhone will finally get an external keyboard

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Last year in intense frustration I wrote It is totally INSANE that you cannot use an external keyboard on an iPhone. It is absolutely crazy that I have to carry around other devices to be able to touchtype on the move.

With the launch of the iPad with external keyboard capabilities (and large on-screen keyboard) I was getting worried that they weren’t going to give the iPhone a keyboard in order to differentiate the devices.

Fortunately Steve Jobs has just announced that iPhone OS4, due out in the Northern summer, will include Bluetooth keyboard capabilities. Again, it is totally insane that it has taken this long – the iPhone has always had Bluetooth, it’s just that Apple deliberately crippled the ability to use it for keyboards.

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This means I’m likely to continue with iPhone for a little while. The latest Android phones were beginning to look very tempting.

Of course there are some other nice features in OS4, notably multitasking and enhanced camera and video capabilities. But the keyboard is for me the critical one.

Keynote presentation on Future of Interactive Marketing at IPZ09 in Istanbul

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For those who were at the fantastic IPZ09 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul this week, apologies for the delay in posting my keynote slides – the hotel bandwidth wasn’t adequate to upload them and I’m only just back at home.

For those who weren’t at IPZ09, note that these slides were designed to accompany my keynote and not to be useful by themselves. However they may still be of interest.

The slides can also be downloaded as a pps file, which includes the movies but not the animations of all the frameworks as I explained their implications for marketers. See here for the Social Media Strategy Framework in English and Turkish.

I’ll be writing more soon about what I covered in my keynote and my (very favorable) impressions of the Turkish digital market.

Social Media Strategy Framework in Turkish – Sosyal Medya Strateji Çerçevesi

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Now having launched version 2 of our Social Media Strategy Framework, we will release it in a variety of other languages.

Since I am giving the opening keynote at IPZ2009 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul on 21 October, we will kick off with the Turkish version, and release the other translations over the next couple of weeks.

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Click on image to download pdf

Please share this with any Turkish speakers.

Also be sure to let me know if you can suggest any improvements to the translation.

In the wake of the death of venture capital: Finding a balance between the incubator and VC models

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There has been a lot of talk lately that the VC model is broken – here is a small selection of what has been being said recently on the topic:

Forbes: Venture Capital’s Coming Collapse

EarlyStageVC: Traditional Venture Capital Sure Seems Broken – It’s About Time

VentureBeat: The VC model is broken

Fred Wilson: Is The “Traditional Venture Capital Model” Broken?

Mathew Ingram on GigaOm: Is the VC Model Broken? Far From it

New York Times/ Bits: Do Web Entrepreneurs Still Need Venture Capitalists?

HuffingtonPost: The Death of Venture Capital as We Know It

There are manifold reasons for the VC sector’s challenges, not least the vastly lower capital requirements of the typical web start-up of today.

One of the poster-children of the new wave of seed capital has been Y Combinator, which provides very small amounts of capital to kick-start new ventures.

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A Manifesto for the Reputation Society: it’s coming soon!

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One of the key themes at Future of Influence Summit 2009 on August 31 / September 1 will be the emergence of the ‘reputation economy’, and how value is being created in that space.

Howard Rheingold, who has been deeply involved in this space since the 1980s, and has demonstrated his prescience by writing – among others books – Virtual Reality in 1991 and Smart Mobs in 2002, will be doing a keynote at the conference.

In our recent conversation about influence and reputation Howard mentioned the 2004 article Manifesto for a Reputation Society, which appeared in First Monday. I saw this a number of years ago but had forgotten it. It is in fact a great overview of where reputation may go. The abstract reads:

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The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives

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Tomorrow morning I’m doing a presentation to the top executive team of a very large organization on the next 20 years. Most of what I will cover will be general societal, business and technological drivers as well as specific strategic issues driving their business. However as part of stretching their thinking I’ll also speak a about the Singularity.

As such I’ve been trying to find one good image to introduce my explanation, however I haven’t been able to find one which is quite right for the purpose.

Ray Kurzweil’s Six Epochs diagram below is great and the one I’ll probably end up using, however it is a bit too over-the-top for most senior executives. The Universe becoming conscious is beyond the ambit of most strategy sessions.

Source: Ray Kurzweil, Applied Abstractions

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Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Free Chapter 11: Social Networks In The Enterprise

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Continuing our series of free chapters from Implementing Enterprise 2.0, here is Chapter 11 on Social Networks in the Enterprise. For full details on the report and all the sample chapters go to the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 website.

Section 4 of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is Creating Business Value From Enterprise 2.0 Tools. It includes chapters on implementing Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks, RSS and syndication, Social Bookmarking, and Microblogging in the enterprise.

Chapter 11 on Social Networks in the Enterprise contains:

* Visual representation of social networks in the enterprise (see also the visualizations for RSS in the enterprise, wikis in the enteprise and social bookmarking in the enterprise)

* Background to social networks and adoption in the enterprise

* Six key domains in which social networks can create business value inside organizations

* Required functionality of social networks for enterprise use

* Issues with implementation, including for internal social network and external social networks

* Two brief case studies of enterprise implementation of social networks

IE2 Sample Chapter 11

You can also just download the pdf of Chapter 11.

Hanging out with Paul Krugman

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I just got sent this nice picture of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and myself at the residence of His Highness Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, UAE Minister for Higher Education and Scientific Research. We were invited to his home in the evening for an informal conversation after the MegaTrends conference we both keynoted at in Abu Dhabi a couple of weeks ago.

HH Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan is looking at a copy of my book Living Networks.

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Innovation Bay angel dinner: great stories from start-ups Goanna, Posse and AdSoft

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Since Victoria and Phoebe are still in hospital, last night I snuck out to Innovation Bay’s angel dinner. Innovation Bay has been running for five and half years, bringing together an invitation-only group to a variety of compact events. The founders Ian Gardiner, Rand Leeb-du-Toit and Phaedon Stough recently got together to reassess what they should do with the community and decided to run an ‘angel dinner’, inviting all of their speakers over the years plus some other successful entrepreneurs and investors to see some new start-ups. I in fact spoke at Innovation Bay’s second event in early 2004, giving an overview of the social networking space at the time, including key players and business models.

It was an excellent evening, and all three of the companies that presented were very impressive with very good stories to tell. Here are some brief notes from the evening:

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2009 is the year of influence – tap the power (on 19 May)!

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This is the year influence shifts to center stage. Wherever I go people are talking about influence. Meanwhile companies are rapidly shifting their marketing resources to tap the power of influence.

There are several primary drivers for the rise of influence:

* The democratization of media, which gives everyone a channel to propagate theirs or others’ opinions.

* Peer trust, which places far greater faith in individuals than corporate advertising and marketing.

* The ongoing fragmentation of mass media, which takes away the power of traditional marketing channels.

* The aggregation of social media, which gives a far stronger voice to the many individual conversations.

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