‘Aussie mafia’ sets up the “biggest startup hub in Silicon Valley”

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News just in that Elias Bizannes of Startup Bus fame is helping setting up Startup House, a 36,000 square foot space in San Francisco’s hopping SoMa district where entrepreneurs will live as well as run startups. There will be 150 desks in the lower floor, with upper levels including offices of the StartUp Bus and a number of international government agencies that want local launch pads for startups coming into the US. The intention is to run hackathons, startup weekends, and anything else that will support the local startup community.

TheNextWeb says that a group of the “Aussie mafia” (the Australian tech entrepreneur network in Silicon Valley) has bought the building and will take 6 months to transform it into this space. It notes that Plug and Play in Sunnyvale and Redwood City down the valley is bigger space-wise, but StartupHouse will probably be the biggest in San Francisco, and perhaps the biggest in the valley in a single building.

Here is a video from TheNextWeb being taken on a tour of the building – it’s an impressive space.


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On my 3rd Twitter birthday: 7 reasons Twitter is central to my life

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Earlier today I noticed it’s three years since my life on Twitter began. At the time I wrote about my belated entry to Twitterland.

It now seems strange to me that I was such a late starter compared to many other connected folk, given that Twitter is now so central to my life.

The primary reason I held off getting started on Twitter was that I felt that my blog was my primary space for content sharing, and I didn’t want to divide my limited spare attention across platforms. I now know that blogs and Twitter are highly complementary. Yes Twitter can be time-consuming. But the rewards are absolutely worthwhile.

Here are 7 reasons why Twitter has become central to my life.
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Keynote: The Business Opportunities of the Future

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This morning I gave the keynote at the MyBiz Expo 2011, on Business Opportunities of the Future.

I had been interviewed for the cover story of February edition of MyBusiness magazine on which industries will prosper and shrink in the decade ahead. I shared some thoughts on the blurring boundaries of industries, and some specific ideas on what sectors to delve into and avoid (on which I’ll share more in a future post).

Below are the slides from my presentation, which include discussion of emerging business opportunities as well as a detailed view of my Success in a Connected World framework. As usual, be warned that the slides are not intended to stand alone but to provide visual support to my presentation.

Keynote: The Business Opportunities of the Future

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Keynote: Social Media in Fashion Retailing

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Tomorrow morning I am giving a keynote to the managers of a national shopping center group about the power of social media in retail, focused on fashion.

Here are the slides for my keynote. As always, the slides are not intended to stand alone, but to provide visual support for my presentation.

The Power of Social Media in Retail

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The presentation covers three domains:
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Launch of Digital Sydney: Ideas, energy, success stories, and massive potential

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I am at the launch of Digital Sydney, part of the Vivid Sydney and Creative Sydney festivals.

The reality is that for much of the last decade and more, the New South Wales government has been among the least supportive of the Australia states for the digital and creative industries, with in contrast Victoria, Queensland, and Tasmania in particular having considerably better developed initiatives to support these industries.
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Keynote slides: Building Success in a Connected World

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Tomorrow morning I give the breakfast keynote at Think Business 2011, making it my third keynote this week.

For those attending the breakfast, here are my slides, which go through and flesh out our recent Success in a Connected World framework and also touch on related issues such as personal branding. The usual disclaimers apply: these slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to stand alone. However you may still find them useful!

Beijing social media/ future of media meetup on May 19

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I’m in Beijing next week to do the keynote at the AICD conference on How Technology is Transforming Business and guest lecture at Beijing Foreign Studies University on The End of Newspapers and Future of News.

While I’m in Beijing I’m keen to catch up with any local folks on Twitter/ Weibo/ social media and those interested in the future of media. As such I’ve set up a Beijing Future of Media/ Social Media meetup on Eventbrite. Please register on the page if you can join us.

Date: May 19
Time: 12pm – 2pm
Location: Union Bar and Grille
S6-31, 3/F, Bldg 6, Sanlitun Village South, 19 Sanlitun Lu, Chaoyang District
朝阳区三里屯路19号三里屯Village南区6号楼3层S6-31

If you’re in Beijing next week would be great to see you there, or if you think there are people who might like to come along, please pass on word.

Thanks to @beijingboyce and @benjaminjoffe for the pointers and support!!

Where news website traffic comes from: Google vs Facebook

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The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has recently released some very interesting research on Navigating News Online, digging into how people navigate to news sites and what takes them away.

Among the interesting insights was data on how news website traffic comes from Google and Facebook, shown below.

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Making sense of and filtering information overload

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I wrote up some brief notes from the Gallery of Modern Art’s recent panel discussion on the future of the 21st century.

Radio National’s Future Tense program subsequently broadcast the discussion and provided a full transcript for those who would like to see more of the content.

One of the many interesting topics of discussion was dealing with information overload. This is an issue that often comes up as a futurist, as people wonder how you keep across everything that’s happening. I’ll write in more detail on this later, but for now here is the transcript from the panel (somewhat mangled from the original) including comments from myself and Tim Longhurst. Some of the key points were:

* The new generation of web tools are enabling us to collaborate to filter massive information overload
* Creating visual frameworks can be a powerful way of making sense of information
* The role of futurists is pattern recognition
* Selective filtering to reinforce our biases is not new
* Most of us will experience more diverse views than before the web

Antony Funnell: Ross Dawson, I’ve given up looking at the technology section in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald because I just can’t keep pace with it – there just seems to be so much change going on. As a futurist, I just wonder how difficult it is to actually keep ahead of all that, to be involved in trying to forecast trends for business or organisations and be on the money, not feel like you’ve suddenly fallen behind the curve.
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World-leading Australian crowdsourcing platform 99designs gets $35 million, shows depth of Australian tech

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As I have written before, Australia is a global hub for crowdsourcing platforms, with the likes of Freelancer.com, 99designs, DesignCrowd, Kaggle, Ideas While You Sleep and many more resident here.

We have tapped some of this Australian expertise for our events, notably our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, held last November simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco.

The latest news is that design competition platform 99designs, in its first external fundraising, has just received an investment of $35 million from major VC firm Accel Partners. Techcrunch reports that 99designs has been growing at 120% per year, and that the number of design competitions hosted by the firm has doubled in the last four months. While the company didn’t need money, it started to see the potential of investing in growth. According to Techcrunch,
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