Monthly Archives: October 2006

User filtered content site Reddit bought by Conde Nast

Ross Dawson, October 31, 2006 at 3:05 pm

Conde Nast, the owner of Wired magazine, has just bought the user filtered news site Reddit, according to TechCrunch. After AOL set up Netscape beta as a user filtered news site, this is the second signficant foray of large media into this space. As described in our Future of Media Report 2006, user filtering is

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Reinventing HTML and the evolution of standards

Ross Dawson, October 27, 2006 at 11:04 pm

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has just announced that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will establish a completely new working group to work on the development of HTML, in his words “reinventing HTML”. This bold move has been prompted by the too-slow shift from a mark-up system which works reasonably

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The greater the uncertainty, the greater the value of scenario planning

Ross Dawson, October 25, 2006 at 7:05 pm

I have been applying scenario planning with clients for the last decade across a variety of industries and environments, including the future of financial services, technology, capital markets, risk management, construction, Internet, Asia, and far more. As I wrote back in 1998 in an article on scenario planning in portfolio and risk management, “The greater

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Mobiles leapfrog the fixed internet in Africa

Ross Dawson, October 13, 2006 at 11:59 pm

I’m just back from a quick trip to South Africa, where I am working with a large organization to help develop their long-term corporate strategy. One of the many insights on this fascinating trip was how mobiles are leapfrogging the Internet across Africa. Across the continent, and even in relatively developed South Africa, fixed broadband

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Changing investor disclosure could transform the world of blogging

Ross Dawson, October 3, 2006 at 4:21 pm

I have previously written about blogging and Regulation FD, which is a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation that requires egalitarian dissemination of substantive news that could affect the share price. On the face of it, blogs and RSS are the perfect way to allow perfectly equal access to news by everyone. Yet this is

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Open innovation in collaborative filtering

Ross Dawson, October 2, 2006 at 4:15 pm

Netflix has just announced a $1 million prize to whoever can improve the accuracy of their movie recommendation engine. To enable people to design an improved recommendation engine, they’ve provided their users’ ratings of 100 million movies, an extremely valuable database. This harkens back to Canadian gold mining company Goldcorp’s initiative, whereby they publicly released

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Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of AHT Group, which consists of 3 companies: consulting, publishing, and ventures firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy firm Future Exploration Network, and events company The Insight Exchange.

Ross is author most recently of Getting Results From Crowds, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, and Implementing Enterprise 2.0. (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.