February 2008 Archives

The energetic Vishal Sharma of VS Consulting Group is running a Startups Carnival over the next two weeks, bringing together a promising field of Australian technology startups. I am a judge for the carnival, together with Justin Davies, and Duncan Riley of Techcrunch fame – bios for the three of us are here.

Detailed applications from 23 Australian startups giving insights into their strategy and situation have been received – the full list is here. I’ll keep you posted on some of the insights and results.

We are currently hiring a new finance/ admin person. One of the impacts of online job classifieds is that it is far easier to apply, and so you get far more applications than when people had to write and post a letter. For another position we're advertising, for an Extremely talented office/ events/ digital media assistant, we've received over 150 applications in the last five days - a few very good, and many just not worth looking at.

However there are occasional compensations for the work of going through many resumes. One application for the finance/ admin position included the following in her career history:

XXXXXXX Finance Service in China (a professional financial consulting company, handling tax dodging sensibly and regular accounting operating for clients)

As an accounting clerk/ admin officer

Ahem.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald titled Facebook up to it by doyen technology journalist Graeme Philipson gives a great review of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum from last week, excerpted below.

Until now, Web 2.0 applications have mostly affected individuals. Companies and government organisations have largely retained more traditional methods of communication. The primary collaborative technology for most organisations in the modern world has become email, which is very much a Web 1.0, or first generation, internet application.

That is now changing. Web 2.0 applications are increasingly finding their way into the enterprise. This phenomenon has, inevitably, been dubbed Enterprise 2.0. That term was invented last year by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee, who has emerged as something of an international authority on the subject. Last week I heard a remarkable presentation by Professor McAfee on the state of play with Enterprise 2.0 worldwide. His talk was beamed in via Skype from Orlando, Florida, where he was attending an enterprise search conference. He spoke to 200 of us assembled in a conference room in Sydney's Luna Park to discuss Enterprise 2.0 in Australia.

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The event I attended where we heard Professor McAfee's words of wisdom was the grandly named "Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum", run by Sydney company Future Enterprise Network (FEN). FEN (futureexploration.net) is run by Ross Dawson, who has become one of Australia's leading internet gurus in recent years. He also runs regular events on the future of media.

In addition to the insights from Andrew McAfee, the article covers the points raised by Euan Semple, who drove the BBC’s move into social media, and the many real live practitioners of Enterprise 2.0 who are in Sydney. It discusses the reluctance by some to embrace these technologies, but also suggests that this shift is inevitable. This is probably the best one-stop review of the event – have a read!

BRW magazine’s annual Digital Generation Flagship Edition came out today. It’s an excellent report and review of the digital space in Australia. Foad Fadaghi, the technology editor of BRW, has come to the media business from the research industry, having held senior analyst and director positions at Frost & Sullivan, Jupiter Research and IDC. This way of looking at the world results in the BRW Digital issue showing how journalism at its best is becoming a lot more like analysis, creating real value-add and insights that can’t be found elsewhere.

Data in the report (with a few snippets available here) includes market shares in online publishing (Google #1 at A$389 million with 89% growth), relative online ad revenues (e.g. NineMSN earns $99 million), surveys of corporate activities in online advertising (e.g. 37% of companies measure their online advertising ROI), shares of online social networking advertising (MySpace wins at 75%), and far more, complemented by a neat visual map segmenting the players in the Australian digital media market.

The report’s article on Web 2.0 draws extensively on an interview with me, with quotes from me as below. The article goes on to cover in more depth some of the players in the space.

The costs involved in web 2.0 development are so low it has spawned a large number of small one and two-person companies that can be profitable with a small user base, Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says. This means web 2.0 development is unnoticed by venture capital and other investors.

Slate magazine has published a very nice slideshow titled "Borrowed Time" about the past and future of libraries. On the final slide it refers to the Extinction Timeline created by What's Next and Future Exploration Network, where we had put 2019 for the extinction of libraries. Slate writes:

Ross Dawson, a business consultant who tracks different customs, devices, and institutions on what he calls an Extinction Timeline, predicts that libraries will disappear in 2019. He's probably right as far as the function of the library as a civic monument, or as a public repository for books, is concerned. On the other hand, in its mutating role as urban hangout, meeting place, and arbiter of information, the public library seems far from spent. This has less to do with the digital world—or the digital word—than with the age-old need for human contact.

Absolutely we are shifting into a world where experiences and physical interactions are becoming more important than ever. For example, shopping in shops will never disappear. We will create new spaces where we can meet and interact. We are yet to see whether the spaces where people spend their time are those based around books and collected information.

James Gardner, head of innovation at Lloyds TSB, writes consistently on his blog Bankervision, disclosing some of the key issues involved in innovating in a major bank. In a recent post New ways of collaborating at the bank, James writes about how Lloyds TSB is piloting social media such as blogs. Some excerpts from his below show how blogging can change how corporations work.

We have one blog, for example, that documents the trials and tribulations of a member of the team that is implementing the social media pilot for us. Along the way there have been a couple of roadbumps, of course, and this particular blog offers the opinions of the team on the ground as things have gone wrong. It is a very positive and welcome read. Quite often, one doesn't have a deep understanding of the real issues that caused the problem in the first place. Sometimes, you want the details without all the unpeeling that goes on before you can get them. This is a blog that does that.

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In the wake of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, Smartcompany magazine has published an interview with me titled Web 2.0: Our winning ways. It begins:

Entrepreneur Ross Dawson is a leading international expert on the way businesses are using web 2.0 in Australia – and he has good news.

After lagging behind our international counterparts in the enterprise 2.0 stakes, Australia is starting to catch up in its use of blogs, wikis, social networks, social search and virtual worlds.

Ross tells Amanda Gome what’s hot, how businesses are benefiting – and what’s destined for the 2.0 dustbin.

A few brief selections from my responses to the interview:

At last I am very encouraged. The response from people at the conference shows there is a lot happening. Up until now organisations have been shy about putting up their hands and talking about what they are doing. Up until now there has also been disparate things being done by different users in different departments. But now things are being squarely addressed by executives at the top of the company so people are prepared to talk about it.

Companies are striving to create more value from the participation of their employees, customers and suppliers by using web 2.0.

...

From a couple of months before the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum held last week, I had been hoping to create some kind of governance framework or implementation framework for Enterprise 2.0 that would be useful at the event.

Last year I created our Web 2.0 Framework, which has now been downloaded around 40,000 times and I gather been used by quite a few organizations in their planning and strategy. This time I wanted to create something that would be useful to help organizations understand and address both the risks and business value of Enterprise 2.0 approaches.

What I have seen in most large organizations is that senior executives’ amorphous understanding of the risks in Enterprise 2.0 has overwhelmed their equally fuzzy grasp of their potential to create business value. A governance perspective articulates and responds to the risks to the business, and also ensures that value is not left on the table – a very important aspect of executive accountability.

In the end I didn’t have time to do the task justice, but quickly pulled together a rough framework to use in my kick-off presentation for the Forum, as below.

In the wake of the Enteprise 2.0 Executive Forum, Peter-Evans Greenwood, CTO of Capgemini Australia, has written in considerably more detail on his thoughts on culture and generational change, which he and others spoke about on the final panel on the path forward.

I have a theory. It seems that most people learn something in their early to mid 20s, and then spend the rest of their career happily doing the same thing over and over again. …. Once they’ve established what it is they do they just want to keep doing it, hoping that the world will remain as it was in their early adulthood.

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If change is the driver in our organizations, but our organizations are resistant to change, then the biggest challenge we face in not technical but the strategy we use to manage change. It’s quite easy to define a technically and economically possible solution that would provide a boost to our business, or even deliver a step change in capability. But if we cannot get our organization to deliver and then adopt the solution, all our work will be for naught.

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So what does this mean for the IT department? No matter how important our success is to the success of the company as a whole, IT is a cost center; value is created at the business coal face, not in the IT department. It’s not our job to deploy the new Enterprise 2.0 solution that will revolutionize the business and then force the business to change. We need to focus on the users, rather than thinking in terms of technologies and IT assets, understand the challenges they are facing and provide them with tools and techniques that they can use to innovate themselves. IT as facilitator rather than asset manager. Or as I heard in the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum the other day, give them they structure they want and focus on managing the flow rather than trying to force them to do something a particular way.

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I love this kind of thinking. DataPortability.org, the extremely important web initiative I have written about before, needs a logo. Redhat claims that its existing logo is too similar to theirs.

Chris Saad, the chair of DataPortability.org, has launched an open competition to design the new logo, with the winner determined by open voting on the web from a short list selected by the steering group. This being a highly prominent initiative that is potentially enormously valuable to the whole ‘net community should attract some talented people. However Chris has also got a whole host of prominent people and companies who support the initiative to kick in prizes, to in fact make this a very attractive proposition to the winner. Prizes currently offered (with more continuing to come in) include:

Initial submisssions

Current prize list:

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that NICTA – Australia’s peak national technology research and commercialization body – has developed a new chip which could have a significant impact on the technology and media field.

The key features of the chip are:
* Very fast: 5Gbps (an HD movie in seconds)
* Short range: Up to 10 meters
* Small: 5mm by 5mm chip
* Inexpensive: Less than $9 in mass production
* Low power: Uses less than 2 watts
* Uses 60Ghz spectrum: faster and less crowded
* Out soon: available in one year
* Cute name: GiFi

A few of the potential applications:
* Download an HD movie (or any other content) to a mobile phone or PDA at a kiosk on your way home, then transfer it to your home entertainment system
* Link all your home devices, including PC and home entertainment so every device has access to the Internet and content can be transferred between devices and across rooms.
* Modular PCs, with CPU, screen, keyboards, drives, mouse all separate devices.

Just two days ago GigaOM wrote about the potential of using 60GHz spectrum and some of the obstacles. It seems that the Australian team has nailed them. GigaOM now says: “I’m impressed,” and also points to similar efforts from Vubiq and SiBeam.

I’m looking forward to this technology being available. Let’s forget Megabits per second and start talking Gigabits per second.

Here is a fantastic resources for those who couldn’t attend the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum (or those who did and want to share the ideas with their colleagues).

Mark Jones of MIS magazine’s The Scoop podcast series recorded three of the case studies presented at the event, and has created a 30 minute podcast of excerpts from the case studies presented by Victor Rodrigues of Cochlear, David Backley of Westpac, and Nathan Wallace of Janssen-Cilag. (See the event speaker bios for details.)

Click here to go to The Scoop podcast on "Australian Enterprise 2.0 lessons revealed".

All three case studies are extremely interesting, with some very honest sharing of each organization’s current activities, lessons learned, and vision moving forward. These kinds of case studies should prove an inspiration to other companies that are implementing Enterprise 2.0 or considering doing so.

We’ve already had a fair bit of media coverage for Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum. Some of the media coverage includes:

Janssen-Cilag dances Enterprise 2.0 jig (Computerworld)
“Pharmaceutical giant Janssen-Cilag has overhauled its enterprise applications to introduce collaboration with a wiki that integrates IT asset management and even micro-blogging.”

Wikis may be working for Westpac (The Sheet) [Note that registration is required.]
[UPDATE: The full story is available on The Financial Standard]
“The arrival of Gail Kelly at the helm of Westpac may accelerate the bank’s adoption of “Web 2.0” tools such as blogs, wikis and social networks, allowing staff to share information freely and collaborate online.”

Exploring the future of Enterprise 2.0 (Melcrum)
“Run from 8.30am-2pm the event took place at breakneck pace, and covered a massive amount on the topic of social media and Web 2.0 in the workplace. There was much talk of knowledge and knowledge workers, easing employee frustrations, helping individuals to do their jobs more easily, differentiating to attract and retain the best talent and increasing employee engagement (yes, all of this in just 5.5 hours).”

There was also last week’s coverage of Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum:

Social networking sites help boost business: expert
"Facebook, Instant Messenger and other online networking tools aren't mere workplace distractions — they improve the way we do business.Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says that a firm's success increasingly hinges on its ability to share knowledge and expertise both with its employees and external clients."

I understand there is a fair bit of media coverage yet to come – I’ll post here when I hear about it

I’ve just got home after the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum. Far too much happened (and I’m far too tired…) to reflect in depth on it all right now, but I thought I’d offer a few initial reflections, and links to some of those who have been blogging, twittering, video blogging and more during the conference.

In short, it went great. I was extremely pleased with how everything went, and all the anecdotal feedback so far has been excellent. It’s always a relief when the technology works as planned, and our Skype video links to Euan Semple, who’s currently visiting Germany, and Andrew McAfee, who was at a conference in Orlando, Florida, worked extremely well. Even with the video images blown up to a large projection screen, many people commented on how good the quality was (including Alex Manchester writing “the connection robustness was impressive”).

Rather than trying to do a summary now, it’s best to point to the many event attendees who were live-blogging the event. Every attendee at the event has been given a login to the Forum blog, so we can discuss and share thoughts and perspectives.

At the opening of the conference I asked for a show of hands of bloggers and Twitterers, and got a response of what seemed to be close to half for blogs, and perhaps a quarter for Twitter, which is pretty exceptional for an executive audience.

On the Forum blog at www.futureexploration.net/e2ef/blog/, there have been around 20 posts since this morning, and we can expect plenty more over coming days – having a look at the discussion on the blog will give a pretty good feel for what was discussed.

Some particularly noteworthy posts below:

Image from Mick Liubinskas on Flickr

Here are my slides for my opening presentation at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum tomorrow. As usual, these are intended for attendees at the event, and won’t mean that much for people who aren’t there for the presentation itself.

I will write up some of the new material I cover in the presentation in subsequent posts, particularly on the governance framework. More details on some of the other content, including the lessons for Enterprise 2.0, can be found from other presentations I’ve done on The Potential of Enterprise 2.0, which was my opening keynote at the IIR Enterprise 2.0 in December, and on Successful Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media at KMWorld in Silicon Valley in November.

After a flurry of last-minute registrations, the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, which is on tomorrow, is now chocka-block, with no more space available in the room. This keeps us at a 100% record for our events selling out (i.e. our Future of Media Summits and Web 2.0 in Australia ).

Given that other events on related topics are struggling or even being cancelled, this seems to show that people appreciate the difference between A. a participatory executive-level event; and B. a formulaic sequence-of-talking-heads-in-a-dark-room type of event that most event organizers seem to think still works.

It also shows that the topic of Enterprise 2.0 is considered to be of pressing relevance today, which supports my (and others’) contention that 2008 will be the year of Enterprise 2.0.

The Freakonomics blog, which is now part of the New York Times online, asks the following question of six prominent academics and participants in the space:

Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?

The responses to this ‘Freakonomics quorum’ are well worth a read, with many thought-provoking perspectives.

It’s a question that in various forms is very prominent in people’s conversations today, either in excitement at the possibilities, or concern at evils ranging from distraction to dehumanization.

My view has always been that any change holds potential positives and negatives, so we must work hard to accentuate what could be good, and contain the things that could be bad. However as social animals, any new communication form enables new possibilities to express what I have described as our ‘latent humanity’.

Social networking technologies have been abused in major and minor everyday ways, and will continue to be so, particularly as we all work out what they mean and how it’s useful to us to use them. Far outweighing that is the potential for us to connect in new ways, to bring together people and ideas across the globe in ways we are still only dreaming about, to enable wonderful connections that never would have been possible otherwise. On the way, it is up to us to find out how we can make the most good come from these new tools.

A very good article in Voice and Data magazine titled Enterprise 2.0 will bring radical change in organisations covers some of the truly important issues on the topic, going beyond narrow views of the technologies to how these new approaches will change organisations. It quotes Steve Hodgkinson of Ovum extensively, including some of these nuggets:

Steve Hodgkinson, Ovum research director, sees Enterprise 2.0 as a genuine opportunity for technology to act as a catalyst for changes in organisational culture.

"Enterprise 2.0 is emerging as the most practical way of sharing and managing knowledge in a range of contexts, from team collaboration to customer self-service forums. This leads to the ability to bring about cultural change with the personal power of informal networks such as wikis, blogs, profiles and forums."

"The root of its culture change power, however, is its ability to unleash the personal power of informal networks," said Hodgkinson.

...

Key ideas within this new system include:

* The need for a flat organisation, rather than an organisational hierarchy
* Folksonomy rather than taxonomy
* User-driven technology rather than IT department control
* Short time-to-market cycles; to continue and increase flow
* Global teams of people, rather than locating the whole organisation in one building
* Emergent information systems, rather than dictated and structured information systems
* The opening of propriety standards

Hodgkinson said: "These informal networks provide organisational peripheral vision and cut through the day-to-day nonsense, enabling more sensitive situational awareness, breakthrough thinking and access to the subtle levers of organisational change."

"The changes are designed to increase ability, flexibility, distribution, openness and simplicity within the organisation."

I strongly agree that these are the key issues at stake. There are lots of other great ideas to uncover in the article.

Steve spoke immediately after my keynote at the IIR Enterprise 2.0 conference last December - I wrote about some of his ideas in a summary of the event. Steve will be attending the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum this week.

Des Walsh has officially launched the Social Media Show, a new podcast series. Interestingly, he has chosen to establish a new dedicated site instead of incorporating it into his existing very popular deswalsh.com blog. He intends to interview some of the many interesting people he knows and comes across in his travels.

His initial round of interviews is with partners of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, starting a few days ago with Stephen Collins of Acidlabs, and yesterday with David Holloway, the editor of the Metaverse Journal, a media partner for the event which is devoted to an Australian perspective on virtual worlds. Des has also written up summary comments in a post titled Metaverse Journal partners with Enterprise 2.0 Thinkfest.

The themes that Des and David chat about in the podcast include:
• Education and health as fields that fit well with virtual worlds, and where is substantial activity
• Political movements in Second Life: Clinton, Obama, McCain and others
• Commercial presence in Second Life: Telstra, IBM and others
• Virtual worlds as a research and development environment
• Technical limitations of Second Life
• New virtual worlds emerging in Australia

David’s an interesting guy well across his field and it’s a good podcast. You can listen to the podcast on the Social Media Show or below.

Des shows his talents as a podcast host – I’m sure the Social Media Show will go very well.

Social Media Show: Interview with David Holloway of the Metaverse Journal

Click here to download…

On Tuesday we ran a media briefing ahead of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 19 February. Someone just pointed out to me that NineMSN wrote up the story under the title Social networking sites help boost business: expert.

Since basically the whole article is direct quotes from me, I think it’s OK to put it below. It's good to see these themes getting taken up in the media, because they really are important.

I however have to totally disclaim the last paragaph in the story, which is a major misquotation. What I in fact said is that there are far too many senior executives who are afraid of negative opinions. It takes strength and leadership to open out the organization, and many of the current crop of top executives are not showing the leadership needed for the current business and social environment.

Facebook, Instant Messenger and other online networking tools aren't mere workplace distractions — they improve the way we do business.

Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says that a firm's success increasingly hinges on its ability to share knowledge and expertise both with its employees and external clients.

"Organisations have always functioned like social networks," he said.

"People are more likely to get information from the people they know well or like, or the ones they believe have the relevant expertise."

In an era where structured repeatable processes like invoicing and recruitment are well established, the best way to differentiate firms is by their ability to network, Mr Dawson said.
Many firms already are drawn to the fluid, flexible approach to communicating offered by Web 2.0 applications such as social networking sites, blogs and virtual worlds.

"It's about the ability to connect expertise and talent in ways which are more efficient and effective in creating value … whether that means finding new business opportunities or responding to market place changes," he said.

It’s great to have Capgemini involved as Gold Sponsor in our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, and Peter Evans-Greenwood, Chief Technology Officer of Capgemini Australia, speaking at the event on ‘Expanding Enterprise 2.0 beyond the early adopters’. Peter has been working with many of Capgemini’s large clients in implementing Web 2.0 technologies and approaches.

In this 12 minute video interview of Peter, he covers a wealth of insights into Enterprise 2.0, including:

* Specific valuable corporate applications for wikis and blogs
* What organizations can do after the first steps in Enterprise 2.0
* Using Web 2.0 as a source of business differentiation
* Moving from thinking about applications to enabling knowledge workers
* Creating competitive advantage through radical increases in efficiency

Peter Evans-Greenwood - CTO Capgemini Australia on Enterprise 2.0 from Ross Dawson on Vimeo.

Des Walsh, one of Australia’s premier bloggers, has launched a Social Media Podcast show. He is kicking it off with a podcast interview with Stephen Collins of acidlabs, which is a partner for our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum next week.

A great interview which touches on what we’re trying to do with the Forum, and Stephen’s passion for these issues. It includes:
• how Stephen works with companies (if you are looking for someone savvy to help your company or to partner with, you need to listen to this)
• how valuable and enjoyable he found it to meet others with related interests at Office 2.0 in San Francisco last year and how those meetings were made easier using social networking tools
• how risk-taking is inherent in corporate social networking and how to manage the risk, e.g. by starting within the firewall
• how younger employees are using social media tools even though they are not provided by the enterprise
• how companies implementing social networking can and should engage employees in a conversation about acceptable use obligations that come with the provision of tools

Des will be doing some more interviews of people associated with the Forum over the next couple of weeks – I’ll keep you posted.

Click here to download…

Yesterday I was interviewed live in the studio on SkyBusiness TV on Yahoo!’s rejection of Microsoft’s offer and what it implies. Some of the points I covered:

* There are few alternatives for Yahoo! to Microsoft’s bid. New Corp, which conceivably could have been interested, has denied any plans, AOL has been rumored as a merger partner but is very unlikely to be willing to spend that much, a consortium of private equity firms could be interested but has not emerged.

* The other mooted alternative is to do a deal with Google on search and possibly divest its holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan, though this is unlikely to be a viable alternative.

* There is strong pressure from the many investment firms that hold stakes in both companies not to increase the bid or to get into a war that will destroy value for both companies. An article in the New York Post shows (below) how many investors would prefer Microsoft to get their way. It also says that Microsoft is looking to hire a proxy firm which would make the situation very hostile. Legg-Mason, which owns 6% of Yahoo!, cannot see alternatives to Microsoft’s offer.

On the newly relaunched Future Exploration Network website, we have added a ‘What is Enterprise 2.0’ page to provide a succinct overview of the space for attendees of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum.

The page (image of the top part below) includes:
* Definition
* Framework
* Technologies
* Corporate applications
* Enterprise 2.0 blogs
* Presentations and videos

Many people seem to think that Enterprise 2.0 is about blogs and wikis. There are many other technologies supporting the shift to more collaborative and productive organizations. One of the most important of these, and one which perhaps does more to change the role of IT in the enterprise, is mashups.

In out Web 2.0 Framework, we define mashups as a “combination of different types of content or data, usually from different sources, to create something new.”

In a consumer web situation, this involves taking content from different online sources, often merging all sorts of data with locations, using a mapping application such as Google Maps. In the enterprise, it often brings together enterprise data (sales, market research, transactions etc. etc.) with information off the public web, though it can also integrate information from different sources within the organization.

The most important implication of this is that it gives power to the end-user. The IT department no longer needs to be asked on bended knee to create applications that will be useful for the company. Staff can quickly and easily do it for themselves. In effect users can become programmers, as I’ve spoken about in previous keynotes on Enterprise 2.0.

These things always take longer than we’d like. But finally the new Future Exploration Network website is up! There are some new features to the site that I’ll point out in subsequent posts, and a couple of final tweaks yet to make. Please let us know in the comments here or by email if there’s anything that doesn’t work properly or you have any suggestions – thanks!

Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at the Managing Partners Forum at Byron Bay, on the topic of Creating the Future of Professional Services, focusing on how to create differentiation in a highly competitive globalized market. The event brought together a small and exclusive group of the Managing Partners of a wide variety of major law firms. The two presentations following my keynote were from Gavin Bell, the Managing Partner of Freehills, Australia’s largest law firm, and David Childs, the Managing Partner of Clifford Chance, the largest law firm in the world. The organizers, Chilli, told me they’d turned away many registrations, keeping the attendee level exclusively at top executive level.

Unfortunately I was only able to stay for these first three sessions, however the themes of the presentations and the subsequent free-wheeling discussion between attending managing partners underlined some of the major issues for law firms today:

* Effectively developing and implementing strategy in a partnership, and the degree to which the strategy process is centralized.
* Strategic choices in geographical expansion (e.g. into China) in a world of law firm globalization.
* Defining the role and ability to enforce policies of the Managing Partner in a broad-based partnership.
* Choices between lock-step (seniority-based) and performance-based compensation, taking into account propensity to collaborate and retaining senior partners.
* Whether and how to outsource both back-office functions and legal support to low-cost countries.
* New capital structures, including public listing.
* Managing cultural change in firmly established organizational structures.
* The ability to attract and retain talented staff as the ultimate driver of firm success, in the face of global competition for talent.

Richard Watson, Chief Futurist at Future Exploration Network, has found that his newly launched bestseller Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years, has generated a very diverse range of interesting opportunities. One of the enquiries was from AVN, a publishing company that focuses on the adult entertainment industry, wanting insights into where their world was heading. Richard invited me to co-write the article on The Future of Adult Entertainment. (The link is not entirely workplace-friendly, even though the article itself is mainly about social and technological trends, so I’ve posted the full article below.)

The Future of Adult Entertainment
New technologies could take it almost anywhere.
Richard Watson and Ross Dawson

We are told the world we live in is changing like never before. We have become exquisitely dependent on technology, which is increasingly pervasive and exponentially fast. Whether this is true is open to debate, but it seems reasonably certain that technology will be one of the key forces shaping how people meet and interact with one another in the future. Hence, technology will heavily influence the future of sex and, with it, the future of adult entertainment - or perhaps vice versa.

The future always has been deeply embedded in the present, and physical relationships are no exception. For example, according to one source, 30 percent of recently married American couples met online. Intimate relationships now can be developed online via email, text messaging and phone sex, and they can be ended this way, too. A few years ago in Malaysia, a man sent his wife a divorce via an SMS message, although a court later said this communication was not legally binding.

Similarly, many a relationship has been terminated because one party (quite often, a woman, it seems) finds evidence of physical or virtual infidelity in sent messages. Will this get worse in the future? It certainly seems so. So-called Internet-porn addiction already is straining some relationships, and it will be interesting to see how future technologies will impact our definitions of virginity, celibacy, adultery and the like.

Of course, technology has a history of being put to unintended uses.

eBay will eliminate negative rankings from May, according to the BBC. This makes what was barely useful into something practically useless.

It’s interesting that when you talk about reputation systems, most people refer to eBay’s feedback and ratings system. It was in fact clear years ago that eBay’s ratings had very little value. The essence of the problem was that there was no incentive to rate people poorly. Since buyers and sellers rate each other, any negative rating can – and often is – reciprocated with another negative rating. However a positive rating is also likely to be reciprocated. Because anyone with any experience on eBay well understands this, almost no-one gives negative ratings, so there is very little correlation between eBay ratings and how good a trading partner people actually are.

Now eBay has recognized this publicly, rather than pretending that its ratings are valid, and is explicitly pointing to users’ retaliation to negative reviews. The BBC article says that eBay says that there are other mechanisms to protect users:

SmartCompany have just published an article based on an interview with me, titled What a Microsoft and Yahoo merger means for entrepreneurs.

The full article is worth a read – below are the direct quotes from me.

There will be fewer exits but more start ups for entrepreneurs in the digital world if the proposed Microsoft takeover of Yahoo goes ahead, says technology futurist Ross Dawson.

…

If the deal gets through the competition regulators, it could substantially change the acquisition landscape for technology entrepreneurs, says Dawson. “Yahoo has said that it intends to buy 50 companies a year; if Microsoft buys Yahoo, that will change.

“While Microsoft has been buying start-ups, [the deal] signals a shift in its strategy and it will focus on digestion of Yahoo.”
…

“While Microsoft is preoccupied, there could be increasing opportunities for start-ups to carve opportunities by being innovators – although it is hard to see how they might exit [at this stage],” says Dawson.

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I have just been interviewed by SBS TV about Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! The interview will appear on their World News program tonight as part of their coverage of the story.

I’m not sure what parts of the interview they’ll use, but some of the points I raised were:

* This is a massive deal. It would be the second largest media merger in history, after the $106 billion AOL – Time Warner merger in 2000. The next biggest after that, as shown in our analysis of the largest media transactions over the last 15 years, is Viacom’s $38 billion acquisition of CBS (with the two companies splitting again in 2005).

* There are three possibilities of what will happen from here. The first and most likely is that the bid succeeds. When Yahoo! turned down overtures from Microsoft around a year ago, it was a reasonable stance to say they could do better alone than owned by Microsoft. The last year, and in particular the last six months, have created an entirely different picture. Yahoo!’s stock has declined 44% since its highs last October, its profits have fallen, and the company doesn’t appear to have a clear, differentiated strategy. In contrast, Google’s fourth-quarter results showed revenues up over 50% year-on-year. Given the 62% premium that Microsoft is offering, constrasted with a falling stock price, it would be very difficult for the board to justify turning the offer down.