Monthly Archives: March 2011
Today at the excellent SydStart event is the official launch of Pushstart, adding to the increasingly rich network of support available to tech start-ups in Australia. There are two key elements to Pushstart: a mentor matching service, bringing together a pool of currently over 50 mentors with start-ups through the year, and a Start-Up accelerator,
Continue reading Pushstart adds a new start-up seed accelerator to the Australian tech scene
Tomorrow morning I am giving the keynote at City of Port Phillip’s inaugural Breakfast Briefing session for the year in St Kilda, Melbourne, on the topic of Building Business in a Connected World. Here are event details and registration. Below are my slides for the presentation, which is almost entirely based on our Success in
Continue reading Keynote: Building Business in a Connected World
Nate Silver, the political statistician extraordinaire, has turned his attention to publishing. His interest is honed by the fact that his blog is now hosted on the New York Times, which is currently implementing a paywall. He has done an analysis of the most influential publications, consisting of a simple review of how frequently publications’
Continue reading List of the 242 most influential publications in the world
Last weekend I was musing about the elements of success in a connected world. Something clicked, and I was able to pull out of it a visual representation as below. For my keynote tomorrow morning on Building Business in a Connected World I will just run through this diagram together with commentary on how to
Continue reading Infographic: Building Success in a Connected World
The Institute of Public Affairs of Australia (IPAA), the professional association supporting senior Australian public service executives, is not prone to rash statements. Thus it is very encouraging to see its new policy paper, The Future Course of Modern Government, provide some pointed insights and recommendations on how to create the government of the future.
Continue reading 11 recommendations to create the future of government
Last week LinkedIn reached a significant milestone: 100 million users. On the occasion LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman sent out an email to the first 100,000 users thanking them for being early adopters. The email included the recipient’s member number, which are given in order of signing up. You can look it up yourself in your
Of a Saturday morning I feel like watching some nice videos and music as I work. So, as we go along, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite music videos: Bjork – All is full of love One of the best videos ever, exploring the future of sexuality amid humans merging with machines.
The majority of my keynote speaking engagements are to executives or managers within organizations, or at large conferences, so there are relatively few opportunities for people to come see me speak (aside from on our collection of keynote speaking videos (which we will be adding to shortly)). However next Wednesday the City of Port Phillip
Chapter 5 from Living Networks, on Distributed Innovation – Intellectual Property in a Collaborative World, is still immensely relevant today. We are still relatively early on in working out the implications for innovation of distributed value creation. Here is a section towards the end of the chapter which provides 5 recommendations on managing innovation in
The iPad has changed my life. It feels like I have been waiting for it since I became conscious. However the iPad alone doesn’t do the job. It is the iPad together with a wireless keyboard that has transformed my life. Two years ago tomorrow I wrote a blog post saying It is totally INSANE
Continue reading The REAL transformative package: iPad plus wireless keyboard
In the early 1990s I worked for several years in Japan as a financial and business journalist. The first article I ever wrote beyond the world of business was on an issue that I felt was very important: the dangers of Japan’s nuclear program. I have been searching for the article for the last week,
Continue reading Japan’s nuclear crisis could be foreseen – a view from 19 years ago
I am writing this in the air over the Rockies, flying back from a scenario planning workshop I ran for a client yesterday. Over the last dozen years that I have been running scenario planning projects I have observed that corporate interest in scenario planning is cyclical. The time horizons that executives think in tend
Continue reading 4 reasons why an increased pace of change means greater unpredictability
I am sitting in the lounge at Sydney airport, about to fly to San Francisco. It is the ease of the iPad that allows me to put up this post on the fly. I came straight to the airport from a media panel organized by Cisco to follow up on their Connected World research study.
Continue reading Notes on the future of distributed work and organizations
The current edition of Fast Thinking magazine has a feature article titled ‘Know Future’ on “the future of futurists”. It looks at the history and background of the profession and goes on to interview a number of prominent futurists. It quotes me: Ross Dawson says becoming a futurist is pretty straightforward. “You can claim you
Almost five years ago now I wrote a post titled Being in two places at the same time which described how Professor Ishiguro, a Japanese roboticist, had created a robot replica of himself so he could give lectures at his university without enduring the commute from his home. The robot, named Geminoid HI-1 to emphasize
Continue reading The latest robots are virtually indistinguishable from people
We are at the cusp of a new phase of robotics, where some of what has been promised to us for decades will come to fruition. An example of this is the iCub, a humanoid baby robot that can learn, emulating human cognition and development. This is the field of ‘developmental robotics’: creating robots that
Continue reading Developmental robotics: the cute baby robot who will grow up to be just like you


























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