Monthly Archives: April 2011

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

Continue reading World-leading Australian crowdsourcing platform 99designs gets $35 million, shows depth of Australian tech

Heather Knight, also known as Marilyn Monrobot, studies human machine symbiosis and charismatic robots. In addition to her doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute she runs a stack of interesting projects. Here is a video of Heather speaking at TED, demonstrating her robot which does stand up comedy. The audience provided live feedback to

Continue reading Charismatic robots can now do stand up comedy and respond to the audience

Tablet computers as seen from 1994

The rise of news on tablets such as the iPad is one of the defining themes of our times. This was foreseen by some, even down to the language that we use. The following video, created by Knight-Ridder in 1994, describes their vision of the future of tablet newspapers.

Global mobile market shares: who’s winning

In preparing for the Ketchum Webinar Series on Tapping the Power of Mobile I wanted some data on international differences in mobile operating system shares. I was just about to begin compiling some data from StatCounter when my co-presenter One2One CEO Simon Noel pointed me to a visual created by iCrossing who have done a

Continue reading Global mobile market shares: who’s winning

In a few weeks I will be in Beijing to give a keynote to the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) annual Company Directors conference. AICD has usually held its annual conference in Australian cities, but when in 2007 it held it in Shanghai they actually had far more attendees than usual. This is now

Continue reading Keynote speech in Beijing on How Technology is Transforming Business

Serendipity is at the heart of today’s emerging society

Serendipity is for me a deeply meaningful word. The more than dozen posts discussing serendipity on my blog include how we created “enhanced serendipity” at an event I ran in 2003 in New York, more details on the story of the word serendipity and how to enhance it, the importance of the “serendipity dial” and

Continue reading Serendipity is at the heart of today’s emerging society

I recently gave a presentation at an offsite meeting of the leadership team of a global professional services firm. I was asked to speak about the future of business, and to be provocative, which is usually my objective in that kind of situation – it’s not very valuable if you can’t get people to think

Continue reading Why high performance organizations will thrive on uncertainty and lack of control

Future of Retail: 10 powerful trends and 1 meta-trend

I have just come across this – an excellent resource from PSFK on the Future of Retail. PSFK presents Future of Retail report View more presentations from PSFK The report covers 10 major trends:

Crowdfunding is the topic of the moment, or maybe it only seems that way from the response to my recent posts on possible changes in regulation on crowdfunding and how the scene is developing. Movies are probably the endeavor which has attracted the most crowdfunding initiatives, including: – A Swarm of Angels (which I first

Continue reading Crowdfunding in film takes off: the case of the attack of the space Nazis

Launch of Future of Sex: why we’re doing it

My company Advanced Human Technologies has recently launched the website Future of Sex (futureofsex.net), which explores the intersection of technology and human sexuality. A few people have been surprised to see us launch this site, as it is a little different from the topics we usually cover. Here is the background and reasons why we’ve

Continue reading Launch of Future of Sex: why we’re doing it

Video and notes on the future of the 21st century

I spoke last night at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, to speak at the last of their GoMA Talks on the 21st century which accompany their current exhibit of 21st century art. The topic was the future of the 21st century, with panellists: – Antony Funnell, presenter of ABC Radio National’s Future Tense

Continue reading Video and notes on the future of the 21st century

Ketchum Webinar Series: Tapping the Power of Mobile

Mobile is shifting to the very heart of media and content. As such, in delving into the future of media over the last few years I have had an increasing focus on the mobile landscape, how to tap its potential, and where it is going. Starting today, I am co-presenting a three part webinar series

Continue reading Ketchum Webinar Series: Tapping the Power of Mobile

The post I wrote on the weekend, SEC opens the gates to crowdfunding and a new structure of capitalism, was on Techmeme for over 24 hours and was ranked by Topsy as one of the 100 most tweeted links , so this seems to be a topic of general interest. One of the best things

Continue reading Insights into the next phase of crowdfunding: tearing down legal constraints and building reputation systems

This is significant. While talk doesn’t necessarily lead to action, a significant shift in capitalism could be coming. On Wednesday US SEC Chairman Mary Shapiro sent a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee. The letter is embedded at the bottom of this post. Many have focused on the potential from

Continue reading SEC opens the gates to crowdfunding and a new structure of capitalism

A recent report titled How Much Information? 2010 Enterprise Server Information written by several UC – San Diego academics says that in 2008 the world’s servers processed 9.57 zettabytes (zettabyte = 10 to the power of 21), or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. A couple of analogies from Physorg illustrate these amounts: * 9.57 zettabytes is equivalent of

Continue reading Is this overload? 9.57 zettabytes of information flows in the world’s enterprises

Gartner has just released some very interesting forecasts for smartphone operating system sales until 2015, as below. In an nutshell, they predict that in 2015 Android will take almost half the market, at 48.8%, and that Microsoft will overtake Apple, with 19.5% share compared to 17.2% for iOS. Nokia’s Symbian platform will fade to virtually

Continue reading Risks to Gartner’s smartphone forecasts: will Microsoft beat Apple, Nokia execute, and Samsung fail?

Since Sydney is my primary home, I have been delighted to see the local digital, creative, social media, and startup worlds explode over the last few years. There have always been pockets of world-class practice here, but we are now getting to the point where Sydney is starting to rank in the top-tier of digital

Continue reading Digital Sydney is crowdsourcing its visual identity – submissions close soon!

What is the future of the Learning & Development department?

Last Friday I gave the keynote for the first breakfast seminar run by CADRE, a leading elearning design company, for senior executives of its clients. The topic of my presentation was The Future of Learning, giving a big picture view to kick off their series. This is a brief description of my presentation: Challenges for

Continue reading What is the future of the Learning & Development department?

The coolest iPhone4 case in the world?

At Christmas my darling wife Victoria, who knows me well and has great taste, gave me an awesome case for my iPhone. It fulfils several functions: * It prevents dropped calls from the iPhone4 ‘death grip’. * It is solid enough to protect from being dropped or thrown by our 18-month year old daughter Phoebe,

Continue reading The coolest iPhone4 case in the world?

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http://rossdawson.com/
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http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2011/01/zeitgeist-2011-anxiety-mobility-blending-indulgence-immersion-wrath-nudity-and-more.html
http://smetechnologyforum.com/
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http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/12/map_of_the_deca.html

About the Blog author

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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 Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (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.

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