Monthly Archives: August 2011
Knowledge@Australian School of Business recently published an interesting article on corporate blogging, which drew on an interview with me. Here are the quotes it took from my interview, along with a few comments. One of the greatest dangers is not getting involved in blogging at all, claims Ross Dawson – futurist, blogger and chairman of
Going beyond human interaction with (quasi) intelligent machines, we are now beginning to explore interactions between (somewhat) intelligent machines. One of the concepts of the Singularity is that machines will before long be able to teach themselves and each other, to the point where their interactions and conversations are incomprehensible to our puny minds. This
Continue reading Proof: Intelligent machines can become religious by talking to each other
In this final video in the series of ‘futurist conversations’ between myself and Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency, we discuss the future of Nokia as a keyhole on where the mobile phone market is going. Here are a few of the points we make in the conversation:
For years I have been writing about reputation and have often said that this will be the decade of the reputation economy. Yet until recently there has been very little in the space. The social media measurement systems such as Klout and PeerIndex have limited data scope and while they talk the language of reputation
Continue reading Breaking: Google+ will be a reputation engine
I was just interviewed by ABC TV for tonight’s 7pm news about Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple. My initial reaction is that is as close to a non-event as it could be. It was absolutely major news when Jobs announced his first medical leave for a life-threatening disease. It underlined that he would
Tomorrow morning I will give the keynote at Mainstreet Australia conference on the topic of Creating the Future of Business. My slides are below. The usual caveat applies – the slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to stand alone. Keynote: Creating the Future of Retail Spaces View more presentations from rossdawson While
The distribution of music taste and consumption has shifted dramatically over the decade years, and will continue to evolve significantly in coming years. Back before a dozen years ago, radio and MTV exposed people to a limited range of music from label playlists, and the cost of records and CDs made it hard to experiment
Continue reading The implications of the new broader, flatter distribution of music taste
This month’s Qantas Business Radio has a technology focus, including interviews with Nick Leeder, Managing Director of Google Australia, Simon Hackett, Managing Director of Internode, Peter Williams, CEO of Deloitte Digital, Charis Palmer, Editor of Technology Spectator, Ian Hogg, CEO of FremantleMedia Australia, as well as myself. There are some great insights in the various
Continue reading Qantas Business Radio: why crowdsourcing will drive the future of organizations
Financial services is one of the most industries in which the use of social media is the most relevant, not least because customer service is a critical differentiator between highly commoditized offerings. While financial services and banking were traditionally highly relationship-based, the shift to online has significantly eroded those relationships. Social media, used well, provides
Continue reading Research: The acceleration of Australian banks’ use of social media
Continuing our series of conversations between fellow-futurist Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency and myself, here is our session on the future of newspapers. Here are a few notes from our conversation:
Yesterday I was interviewed on ABC TV about Google’s bid for Motorola Mobility. The interview segments aired were on the value to Google of Motorola’s patent portfolio and the implications for the Android ecosystem. Below are excerpts from the transcript of the interview on ABC.
How much value do you get from the web? A lot more than you pay for it. We may quibble about the cost of bandwidth and online services, and in some cases we should, but the reality is the value we get from connectivity and web-based services is massive. Earlier this year McKinsey & Co
Continue reading The extraordinary personal value of the web: $140 billion is the tip of the iceberg
The music industry has struggled for over a decade as it tried to push back against inevitable change and maintain the status quo. While there has been some good experimentation over the years, we are now reaching a phase where the old structures have pretty much died and all that remains is experimentation to build
Continue reading Exploring new formats for music (and revenue): Björk releases inspiring “app album”
Back in the late 1990s I did considerable work applying scenario planning to financial risk management, using qualitative approaches to managing risk as a complement to quantitative methodologies such as Value at Risk. However financial institutions were generally very slow to acknowledge the value of anything not fully quantified, so I shifted my attention to
Continuing our series of conversations on the future with Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency and myself, here we discuss the future of Twitter. Some of the topics we discuss include:
Tomorrow morning I am giving the opening keynote, titled The Future of Living Networks and Organizations, at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit. Here are my slides for the keynote. As always, the slides are intended to accompany my speech, not to stand alone, so are provided for people who are attending the
In my misspent youth I worked in international equities sales for Merrill Lynch. That was when I was first introduced to the Capital Asset Pricing Model that still underpins investment analysis today. Aong other things the model suggests that the return on an investment needs to be commensurate with its risk to attract investors. Through
Continue reading US equities: zero gains over the last 12 years, how about the next 12 years?
For the last decade I have examined and applied social network analysis in and across organizations, for example in large professional firms, technology purchase decision-making, high-performance personal networks, and other applications. The more time you spend with the analysis of social networks in organizations and those firms that have applied the techniques, the more evident
The centrality and ease of use of the Circles feature means Google+ is a significant step forward in social networking. It has been a key platform in its initial success. The Circles feature enables people to selectively share content. Someone can send work-related discussions to their public stream, photos of their children to their family,
Continuing our series of conversations between fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here is our session on the future of television. Here are a few of the ideas we share in the session:
On Tuesday I gave the opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium. CIO magazine did a nice article titled IIIS: Big Data driving new trends which reviews my keynote and the one immediately after from Steve Duplessie, one of the world’s top analysts on data and storage. It
Continue reading Reality mining, pervasive data capture, and how Big Data can create value
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (slogan: Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise) is offering $42 million in funding for “revolutionary” research into social media in strategic communication. The DARPA announcement states: The conditions under which our Armed Forces conduct operations are rapidly changing with the spread of blogs, social networking sites, and media]sharing
Continue reading DARPA offers $42 million for ‘revolutionary’ research on social media analysis
Continuing our series of conversations between friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here are some discursive thoughts on open versus closed systems. Given this issue’s central role in virtually all business strategy today, we find that our clients are consistently asking us about how to think about and build strategies in this context.
Continue reading Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on Open vs Closed Systems
One of my key themes is that of governance as enabler. As I proposed in my keynote on the transformation of business at the recent AICD conference, ‘Governance should focus as much on enabling innovation and taking useful risks as about managing and mitigating risk’. Over 93% of the 600 or so company directors present
Continue reading Governance as opportunity: Governance, risk, and compliance in the cloud
Directly following my opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium was Steve Duplessie, who is recognized as one of the top people in the world on information infrastructure. Here are some notes taken from his excellent keynote:
This morning I am giving the opening keynote at Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium, organized by the Storage Network Industry Association and Computerworld. Here are the slides to my keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure. My usual warning applies: these slides are intended as visual support to my keynote, not as stand-alone slides. In this
Continue reading Keynote slides: The Future of Information Infrastructure
The Smithsonian Institute and Pew Research Center recently did a survey of Americans on what they thought would happen by the year 2050. Good created a nice infographic, below, summarizing some of the data. Click on the image for the full size version. Image source: Good The Smithsonian magazine has also created a nice animation
AHT GROUP VENTURES & FEATURED CONTENT
About the Blog author
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.
Books By Ross Dawson (Incl. Free Chapters)
Articles and Reports
Future of Media Report 2008
Future of Media Report 2007
Future of Media Report 2006
Executive Insights into Enterprise Social Network Strategy
Future of the Media Lifecycle
Future of Media: Strategy Tools
Executive Insights into Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0 Framework
Trend map 2007+
Extinction Timeline
SAP White Paper: Service Delivery Innovation
White Paper: The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services
CNET/ University of Virginia White Paper: How Technology Purchasing Decisions Are Really Made
PM Network magazine's lead article on virtual teamwork (440KB), featuring Ross Dawson on the cover
Microsoft Strategic White Paper: How To Lock-in Your Clients (1.1MB)
Go to main blog page
Ranking
AHT GROUP BUSINESS MODEL
Visualization of our activities and model
Our priorities for 2012Upcoming event
Latest book
Recent Media Appearances
- Apr 27, 2012 – 20 minutos April 27, 2012
- Apr 26, 2012 – TheNextWeb April 26, 2012
- Apr 18, 2012 – Le Monde April 18, 2012
- Apr 7, 2012 – The Age April 6, 2012
- Apr 5, 2012 – Sky Business April 5, 2012
RECENT MOST DISCUSSED