Monthly Archives: November 2011
Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, is in Australia for the launch of Yelp Australia. I was invited to interview him on Monday (embargoed until today) as part of a major media campaign to kick off the site. Australia is the 13th country where Yelp has launched, with up until now all the action outside North
Continue reading Yelp leaps into the underserviced consumer review space in Australia
One of my speaking bureau just asked me to provide them with a few quick ideas on how technology is changing events, as one of their key clients is having an internal meeting to discuss their future use of technology in events. I only had 10 minutes free to write something, so it’s far from
Last week I spoke at the annual meeting of a division of a major bank. It was a one-hour event, with a live audience of several hundred, and a few thousand who worked in other locations watching via a live webcast. Given the pace of change in their business and their overt focus on innovation,
Early this year I caught up for a coffee with Stephen Browning, Director of Corporate Affairs at News Digital Media and The Australian. During our conversation he told me about a weekly digest of what’s happening globally in digital news and paid content that he compiled for executives at News Limited, to keep them informed
Continue reading Open strategy: News Limited shares its inspirations on the future of paid content
This year I have been drawn significantly into the retail industry, being the lead technology advisor for a major study on the long-term future of shopping centers, and giving keynotes at a number of public and in-house retail industry events on topics including the future of retail shopping districts and social media in retail. We
Continue reading The future of retail: the rise of omnichannel marketing and sales
Author and speaker Scott Berkun has some great books out, including the very well-known The Myths of Innovation. For his latest book, Mindfire, is a collection of his essays and articles. Before its release, Scott wrote Why I’m self-publishing my next book, giving some really good reasons:
I have long said that table tops will embed video and that we will use every possible means to interact usefully with computers. Software and device vendor ExoPC has announced EXOdesk, a computer interface that will be laid on your desk, offering digital keyboards, a variety of colorful keypads, sortable RSS feeds, and even a
Continue reading Next year your entire desk will be a computer control device
In Chapter 1 of my 2002 book Living Networks I wrote: When did you last say or hear someone say “what a small world”? People have an unquenchable fascination with how richly we are connected, never ceasing to be amazed by the seeming coincidences of how one friend knows another through a completely different route.
Continue reading Our shrinking degrees of separation: heading down from 6 to 3
Yesterday I gave the keynote on The Future of Information Technology at the Local Government IT2011 conference in Coffs Harbour, which this year had the theme of mobility. Given the ambitious scope of my keynote title, I covered a lot of territory including fundamental technology shifts and the evolving shape of organizational technology. In looking
Continue reading Tear the walls down: Jericho and the future of enterprise tech
Twitter has created a nice video showing how much and when the unique moment of 11:11 on 11.11.11 was mentioned around the world last Friday, as below. They describe it: This clip is a visualization of all the Tweets mentioning 11:11 on 11.11.11. Each “1” is a location that moves with the conversation on Twitter.
Continue reading [VIDEO] The flow of Twitter around the world
I am at a media briefiing by cloud-based ERP provider NetSuite at the very nice Quay restaurant in Sydney. In addition to the interesting presentation by CEO Zach Nelson on the state of NetSuite, we have been given no less than 7 press releases, so a big news day for the company. One of these
Continue reading Latest data: Retailers shift to social media and online
At the Canon CIO event I spoke at last week, jazz trumpeter extraordinaire James Morrison and his band played music through the event. James also gave a brief presentation on the event’s theme of the future. He said that not so long ago music was not chosen by consumers, but pushed on us by record
Continue reading The liberation of music for consumers and musicians
Earlier this week I spoke at an excellent event organized by Canon for the CIOs of major organizations. During an extended lunch, a diverse range of ‘celebrities’ including TV personalities, authors, and musicians gave short presentations. I spoke about how the evolving intersection of technology and society is shaping employees’ expectations, particularly in the technology
Continue reading 5 facets of employees’ increasing technology expectations
Honda, better known for its cars, has just released a new version of its Asimo humanoid robot, as shown below. It can run at a good pace, hop on one foot, and unscrew bottle caps and pour drinks.
Governments around the world are increasingly recognizing that they have a responsibility for structured thought and research about the future, both to shape their own initiatives, and to assist companies and institutions in the nation to survive and thrive in times of change. Examples of government futures groups include: Egypt: Center for Futures Studies France:
Continue reading How governments research and communicate about the future
Over just the last few years, Australia has established itself as a global hub for crowdsourcing platforms. Early last year I wrote about the phenomenon, pointing to leading service marketplace Freelancer.com, which is now based out of Sydney (see my interview of its CEO Matt Barrie on Channel 7 last week), 99designs, which recently raised
Continue reading Australia’s continued rise as a global hub for crowdsourcing
A nice video titled On the Brink of a Networked Society, shown below, has just been launched by Ericsson. It includes a series of excellent interviews exploring some of the many implications and directions of a connected world, including health, industry structure, how we socialize, and far more. It’s well worth watching. The single quote
Continuing my ongoing coverage of the state of equity crowdfunding, news is just out that a Republican bill proposing that crowdfunding be allowed will get support from the White House. This is not too surprising given the White House recently explicitly supported crowdfunding in the context of the Obama Jobs bill, but is still a
Continue reading Latest: Equity crowdfunding coming shortly? Congress offers bipartisan support
I have recently done a number of interviews on the implications of Apple’s voice assistant Siri. To me, it’s looking very much like Apple has once again brought a technology to market precisely when it is sufficiently mature to impress. Voice control and ‘intelligent assistants’ are far from new, but haven’t been widely used to
Continue reading Siri and the dawn of the era of intelligent agents
In the Kochie’s Business Builders program that I hosted on Sunday, I interviewed Matt Barrie of Freelancer.com, and Eddie Machaalani and Mitch Harper of BigCommerce, both fantastic Australian online business success stories. Following the excellent Freelancer.com interview, below is the interview with BigCommerce’s founders. They recently raised US$15 million from US VC firm General Catalyst
The other day I caught up for a coffee with Ryan Wardell, the founder of Project Powerup, a crowdfunding site focused on startups. Project Startup uses the classic crowdfunding model used by Kickstarter, Indie GoGo, Sellaband and other crowdfunding platforms for funding creative projects, in which funders are rewarded by receiving products, services, preferential treatment,
Continue reading Proposal for a new crowdfunding model: Betting to win
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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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