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Prof. Knight is angry – but does this help to recover and transform? (source: thisislondon.co.uk)
G20 summit under immense pressure
Radical measures must be decided at the G20 summit or it could become the “fateful moment” when the global recession lurches into an outright slump, Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said today. (guardian.co.uk, 2009-03-30)
The crisis and the consequences for business and politics are still in the focus of mass media and the blogosphere. When I check the stats of future facts blog I find a lot of phrases containing “financial crisis” still on the top of the most used search terms. Surprisingly most of the visitors checked in here on the post of Oct. 2008 Global financial crisis may end 2009 – which is not really a typical post in a blog concerned with long-term trends. The news seemed significant at that time because
- it had been expressed by an insider, Michel Camdessus, the former chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
- it was extraordinarily optmistic.
Let us contrast this sunny quote of last year with doomsday news like this of March 25th 2009: “Russia Expects New Financial System Crisis Outburst”. Russia’s Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin said:
“We were standing on the brink of the financial collapse, but we prevented it, and I must here thank the Central Bank and the State Duma for giving us an opportunity to take decisions quickly,” (my emphasis, www.marketoracle.co.uk)
The coincidence of some news urges me to come back to the issue of the spreading crisis. In these days we read Read the rest of this entry »
At the worlds biggest IT fair, CeBIT in Hanover, ending on Sunday they tried something new. With “Webciety” there has been a new format to close the gap between hardware selling companies on the one hand and increasingly important web companies on the other. We hear this for so long and it is from year to year it is more true: We are on the way to web society / “webciety”. At the panel there have been issues like Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing and Identity Management – but the most interesting subject for me has been the upcoming and invasion of the “digital natives”. The consequences for enterprises, media industry and marketing are still in the debate. At webciety there has been a book presentation concerning the topic. You can access and download the book at scribd as a PDF (German):
DNAdigital – Wenn Kapuzenpullis auf Anzugtraeger treffen
Digital Natives – different mindset, communication habits and consumption patterns
Marc Prensky coined the term “digital natives” in the context of education some years ago (“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” 2001). Since Gartner and other analyst firms took it seriously since 2007 today companies start to analyze more thoroughly the rather heterogeneous group of digital natives. The core definition is trivial:
A digital native is a person who has grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet, mobile phones and MP3. (Wikipedia)
Prensky realized the disparity in the realm of learning and teaching – teachers are just ill-equipped to educate digital natives, whose sophisticated use of digital technologies is incompatible with practice in schools and universities. No question the disparity today is virulent in the enterprise context (actually I am preparing some stuff concerning the issue and Read the rest of this entry »
STOA Report "Looking Forward in the ICT & Media Industries"
Today “Web 2.0″ is just mainstream and seems more or less boring as a subject of research. The prevailing question is how to realize practical and efficient Web 2.0 solutions, what to do and not to do with social networks, social media – as a user and in the business perspective. As a typical example see a lengthy blog post like this from Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 blog – this is what a lot of people care about: 50 Essential Strategies For Creating A Successful Web 2.0 Product
But there is still the demand for critical assessment of the dynamics, the effects and side effects of the transformation (revolution, yep) of ICT and the media industry. Even politicians have come to understand the issue, lately when they realized the role of Web 2.0 in becoming the 44th president of the USA (BTW I have been blogging in last July: “Maybe Obama can win with swarm mobilisation effects in the internet – and is the first “user generated president” of the USA.”)
In the last year I had been asked to contribute some statement in the STOA report “Looking Forward in the ICT & Media Industries”. The acronym STOA means Science and Technology Options Assessment (for the European Parliament) and you are educated enough to enjoy the allusion to the ancient philosophy school.
Critical assessment of Web 2.0 and the user’s social capital
Don’t get me wrong – my attitude concerning Web 2.0 is rather affirmative (see my record) . But as with most technological innovations there are some downsides. To know them is just a necessity if you want to secure the acceptance and value of a technology in the long run. After the “BeaconGate” there was a second “Facebook scandal” (the terms of service thing) some Read the rest of this entry »
Copernicus changed our direction of perspective (source: wikipedia.org)
Hm, what a long winter break. Well, I have been reading some predictions for 2009 (like this at RWW or that at VentureBeat), I enjoyed texts looking back at 2008, too (e.g. Andrew McAfee or McKinsey). When I came across the RWW post I thought about my own “social media wish list”. I have to confess in the first place the radical and techno heretic thought occured to me: “Could please someone just stop the noise!” The majority of folks out there has no ”social media wish list” just because they are not participating. Their social networking is working fine with phones, address books and calenders – and so the question is: Why is it a mess for so many to organize the social life(stream) on the web? There is a complexity of service options, habits, expectations, aggregators and this makes users really tired. The landscpae is unripe and there is much space for improvements. I want to pick only one issue.
Copernican revolution of the social web in 2009?
When users complain about social networking one point is fragmentation and the resulting number of services and feeds one has to manage. So, could we please have some paradigm shift with the services serving the user and not the other way round? This Copernican revolution of the social web could mean to build up a technically autonomous layer for identity, authentification, social relation management. This is like a u-turn in perspective and isn’t it this, what the ideas and approaches of social network portability etc. are about? But reducing the work load to manage the networks will not be enough to bring the social dimension to flourish.
Social network concepts of today are primitive and stupid
It is time to integrate professional experts of the social in the development process – i.e. the guys of the sociological and humanities department. Think about the “collision of worlds” and role conflicts, when the social architecture (relation modes, transparencies, “hiding places”) is not adequately designed. User control and service transparency have to be much better to avoid the user’s dilemma (what to show and what to share with whom). There have to be relation types (friends, family, relatives, colleagues etc.) with differentiated rights to share parts of your life. For the moment I would call this “transparency management” – which is more than identity management. To understand the issue just read this article: ABC News: Friended by Mom and Dad on Facebook.
Image source: en.wikipedia.org
Update: Links
“Social usability” will be a key concept for succesful merging of social and mobile sphere
CommunityCamp 2008 was the first of it’s kind in Berlin – a thematic barcamp, focused on the fuzzy issues of community. There were practical down to earth sessions around community management and some sessions for research issues and academic reflection as well. In my first session “Mobile Communities – types, trends, potentials”, I was trying to think forward beyond the services of today. There are apps on the mobile device just to keep in touch, others are location aware or realize social mapping. The combination of
Mobile Communities – Future Trends and Challenges
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.
Early switchers at earth2tech.com
Fears and hopes
Guess you know Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” (youtube). When the wall came down in Berlin some 19 years ago it happened that this easy swinging a cappella sound was the somehow perfect soundtrack for the ambiguity in the mood of the reunified Germans. Ambiguity of fears and hopes – and what followed really was political “change management XXL” – with the inevitable pains of transformation.
Now, this is end of October 2008 and I feel a certain resemblance to the situation of 1989. In these days a lot of commentators suppose that the financial crisis is just the beginning of a longer lasting downturn of the global economy.
One last look back
Futurists and scenario planning people are prepared for the discontinuities of complex systems. This time the wild card was to expect. Warnings date back to 2006 (nypost.com) and even 2004 (abajournal.com). By the way recession cycles of market economy are observed since its beginnings. And Talebs book about the improbable “black swan” has been written in 2007. But who wants to hear bad news? We have to. That’s why we are implementing early warning systems and pay experts, even futurists.
Looking forward – Opportunities in times of transformation
This is the time of cutbacks and layoffs, but that is only the one side. At O’Reilly’s Web2Expo Europe some days ago I heard Robin Daniels (Salesforce.com / Cloud Computing: Freedom to Focus on Innovation”). One of the messages was: “Don’t optimize, but innovate!”. So don’t worry to much, Read the rest of this entry »
Startups? The party is over (tag it just “pink slip”)
We will see mass extinction of some tiny web services – so if you have some assets there, like some thousand relevant bookmarks, pictures or documents on some free service, now is the time to save it on your harddrive. Maybe tomorrow the server is down, maybe not. I have seen this all, when the first dotcom-bubble burst, and it will be just the same procedure. The big web 2.0 services (and Googzilla’s free services) will survive, but maybe will not be free anymore … Next post will be about the good news, the chances of this cleaning up, I’ll try! Interested in the tech sector, advantages of the crisis? For now read 10 Ways the Financial Meltdown Impacts Tech – Seeking Alpha
Via our (still beloved?) TechCrunch a lengthy presentation: Sequoia Capital’s 56 Slide Presentation Of Doom
Is Google totalizing the infosphere? Cam head for Google's controversial Street View (googlewatchblog.de)
Michael Arrington’s post made the point: Organize All The World’s Information, Then Put Google Ads On It
My comment there:
Google quietly changed from time to time. The “official mission” of organising the worlds information is no lie, but it is the half truth only, as you point out. Google is an advertising company – THE advertising company of the world.
I count it on my fingers. We will see perfectly contextual mobile advertsing FOR EVERYONE soon, for every local business – easy as an Adwords account – it will be an extension of it.
And there is still the dilemma at the core of the business model of Google: Do not make your search results too good to keep the click-through-rate high because this is just the source of revenue. Null sum dilemma. …
Some more musings about Google’s roadmap
Up to now the business model was primarily about online advertising. But exactly in which sense? The brilliance of the Google business model was to run “micro auctions” in the attention hungry attention economy (i.e. Adwords). Every big and small business searching desperately for the “customer one click away” competing with all the other businesses and products. Read the rest of this entry »
Social media are mainstream (in some countries more than in other)
The concept of web 2.0 was under attack since the beginning and today in 2008 it sounds a bit old fashioned, at least for people like me using it since years. But actually we see again little bits of web innovation dynamics, recognize new phenomena in these days.
Consider e.g. the spreading of microblogging services like twitter – it is no accident that yammer.com was prize winner of TechCrunch50, just a “twitter for business”. And at DEMOfall 08 the winner was Plastic Logic’s ebook reader – will it be disruptive? Then there is the reality of new platforms – an emerging mobile
Will Google own the web of the future? Picture source: mobilementalism.com
No, this is not an other post with a narrow focus on the new browser from the wellknown company. The following text has been published first on the website of Z_punkt The Foresight Company. Maybe the browser release is a milestone in the company’s and the web’s history (up to now there is a difference). It is a good opportunity for some folks to look back and forward – e.g. What to Expect from Google in the Next 10 Years. And the present, uncontroversial facts are excting as well.
The reactions in “Slow Europe” to Google’s coup are remarkable and come as expected. Some would like to forbid that speed of innovation, at least they are crying … and they know “Hey, we are _definitly_ out of the (search business) game! We even do not know the rules!”.
Time ago I really enjoyed the post of Michael Arrington about some desperate efforts of European hmm… “research politics”. The post closed: “… no wonder that many of the best European entrepreneurs keep coming to the U.S. to start companies.”
Chrome – Web-Herrschaft oder nette Innovation?
Als am 2. September der Browser Chrome in über 100 Ländern zum Download bereitgestellt wurde, war dies Read the rest of this entry »
