Is your business nettified?

One industry (ICTI) has swelled up a strong wind for all other industries. The Internet, a breeze in the early 90s, is hungry for more.

Life is in the nettification‘s embrace with technologies like:

• online/offline (Adobe – Air),
• mobile (like Android and other open promises),
• location brilliant (many emerging businesses and applied businesses),
• multi-sensory,
• searchable/findable,
• workflow/processes and
• beautifully presented experiences

Isn’t it amazing how much of your life now depends on the seemingly geekish activity to augment it, speed it up, slow it down, delight you, nurture you….

This is an avalanche of innovation and change in your life and the business you’re in

In many ways the future is not yet visible and yet it is already there in a myriad of smallish experiments of what is possible when current/new technologies are applied to newly thought through business model elements and customer delight. Simple implementations to extend a net based application to the desktop/mobile device for off-line work using the Adobe Air product is a clear example.

In short if your business has not got some serious thinking going on about its nettification I think you might leaving lots of money on the table in the next few years or worse yet, the whole company. If you can develop and launch services and businesses on the net in a matter of weeks, how do you compete?

How very exciting!

Pop!Tech – Camden Maine – Oct07

When you need to get rid of cobwebs in your brain I recommend a few things

• A long dinner with friends with a conversation repertoire
• A long walk in the Sydney bush – in particular the ones with vast views to the water
• A long canoe journey along the Sydney foreshore(s)
• A week skiing with friends and family
• A cottage in Finnish Lapland [winter] or by the lakes [summer]
  ……
• And then there is Pop!Tech

Pop!Tech happened already some weeks ago but I have really had to digest it for a while to write about it.

I had never been to Maine before, nor to Camden. It is a gorgeous New England town by the Atlantic. Timing was perfect as the fall [autumn] leaves were getting to their joyous colors. My flight in was in a jumpy commuter plane from Boston to Rocklands. I had charming chat company in a man who is local to the Maine coast and was sharing insights about the area and the night coastline as we flew in.

From the airport I took a taxi to Camden and a motel very close to the Camden Opera House where the event was held.

As a pre-event extra I had booked myself to a workshop discussing mobile solutions in Africa. It was eye opening to see how the technologies are used when you have to be innovative to make it work. The solutions go from business tool related solutions [sales tool] to being a part of the health care system to community assistance.

The next day the show was full on.

I met with some wonderful people from the West Coast of the US, Seattle and San Francisco who became my guardian angels. For a newbie to Pop!Tech I got lucky as I was shown to a coveted seat out front, thank you Buzz, Pat and Brian . Every conversation I had with some 50 out of the 500 total attending was worthy of some stage time, everyone had something to say, a great business they were running or building or research they were doing etc – so many wonderful people and so little time. Lucky girl!

Pop!Tech has a mixture of presenters: artists, researchers, published authors, inventors, not for profits, religious leaders, technologists, community leaders.

Each presentation was a culmination of talent, persistence, belief, passion, dynamism wrapped up in 20 minutes of self-controlled or less so outpouring in the form of visual, performance, voice, texts, presence, storytelling, themes….

You can see the presentations on Pop!Tech site but what you have to be there for are the discussions you have

• with the presenters who for the most part take their turn in the audience to be wowed by the other presenters and
• with the audience which is also vetted to attend.

The idea as I see it is to form a large conversation to move things forward, to engage people who have ideas, means, energy and contacts to offer.My take aways and impressions

• Africa is enterprising
• Mobile is growing in millions of niches
• Solar has great future potential
• Creating the system is hard
• Youth is ready for green leadership and roles
• Light is fundamental is villages without electricity – there is a solution
• Worlds first not for profit pharmaceutical company was founded a few years ago
• Now biotech company joins nfp pharma and gets Gates Foundation to join to eradicate some illnesses
• Artists Association should become the new Ministry of Defense [Vanessa German - you gotta see the argumentation]
• We disgard a lot of cans, bottles, printed paper if you have trouble with the numbers go see it visualised by Chris Jordan
• Storytelling is an old art form, at Pop!Tech we were delighted with digital storytelling from Alaska and other [Jonathan Harris]
• Africa has a values and culture issues from years of hardship and misery – how to work on that while at the same time treating the symptoms
• Language is a tricky bedfellow, we screw up so much in life by an inability to converse more directly without ‘feeling like’ we’re losing face, potentially [Pinker, I am about to start reading his book which we found in our goodie bags] – I always preferred direct talk, hard as it might be at times to receive and give, makes for a better relationship
• Men and women, yes it is such a fun topic and when delivered with humor it had us cracking up – we’re just wired differently. Who is smarter than the other? I [dj] think we have to know which smarts we’re talking about [Louanne Brizendine on brain]
• What we communicate with our skin – a la modern anthropology
• Eating al desko is one modern issue – until we all embrace slow living – what is it that we’re in so big a hurry to get to, I don’t think many even know, it is just churning wheels and feeling important
• Affordability is not an economic problem, it is an engineering and design problem
• Microfinance works real well in many countries
• “Money is a sign of poverty” Ian Barks {?}
• ML King did not change the world by saying, “I have a problem”
• Fast trends get all the attention and slow trends make all the change [Brand in 06]
• Mass observation from the 1930s, recording daily lives, citizen journalism
  my own addition to this is history will never be the same, not formal, not as rewritten by the victorious, but tells us how we thought, felt, appreciated, hated, commented, understood, …on a daily basis and recorded [Google and other projects??] for generations to come
• Living in cities is a form of consensual hallucination. London has food for 3 days, fragile?
• Participatory sensory mapping has fascinating potential – need to talk to Christian Nold more about that
• Making toys is art and science – beauty of blending the two
• Harvesting the ambient RF already out there for wireless power
• We need some things to be present to threatening change: a face of terror, speed/abrupt change, visceral to us, morality of change. All these lacking in climate change and we sit and wait….

…..and much more

Thank you!!!!!

Mobile business design

An example of how technology obscures and then surprises us

What is mobile business design. It is in essence a layered view of an organisation from circa early 20th century to today.

A mobile business design leverages a history and a present and some near term future.

History

A salesman did not sit in an office writing memos [read e-mails] to his clients. He was traveling. He was face to face. He was living the life of the client. For some 20 funny years in many ways we forgot this and then found it again as a great argument when mobile phones came around. wow!

Present

After a little confusion we’ve now come back but with a vengeance. Now we can not only send the lonely salesman out on the road but we can actually keep him company, send him things to help out and listen to the evolving status of the client case. The salesman gets to go home at night and come to the office when it is time to celebrate a success.

Future

Deep immersion anyone. The roads never traveled! The virtual path to success. The party is still at the face to face locale of choice.

Just no energy today to be more deep and meaningful about the important topic of Mobile Business Design. Just to show a little thought journey on how we pendulum swing with our innovations but always in a slightly different place. And yet, we’re still just humans.

One mobile device or many mobile devices

Possible directions – one engine – many uses

Will we have the ONE device, it opens the doors for us, it controls our home electronics, it acts as our entry to all portals, it is a personal hub for our real and virtual lives.

Today we have a number of devices. Why? Well at least one thing is clear. None of them perform in well in all circumstances. So for example. I have my work laptop and my personal laptop [mac powerbook]. I like the psychological separation of the two. I like the fact that they are different. I am on my computers alot [no different to so many others] and it is great to look into a different world when at work versus when at home. This could, I think, be done cleverly on one hardware, but I have not seen that yet. Part of the issue is the ‘what gets booted up and what does not’, when all you really want to do is check your e-mail. If I want to just check my e-mail, please don’t load everything and take so long to do it. There are signs that this kind of separation of tasks is about to happen.

Now the discussion about the Swiss Army Knife of mobile devices [does it all] can start shifting slightly. Instead of dreaming of doing everything with one hand size tool we can configure what we need. As the processing power and so on improves soon a match box size ‘engine’ can do as much as a laptop does and more [e.g. think of ipod]. There are flexible screens, projected keyboards and so on. These mean that we could have one engine for everything and several input/output concepts for the many purposes and styles of sharing and communicating. This works, as long as we do not have to think too hard what to take with us.

Another reason why two different laptops [while we wait for the full on mobile tool] are important to me. Companies are taking control of the work device networked to the corporate network. Soon we will see our laptops swept for content – even automatic publishing somewhere on the corporate systems – and ahem I am not keen on the company looking into my private stuff, a folder just does not cut it.