Tag Archives: innovation

Calling bullshit on social media?

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Interesting post critiquing social media jargon and hype from Scott Berkun:

While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted – if only to  take a shot at calibrating how people talk about this stuff. I hope this post is used whenever someone feels they’re being sold something phony or that makes little sense and wants a skeptical opinion to help calibrate where the truth is.

For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around – first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve been involved in many stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.

Leicester amplified

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NLab Social Networks Conference 2008 – Andrea Saveri from IOCT on Vimeo.

At e-mint last night WordFrame’s David Terrar reminded me that next week NESTA is interviewing people who’ve entered proposals to be the learning partner for ‘Amplified City Leicester’. What’s Amplified City Leicester I hear you say? Watch the video above to get a conceptual idea, then read below…

In terms of an overall project overview here’s what I’ve extracted from the ITT:

Amplified City is a city-wide experiment designed to grow the innovation capacity of Leicester by networking
key connectors across the city’s disparate and diverse communities in an incentivised participatory project,
enabled by social media:
• To develop a transferable model for amplifying a diverse city’s grassroots innovation capacity through
connecting diverse communities through key individuals
• To generate practical examples of how collaborative technologies can be exploited in a city context

It clearly has a lot of potential in a city which is set to be the first city in Europe where the BME population is 50% or higher:

Informed by research conducted by the Institute for the Future; de Montfort’s Institute of Creative Technologies’s work on transliteracy; the NLab regional social media network and the IOCT’s visiting professor Howard Rheingold, the project will build on the participants’ existing understanding of their working styles, motivations and expertise.

The aim will be to create new structures and processes that bypass traditional constraints and stimulate innovation for social and commercial benefit across the city.

Watch this space Leicester!

PS: Talking of amplification it’s great to see plans for a new music project, ‘Lock 42‘, to open in a Victorian Mill on Frog Island in Leicester in October, out of the ashes of the famous Princess Charlotte, where I saw the Dandy Warhols play.

Big White Wall wins top award

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Congratulations to Big White Wall which has won the 2009 MediaGuardian Award for Innovation for Community Engagement.

easy = viral

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How important architectural choices are in creating viral applications? Very important in encouraging retweeting for example, from James Governor’s Monkchips blog:

Tim O’Reilly says:

As one of the most prolific retweeters around, I want to give a shout out to twhirl for encouraging retweet behavior by giving a simple button to do it. I don’t think I would ever have adopted retweeting with such gusto without that easy feature.

This example illustrates just how important architectural choices are in creating viral applications.

What’s so wonderful about twitter is that its minimal interface has led to an explosion of user and third-party application innovation. It’s a bit like what Alexander Pope said about writing in rhymed couplets: the limits of the form made his creativity shoot out, as water from a fountain.

How easy is it to replicate Silicon Valley’s innovation in Europe?

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“I was in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago speaking to a group of marketing executives at Royal Philips about the forces that drive the Internet revolution in America. “So what is it about Silicon Valley that makes it so innovative,” one Philips executive asked me after my speech. “How easy is it to replicate this innovation in Europe?”

It’s a great question — one that has intrigued me since 1983, when I first arrived in northern California as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Indeed, it’s such a good question that I instantly Googled it when I got back to America.”

Goes on about paradox of 50′s and 60s culture, company law, etc. Makes good sense to me.

 

A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution

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Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab, a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs, and firms experiment with, craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation. Here is his ‘Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution.’

 

 

 

 

From the Microsoft Startup Zone, Lynda Ting blogs on Xpree

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Hmm, interesting analysis..

Communication and Collaboration Solutions

Xpree—wisdom of the crowds to a whole new level, by Lynda Ting

I sat on a panel yesterday organized by Fountain Blue, a community that fosters entrepreneurial coaching and leadership in Silicon Valley.

This is how I came across Xpree.  While I was given only a 60 second elevator pitch and a 3-minute Q&A session, I immediately took to the idea of using the wisdom of the crowds to create a predictive market in the enterprise.  Specifically, in the areas of demand planning, forecasting and innovation management.  What’s even more interesting is the use of web 2.0 technologies and gaming principles to execute this idea. 

At a very high level, you create a profile, bet on the outcome of an idea that a co-worker has posted, set the metrics and see what the crowd has to say.  Top forecasters get ranked and if you use your imagination, there’s a whole social community that can be built around forecasting.  So, why would an enterprise customer care about this? Early proof points from Xpree customers show that these crowd-based forecasts, more closely align with actual outcomes than what the conventional planning tools offer today. Taking the idea one step further, this data could be fed back into existing product development and design management systems to improve products brought to market.  

There are quite a few companies in the consumer space with only a few other competitors aimed at the enterprise space such as Consensus Point, Inkling Markets and NewsFutures, so I it remains to be seen how Xpree can gain some ground.

Doctor Dalai’s superb April Fool

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I loved Doctor Dalai’s recent April Fool, announcing the partnership between Siemens and Disney:

“Disney and Siemens are two of the world’s most recognized and respected brands, both known for their relentless commitment to innovation. We look forward to working with Disney to grow our relationship and realize the potential of two great companies. This new relationship creates an ideal opportunity to demonstrate Siemens’ innovations to our customers, while also strengthening the Siemens brand in a memorable and relevant way. Viewing medical images, such as CAT (Computed Axial Tomography) scans or MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) exams has been limited by our 20th Century-based technology.

“No matter how fast the computers get, or how sharp the image may appear, we are still seeing only a shadow of what is truly present within the body,” notes George Nolen, President & CEO, Siemens Corporation. “With the advanced visualization techniques of Disney’s Pixar division, as well as their expertise in flight simulation as applied to various attractions, we are now able to actually place the physician virtually within the body. The most microscopic of processes will be visible to the eye from this vantage point. This certainly represents a new era in imaging.” Note Doctor Dalai, after contact from Siemens, has now removed the post.

The great added bonus about this joke is that there’s a nice grain of truth embedded in it — as didn’t Pixar start out in part as a manufacturer of medical imaging equipment?

 

 

Report: Web 2.0 funding in U.S. slows, except at Facebook

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Venture capitalists pumped a record $1.34 billion into 178 so-called Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. in 2007, up nearly 88 percent over amounts invested in 2006 — but social networking company Facebook Inc. accounted for 22 percent of it all.

And according to data unveiled Tuesday by Dow Jones VentureSource at the Web Ventures conference in Redwood City, Calif., deal growth is slowing.

From 2002 to 2006, Web 2.0 deal flow doubled every year, but 2007 only saw deals increase 25 percent to 178 from 143 deals in 2006. Nearly all of this growth happened outside Silicon Valley, the longtime home of Web-related innovation and investment.

“On the surface, the numbers look fine for the Bay Area — $720 million invested in 72 deals — but take Facebook’s $300 million out of the statistics and you see a very different picture,” says Jessica Canning, director of global research for Dow Jones VentureSource. “Web 2.0 deals in the Bay Area actually dropped from 74 deals in 2006 to 69 last year and investments were down 3 percent from the $431 million invested in 2006.”

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook raised $240 million from Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) in a highly publicized corporate round as well as at least $60 million more from individual investors last year. The next-largest Web 2.0 deal was the $44 million first round for Ning, also of Palo Alto, which lets users create their own niche social networks.

Despite these larger deals, Web 2.0 companies still remained a relatively inexpensive investment for venture capitalists. According to the data, the median deal size for these companies reached a record $5 million in 2007, up from $4.1 million in 2006. This is still far behind the overall $7.6 million industry median for a venture capital deal in the U.S. in 2007.

Even so, investors are placing a higher value on Web 2.0 companies. The data shows that in 2007, the median pre-money valuation for a Web 2.0 company reached a new high of $10 million, up from $6 million in 2006. Still, that’s well below the overall $16 million median pre-money valuation seen for venture-backed companies in 2007.

Facebooking the enterprise

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IP Business News: For perhaps the first time in the history of business and large enterprise computing, innovation is in the hands of the users, says Austin. “Control must be balanced with openness.”