Okay, I’m back on track again. Jetlagged still, but I think it’ll be okay. I’ll try to write down a few thoughts when I’ve landed properly. Just a short note to say that I will be having a presentation at Lunds University at 9 am tomorrow, if anyone happens to be around. The official invite is right here (PDF).
Oh yeah, our more corporate blog Good Old Office is up and running for real this time.
Douglas Engelbart is a legend, and one that laid the foundation for his genius in the most impressive way I’ve heard in a long time. Perhaps ever, actually. At the age of 25, he took a few months to try to straighten out what he should be doing the rest of his life. What he realised was that if people don’t get better at collectively using their resources in order to get forward – the world would ultimately crash. So he put together his lifetime goal from this insight, and phrased it like this:
As much as possible, to boost mankinds collective capability for coping with complex, urgent, problems.
This then became the driving force behind his work, and life, for 55 years and counting. _Wow.
Engelbart spoke calmly and with a very humble approach. Today, many of the ideas presented are obvious and integrated in society and systems. Therefore a simple analysis would have been “heard it all before“. But this is where it started. From the beginning. I found it a bit difficult to keep that perspective in mind.
He stated that solving any truly large-scale problem requires collective capability. And in order to do this, one must develop an adequate comprehensive understanding of the following:
The problem situation
The possible solutions
The resources required
The resources available
Engelbart called the way of approaching this the Collective IQ. He also added that the augmentation model was valid over a very large scale, following this logic:
Individual human – Operative IQ
Community of Practise – Collective IQ
A Complete Company – Collective IQ
The World – Collective IQ
At times, the presentation was very abstract and hard to follow. Or at least to summarise in an easy way. Someone more skilled would definitely done it better. Check Technorati to see what others are writing.
tags technorati : injo4 innovationjournalism douglasengelbart
tags bloggar.se: injo4, innovation journalism, douglas engelbart
Okay, I set up a Onelinr backchannel for INJO4. Let’s see if I can get people to use it.
tags technorati : injo4 innovationjournalism backchannel onelinr
tags bloggar.se: injo4, innovation journalism, onelinr, backchannel
I’ll be a bit slower on the blogging today, the focus of the programme is slightly different. I might cover one or two things later on.
Until then, this chartlet is interesting:
Posts that contain Jaiku per day for the last 30 days.
Get your own chart!
tags technorati : injo4 innovationjournalism jaiku
tags bloggar.se: injo4, innovation journalism, jaiku
Here’s my presentation in Slideshare format:
Update: Thanks to Nate Anthony for getting a few terms more correct in the presentation. And also, check out Seth Familians presentation on the same topic linked as a PDF here.
tags technorati : injo4 innovationjournalism presentation goodold bjornjeffery
tags bloggar.se: injo4, innovationjournalism, presentation, goodold, björn jeffery
Technorati: An introduction for Journalists and Publishers
Dave Sifry started out asking the audience how many were working journalists or publishers, and also how many that already used the service. Only 20% were using it, some what surprising I thought.
Sifry emphasised that the media landscape is changing, and also the increasingly difficult differentiation between advertising and non-advertising in content. Not only was the media changing, but also the places where one can get the media from. Examples like YouTube, MySpace were mentioned. This part was hardly news for anyone reading this blog, but fair enough – a good introduction for the crowd.
He described what he hoped to become a shift in journalist attitude that was “this is what happened today” to “this is a very small part of what we could manage to find in this enormous news flow that happened today”. Something to that effect at least.
Sifry encouraged journalists to get involved in the conversation through tracking what is being spoken about right now. Technorati can today show content that was posted just under 60 seconds ago, making it ideal to pick up instant reactions regarding current events.
Under the topic “Using Technorati in journalism”, Sifry outlined three major points:
Search: Get the real-time conversation
A way to discover not only what people are talking about, but also as a way to find sources to more information. Finding the people behind the blogs so that you can contact them for further research.
Discovery features: Gauge the Zeitgeist
Technorati look at what 75 million people are talking about and track the most active conversations. This can be used to find new ideas for stories.
Authority: Understand your sources
“Every single person has a reputation”, Sifry said. Technorati can be used as a good way of checking what is being said about people. And it’s also a good way to find out more about people doing rants and raves – being able to understand their context and background.
Sifry continued with a Sun Microsystems case study. Sun regularly listens to the conversation about their products, and they provide a link to a Technorati search from each product page (see an example here).
Sifry finished with an interesting answer to a question about how Technorati themselves innovate. He said “don’t build the right system first” meaning that most projects fail anyway, and that one should focus on getting systems out there fast and then listen to the responses and change them accordingly. They try to work with new feature development within two week cycles. Two out three projects on average fails, but according to Sifry this was a good thing. Provided that you revalue what is a success, and what isn’t.
tags technorati : injo4 technorati davesifry innovation
tags bloggar.se: injo4, technorati, dave sifry, innovation
I’m at Stanford! I’ll be holding a presentation at the Innovation Journalism conference later on today, but I wll also try to to live blog the conference as much as I can. Please check out the programme and let me know if there is anything specific that you want me to catch and I’ll try to write more about that.
The first session was from Stefan Andreasen, CEO and founder of Kapow Technologies. His topic was “Taking a European startup to the US – The Entrepreneur’s perspective”.
Not familiar with Kapow? Neither was I, even if it ringed a bell somewhere. Basically, what they do is help making mashups or create new relevant feed streams. Today, mashups are still difficult because of the lack of relevant API’s to use. So what Kapow does is to create RSS feeds and similar standardised formats automatically from a large variety of sources – directly from webpages or in databases. Sounded a bit like Yahoo Pipes, but you don’t have to have the initial RSS feeds. Clever.
Kapow started as Kapow.net – a one stop shopping site for real estate, cars, boats etc. Andreasen explained that they unfortunately were about five years ahead of its time, as real estate agents thought they were stealing their profits more than anything else. Because of this, the company died with the dotcom-death of 2000-2001. Fortunately they could reuse their technology to create a product which could be sold to Danske Bank and used the money to fund their new company, Kapow Technologies.
Making the shift over the Atlantic started when Kapow realised that all current partners, and potential partners, were to be found in California. Also, is was considerably easier to find investors when you are in a market where the growth potential is larger, i.e in a larger country.
Andreasen listed a few key points in finding the right investor:
The partner they found was Kennet, and with help from them they today have 75% of their business from the US.
Andreasen also listed a few lessons that he had learned from moving your company to the US:
A good and humble presentation from a person who obviously knew what he was talking about. I’ll definitely be looking out for Kapow ahead.
* * *
Next up was Javier Rojas, Managing Director of Kennet that presented with the title “European Innovation & succeeding in the US – expansion strategies for European entrepreneurs.”
Kennet Venture Partners is a VC firm focusing only on American and European innovation. They have moved several companies from Europe to the US, and are used to the problems that may occur. The companies that they look for have a revenue between 4-50 million US dollars. Usually their commitment is between 3 to 6 years.
An interesting point was when Rojas said that there will be a split in managing content and managing your audience. He argued that newspapers (and others) had to open up to other sources of content, and also let their content go to other hosts. Good point, even if I think it will take quite some time for the newspapers to accept. Rojas gave this a time frame of five years. For this, Kapows technology would be perfect, he argued.
As for the pure VC point of view, Rojas held a good presentation, but there was so many points being made that it was very difficult to keep up. He basically went through their entire investment logic in 20 minutes. Very interesting, but basically unbloggable. I’ll make a few summarizing points below to try to catch the main frame.
Rojas focused on one major challenge for the European markets: – it’s not homogenous, and therefore each country is insufficient in size to support a global vendor domestically. This creates a very expensive business environment. He gave an example of having three sales people that covered the entire US – one on each coast, and one in the middle. In Europe they had to have three people just to cover Great Britain and Germany. The equation for sales that he used was one salesperson for every 1.2 million US dollars revenue at 60% gross margin.
He continued to explain that entering the US market typically costs around 5-15 million US dollars. In order to be successful here Rojas emphasized the importance of having key management living in the US. A lot of European companies fail in not willing to relocate their management, and miss out on many opportunities because of that. For instance, having the VP Sales in US was essential Rojas said.
tags technorati : injo4 kapow kennet vc entrepreneur innovation
tags bloggar.se: injo4, kennet, kapow, riskkapital, entreprenör, innovation
Tomorrow I’ll being flying out to California to hold a presentation at the Stanford University Innovation Journalism conference. I’ll be in San Francisco until Sunday, and in San Jose until Wednesday after that. Unfortunately, these last two weeks have been so busy that my preparation is next to nothing. So if you know any interesting people you think I should meet – or if you perhaps live there yourself – please drop me a line. The only two places I know I’ll be at is the Björk concert and the Likemind breakfast.
One more thing – if you’re Swedish – stop over at What’s Next and listen to the latest podcast that Henrik, Eric and I participated in.
tags technorati : sanfrancisco sanjose conferences stanforduniversity bjork likemind whatsnext
tags bloggar.se: san francisco, san jose, konferenser, stanford, björk, likemind, whats next
One of the projects that I run on the side of Good Old, is a blog called Discobelle.net. It’s a music blog that has become quite influential in the genres that we cover. An interesting point is that we get a lot of American PR-agencies that try to get us to write about their artists. Americans, working through a Swedish blog, in order to reach an American public. The globalized internet at it’s finest.
But an even more interesting point is the one about the genre blog house, that we are partially credited for in the Wikipedia article (they’ve deleted the article now, I see). The term is some what derogatory and descriptive of the wide spread electro house that is posted on a lot of blogs these days.
In the discussion about whether to keep the article or not, the argument was brought up that there were no sources for the name, “Published sources would be helpful here” it said. Helpful perhaps, but not realistic or even relevant as this is a phrase coined in an online conversation (probably here). It’s hard to trace back to one single person. And why would a “published” source make more credible than anything else?
One of my all time favourites, Edward de Bono, makes the point that good ideas can be created easier with certain methods. And while using these methods, it’s not entirely clear who came up with the idea as there are so many people participating in different ways. It is not important either – as long as the idea is truly good and solves the problem that you have. It’s the same thing with phrases, or a lot of other things, if you ask me.
In all these ongoing conversations; ideas, phrases and thought streams are presented daily. I read something interesting, and then perhaps I blog about it adding my thoughts to the original. Someone else reads my blog post and writes their own. They add to it again, and puts together a snappy way of presenting it. Now who owns this idea?
I question the whole idea of claiming ownership of something that was born inbetween people. It’s just not an important factor any more. In a conversation centred society, old rules concerning copyright and relevant sources can hardly apply any more. Too bad the world’s most progressive encyclopedia can’t lead the way here.
tags technorati : wikipedia copyright conversations discobelle bloghouse
tags bloggar.se: wikipedia, konversationer, copyright, discobelle, blog house
For being a semi-corporate blog, I rarely write about what I actually work with. Those of you that follow my Jaiku get the picture, but hardly any results. I thought I’d just quickly mention two projects that I have been involved with lately.
If anyone has missed it, I work as an internet strategist at a communication agency called Good Old. We work with both strategy and production within digital media, focusing mainly on media companies at the moment.
The first project I thought I’d mention is the new supplement Fredag for the daily newspaper Corren. I worked together with Anna Lindberg in shaping the concept, focusing on how to get closer to the student community and involve the readers on an editorial level. The result landed on my desk a few days ago and turned out really well. An unusually non-digital project, but there you go. We had loads of ideas for web and mobile as well, but they had to wait for a while. (and if my E70 wasn’t so troublesome you would have had a few pictures as well)
The other project is for Sydsvenskan, a daily newspaper here in Malmö. I assisted in developing a tv-concept around Margret Atladottir that was recruited from a competitor. The first test show has aired and can be seen here. It’s going to take a while to find the exact right approach, but I’m convinced this will be one of the most popular features of the site pretty soon.
tags technorati : corren sydsvenskan newspapers media goodold
tags bloggar.se: corren, sydsvenskan, dagstidningar, media, good old
