Aggregation of Future Exploration blogs: Future Exploration Network blog, Future of Media Summit blog, Enterprise 2.0 Forum blog

The past, present, and future of location-based mobile social networking

I have long believed that location-based mobile social networking is central to how technology will connect us. The advent of next generation phones including the iPhone combined with people’s familiarity and engagement with social networks means that the space is – finally – ready to take off. Here is a very quick review of the past, present, and future of the space.

The Past
The original location-based social networking application was proximity dating, which I wrote about in chapter 2 of my book Living Networks in 2002, in describing some of the many ways that networks bring people together:

In mobile-mad Japan, "proximity dating" has had a big success. As in Internet dating, you complete a profile of both yourself and your desired partner. Instead of suggesting people to exchange e-mails with, the service rings you on your cell phone to let you know that someone with a matching profile is within a few hundred yards of you, and allows you to arrange to meet them. Since high bandwidth mobile technology is now available in Japan, the system can also allow you to see each other on your mobile videophone before you meet.
[Download Chapter 2 of Living Networks]

People were very interested in the idea, and I got a lot of media coverage at the time for my thoughts on where this was going. There were a variety of technologies and platforms available for location-based social networking in the early days, however the major constraint was that very few phones had GPS, so the location of each phone had to be determined by cell tower triangulation, giving an accuracy often not better than one kilometre. One early example of location-based social networking at the time was from Swisscom, in which people could engage in anonymous chat, with indicators of both the numbers of degrees of separation from their counterpart in their phone books, and the approximate distance between them (from low to high).

Keynote for Optus Business: Five Driving Forces of Connected Business

I have just completed delivering keynotes in six cities as part of a national roadshow for Optus Business. Optus’ annual client event, this year titled Beyond 08, was a morning event for its clients and prospects in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra. The sessions began with my keynote on Surviving and Thriving in a Connected World, followed by Optus executives presenting insight and client case studies on mobility and IP convergence. Each event included an exhibition featuring Alphawest, the ITC services firm Optus acquired three years ago, and a broad array of Optus Business delivery partner organizations.

Rather than try to run through my entire keynote presentation here, I thought it would be useful to include the key content from just one of the five sections, on the Driving Forces that are transforming a connected world. The rest of the keynote describes in detail what connected business looks like, winning strategies for organizations in a connected economy, and finally the action that needs to be taken to succeed.

The five driving forces of Connected Business are:

1. Connectivity

Increasing connectivity is an overwhelming force, shaping society and business. We have come a long way since the first mobile phones that weighed less than a brick in the early 1990s and the birth of the graphic web browser in 1993. As we shift to pervasive connectivity, giving us access to all the people and information resources of humanity wherever we go, entirely new possibilities are emerging on who we are and how we live our lives. As messages flow rapidly between us, the people on the planet are becoming connected as tightly as the neurons in our brains, giving rise to an extraordinary global brain in which we are all participating.

ABC Radio: Peer-to-peer file sharing and the future of the media

Today’s ABC Media Report featured a special report on peer-to-peer file sharing and its impact on media. The program provided an overview of the history of peer-to-peer content sharing, starting from Napster and its legal travails, moving on to Kazaa, BitTorrent, online video distribution and the situation today, and how it is impacting the music, video and media industries. The report can be downloaded as a podcast (note that the peer-to-peer piece is only on the download, not the stream).

In between various industry lobbyists, lawyers and musicians, I was interviewed as a “futurist,” describing how video content is increasingly being distributed over the Internet and digital channels, and how content providers now have a choice on whether they distribute through traditional broadcast and cable television, or directly to their audience.

I was also quoted on some of the ideas that were contained in the Future of Media Report 2008, on how the media and entertainment industry is likely to quadruple in size over the next 20-25 years, and on the continuing drive to fragmentation that is challenging the industry. I continue to believe that there are major opportunities for those content providers that position themselves effectively in the current extraordinary transformation in content distribution.

Peak of Australian Twitter use was at Future of Media Summit 2008

Hitwise has just released statistics on Twitter usage in Australia, showing that Twitter usage is up over 500% over the last year. More interestingly, Australia’s share of Twittering globally has more than tripled in that time. It should also be noted that people increasingly use mobiles and Twitter clients such as Twhirl, so Hitwise would not be seeing this traffic, suggesting that the increase in usage is probably significantly greater than the figures they’re reporting.

Of particular interest is that Twitter’s peak of usage in Australia was at the time of the Future of Media Summit 2008, on July 15. This isn’t that surprising given the very strong use of Twitter at and beyond the Summit (see Twitter posts tagged #fom08), and the many people who commenced Twittering at the event.

Certainly other more recent events in Australia (for example today’s Web Directions South #wds08) are likely to have more Twitter usage than the Future of Media Summit, however that is on the back of a significant increase in the local Twitter population since then. It’s certainly great to see that the Future of Media Summit got such great Twitter uptake, especially since the event covered the entire media landscape, not just social media, and many attendees were from traditional media and unlikely to ever Twitter.

Thanks for the reference from the blog of social media strategist and Twitterer extraordinaire Laurel Papworth!

Also see the original release from Hitwise for more interesting insights, such as the fact that Twitter delivers 10x more traffic to financial institution websites than it did a year ago, suggesting that Twitterers are saying either nice or bad things about banks.

SkillsOneTV: Ross Dawson on the future of work

SkillsOne is the TV channel of the Institute for Trade Skills Excellence, providing video programming both on cable TV and online to promote the development of trade skills. Last May it
won the Webby award for the best association website.

Shortly after SkillsOne was founded last year I was interviewed by the channel on the future of work. The full interview was run on the cable programming, while two 3 minute excerpts from the interview are provided online. Part 1 of the interview is below – I’ll post Part 2 a little later.

A quick summary of the key points I made in this segment:

Two questions when you are considering a trade or profession:
* Is it possible that computers or machines will be able to do this?
* Is it possible that someone working overseas will be able to do this for clients here?

In a global connected economy we must become more and more specialized, otherwise our work become commoditized. However specialists must collaborate closely with others in order to create value.

The Future of Financial Services - the Indian perspective

I'm writing at the Vision 2020 Financial Services Sector conference in Mumbai where I'm giving the keynote speech. I'll post a review of my presentation later, and here will post notes from the interesting speakers and my conversations on the day, combined with my own reflections.

The conference is organized by NDTV Convergence and Wipro. NDTV runs all of the online operations of NDTV, a diversified media company centered on its business TV channel. Wipro is one of the top three IT services companies in India - for each of Wipro, TCS, and Infosys financial services is their largest client sector.

Public sector banks and transformation to a true market economy
India has 23 public sector banks, which means they are owned at least 51% by the government. In most cases these are listed companies with a wide variety of investors. While it is now well over a decade since India began its transition from a largely nationalized economy, there is still a long way to go. There is unlikely to be large scale privatization for the foreseeable future, and in many sectors other than banking there remains major shifts required to move to open market attitudes and competitiveness.

Conversation with Napier Collyns on scenario planning, networks, oil, geopolitics, and noticing what matters

I caught up with Napier Collyns in Sydney the other week, after having seen him in both New York and London earlier this year. His highly peripatetic lifestyle means that we’re often not in the same place at the same time, but we’ve managed to cross paths more regularly recently. Napier had just spoken at the Australian Leadership Retreat organized by the Australian Davos Connection on a number of topics including peak oil.

I thought it would be a great opportunity to record a video conversation with Napier. We sat down for an hour after a pleasant lunch and spoke on a wide range of topics, including many aspects of scenario planning and its history and future, Global Business Network, social networks, geopolitics, oil, and how we notice what’s important from an excess of information. The video is below, and a timeline of conversation topics at the bottom of this post.

Conversation: Napier Collyns and Ross Dawson from Ross Dawson on Vimeo.

I’d originally thought we’d create three 10-15 minute self-contained segments on different topics, but that’s not how conversations work. It ended up as a free-flowing discussion over an hour moving far beyond the intended starting points. There were some extremely interesting insights in the conversation, I thought, particularly for anyone interested in scenario planning, so I’ve posted the entire conversation, together with a chronology of conversation topics so you can go to the points of greatest interest to you.

Social networks help people to get jobs: employer survey

Careerbuilder.com has just launched a survey which says that 22% of hiring managers use social networks to screen candidates. The report emphasizes the downside for applicants, saying that one third of hiring managers rejected candidates based on what they found, including drug and alcohol use, inaccurate qualifications, links to criminal behaviour and so on. That’s the stuff that gets the headlines.

Less prominent in the report is that 24% of hiring managers found content on social networks that convinced them to hire a candidate, including solid references and a professional image.

Using social networks to get additional information about candidates is a no-brainer, and think it’s an indictment of the profession that just one fifth of hiring managers use an obvious source of information about applicants. It also should be very obvious to anyone with half a brain today that their social network profiles will be looked at when they’re applying for jobs.

Of course using social networks in screening is just one possible use for social networks in the hiring process. Even the CIA has been using Facebook for recruitment for well over two years, well after leaders in the space such as Ernst & Young (see EY's Facebook careers page , which has over 18,000 fans (Facebook login required).

Future Exploration Network and IBM are running a Social Network Strategy Executive Roundtable this week for top executives of major organizations. We’ll release a report on the discussions, which will give some great insights on how these and other aspects of social networks in the enterprise are viewed by senior management. The report will be available here in a couple of weeks.

Effective governance unleashes the creative potential of Web 2.0 in the business

IT Business Edge has just published an interview with me on IT governance for Web 2.0 technologies, a topic I'm spending considerable time on in my consulting work with major organizations. The complete article, Set Policies to Unleash Creativity with Web 2.0 Tools, is available on their website, and the interview is reproduced below.

Hall: Just to make sure we’re on the same page, how do you define Web 2.0 technologies?
Dawson: Basically, they’re technologies that use mass participation to create value for the business. They can be wikis, blogs, social networking, social bookmarking, mashups and other tools, but [the term] also involves the underlying architecture behind those tools.

Hall: So what would IT governance for those tools look like?
Dawson: I look at governance in a broader context as having a full understanding of potential risks, potential benefits and having set-off structured policies and procedures where any risks are minimized and benefits are maximized, with a high degree of transparency and accountability for executives and other people in the organization.

Media is becoming everything

Photon Group, in their annual results presentation today (Revenue up 94% to A$376m, Net Profit up 33% to A$21.7m - go to ASX to download FY2008 Annual Results) used three quotes to support their “media neutral, consumer driven “ strategy:

“The current agency model, producing marketing programs built around 30 second television ads, is no longer relevant for today’s business environment” Tony Palmer, Chief Marketing Officer for Kimberly Clark

“Today almost every business and social activity is a form of media. An increasing proportion of our social interactions happen across media channels”
Ross Dawson, Chairman of Future Exploration Network

“We will spend our marketing funds where the consumer will be and that is changing rapidly”
Craig Herbison, General Manager, Brand and Communication for Vodafone Australia

The quote from me is taken from the introduction to our Future of Media Report 2008, which has been getting a fantastic amount of attention globally since its launch in July.

I have spoken and written before about how media is beginning to encompass almost everything in the economy (for example in my speech on Enterprise 2.0 at KMWorld in Silicon Valley last year). I think it’s worth reviewing the first paragraph of the Future of Media Report 2008 below. I believe this view is central to how media, business, and society will unfold over coming years.

We are entering the media economy. The traditional boundaries of the media and entertainment industry have become meaningless. Today almost every business and social activity is a form of media. An increasing proportion of our social interactions happen across media channels. Every organization is now a media entity, engaged in creating and disseminating messages among its staff, customers, and partners to achieve business objectives. As the physical economy becomes marginalized and economic value becomes centered on the virtual, media encompasses almost everything.