The Do Lectures 2010

Do Tent in the background aka Ted in a tent

Last year I had the privilege to speak at The Do Lectures (my review here) (more Do stuff), and though I will not be able to make it this year, I wanted to share my enthusiasm for the 2010 event. There is a great speaker line up - which is designed to do what it says on the tin – to inspire people to go and do something with their lives.

Also I might add – The Do Lectures is an event that is cross disciplinary, and brings in my view an alternative view of how we make business, art, love and life in this networked world. And it is this diversity that makes the experience so rich and rewarding. It is the rule of No Straight Lines vs. the straight line one. As Proust said, the real voyage of discovery is not to seek new landscapes but to look upon the world with fresh eyes.

So from the future of publishing presented by Craig Mod, to John ‘Jay” Burton Rogers from Local Motors, Maggie Doyne building schools in Nepal – these are people as Ivan Illich says are leading a life of action. So unlike other events, if you want inspiration, and hang out with some great people, where speakers sit and have breakfast with you, lunch with you and dinner with you and chat, where you talk to others that have asked the question, ‘why?’ what comes next? What is the alternative, where you will be moved – then Do is the place for you. You can by tickets here. Don’t just stand there, Do something.

http://thedolectures.co.uk

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Posted in: Convergence, Economics, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Education, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Mobile, Engagement Organisations, Engagement Politics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Green tech, Music, Social Marketing Intelligence, Social Networks, Society, Strategy, Trends, Web/Tech

Rocky and Balls at MLove

In the car that drove me down to MLove two young women were sat in the back of the car with me, feverishly chatting to each other and writing in a notebook. I struck up and conversation, enquiring what they were doing? Songwriters, ahhhhhh I see songwriters going to conference about mobile….. er of course you are. So I asked why were they going to a mobile conference in the middle of nowhere?  Because they were performing stupid! Doooh.

Sophie Madeleine, left and Hannah-Rei, right, form the duo that is known as Rocky and Balls. As you can see these are demure looking ladies – let that not fool you – and although they both sing like angels, there is craft, humour and more sauce in their song writing than you would get in 10 Heinz sauce bottles.

Armed only with a Ukulele, and a Kazoo, well in fact we all had Kazoo’s, we were regaled with the Beard Song, (now I have to grow one, and live in hope) and two of my favourites, I heart you online, and Love Cake a Baking Song – apparently.

All these songs were touching and achingly funny. So Sophie and Hannah, I heart your songwriting and performing skills. And recommend that more people come and look you up, listen to your music, buy your music and book performances – the world needs you. Here is my fave song for your delectation. As separate artists, they also cut the mustard to a high standard.

Check them out on their YouTube Channel

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Posted in: Music

Curated consumption in 2010

Good piece from Wired on Curated consumption, though Sarah Rotman Epps from Forrester takes a slightly different perspective to me and something we at SMLXL have been thinking about for a little while. In 2006,

Lets just sprinkle the words, community, advocacy, time-shifting, curated consumption, word of mouth, trust, authenticity, in here, as a few reflexsives.

Its not a broadcast ecology, its a network ecology. Now we need to work out how play a role in that network.

In a Pull World, when the avalanche of information is so great, we have no option but to curate our consumption. And anything helps us do that is always welcome. And it may be your curation tools and services of choice will be different to mine.

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Posted in: Culture, Data, Distribution, Economics, Link Economy, Media, Social Networks, Society, Strategy, Trends, Web/Tech

All you need is love – MLove is all you need

Last week I was speaking @ participating and co-creating in an event called MLove. Which was held in Beesenstedt in an old Schloss, in the middle of nowhere. When we landed in Altenburg, our driver said “welcome to nowhere. I am now taking you you nowhere”.

I new this event was going to be different when we arrived, though I was already excited because of the design of the event, and the quality of speakers. And I knew something special might happen, when on the first day sitting in the faded grandeur of the ballroom, we were asked to close our eyes by a Tibetian Lama, and to take the red, white and blue pill for inner peace and harmony, to feel the quietness of the inner body. We all did it, it felt really weird and it felt really really good.

Yes we were all there because in some way or another, the idea of connectivity and communications enabled by mobile technologies was the gravitational pull, yet the agenda I can tell you was as broad as the diversity on this planet. Favourite speaker was, Kazi Islam – CEO, Grameenphone IT, Dhaka, Bangladesh, as his message to us was compelling and humbling. His statistics of the probability of too many people that will never make it beyond child birth, to the age of 5, the chance of obtaining clean water or an education to lift them out of poverty – forced us all to pause and think what we filled our days up with – we were he told us in the 0.01% percentile blessed in so many ways that we all take for granted.

I also felt there was a desire to want to effect change, to build the world afresh, but also that we could do this by also making money, redistributing wealth, and creating a more equitable society.

The Open Space and Future Cube experience, where speakers and attendee’s collaborated together to look at for example, Justice, Wealth Distribution, Emerging Markets, Media, was part of the special part of this journey of discovery for us all. So we were actively working together to look at problems and trying to discover/design solutions. Paul Bay spoke so elegantly about media being sensorial, emotive, and fluid. S if you did not go missed something special and if you did it was an honour to hang out with you all.

Emerging Markets Future Cube. Very intense very productive

Ralf Rottman wrote:

When Peter Giblin and Harald Neidhardt set out on their journey to create the MLOVE concept, there was one key driving factor: Putting the people back into the center of everything. Many, if not all, business events and conferences are grouped around the central concept of an audience and speakers. Two distinct roles. Some who listen. Some who talk.

While “a great chance to network” is on every agenda these days, I never quite experienced it as intense, as enriching as during the MLOVE days. Both, for work and for my personal life.

It was this intensity of engagement that made this event special, the only other experience that has moved me as much is the Do Lectures, And the art projected onto the facade of the schloss was something that took this whole experience onto another level, created by these very special people.

As the Beatles sang, All You Need is Love.

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Posted in: Alan Moore Speaking, Culture, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Education, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Mobile, Engagement Organisations, Engagement Politics, Ethics, Greentech, Marketing, Media, Participation, Social Networks, Society, Trends, Uncategorized, Web/Tech

Enable and empower communities don’t build apps

Most government agencies are missing out on a core ingredient with their contests. Sunlight had a not-so-secret sauce in its contest strategy that ought to be shared

For us at Sunlight, the not-so-big secret was that it was never about the apps. While it worked out great that there were apps like Filibusted and Know-Thy-Congressman, the production of the apps were never our desired end results. A win for us wasn’t the awesomeness that is GovPulse.us, a great app built for Apps for America 2. It wasn’t even getting exposure to the technology community through the talks I got to give at places like Web2 Expo, and OSCon.

A win for our contest program was Jim Gilliam. Jim participated in our first apps contest with “Hello, Congress” that is now GuvLuv.org. Jim entered that contest, became an avid member of the Sunlight Labs Google Group got inspired, and built act.ly not out of any apps incentive, but because he was inspired. Jim’s now building a business around that work.

See— the purpose of our contests weren’t to generate apps, but to build community. It’s to create a sustainable community of support and connection for the people who are eager to help out. The contests were an incentive model to build a long-term community of developers.

Via Clay Johnson quoted from his blog and frequently tweeted @ #gov20

Enabling and empowering, not service deliverology with targets! It’s embedded sociability not social media. Its a bit like the Bill Bailey principle, Bill the comedian is asked how he comes up with his jokes – “I start with a laugh and work backwards, what do I need to do to create that amunt of laughter?” Exactamondo. This also got me thinking about the Dewey Winburne Awards – where people everyday people go the extra mile to help others via technology – I went to the awards and was deeply moved whilst I was in Austin Texas. If we expand on that, for me enabling is giving people the tools to do things they are passionate about. The idea that we have, and we have, professionalised all the services a community needs, but removes the community from, if they want to, engage, help, advise etc., as now all services are run by professional administrators – perhaps inevitable in complex mobile societies – but we have lost something along the way and we need to claim it back. When we remove people from creating everyday things we also remove context, when we remove context, we remove meaning, without meaning we are unable to engage. Its why so much modern politics leaves us cold and disinterested. But that said, as Richard Sennett wrote in his book The Craftsman, we want to re-engage with the spirit of the Enlightenment but on the terms that are relevant to our age. Thank you Dominic Campbell of FutureGov for giving me the heads up on this #gov20 event – fascinating

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Posted in: Convergence, Data, Education, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Politics, Ethics, Government & Politics, Mobile, No straight lines, Politics, Society, Trends, Web/Tech

24 layers of telecommunication data topography

24 layers of Telecommunication data topography through tracing real geographical mobile uses hour by hour, Eunju Han.

http://ht.ly/21Np0

What could data do for us?

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Posted in: Culture, Data, Media, Mobile, Social Networks

No Straight Lines interview @dishymix

Here is a link to the interview that I had with the fabulous Susan Bratton of DishyMix.

It was said that Alan Moore sounded like a character from a Guy Ritchie movie at his SXSW keynote. Skyping in from Over, England (a village outside Cambridge), Suz and Alan talk about our collective responsibility to leverage open social systems, global connectivity, consciousness and lightweight (green) business practices to the way we strategically create companies in the future. More on No Straight Lines. My SXSW presentation. Do Lecture (Video)

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Posted in: Alan Moore Speaking, Convergence, Culture, Darwin, Economics, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Organisations, Ethics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Green tech, Greentech, Identity, Law, Link Economy, Marketing, Media, No straight lines, Participation, Philosophy, Podcasts, Society, Strategy, Trends, Web/Tech

Qustodian development opportunity

People need brands and brands need people, its just that in the early 21st Century we can help those people and those brands, find each other when they need each other the most – this is all based upon the principles of accepting we live in a pull world, a search economy, a semantic universe where trusted data, aggregation, filtration and curation of information all play key and important roles.

Qustodian is a company that enables such an interface to happen between people and companies they allow to communicate with them –

Qustodian is the keeper of your data, but you own it – one has an application on the mobile that enables access those communiqués as and when one wants to.

Each and evry person has its what is called a YOAD

Yoad /‘j??d/ 1. n. a file in database storing a person’s profile information and consumer lifestyle preferences for use by marketers and advertisers to determine whether to send a highly targeted commercial communication to that person (normally to their mobile telephone); 2. v. to send an advert to a person’s mobile phone [orig. unkn.]

The Qustodian service and platform has been built for all the main smartphone systems (Symbian, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, SonyE, Windows + a web version for everyone else) and are also operator agnostic – as we look for ubiquity.

Qustodian is offering its platform for research purposes especially in the light of Technology Strategy Board is to invest up to £10 million in new research projects that will help accelerate the development and deployment of more secure and trustworthy information systems within Digital Britain and the wider global economy.

What are the outputs that Qustodian is looking for? Something along these lines

To develop and understand the princples of,

• Data cooperative
• Value of data profile (yoad)
• Possible uses of communication channel (buying groups, VRM etc)
• Yoad creation principles and evolution to maximise its’ value to all

So if that appeals to you please get in touch here . You can be a university, research centre, a company – we are more interested in who you are and what you would like to do with our technology.

www.qustodian.com

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Posted in: 7th Mass Media, Advertising, Data, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Mobile, Ethics, Marketing, Media, Trends

MLove Berlin = space to think

Last week it was Helsinki, talking to, and running workshops for, mobile operators and others interested in the business of mobile. This week its Berlin and the MLove festival. There is real strength in depth in the quality of the speakers. And its not too late to come along.

Peter Giblin: Director of MLOVE Confestival from MLOVE on Vimeo.

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Posted in: Alan Moore Speaking, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Mobile, Marketing, Media, Mobile, Participation, Philosophy, Strategy, Trends

Mobile lessons for us all – all six of them

I had the benefit of getting to know Philip Sugai via Lars Cosh-Ishii from Mobikyo, and was very excited when Philip told me about his new book – The Six Immutable Laws of Mobile Business which are,

Immutable Law #1—Value Over Culture
Immutable Law #2—The Law of the Ecosystem
Immutable Law #3—Mobility Empowers
Immutable Law #4—The Value of Time Zones
Immutable Law #5—Mobile-Specific Business Models Are Essential
Immutable Law #6—The Future Is Simplexity

I found this to be a very insightful read especially Law #6 – Simplexity. When a service or device becomes more powerful but simpler to use because of the increasing ‘intelligence’ of the hidden back-end. They point to the iPhone (though the engineering of the iPhone according to some does suck up bandwidth), and of course we can add, I suggest, the BBC iPlayer to that list as well, as businesses like, TxtEagle, Layar, GrowVC, Local Motors and Ushahidi, which all use the harnessing of data and distributed intelligence to play a critical role in the performance of those businesses and services, as well as being ‘easy to use’ powerful tools and services. That is my personal opinion. I also very enjoyed the point they make that value in mobile is what counts, not culture. As many like to dismiss Japans mobile culture as an aberration. I would urge anyone thinking about the business of mobile to buy this book, read it, study it, re-read it and understand its message. I was speaking and running workshops in Helsinki last week at the Nokia Siemens Networks Marketing Forum and it was interesting to see a more engaged international audience looking for solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

Lots of case studies and insight and the authors will tell you that Mobile Social Networking started in Japan.

The authors are Philip Sugai, Marco Koeder and Ludovico Ciferri. (more info here).

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Posted in: Alan Moore Speaking, Books, Convergence, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Mobile, Generation C, Mobile, Networks, Participation, Social Marketing Intelligence, Social Networks, Strategy, Trends, iPhone