We are all cyborgs now!

Lisa Gansky, “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing”

Traditional businesses follow a simple formula: create a product or service, sell it, collect money. But in the last few years a fundamentally different model has taken root - one in which consumers have more choices, more tools, more information, and more peer-to-peer power. Pioneering entrepreneur Lisa Gansky calls it the Mesh and reveals why it will soon dominate the future of business.

Mesh companies create, share and use social media, wireless networks, and data crunched from every available source to provide people with goods and services at the exact moment they need them, without the burden and expense of owning them outright. Gansky reveals how there is real money to be made and trusted brands and strong communities to be built in helping your customers buy less but use more.

Consider the explosive growth of Zipcar. By exploiting the latest technology and making it easy and affordable to have a car whenever you need one, this young company is helping to redefine personal transportation. And deeply worrying established competitors. Gansky shows how the same pattern is playing out with less famous Mesh companies that are reinventing an enormous range of industries:

Futurescaper

Futurescaper uses a Wikipedia-style approach to collect trends and weak signals.  It was designed to explore specific questions about the future through a structured, online data entry form.  It soon became clear that it was actually more useful at dumping a ton of apparently unrelated data into the system, coding and tagging it, and then seeing what patterns emerged.

Futurescaper: An Overview

What it is

• A system for collecting and exploring trends and factors and integrating them into emergent themes and issues.
• A structured mechanism for collecting input and data from a distributed, loosely connected groups of participants.
• An inductive way of generating scenario themes and logics that doesn’t require deductive, 2×2 grids, lots of interviews or workshops, or a very big budget.

What it isn’t

• An opinion survey, a prediction market, an ideation tool or an ideas contest.
• A scenario narrative generation engine.
• Very social or fun.

Not sure if it or isn’t yet (but I doubt it)

• A collective debating platform
• A consensus-building platform.

read the full article from Noah Raford here

Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn’t been the technology itself but how we’ve used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We’ve decentralized media production and distribution. We’re doing the same for energy. And we’ll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us—namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services(LBS) change the world?

read the whole post on Now Sourcing

The Internet of Things, an introductionvideo by IBM

Ook apparaten gaan straks communiceren op internet. Met elkaar en met hun gebruikers. De toekomst is aan het Internet der Dingen. 

Maar zou je je afgewezen voelen als je koelkast je geen mails meer stuurt en word je vrienden met je toilet op Facebook?’

Over regelgeving en relevantie…

lees het artikel op Emerce

download ook “ The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID”  van Rob van Kranenburg op de waagsite

The Future Internet: Service Web or the Internet of things.

Jesse Schell’s talk on “design outside the box”. The future of games.

This video was prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books and produced by Khaki Films (http://www.thekhakigroup.com/). Originally meant solely for a DK sales conference, the video was such a hit internally that it is now being shared externally. We hope you enjoy it (and make sure you watch it up to at least the halfway point, there’s a surprise!).

The clip was inspired by a video created by an Argentinean agency, Savaglio/TBWA entitled, “Truth”: http://bit.ly/truthvideo

Read an interview with the creator of the video on the Penguin Blog:http://bit.ly/futureofpublishing