Group items tagged

A new report from the Institute for Global Futures, Global Futures Forecast 2012, lays out the top trends that it believes will shape the coming year. It's looking ahead to a future that it says may be characterized by complex trends, accelerated change, hyper-competition, disruption, innovation and uncertainty, and that will demand a new way of operating. It recommends continuing investment in innovation in the U.S., as that is the central driver of US and global competitive advantage, and a requirement for achieving more stable growth. And it advises that organizations' leaders need to do a better job becoming long-range thinkers given that the accelerated pace of change means that the future is coming at us faster than ever before, and with change comes risk. What do such things have to do with the Semantic Web and semantic technologies? Apparently, quite a lot.

What the Internet is hiding from us - Will Google's blind faith in the algorithm doom its future?

In the hyperlinked  write up, the author pointed out three "items" which appear to make clear a topic I find quite unclear. My reaction was that these items do not capture search either of the moment or some "to be" world where content management experts, governance specialists, and "real" journalists look for information. The items described a future that underscores a conceptual problems in thinking about information retrieval.

"NEXT UP: MACHINES THAT UNDERSTAND YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU CARE ABOUT, ANTICIPATE YOUR BEHAVIOR AND EMOTIONS, ABSORB YOUR SOCIAL GRAPH, INTERPRET YOUR INTENTIONS, AND MAKE LIFE, UM, "EASIER.""

What do Color, Quora, Hunch, Blippy, and StockTwits have in common? They are examples of companies that generate value for their users by leveraging the concept of the Interest Graph. The list also features some of the most promising startups right now, having raised close to $100 million in venture funding. Pure coincidence?

"Fascinating insight from the MIT Centre for Collective Intelligence at the IBM Think Forum. The video is 40mins long but worth watching if you're interested in what makes groups effective in solving complex problems. It also shows how (and why) the idea of 'distributed leadership' is becoming more widely seen as the future model for managing organisations and complexity."

A question for you: How does discovering and sharing online information make you feel? [I'd bet a good number of you are frustrated, feeling the negative effects of what Eli Pariser calls the "filter bubble"...] Well, here's something else to consider: discovering and sharing information - and the means for curating it - should be serendipitous. Really, it should. A Form of Collective Intelligence I had the fortunate pleasure of meeting up with my friend Jarno Koponen while in Helsinki this past week. Jarno and his founding partner, Marko Anderson, have spent the last two plus years building a predictive discovery engine, called Futureful.

"There is a seismic shift underway in the digital world that within a decade will completely transform the web into an App-o-verse. Several simultaneous trends are stacking up to change how we consume and create digital content, and platform companies are positioning themselves to enable the process. What we are seeing are the early stages of what I call, "The Appification of Everything." This is not about adding more icons to your home screen, though, but about a fundamental shift in how we metabolize information and entertainment. The web as the universal storage medium is being superseded by the internet as universal flow medium. Instead of thinking about the web as a hierarchical tree of documents-a Wikipedia of Wikipedias-we need to start thinking about all of that content as an underlying service layer for application-based interfaces."

"Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence,  is one of the leading thinkers in the realm of anticipating how new technologies will transform the way work is done and leaders lead. His 2004 book, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life, helped thousands of executives and would-be executives see their organizations, and themselves, in startling new ways. As a result, many organizations are becoming more collaborative and democratic. Now, Malone is exploring how social business, data analytics and cognitive computing will transform organizations once again. Here, he talks about the revolution that is coming."

Gamification -- the application of online game design techniques in non-game settings -- has been quickly gaining the attention of leaders in business, education, policy and even terrorist communities. But gamification also has plenty of critics, and the debate over its future could become an epic battle in the same vein of many online game favorites. This special report includes coverage of a recent Wharton conference titled, "For the Win: Serious Gamification," in addition to interviews with conference participants who discuss the use of gamification in business, government and other arenas. 

"For more than half a century, computers have been little better than calculators with storage structures and programmable memory, a model that scientists have continually aimed to improve. Comparatively, the human brain-the world's most sophisticated computer-can perform complex tasks rapidly and accurately using the same amount of energy as a 20 watt light bulb in a space equivalent to a 2 liter soda bottle. Cognitive computing: thought for the future Making sense of real-time input flowing in at a dizzying rate is a Herculean task for today's computers, but would be natural for a brain-inspired system. Using advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry, cognitive computers learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember-and learn from-the outcomes. For example, a cognitive computing system monitoring the world's water supply could contain a network of sensors and actuators that constantly record and report metrics such as temperature, pressure, wave height, acoustics and ocean tide, and issue tsunami warnings based on its decision making."

"Not everything happens for a reason in the world of information management. Not every table or field in a database got where it wound up via some master plan. More often than not, a company's information architecture has grown and evolved organically, like a sort of digital mycelium, spreading underground for years, ultimately providing the infrastructure for all manner of analytical insights to blossom somewhere down the line. The obvious casualties of these "accidental architectures" (as companies like EMC and Talend are calling them) are the elusive goals of clarity and certainty. That's why residential construction engineers take a vastly more disciplined approach when working with their architect counterparts. You wouldn't want an accidental architecture for your three-story home, would you? No one in their right mind would want any such thing."

Web content management is at the most significant inflection point in its 15-year history. It's now all about the context. By 2013, Gartner contends, 40% of large companies will have context-aware computing projects on the way. Context is driving content and intelligent customer interactions, delivering Web experiences that will engage site visitors and deliver better business results.

Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month. Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?

Social, although hot right now, is not the only technology transforming the web today. Location-based social search applications are bridging the gap between our online and offline worlds - and in doing so creating a whole new way for people to find and use information.

For years I've been singing the praises of niche outreach and waiting to see niche social networking overtake general social networks (like Facebook) with the public. I'm sad to say it hasn't happened as quickly as I would have liked. Too many people are still wasting too much time trying to be everything to everyone. That said, niche social networking is here, and it's been around much longer than some of you probably realize. Let's explore niche social networking, what might be holding it back, and where things are going well for niche social networks.

At its core, gamification is about one thing: fun. In today's competitive battle for mindshare, games are the most effective tool for leveraging technology, rising above marketing noise and engaging the socially networked consumer.

Some of our best minds work and innovate in the technology sector. Social networking, ubiquitous video streaming and global connectivity have ushered in a new world for many, but not all. We plan to apply the brainpower that delivered these inventions to the biggest social challenges of our time. In short, we think the technology industry can reboot American innovation and prosperity.

3D printers, sensor networks, virtual humans and other technologies under development now will drastically change our world in the decade to come, according to Cisco chief futurist Dave Evans