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Internet Banking: 2010 and beyond I’ve been reading a range of articles about the next generation internet, or the semantic web as it is called by those in the trade. Semantic is a method of looking for the meaning and relationships between things, and the semantic web effectively moves us away from files and downloads to databases and integration. In practice, this means that rather than going on to the internet to pull things out and push emails and files around, the internet continually monitors you and your tastes and finds things to push at you which match your electronic lifestyle. In other words, it makes everything online much more relevant to you as an individual, and moves us away from having to search because the semantic web will find for you. Take the way we use Google today. When you go into Google and search, it is very rare that you find what you want straight away. In fact, you often have to crawl through screen after screen, and change searches three or four times to even come close. The semantic web overcomes these difficulties because you will not have to search. The semantic web knows you and finds for you. It knows you work for a bank or technology firm, and therefore knows that when you say ‘payments’ you mean it in a professional sense, not a generic sense. Therefore it senses the most relevant things to the way you search and your profile of usual interests.

9 Technologies to Watch & Get Involved With in 2009

1. All Social Media is Now Mainstream

2. Twitter Means Business

The arrival of sustainable sustainability?

A little late I know, but just before the end of the year, we were fortunate enough to be a part of the Sustainable Life Media conference in Miami.  As is often the case, the event was full of interesting people extolling the virtues of more sustainable practices - from large MNC’s such as J&J through to some fantastically nimble social start-ups. But more than that, there was a real sense of change in the air. A sense that for the first time we were looking at making businesses sustainable, rather than bringing sustainability into business. In other words, for the first time I sensed that sustainability was being recognised as a key piece of DNA architecture for business, rather than some fan-fared adjunct.The ramifications of this are profound: for a start, this is what Peter Salmon from Moxie (who I had the pleasure to share a plenary session with) has labelled Sustainability 2.0. Or even 3.0. It also suggests an exciting trend that sees sustainability becoming near-impossible to focus on within the firm. That is not to say that it is absent, but rather just invisible.  Or rather, inherent. We are constantly hearing clients and colleagues citing an economic downturn as the worst possible time to embark on initiatives under the sustainability banner. But to make this criticism is to make the mistake that sustainability remains an annexe to the firm - an incidental anecdote to be told when appropriate.

This is most certainly wrong; instead, sustainability offers the best chance for firms to remain in business, as they redefine boundaries of influence and re-stock reserves of trust.This sounds absurd, but for too long, I really do not think the majority of firms have actually viewed sustainability as being linked in any way to their…..well, sustainability. And as such, it has been a nice-to-have appendage.So maybe this is now changing? Maybe Sustainability 2.0 and the crushing re-evaluation of business in the current climate marks the arrival of sustainable sustainability?  Based on the clear exodus of freshly-empowered CMOs and CEOs from large MNCs at the Miami conference, keen to demonstrate their new-found independence via boutique consulting efforts and old business cards with biro’d new titles and cell phone numbers, it seems so. Which also means sustainability could be finally becoming less about guilt, burden and ‘doing what’s right’ and much more about opportunity, energy and doing what’s exciting. Which would be very exciting indeed.G  

The New Economics of Music: File-Sharing and Double Moral Hazard Part 1: Why the Music Industry is (Really) Broken ‘The whole point of digital music is the risk-free grazing’ – Cory Doctorow Every major label 's setting up an iTunes these days. They're all, in the immortal words of Johnny Cash, 'born to lose, and destined to fail'. Why? The music industry doesn't understand the microeconomics of it's own business. If it did, it would see that it's business model is not just misguided, but broken- because, DRM or not, the implicit contract it signs with listeners is being broken in both directions. I reached this conclusion because, as I was scoping BoingBoing one day, I read Cory's statement, and it struck me as exactly right. For many people, digital music's more about risk than it is about music itself. Not legal risk - but transactional risk, the kind of risk you take when you buy a used car. Now, this statement has deep economic meaning. I'd like to explain why.

Here’s advise from Steve Jobs in managing in a downturn. "We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time."