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francispisani

Technology Is Not the Answer - James Fallows - Technology - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...73065

technology development Winch5 @@

shared by francispisani on 13 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • In project after project, the lesson was the same: information technology amplified the intent and capacity of human and institutional stakeholders, but it didn't substitute for their deficiencies. If we collaborated with a self-confident community or a competent non-profit, things went well. But, if we worked with a corrupt organization or an indifferent group, no amount of well-designed technology was helpful. Ironically, although we looked to technology to attain large-scale impact into places where circumstances were most dire, technology by itself was unable to improve situations where well-intentioned competence was absent. What mattered most was individual and institutional intent and capacity.
  • the theory of technology-as-amplifier explains why: As a society, we haven't been so intent on eradicating poverty, as much as perhaps, on ever cleverer ways to guide us to the nearest cup of coffee. The technology is incredible, but our intent is not there.
  • It's not just electronic technologies that we place undue faith in. We also expect too much from other technologies, institutions, policies and systems, or "TIPS" to coin an acronym. Like the tips of icebergs, TIPS are the most visible part of cultural change and public policy, but they are dependent on the much more significant, if invisible, bulk of individual and societal intent and capacity. Current events are constant reminders of this.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I'm not saying that TIPS aren't important. Technologies can enrich lives; democracy can be preferable to dictatorship; and market capitalism can be an equitable economic engine, no doubt. But, we fetishize technocratic devices and forget that it's our finger on the "on" switch and our hands at the controls. Something other than TIPS still demands attention -- something I've so far called good "intent and capacity," and what in future posts I'll call virtue. 
  • francispisani on 13 Aug 11
     
    In project after project, the lesson was the same: information technology amplified the intent and capacity of human and institutional stakeholders, but it didn't substitute for their deficiencies. If we collaborated with a self-confident community or a competent non-profit, things went well. But, if we worked with a corrupt organization or an indifferent group, no amount of well-designed technology was helpful. Ironically, although we looked to technology to attain large-scale impact into places where circumstances were most dire, technology by itself was unable to improve situations where well-intentioned competence was absent. What mattered most was individual and institutional intent and capacity.
francispisani

The Global Innovation Interest Index - Haydn Shaughnessy and Nick Vitalari - Research -... - 0 views

blogs.hbr.org/...lobal-innovation-interest.html

innovation Winch5

shared by francispisani on 18 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • francispisani on 18 Aug 11
     
    How interested are people in innovation - and how does that change cross-culturally? What do users across the world really want, how can we uncover and design for their unmet needs, and what services can we attach to products to stay close to our customers? We've found that these questions point to a new need for innovative cultures in the world today (distinct from innovative companies).
francispisani

The Emerging Startup Culture In Cairo Will Blow You Away - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/startups-in-egypt-2011-7

startup entrepreneurship Egypt Winch5

shared by francispisani on 18 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • francispisani on 18 Aug 11
     
    At the end of the week, there was a business competition.The four winning companies were: Bey2ollak - An iPhone app that provides live user-generated reports of traffic conditions on the streets of Cairo. It already has more than 50,000 subscribers and a partnership with Vodafone -- one of the largest mobile phone operators in Egypt. Inkezny (translation: rescue me) - An iPhone app enabling travelers to make emergency calls in any location in the world without having to know the local emergency phone number, as well as seeing GPS directions to and phone numbers for the nearest hospitals  Crowdit - A digital collaborative storytelling platform using real-time pictures, video, and social media reports to reinvent the way stories are told and shared online SuperMama.me - The iVillage of the Middle East, creating a community of mothers designed to connect and empower the women of the Middle East/North Africa region
francispisani

The Problem With Silicon Valley Is Itself - TNW Entrepreneur - 0 views

thenextweb.com/...-with-silicon-valley-is-itself

Winch5 siliconvalley innovation @@

shared by francispisani on 18 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • As a Brit who gave up cheerleading the European tech scene to make the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley to live, eat and breath the world’s leading hub for technology startup innovation, I’ve been largely unimpressed and disappointed by the quality of startups here.
  • there’s only two, out of two hundred, I think are game changers. Now, don’t get me wrong, Silicon Valley is an incredibly inspiring place to be. Everyone is doing something amazing and trying to change the world, but in reality much of the technology being built here is not changing the world at all, it’s short-sighted and designed for scalability, big exits and big profits.
  • I’ve come to the conclusion that entrepreneurship in the Valley has become productized
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • It’s never about the technology or impact it’s having, it’s about the game of entrepreneurship; getting users, funding and exiting as quickly as you can.
  • From an investor’s perspective, it’s a clever model; you put a group of extremely talented and hard working graduates together, give them seed funding, keep them lean and they pivot until they get you a hit and you make your return. But I wonder if the model is counter productive, producing risk averse entrepreneurs who, if they follow the right procedure, are almost guaranteed success in the form of a talent acquisition or exit. Should this be what entrepreneurship is about? What happened to irreverence, thinking outside the box, wanting to make a difference in the long run?
  • the gold-rush mentality.
  • there is innovation happening around health care related startups
  • One of the reasons for lack of innovation in the Valley is that entrepreneurs are not exposed to enough real-world problems.
  • consumers in the USA clearly want to play Angry Birds, whereas in some African countries consumers are more likely to be searching for their nearest Malaria drugs clinic.
  • you wouldn’t even imagine
  • many entrepreneurs can’t get to the US because of visa issues
  • Startup Chile
  • There is one thing though, that continues to set Silicon Valley apart from every other technology hub on the planet and that’s access to finance.
  • But the funding landscape is changing due to the cost of innovation decreasing rapidly which means anyone with a laptop and a WiFi connection can get an idea off the ground for dirt cheap.
  • Geeks on a Plane
  • i/O ventures
  • more media should cover tech outside the Valley
francispisani

Thinking about curation in the enterprise - confused of calcutta - 0 views

confusedofcalcutta.com/...out-curation-in-the-enterprise

curation enterprise *** winch5 Socialbusiness

shared by francispisani on 20 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Content may be considered king, but distribution has always been the hand that rocked that particular cradle and ruled that throne.
  • curation. The SOP of curation, to paraphrase Rosenbaum, is Selection Organisation and Presentation. Curation is about human beings adding their passion to the filtering process, in order to select what should be experienced, put the selections into some cohesive order and then to make those selections accessible to the relevant audience.
  • Esther Dyson, whose writings about the future of search have been at the back of my mind all through my thinking about this. In Curation Nation, Esther quotes Bill Gates as saying (at a private dinner) “The future of search is verbs”. She then goes on to explain that “when people search…they are looking for action, not information….they want to find something in order to do something”. If you get the chance, you should read Esther’s writings on the future of search, just google it. In fact there may still be a YouTube video summarising her views
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Information flows in the enterprise should always enhance the ability of participants to do the right thing in the right place at the right time. Which lets me segue neatly into the crux of this post, curation in the enterprise. Every enterprise has its own variant of curator, people who help decide who sees what, when, and in what shape. Information overload is everywhere, the Shirkyian filter failure is everywhere, and into the valley ride the usual six hundred, theirs not to reason why. So in order to understand how enterprise curation should take place, it’s worth looking at some extreme forms of enterprise curation as practises today. There appear to be four main forms: The Signal Booster The Spreadsheet Jock The Soulmate The Sidler
  • The Signal Booster obtains power by PowerPoint, thinks in bullet points, rarely knows more than what’s on the slide. Acts as a mediation layer between those that do and those that decide.
  • The Spreadsheet Jock believes there’s safety in numbers, that firms can be managed by algorithmic trading. Runs the risk of past-predicting-the-future
  • The Soulmate is a crony of the powers-that-be, using that association to derive second-order power, and has an unusual effect: an inadvertent tendency to ensure that anything the CEO doesn’t want to hear doesn’t make it to the CEO.
  • The Sidler is a rare beast, someone who can only thrive in the rarefied environment of “briefing” cultures. They are often seen alongside the CEO, whispering in their ears, advising and commenting on the status of things they aren’t involved in. Sidlers are chameleons, sometimes boosting signals, sometimes driving spreadsheets, sometimes being soul mates. But always sidling.
  • All these are extreme forms of enterprise curator, responsible for deciding what information is accessible, to whom, when, and in what shape.
  • And all these are fundamentally inefficient models of curation in the enterprise,
  • Linus’s Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) plays out very well in any community that is built to scale. So every staff member is empowered to solve problems. Every trading partner. Every customer.
  • In large hierarchical organisations, some form of summarising and filtering takes place in all information flows, from top to bottom as well as from bottom to top.
  • A web rather than a chain, the social enterprise is somewhere where everything and everyone is a node on the network.
  • Everyone’s not just a curator… Everyone’s not just a designer… Everyone tries out products and services, and provides active feedback.
  • This ability for two-way communication means that conversations take place without any loss of detail. The need for summarising is reduced, since the cost of hanging on to the detail is low.
  • Drilling into the detail was historically complex for reasons other than just the cost of doing so, or for that matter the distance expressed as the number of levels in the organisation, the divisional silos, and so on. We had the added complexity of security systems that did not differentiate between systems of engagement and systems of record, and as a consequence didn’t know how to handle entitlement safely and securely. Good social enterprise implementations solve that elegantly.
  • It’s not enough to have access to the information, that still doesn’t solve the overload problem. So we need access to expertise.
  • Find the people that are acknowledged rather than asserted experts, experts because of what they do rather than who they are.
  • As we move from the Hit Culture to the Long Tail of problem solving, we need more and more experts, “long tail experts”
  • The promise of the social enterprise is a remarkable promise.
  • Networked non hierarchical models. Involving everyone: staff, partners, customers. Two-way communications. Easy access to domain expertise. In an environment where aggregation takes place without any loss of accuracy or of the source data, where you can “follow an order or a complaint, safely, securely, efficiently, effectively”.
  • I’ve come to realise that the Social Enterprise is to traditional software what Skype is to traditional telephony, what Paypal and Square are to traditional payments. Quick and effective. Riding over the top of existing infrastructural investments. Focused on simplifying the customer experience, eradicating traditional frictions, reducing the distance between the customer and the firm. Engaging with the customer rather than with the back office.
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