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the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected.

This is the single most important trend in the world today.

The merger of globalization and I.T. is driving huge productivity gains, especially in recessionary times, where employers are finding it easier, cheaper and more necessary than ever to replace labor with machines, computers, robots and talented foreign workers. It used to be that only cheap foreign manual labor was easily available; now cheap foreign genius is easily available

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

Like many in their cohort, Mohammed and Ali Rafea, who won one of the internships at iContact, are trying to solve some of Egypt’s problems through technology — and hope to turn a profit in the process. After the revolution, they said, Egyptians were turning to Bey2ollak to pass along information about the safety of the roads. “We added a new status to say that a road is a danger zone and there are protests and thugs,” Mohamed Rafea said.

and Sawari Ventures, a Cairo-based venture capital firm,

Ahmed el-Alfi, the founder Sawari Ventures,

Seeing the potential in Egypt, Mr. Alfi left Southern California in 2006 to move to Cairo. “Most of my friends questioned my sanity for making that move,” Mr. Alfi said. “But I was very encouraged by what I saw.”

“These entrepreneurs are thinking big and globally, and they are creating Web apps that you could see in Dumbo or Palo Alto,” he said, referring to the neighborhood in Brooklyn. “They are building companies and products that can be very influential. I would invest 30, 40 or 50 thousand dollars in these young entrepreneurs.”

As Mr. Gerber, one of the American delegates, put it: “We were just so amazed by the business acumen we found in Egypt.”

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.