Monthly Archives: October 2012

Innotribe at Sibos Osaka: Innotribe Health Index

Posted on by
2

This blog post shares some more details about the Innotribe Health Index. This session will take place on Monday 29 Oct 2012 from 11:00 till 12:15 in the Innotribe Space. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos is here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.

Whereas we are sure that the main conference will cover main topic areas and trends such as Global Shifts in Economic Power, Regulation, and the financial crisis, Innotribe would like to propose some alternative lenses based on New Economies and New Values thinking, aimed at accelerating a positive re-balancing.

The Innotribe Health Index is a brand new Innotribe initiative. Through six different lenses (Reputation and Sentiment, Social Data Capital, Big Shift Readiness, Technology Readiness, Urbanization and Inequality, and Agility), we will try to give an alternative ‘health check’ of the financial system.

The intention is that the Innotribe Index is an annual checkpoint, where this year we establish the baseline, and in subsequent years we look at the progress we make versus this baseline.

The effect we want to create is a bit like the famous “state of the union” update on Internet trends by Mary Meeker (who moved last year from Morgan Stanley to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Beyers).

Here is the data-avalanche presentation by Mary Meeker of last year at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco:

That went fast? Yes, indeed. Like a jet-airliner flying through your living room!

We will at least go as fast, if not faster. Indeed, this session is designed as a “high-speed” session.

Each igniter (that’s how we call our speakers) will give a power talk on their specific lens, and where possible come-up with a readiness index score from 1 – 10, giving a sense of the readiness of our community for that particular challenge. That’s six lenses in one hour!

Some background on our igniters for this session, and why we invited them to be part of this session:

Julius O. Akinyemi

Julius is the initiator of Unleashing the Wealth of Nations project and the Resident Entrepreneur at MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The objective of this initiative is to effect a sea-change, a quantum leap for ordinary citizens of developing economies to move from day-to-day survival mode to a personal wealth creation and growth via asset ownership, registry, and mobilization.

To unlock the wealth of nations, we aim to provide practical solutions tailored to the local environment that leverages the convergence of existing technologies. By registering people, their assets, and life events in an eRegistry, and through economic modeling, we will work to mobilize the currently dormant trillions of dollars in local assets in developing nations in order to generate local capital that fuels the economy via asset securitization.

Julius will come with a “Social Data Readiness Index”, as we see the availability of people’s social and identity data as one way to create financial inclusion. This topic will also be covered during one of the breakouts of the Digital Asset Grid session to showcase that unlocking data assets has an important role for the bottom of the pyramid.

Wouter De Ploey

Wouter is Director in Business Technology Office, McKinsey & Company.

He will present results of research done by the McKinsey Global Institute on global economic trends, including urbanization, resource markets, capital markets, and productivity and growth, with a focus on Asia.

  • The landscape for supply/demand of labor is changing dramatically: where are the jobs for skilled/unskilled workers? Is the inequality in wages going up/down?
  • More and more people live in cities. Urbanization is driving a lot of growth. McKinsey identified 450 emerging market cities. Capital follows activity. Access to capital gets tighter and more localized. Do banks have the right local footprint?

“What’s the readiness of banks to confront these meta-challenges?” is the subject of this lens.

John Hagel

John is Co-chairman, Deloitte Centre of the Edge. He very much supports out-of-the-box and catalyst new ways of thinking. That is for sure one of the many reasons why John is one of the enablers for the Innotribe incubation activities.

John writes regular for HBR, on his own blog, and has published several book. His latest “The Power of Pull” (Amazon Affiliates link) has become a business classic, where John highlights how we move from Knowledge Stocks to Knowledge Flows.

This shift is also at the basis of the Big Shift Index that Deloitte’s Center for the Edge has developed to provide a clear, comprehensive, and sustained view of the deep dynamics changing our world, and what companies can do to address them.

The Big Shift Index consists of 3 indices and 25 metrics designed to make longer-term performance trends more visible and actionable. You can download the Big Shift Index here (PDF file)

We are very proud of having such a thought leader as John Hagel with us at Innotribe Sibos to present the Big Shift Index. You don’t want to miss John’s authentic take on this fascinating subject.

Michael Jones

Michael is VP of Technology, Dachis Group. We have invited Michael to present the Social Business Index.

This index is built on top of Dachis Group’s Social Business Intelligence Insight Platform, analyzes the effectiveness of strategies and tactics organizations employ to engage the market through social channels.

The Social Business Index analyzes signals from over one hundred million social sources globally and analyzes the performance of the largest global companies and thousands of those companies’ brands. The Index is generated through the use of natural language processing, semantic analysis, and machine learning algorithms.

Think about it as a machine learning engine.

Michael will do a drill down on the data they have available on financial institutions.

William Saito

William is Founder & CEO, InTecur, K.K.

He is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, public policy consultant and educator who has founded start-ups, managed corporations and worked on global information security policy over the past two decades.

To build entrepreneurial spirit in Japan, Saito also acts as CEO for the Innovation Platform Technology Fund (IPTF), a venture capital fund established by ex-Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei and Kazuhiko Toyama, the former COO of the Industrial Revitalization Corporation of Japan (IRCJ). The IPTF seeks to produce more successful global ventures in Japan by creating a genuine venture environment.

Saito is active in several roles with the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2011, he was named a Young Global Leader.

He is also Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, the first such commission ever appointed by Japan’s national legislature.

With his strong entrepreneur role and his extra-ordinary international perspective, we have asked William – who now lives in Japan – to come up with “The William Saito Index”, an index reflecting agility readiness in financial services.

It will be a very personal take reflecting on entre- and intra-preneurship, in Japan and globally.

Michell Zappa

Michell Zappa is a Berlin-based technology futurist who has spent part of his life between London, São Paulo, Stockholm & Amsterdam.

His work, called Envisioning Technology, focuses on explaining where society is heading in the near future by extrapolating on current technological developments.

His research facilitates understanding the field for those who work in technology by painting a bigger picture of where the landscape is heading. In this, he tries to guide both corporations and public institutions in making better decisions about their (and society’s) future.

I met Michell through a tweet that was forwarded by one of my followers. Once we connected, we immediately spotted a fantastic opportunity to describe the readiness of financial institutions through an amazing interactive infographic. As we get closer to Sibos, we’ll release some pre-views of these amazing insights.

Coming soon: previews of Michell Zappa’s infographic on technology readiness of banks: short, medium and long term.

Michell has really surprised me with his fresh take on technology readiness, and I am very excited by the work-in-progress that I have seen from him in preparation for this session. Next year, I would love to give him a full hour.

So, in summary, fasten your seatbelts for this “faster-than-light” session, were you will be immersed in the readiness of financial institutions based on six different alternative lenses.

See you all in Osaka! Monday 29 Oct 2012 from 11:00 till 12:15 in the Innotribe Space.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

Innotribe at Sibos Osaka – Future of Big and Small Data

Posted on by
Reply

This blog post shares some more details about the Future of Big and Small Data session. This session will take place on Wednesday 31 Oct 2012 from 12:30 till 15:30 in the Innotribe Space. This Future of Data session is leading into the next session on Digital Asset Grid. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos is here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.

Picking up where we left off last year with Big Data, this session will de-mystify what we think we know about data. We will hear opinions of different experts and judge together what are the hard facts, half-truths and complete unknowns about data today: big, small, broad, real time. We will dive into artificial intelligence, augmented reality and algorithms and how they impact our analysis and use of data.

This will be one of those Innotribe sessions, where we go “all the way” with super igniters (that’s how we call our speakers) and the amazing group techniques from Innotribster Mariella Atanassova and her team of designers and facilitators.

We will indeed design this session

as architects of serendipity,

creating collisions of ideas,

leading into

immersive learning experiences

The high-level design of the session is organized around debunking the myths that exist about data. We will look at this from different angles:

  • Who is consuming the data: people, business, devices, applications, API’s (Application Program Interfaces)
  • Technical and human aspects of data creation, data usage and data management
  • The different lenses offered by our igniters

I would like to share a bit more about our igniters for this session and why we have invited them:

For the more “technical” angle on the subject:

Sean Gourley, CTO, from Quid.

Sean Gourley is originally from New Zealand and now based in San Francisco where he splits his time between Mathematical research and his venture backed startup Quid.

He has a PhD in physics from Oxford, and his academic research has taken him from Nanotechnology to Complex Systems and the Mathematics of War. Prior to Quid he worked at NASA Ames in Mountain View, Exclusive Analysis in London, and a (very) brief stint as a consultant at BCG in Chicago.

Sean started Quid back in Dec 2009, and they are doing some pretty amazing things with data, mathematics and visualization. They are building a global intelligence platform, a place where open source intelligence is collected, structured and visualized to help people understand and make better decisions about the complex world we live in.

Sean is currently CTO of Quid. Their corporate slogan of Quid is “Augmenting Our Ability to Perceive this Complex World™ ”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V43a-KxLFcg&feature=youtu.be

Sean will talk about the war of algorithms, a world of machines where black-swans almost become the norm. I have already mentioned this fantastic talk in my blog post about “The Cambrian Explosion of Everything”

Amir Halfon, CTO for Financial Services , MarkLogic

It is Amir’s fourth Innotribe at Sibos.

Before Amir recently joined MarkLogic, he was with Sun/Oracle for more than 12 years, where his last position was Chief Technologist specialized in Financial Services. MarkLogic offers next-generation database technology capable of handling any data, at any volume, in any structure. So, Amir brings the enterprise perspective.

This will not be a product pitch. We specifically invited Amir for his rich background in financial services and his familiarity with the Innotribe-way of doing things, so we can tap into his broad experience to map the generic big data concepts to our specific market.

Anant Jhingran, VP, Data, Apigee

I met Anant for the first time last year during Defrag 2011, where we had breakfast with Sam Ramji, Head of Strategy at Apigee.

Anant is VP of Data at Apigee. Before he 21 years with IBM where he was VP and CTO for IBM’s Information Management Division, Co-Chair of IBM wide Cloud Computing Architecture Board and one of the “IBM Fellows”.

He is our ideal igniter to talk about data as seen by API’s. However, in the session preparation talk I had with Anant, he already highlighted that discussions about APIs are very people centric in the enterprise:

“What is the governance for publishing the APIs? Some enterprises insist on a central gatekeeper for APIs, others believe in a decentralised Darwinian model.”

Anant blogs regularly. Check-out here how his new start-up life changed his thinking. I love his quote:

“Coding is liberating”

Alexander D. Wissner-Gross, Institute Fellow, Harvard University Institute

Alex is an award-winning scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. He serves as an Institute Fellow at the Harvard University Institute for Applied Computational Science and as a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Laboratory.

He has received 107 major distinctions, authored 13 publications, been granted 16 issued, pending, and provisional patents, and founded, managed, and advised 4 technology companies, 1 of which has been acquired. In 1998 and 1999, respectively, he won the U.S.A. Computer Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent Search.

In 2003, he became the last person in MIT history to receive a triple major, with bachelors in Physics, Electrical Science and Engineering, and Mathematics, while graduating first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering. In 2007, he completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard, where his research on smart matter, pervasive computing, and machine learning was awarded the Hertz Doctoral Thesis Prize.

His work has been featured in over 100 news outlets worldwide including The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek.

Alex will share how HFT is driving a latency arms race. He has a fascinating story about “Sea-Steading”, where financial institutions start building operating centers in the middle of the ocean, just to win a couple of mille-seconds in latency.

He has developed an algorithm that calculates the best geographical spot for an operating center, based on a number of criteria given by the customer.

For the more “human” angle on the subject:

Andrew Keen, Author, Andrew Keen Productions, Author Digital Vertigo

I am very proud to have Andrew Keen on board. Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is particularly known for his view that the current Internet culture and the trend may be debasing culture, an opinion he shares with Jaron Lanier and Nicholas G. Carr among others.

Keen is especially concerned about the way that the current Internet culture undermines the authority of learned experts and the work of professionals.

He is sometimes called “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley”. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award.

Andrew just published his new book about the social media revolution, “Digital Vertigo” (Amazon Affiliates Link), a book I highly recommend, and the thinking developed in this book is the main reason why I invited Andrew to Innotribe at Sibos.

Following extract is typical Keen-speak:

“I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery: This idea of personhood is certainly changing, perhaps has already changed.”

He is a real “contrarian” and therefore our ideal igniter to challenge all your assumptions on data and social media. The myth he would like to challenge is:

“the myth that social media

brings us closer together

and unites the human race”

Daniel Erasmus, Owner, The Digital Thinking Network

I was introduced to Daniel Erasmus by Brewster Kahle (who was critical for the Google’s book digitization) during Jerry Michalski’s retreat when he heard about the Digital Asset Grid. Because Daniel was doing some really advance scenario thinking for some clients in the financial industry, Brewster thought i should meet him.

Since then, I enjoyed numerous calls with Daniel on the importance of scenario thinking, and it was almost by accident we stumbled upon his start-up NewsConsole™, which is all about big data and the co-existence of man and machine and the world of augmented reality, in the sense of augmented information reality.

“Every day, an exabyte of information is created – an amount equivalent to half of all information created up to 2001. You will not read it, nor will any other individual, but some of it will be critical to your business.”

NewsConsole™ reads more than a million news articles per day to give its clients strategic overview of today and tomorrow’s news.  The Console is in use in the Financial Services, Governmental, the Energy and other sectors.

I love the way he talks about big data:

“Big data sells the story of “the eyes of god”: sometimes it is there, sometimes is  not. It’s about sort of half-truths, I would call them contingent-truths, as half-truths” has something negative”

and

“We see a computation a-symmetry. Google (for example) can do calculations on my data, but I cannot. This a-symmetry will have stunning implications on the power balances in the world. 20th century is all about “mass”. The 21st century is about the interface of one”

Daniel is a very erudite and versatile international businessman. In his scenario thinking work, he uses similar facilitation techniques as the Innotribe team, so Daniel will move between the spaces of advocacy and facilitation.

As for the other Innotribe session, you see that we put quite some effort in architecting, content curating, designing and facilitating our sessions.

We want to do more than just “events”

and listing some speakers.

We’d like to offer you

a memorable experience

In summary, this session is about debunking myths about data. What is the myth YOU would like to debunk? Let me know via the comments option of this blog post.

See you all in Osaka! Wednesday 31 Oct 2012, at 12:30 in the Innotribe Space.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

Innotribe at Sibos Osaka: Digital Asset Grid

Posted on by
8

This blog post shares some more details about the Digital Asset Grid session. The session Digital Asset Grid will take place on Wednesday 31 Oct 2012 from 16:00 till 17:30 in the Conference Room-3. It is part of the Main Conference sessions of Sibos. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.

I have written extensively about the Digital Asset Grid in previous blog posts. Most recently in Banks-as-a-Platform and the Cambrian Explosion of Everything, all reflections on what it means to live in a hyper-connected world, to be immersed in the digital age.

We swim in a sea of data and the sea level is rising rapidly. Tens of millions of connected people, billions of sensors, trillions of transactions now work to create unimaginable amounts of information. A new environment requiring a lot of adaptability. We are species from the land that have to learn to live in the ocean. Like camels that used to live in the desert, that now have to survive in the ocean.

A new environment requires a new design.

The digital age and making the new design presents both threats and opportunities for Banks:

  • Dis-intermediation and erosion of market share by new entrants, telco’s and dominant technology companies threaten the position of Banks – and are increasing in velocity – reducing margins and profitability.
  • But there are also opportunities: new sources of rich information are multiplying, and the information that is available is being digitised.

Every business is becoming a digital business,

also banks and financial institutions

However, the potential benefits of the explosion in number of nodes and the data volume explosion are being squandered due to low levels of trust, concerns about security, and barriers to monetisation. The Digital Asset Grid has the ambition to tackle these challenges.

The Digital Asset Grid is a research project by Innotribe, SWIFT’s Innovation initiative for enabling collaborative innovation.

The Digital Asset Grid is probably one of the most forward-looking incubation projects of Innotribe.

The project proposes a new infrastructure

for banks to provide a platform

for secure peer-to-peer data sharing

between trusted people, businesses, and devices

The Digital Asset Grid does for data what SWIFT has already done for payments: providing a new scalable global network that supports “digital data banking”, a trusted peer to peer sharing of any digital asset between two or more nodes on the network. Banks existing qualities in management of de-materialized assets (today this is money but tomorrow this will be data), trust, regulatory compliance, market coverage and risk management puts them in a unique position to assume this role.

Indeed, with the Digital Asset Grid, we believe we are setting the direction for creating an internet-scale digital platform for information logistics.

The Digital Asset Grid acts as a digital map which describes:

  • The location of the data,
  • The trust framework governing access,
  • The digital identities who have access to that data, and
  • The usage rights these identities have under trust frameworks.

It overcomes the “data frictions” such as lack of security and trust and enables data to flow, leading to the creation of a low cost eco-system of revenue generating apps & services.

In addition, the Digital Asset Grid leverages SWIFT’s core skills and competences regarding governance, identity, security and operational excellence, establishing thus a global data-sharing platform as ubiquitous and reliable as today’s global banking network.

As part of the research, we wanted to go beyond mere PowerPoint presentation of a concept. What we have done is building an end-to-end prototype, with working applications and a working back-end infrastructure, together with a solid business story that is the result of a consultation with several banks of our community. In addition we produced a “foresight”-video of possible use cases.

Innotribe and its collaboration partners will present this prototype at Sibos on Wednesday 31 October 2012 from 4pm – 5:30pm in Conference Room 3. The session is part of the Main Conference Sessions of Sibos.

What we will show-case is:

  • A very strong opening with a strategy story by Antonio Benjamin – Global Chief Technology Officer & MD Citi GTS/ICG
  • A exciting intro into the changes in the digital data landscape
  • A brand new HD video – in the style of “Flowers for Grandma” and “Fly me to the Moon”, taking you into a not so far future 2013-2014, and showing in life environment of what is possible with current technology and the apps that we have built as part of the prototype.
  • A working prototype of the Digital Asset Grid server, server code and APIs
  • 4 applications illustrating the power of the Digital Asset Grid; some apps are relevant for the retail space, others are more relevant in a B2B context.
  • A compelling Business Story, where the opportunities are categories in three groups:
    • Creating new revenue streams through monetization of existing and new data assets
    • Doing the same better
    • Delivering New Services

But it would not be Innotribe if we added some elements of performance and interactivity. I can’t reveal everything in this blog post, but the staging of this session will include a motorcycle and smoking server.

Also, we will have facilitated breakout sessions to create an immersive learning experience for the audience. In these breakouts you will have the opportunity to get into person-to-person conversation with the developers of the applications and the back-end infrastructure, and the partners who have built the Business Story.

And at the end, Yobie and senior representatives from two other major banks will wrap-up the sessions with some suggestions on the way forward. And we’ll have some other surprises and some very cool announcements, which of course I cannot share now, if not you would not come to the session 😉

The Digital Asset Grid offers Banks the opportunity to transform their industry, making them and their customers more efficient, generating new value and enabling Banks to launch a range of new services – it is a game changer.

The financial industry has a unique chance to seize this opportunity and position themselves in a very compelling competitive position in a future of real-time information logistics.

I cannot enough emphasise the importance of the Banks-as-a-Platform meme: it means that the value creation moves from the centre to the nodes. The market used to think in monopolistic, silo-ed service providers, that put themselves in the middle of the nodes-universe, leading to non-interoperable silos of data and value creation. By moving from a central to distributed architecture at internet-scale, banks suddenly have the opportunity to be themselves the platform, with SWIFT as a shared beacon of governance and trust.

I believe this is a “good” project. Good for our industry. It comes at the right time and at a tipping point where we see an evolution towards a peer-to-peer economy between trusted nodes in the grid.

It is fantastic that SWIFT – through the Innotribe Incubation Fund – makes this sort of research and experimentation projects possible.

Incubation is in my opinion indeed about “catalysing ideas”: it is about setting waves of thinking into motion, planting seeds in the brain, and getting the chance to develop those ideas in full so that they become foresight scenarios that become in their turn reference points for decision making.

Only when you have some strong foresight scenario/reference in your brain, you can spot and recognise the disruptive change signals from the market and make relevant and inspired decisions on “what would I do if this scenario happens?”

The Digital Asset Grid is one of those foresight scenarios of a catalysed idea, a strong testimony that innovation beyond adjacencies can happen in more traditional environments.

The team has done a great job in depicting the “foresight reference model” of a not-so-far-out possible future. The test for our community will be to validate whether we can rally ourselves to take the foresight model out of its incubation sandbox and move it to the next phase of acceleration and do it for real.

I am very excited to be able to share soon with a wider audience the results of the last couple of months of hard work, and I am very curious to see how and when our industry will seize this opportunity. I feel privileged to witness this turning point, and I am deeply grateful to the team, the customers, and SWIFT who made all this happen.

See you all in Osaka! Wednesday 31 Oct 2012, at 16:00 in Conference Room-3.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team