The age of the unthinkable

Some weeks ago, i had the opportunity to listen to a fantastic speech by Joshua Cooper Ramo, writer of the book “The Age of the Unthinkable: why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it”.

This is the sort of guy that when he takes the stage, you immediately know you’re in for something special.

Some personal notes on this great speech:

Our world has now more actors, more groupings. The unpredictability is part of the system. It will be a given part of our future. He talks about:

SHAPESHIFT

Our world offers more options. We have a spectrum choice between no options –> limited options –> unlimited options. You can’t predict what people are going to do with these unlimited options.

YOU CAN’T PREDICT

Our world is more networked. It also means it is easier to share and spread risk

So far the analysis. How can we manage this unpredictability ?

One eye-opener was a visual showing how differently western and eastern people look at a picture: western people mainly look at the object, eastern people mainly at the surrounding environment of that object. So, understanding of unpredictability has a lot to do with understanding the environment.

It will also require resilience. But not resilience as we know it from messaging networks like SWIFT. More a resilience deeply integrated in the ecosystem, a bit like Hezbollah integrates resilience in every little piece of its organization.

Periods of change are not the exception but the rule.

You have to surf the wave, not try to predict the wave, but

look at how the wave can help you.

It will be ever easier to disrupt. The question is how to empower people to disrupt for the good. This is really about innovation driven by a set of values. Oh boy, how close is all this to the ideas of our Think Tank on Long Term Future.

Innovation in big companies can NOT take the lead. They have NOT been instrumental in the shifts from magazines to online, from Microsoft desktops to web2.0 cloud, from Financial Institutions to… un-banked payment and financial solutions.

The speech was delivered as part of an Oracle conference. So, i found it a bit “cheap” to say that Oracle was innovative and Microsoft not. The rationale being that Oracle “buys and integrates” and Microsoft buys “tons” of innovation but does nothing with it, does not integrate. Was a bit too close to the Oracle conference message of acquire and integrate.

He then went further on the theme of personal responsibility (i am free to smoke) and the balance with a certain set of basic rights (for ex healthcare). And that in the USA, everything is about rights (and maintaining that state) not about personal responsibility and that that has to change.

About maintaining states: Twitter is all about maintaining state in a constant changing environment.

And that there is hope.

And that

FEAR is an easy commodity to sell when

people are confused

during disruptive change. And that in these circumstances simple answers are usually dangerous answers.

Or the closing topic: never invest in people older than 25 years, as they are not used to live in constant change.

The speech was great. The book reads “like a train”.


State of the Web Sep 2009

Over the last month there was an interesting series of articles on Read Write Web about the Top-5 trends on the web.

They now come all together here.

There is also a presentation on slideshare and you can download the whole thing also in PowerPoint.

The author covers the following 5 trends:

  1. Structured data
  2. Real-time web
  3. Personalisation
  4. Mobile Web / Augmented reality
  5. Internet of things

The sections on Real-Time web and Internet of things are a bit poor. I would definitely add a 6th trend: reputation and clout. Also semantic web could have some more meat around the bones. Not much left, huh ?

Coincidently, i found another one on slideshare addressing that same topic. It takes Boris about 30 slides to get up to speed, but he is bringing some interesting concepts such as “Robot Food”, Open Source licensing of data (our lawyers will go bananas), economic incentive to influence search, and community building.

However, i am not convinced by this deck either. Is there any better material around that would allow me to explain in layman’s terms why this is so important (you preach to the convinced).

In my opinion, there is a great role for standards organizations such a SWIFT to leverage and redefine their role as semantic ontology sources for vertical segments such as the financial industry. They must be able to leverage their standardization expertise into other domains than just standard “messages”. Now they could take the lead in standardizing ALL data: structured and non-structured. That would allow us to create powerful mash-up driven solutions that get us into intelligent pattern recognitions engines for the industry.

Innotribe @ Sibos – News Flash 9 – The Specials

Print

In Innotribe News Flashes 1 to 8, we have given you an overview of all the different sessions, debates, and presentations.

In this News Flash #9, i would like to point you at some of the presentations that have that little extra bit. As content coordinator of this year’s Innotribe @ Sibos, i had the privilege of meeting most of the speakers face to face, see the passion in their eyes and the tone of their voices. As the presentation material was being sent in, i could see how some presentations will be – how to say this – “different”.

There are of course many other cool sessions during Innotribe at Sibos, and for this overview i have NOT scanned the almost by definition and design great Opening and Closing Sessions, the Sibos Labs, the Cloud and Mash-up keynotes and the Face to Face discussions. So, i am in essence focusing on what is really special on the Innovation Floor, next to the big SWIFT stand. All the other presentations on the Innovation Floor are of course also from outstanding quality and content 😉

So, here we go ! Below my very personal selection of “The Specials”  and why I put them on my shortlist:

Tuesday 15 September 2009

14:30 –15:30 Oracle Fusion Middleware – Foundation for Innovation and Growth

Paul Shetler – Senior Director, Global Financial Services, Oracle

To be honest, i was expecting a quite commercial pitch from Oracle. To my surprise the presentation ended up to be quite educational. Although in the Oracle look & feel, Paul succeeds in putting together a deck with a real story line, good examples, and some interesting architectural thoughts about Anti Money Laundering, Fraud, and Reference Data. Paul’s presentation is very complementary to the presentation of Jost Hopperman (VP of Forrester Research) during the Innotribe opening session on monday morning. How a presentation with good content does not always require flashy visuals and special effects.

17:00 – 17:30 The virtual branch of the bank – project Wonderland

Michael Gialis – Head of Business Development for SUN Lab, SUN

On the shortlist for very similar reasons. The subject of virtual reality is well introduced and positioned, and goes well beyond the traditional blah blah on Second Life etc. Michael also brought a video with him, so that it all becomes a bit less… virtual 😉

I already posted on Project Wonderland in a previous posting “Virtual Worlds” on my personal blog.

Wednesday 16 September 2009

A lot of cool stuff is happening on day-3 of Innotribe !

13:00-13:30 A Reality Check? Time to Innovate? The Marriage of Business and Innovation

Clare Porter – Senior Vice-President – Technology Solutions, SunGard

It was interesting to follow how Clare built up the presentation. First she worked on a sketch/’”flow” of her presentation. Later she built the presentation itself. Again a surprise, as one could expect a standard vendor presentation, and Clare did something extra. Also, Guy Kawasaki will like the title including “reality check”, the title of his last book.

14:30-15:00 MacroSense – Understanding Realtime Consumer Sentiment & other Predictive Analytics from Mobile Location Data

Greg Skibiski – CEO, Sense Networks

Sense Networks is a real start-up with solid funding from Intel Capital, Javelin Venture Partners, and Passport Capital. I went to visit them in their office in New-York during one of my previous business trips and had a 1-1 with Greg Skibiski, the CEO. The office looks like, well it looks like a start-up: 11th floor, the boxes of the move still in the corridors, developers hacking their way through code. Greg small Spartan office way in the back, team members walking in and out the office with questions that need an answer right now. Pictures of after-funding party on the wall, press articles, team event snapshots, smiling faces everywhere, buzz, excitement. Greg is in his early 30’ies i guess, but boy, what a nice career at that age ! Has a story to tell, and it’s clear he sits on a goldmine. Just have a look at their site and the about us/company/founders information.  The founding team is composed of top computer scientists from MIT and Columbia University. Co-founder comes from MIT with specialty on privacy. What SenseNetworks does with massive sets of mobile data is incredible. If you want to get a feel on what Web 4.0 (combination of semantic web + pattern recognition engines + collective intelligence) will look like, this is your place to be.

15:30-16:30 Holographic Banking

Michael Warner – CEO, Quantum4D

We had to do quite some changes to our Innotribe booth to accommodate for this presentation and more excitingly the live demo ! They bring along a holographic projection unit. See also my previous posting on my personal blog about virtual worlds and/or holographic week-end. So, after the first 30 min presentation, the audience will have the opportunity to put on some sort of helmet and “walk” through the holographic banking environment with some sort of pen-pointer. In their words:

We will allow the audience to cue up to view the same views displayed on the big screen in an experimental holographic 3D display. Users wearing polarized sun-glasses will be able to see the above described animated network graphics ‘floating in space’ in the air between them and two screens. Users will also be able to wear a head tracking hat and use a pen device to literally look around and manipulate the network visualizations

Go and check it out !

16:30-17:00 The near-future of natural language interfaces

Aza Raskin – Head of User Experience, Mozilla Labs

Presentations from Aza Raskin are always great. Even if you’re not convinced of the subject, go and see this if only for the personality of Aza. I saw him doing his pitch at the Web 3.0 Semantic Web conference some months ago, and know right away “i want this guy at Innotribe !”. Just google Aza Raskin. He is now 25, and gave his first keynote at the age of 10 ! His father was Jeff Raskin, big thinker behind the Apple interface. So, Aza has been living and breathing user experience from when he was born. With the mother milk sort of ;-)Great speaker, highly energetic, visually strong metaphors,… Top !

17:00-17:30 Liberating the Collateral Information Worker through iPhone and other mobile devices

Nick Davies – Global CTO, Lombard Risk Management

I hope he will apologize me for this, but besides being CTO at Lombard, Nick is a real geek 😉 If it smells technology, he wants it. Nick blew my mind away when he explained me what modern video cameras can do. He has one with a 43GB (!) flash-card in it, with build-in Wifi in the flash-card. Shooting a video that was instantly sent into the cloud via MyMobile and real-time synched with his Mac at home. And the other server at his mother’s place to synch pictures etc between 2 locations. He has two iPhones and one iTouch with 100+ iPhone Apps on it. You get the idea how tech savvy Nick is. For Innotribe he took on a challenge 3 weeks ago: “let me build and live demo an iPhone application that hooks into an existing collateral management application, and I will demo it at Sibos.” I don’t know when Nick slept during the last weeks, but last Wednesday – just before the deadline – i received his presentation that will underpin this very cool demo. Mattheus from Venturebeat should definitely have a look at this.

Thursday 17 September 2009

10:00-10:30 The “Financial Commons” – collaborating to create, share and remix software

Alex Wulms & Mariela Atanassova from SWIFT.

These are SWIFT folks. And no, this is not navel staring. If you want to see and feel the enthusiasm of young people that get the opportunity of doing something cool, this is your place to be. Alex and Mariela have put a refreshing presentation together on a subject that one could make as boring as hell. To illustrate their story, they will cook soup ! Curious ? Good, that’s why they’re on the shortlist.

12:30-13:00 The Collaborative Back Office – Creating A Network Effect

Neil Vernon – Senior Product Manager, Smartstream

When i opened Neil’s presentation, it was “wow”. In had seen the material about TLM on Demand on the Smartstream website – all very professional – so i felt confident that i knew what to expect. Neil’s presentation does NOT use any of all that. Instead, he made a refreshing presentation – reality check style, no crap – on where we are and what’s next for Software as a Service. Neil is also on the Cloud debate panel, and gave some solid and challenging input to the moderator. I like this sort of folks.

13:00-13:30 HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry Smartphones

Hédi Ezzouaoui – Director, Financial Markets – Worldwide Financial Services Industry, HP

A very good example of how “anchors” in some vertical industries want to claim the space for Cloud computing. HP has a well-known big stake in the printer business. How can they leverage that in the new world of Cloud computing ? Come a see Hedi giving a demo with a Blackberry, wireless connected to the internet, and capable of printing on any networked printer world-wide. For the show, they’ll have a printer on site (but connected).

Practical:

Innotribe at Sibos is an integral part of Sibos. All Innotribe sessions are open to any Sibos delegate with a full week or day pass.

This is the last News Flash before Innotribe @ Sibos really kicks-off. From now, i hand you over to Jeroen Derynck, our “flying Innotribe reporter” who will cover Innotribe from start to finish. Follow us via live-postings at www.innotribe.com or via our Twitter account #Innotribe or via our Innotribe group on LinkedIn.

Innotribe @ Sibos – News Flash 8 – Presentations Day-4

Print

In this 8th News Flash on Innotribe @ Sibos, we’d like to give you an update on the rich set of presentations scheduled on 17 Sep 2009. These presentations come on top of our main morning event, the Innotribe Closing session from 10:30 – 12:00 .

On 17 Sep 2009, all below presentations will be held on the Innotribe Floor (follow the signs Innotribe Lounge). This is a special Innotribe booth next to the big SWIFT stand on the Exhibition Floor.

All presentations are R&D Insight presentations: talks and demos from the edge of business and technology. Several presentations include a video- or live demo ! Check out the specials for each presentation.

In the Innotribe Dome

Innotribe Closing Session

10:30-12:00 See News Flash 4 for details

On the Innovation Floor

R&D Insight presentations

09:00-09:30 Expanding the frontiers of financial services – enabled by smaller, cheaper computing on the move – supply chain, working capital, risk management and service delivery

Nigel Woodward – Worldwide Director Financial Services, Intel

– Presentation abstract: Computing in banking has traditionally been focused on process automation. Front, middle and back office operate islands of processing which variously integrate administration of transactions from capture to settlement.  These are tried and tested technologies. However look at emerging technologies and the picture changes. 3 axis drive innovation today – cost of compute, mobile and online; mix these elements and apply them to what business functions and the operational model can be challenged.  Data can be accessed earlier in the supply chain, huge amounts of transactions can be processed economically and information can be dispersed and accessed on the move to mobile devices.  This session will reveal today’s advances in chip capability and pose questions of where this might take the industry – challenging the status quo.

9:30-10:00 Meeting the Challenges of a Growth Market: Upgrading the Chinese Banking Infrastructure

Xin Sheng Mao – CTO IBM China Development Lab, IBM

– Presentation abstract: We will share our observations of the business challenges and opportunities in the China finance segments.  The Chinese finance market is growing very quickly.  But the market also faces lots of challenges, for example, trades and volumes are growing faster and faster, increasing the need for new innovative finance services, lower transaction latency etc. The as-is infrastructure is not going to survive and has to be upgraded.  We will share how we are helping customers prepare for these upgrades, including solutions from our industry solution lab, our products and innovative technologies.

10:00-10:30 The “Financial Commons” – collaborating to create, share and remix software

Alex Wulms – Lead Developer/Systems Engineer, Information Systems – SWIFT.COM Development

Mariela Atanassova, Innovation, SWIFT

– Presentation abstract: This presentation will share the experiences of one of the SWIFT team that responded to the SWIFT Innovation Challenges. The project was about co-development for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. This project illustrates two dimensions: first, how CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) can lead to innovation and second, how SWIFT developers and external developers work together in an open source mode. Inspiration for other modes of co-operation with our community of members and partners at large ?

12:00-12:30 Smarter Mobile Payments

Peter Bearor – Global Payment Systems Sales Leader, IBM Sales & Distribution

– Presentation abstract: Technologies are more interconnected, intelligent and instrumented than ever before.  Come hear how IBM’s investments in these technologies is leading to smarter mobile payments.

12:30-13:00 The Collaborative Back Office – Creating A Network Effect

Neil Vernon – Senior Product Manager, Smartstream

– Presentation abstract: SmartStream will discuss: The evolution of Cloud computing in SmartStream’s OnDemand SaaS platform, Creating collaborative processes inside institutions to reduce transaction costs, Establishing collaborative venues for Banks and their Corporate clients to achieve the lowest cost per transaction, Strengthening collaborative processes with Artificial Intelligence.

13:00-13:30 HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry Smartphones

Hédi Ezzouaoui – Director, Financial Markets – Worldwide Financial Services Industry, HP

– Presentation abstract: HP will demonstrate HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry smartphones, a web-based solution that allows mobile users to easily print documents to the nearest printer no matter where they are. The CloudPrint service, invented by HP Labs, is printer-agnostic and driverless and requires simple Internet access.

– Specials: live demo

Practical:

Innotribe at Sibos is an integral part of Sibos. All Innotribe sessions are open to any Sibos delegate with a full week or day pass.

Follow us via live-postings at www.innotribe.com or via our Twitter account #Innotribe or via our Innotribe group on LinkedIn.

Innotribe @ Sibos – News Flash 7 – Presentations Day-3

Print

In previous News Flashes, we already detailed the Innotribe opening and closing sessions, the Innotribe Sibos Labs, the Face to Face discussions, and the overview of presentations on 15 Sep 2009.

In this 7th News Flash on Innotribe @ Sibos, we’d like to give you an update on the rich set of presentations scheduled on 16 Sep 2009. Several presentations include a video- or live demo ! Check out the specials for each presentation.

On 16 Sep 2009, we’ll have presentations at 2 locations:

  1. Innotribe Dome (follow the signs Sibos Labs):
    1. Keynotes on Mash-Ups: by innovation leaders on how this trend transforms their business.
  2. Innotribe Floor (follow the signs Innotribe Lounge). This is a special Innotribe booth next to the big SWIFT stand on the Exhibition Floor.
    1. R&D Insight presentations: talks and demos from the edge of business and technology
    2. Mini-Keynotes: Innovation updates from Partners

In the Innotribe Dome

Keynotes on Mash-Ups

9:00-9:30 Mashups for Global Financial Markets

Gary Dolsen – Director, WebSphere Portal, IBM

– Presentation abstract: Succeeding in today’s volatile financial environment requires not only managing but taking advantage of changing conditions in real time. Mashups bring information and capabilities together from diverse sources and empower individuals to assemble their own applications – offering compelling speed and self sufficiency to a wide range of financial professionals. The ability to reuse and tap into enterprise, web, and personal information gives financial organizations the power to significantly increase their return on investment from existing information and applications, and to strategically leverage services from the web to create new applications and serve new markets.  Learn in detail how mashups can rapidly combine information and applications to help your teams work faster and smarter – for example mashing together up to the minute regulatory updates with information from multiple systems to quickly analyze an event for regulatory compliance. Come and learn best practices from mashups that span retail and B2B institutions – ranging from financial investment analysis to financial investigations and fraud management, and beyond to see how your company can innovate with mashups.

– Specials: this presentation includes a video-demonstration.

9:30 – 10:00 Improving service excellence in banking through mashups

Olivier Berthier – Solutions Director, Transaction Banking, Misys

– Presentation abstract: Mashups are not merely one of the cornerstones of the Web 2.0 marketing wave or simply an innovative technical approach to combining data sources in a more efficient and easy way than ever before, they are also starting to appear in banking as a way to unlock new self-service capabilities for consumers of financial services particularly in the corporate banking space. After an overview and hopefully demystifying of the term, the presentation aims at walking through concrete examples of what mashups can offer a bank and more importantly its customers, with a focus on the “1+1=3” benefits brought by mashups’ more nimble and truly open aggregation techniques.

– Specials: this presentation includes a live demo.

10:00-10:30 Order from Chaos: The future of the web

Aza Raskin – Head of User Experience, Mozilla Labs

– Presentation abstract: At Mozilla, we don’t talk about building a semantic web; that’s synonymous with saying it won’t happen. Instead we talk about the contextual web, building the browser into an intelligent broker of your identity, and pragmatically turning the soup of data that is the Internet into the gravy of meaningfully contextual interaction. In this session, we discuss making order from chaos, and making the open web a better place to work, communicate, and play.

– Specials: this presentation includes a live demo.

On Innovation Floor

R&D Insight presentations

14:00 -14:30 R&D approach and roadmap to building Cloud Infrastructure and Services to support Enterprise Cloud Computing

Stephen Morse – Senior Director – Sales Engineering APAC, Salesforce.com

– Presentation abstract: Enterprise Cloud Computing demands new development methodologies and advanced approaches to data center infrastructure and service development.   Come learn how Salesforce has designed their R&D process to deliver 29 major releases in 10 years, and some of the future initiatives in data center infrastructure to provide the next generation of support for Enterprise Cloud Computing

14:30-15:00 MacroSense – Understanding Realtime Consumer Sentiment & other Predictive Analytics from Mobile Location Data

Greg Skibiski – CEO, Sense Networks

– Presentation abstract: Mobile location data from carriers is the world’s best data source describing unbiased real-time consumer behavior en masse. Analyses include macroeconomic trends from, how many people are going to work in the morning or out at night partying, down to understanding equity related demand metrics such as how far consumers are willing to travel to get to specific retailers, year over year. Even years of data from the locations of taxicabs has proven valuable in understanding real-time elasticities of demand based on income, derived by intelligently combining taxi movement data with the demographics of pickup and drop-off locations. Location data is the "lingua franca" of the world, as latitudes, longitudes and time are constants, and more than half the people on the planet are currently creating location data with the cell phone already in their pocket.

15:00-15:30 The future of EAI: how technology / open standards evolution will lead us to intelligent messaging

Kurt Florus – Chief Architect Global Messaging, Sungard

– Presentation abstract: In this presentation we will look at how the proliferation in open source technology, as well as the work SWIFT is embarking on regarding standards evolution, will help us to deliver intelligent messaging solutions to the market.  More explicitly, we will explore the innovations around transparent standards updates, business process modeling, model driven architectures and how we plan to increase STP rates through self-learning repair.

15:30-16:30 Holographic Banking

Michael Warner – CEO, Quantum4D

– Presentation abstract: What if you could model and visualize your enter business world in one collaborative living work environment?   Holographic Analytics goes beyond pages and files to open a new universe of interconnected insights.   During this session, we will go on a half hour tour exploring dynamic 3D holographic models of SWIFT’s global banking networks on a national scale.  We will then fly into regional views and on down into a individual bank and its internal network topology.  The tour will include – among a number of potential tour stops – models of banking markets that ‘mash-up’ demographic and industry data with SWIFT traffic.  We also aim to show a visual model of the bank enterprise itself from several dimensions (staff activities, IT networks, etc…) and how that those domains interact with each other and the larger banking ecosystem we help illuminate. This includes the addition of a display platform which will allow the audience to cue up to view the same views displayed on the big screen in an experimental holographic 3D display. Users wearing polarized sun-glasses will be able to see the above described animated network graphics ‘floating in space’ in the air between them and two screens. Users will also be able to wear a head tracking hat and use a pen device to literally look around and manipulate the network visualizations.

– Specials: this presentation includes a live demo where you will be able to move around in a holographic environment.

16:30-17:00 The near-future of natural language interfaces

Aza Raskin – Head of User Experience, Mozilla Labs

– Presentation abstract: Building a natural language interface for the browser is a mix of pragmatism and research. In this talk, we delve into building open platforms that work across multiple languages, and where the future of the browser lies.

– Specials: this presentation includes a live demo.

17:00-17:30 Liberating the Collateral Information Worker through iPhone and other mobile devices

Nick Davies – Global CTO, Lombard Risk Management

– Presentation abstract: This presentation we will show you one example on how a Collateral Information Worker can push transactions and remain connected to their workflow using a mobile device allowing unprecedented freedom for the worker, improved business decision efficiency and better risk management, even if the manager is in a meeting away from their traditional desktop. Come and imagine the future with us….it really is here today, and the formula is very simple: UBIQUITY + EXCEPTION BASED MANAGEMENT > LEGACY STP BENEFITS. It’s time for a new liberation.

– Specials: this presentation includes a live demo.

Mini-Keynotes: Innovation updates from Partners

13:00-13:30 A Reality Check? Time to Innovate? The Marriage of Business and Innovation

Clare Porter – Senior Vice-President – Technology Solutions, Sungard

– Presentation abstract: Global conditions and cost pressures are changing how technology is managed but is technology keeping pace with the challenges in the business world? Alternative delivery models are a now an imperative to meet the developing business expectations. This session will include lessons learnt from first generation SaaS deliverables and what the future roadmaps will look like.

Practical:

Innotribe at Sibos is an integral part of Sibos. All Innotribe sessions are open to any Sibos delegate with a full week or day pass.

Follow us via live-postings at www.innotribe.com or via our Twitter account #Innotribe or via our Innotribe group on LinkedIn.

Innotribe @ Sibos – News Flash 6 – Presentations Day-2

Print

In this 6th News Flash on Innotribe @ Sibos, we’d like to give you an update on the rich set of presentations scheduled on 15 Sep 2009. Some presentations include a video- or live demo ! Check out the specials for each presentation.

All presentations listed below will take place on the Innotribe Floor (follow the signs Innotribe Lounge). This is a special Innotribe booth next to the big SWIFT stand on the Exhibition Floor.

We’ll have 3 types of presentations that day:

  1. Keynotes on Cloud: by leaders from the Cloud computing industry
  2. R&D Insight presentations: talks and demos from the edge of business and technology
  3. Mini-Keynotes: Innovation updates from Partners

Keynotes on Cloud

9:00-09:30 Enabling Agility through Cloud Architectures

Amir Halfon – CTO Global Financial Services, SUN

– Presentation abstract: Cloud Computing has become one of the most important concepts in IT. It holds the potential of transforming the way IT services are being delivered by facilitating new levels of agility and automation that are impossible to achieve in the traditional data center. This presentation will explore how public, private and mixed cloud environments are changing the relationship between application developers and IT deployment. It will also discuss how applications and our notions of their reliability and availability are being transformed by these new models.

9:30-10:00 Let’s Head For the Clouds

Jeff Barr – Senior AWS Technology Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

– Presentation abstract: Amazon Web Services Senior Evangelist will introduce the concept of cloud computing from a business and architectural concept.  Jeff will review the economic model and resulting benefits of cloud computing, including an overview of Amazon’s line of scalable web services including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, the Amazon Simple Storage Service,, and Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Jeff will also cover real-world cloud computing success stories.

10:00-10:30 The Cloud in Context

Russell Daniels – Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, EDS, Hewlett Packard

– Presentation abstract: In this presentation, Russ Daniels will describe how the cloud will fundamentally change the way people and businesses connect to information and the profound impact this will have on every aspect of our lives. The cloud will enable a proliferation of services anchored around individual profiles, aware of context and location, and tailored to particular areas of experience as well as vertical industries. Daniels will outline the implications this shift will have for the Financial Services industry, and how companies can move to capitalize on it.

15:30-16:00 Real-Time Results in the Cloud for Financial Services

Stephen Morse – Senior Director – Sales Engineering APAC, Salesforce.com

– Presentation abstract: Financial Services are already reaping the benefits of enterprise cloud computing to drive faster innovation while simultaneously reducing capital expense, operational expense, and risk.  We will review key Financial Services case studies, leveraging Sales, Service, and Platform Cloud capabilities, with specific demos of the solutions.  Also addressed is a discussion on cloud security, availability, and performance vs. traditional on-premise models.  Attendees will learn how to begin building cloud apps immediately.

R&D Insight presentations

16:00 – 16:30 The Benche

Lars Millberg – Head Cash Management, SEB

– Presentation abstract: The Benche (www.thebenche.com) is one of the world’s leading online communities for Trade Professionals. The Benche is provided by SEB as a free service to trade finance professionals or other members active in international trade. The purpose is to encourage sharing of knowledge and experience, open discussions and networking between such professionals. Lars Millberg will speak about the original idea that later became the success of today. He will guide through first meeting with site provider, building the structure of the site, touching upon surveys of client’s interest, pilots and the great launch till the status of today. Lars will also present problems encountered, lessons learned, and the continuous evolutionary roadmap of The Benche.

16:30-17:00 Discontinuities in Distributed Computing

Joe Weinman – Strategy & Business Development VP, AT&T

– Presentation abstract: Every decade or so, a major new paradigm shift occurs in the world of computing.  Shifts from the mainframe to the mini to the PC to the web are examples.  Now, we are at the beginning of a set of interconnected discontinuities.  First, the shift from enterprise data center to hybrid architectures including cloud computing.  Second, a shift from text and numeric data to multimedia, including video.  Third, a shift from person-to-person communications to sensor networks and automated agents, including speech synthesis and semantic analysis.  Fourth, a shift from fixed to mobile.  And finally, new interfaces…not just Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers, but multi-touch, accelerometers, and ultimately, brain-computer interfaces.

17:00 – 17:30 The virtual branch of the bank – project Wonderland

Michael Gialis – Head of Business Development for SUN Lab, SUN

– Presentation abstract: Introduction to Virtual World technology and Project Wonderland specifically. We will discuss: 1) some ideas of use cases for virtual world technologies, (call center, virtual customer branch, interbank / inter-industry collaboration, etc.) 2) our approach to developing opportunities in this space, (technical collaborations with universities and enterprise, service and technology partner eco-system development, proofs-of-concept, etc.) 3) our architecture and distinguishing features and characteristics (GPL v2 w/ class-path exception, modular architecture, extensible platform, built for enterprise security / integration, etc.) 4) our go-to-market plans, (partner model, professional / engineering services, deployment / hosting services, commercial licenses, production support, etc.), and 5) provide the audience with a video demonstration

– Special: this presentation includes a video-demonstration !

Mini-Keynotes: Innovation updates from Partners

14:30 –15:30 Oracle Fusion Middleware – Foundation for Innovation and Growth

Paul Shetler – Senior Director, Global Financial Services, Oracle

– Presentation abstract: Changing markets, competitive pressures and evolving customer needs are placing increasing pressure on IT to deliver greater flexibility and speed. Organizations are adopting technology as a means of delivering on these requirements by overcoming the complexity of their application and IT environments. With the launch of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle is fundamentally transforming the way its customers develop, run, and manage their custom, packaged, and composite business applications. Learn how across the entire family of middleware components, Oracle has worked from a common set of design principles to forge unprecedented integrations between best-of-breed components. This innovative approach will help Oracle customers leverage agile, adaptable applications with a degree of ease that was not possible until now. Oracle Fusion Middleware also delivers unprecedented support for virtualization and cloud computing.

Practical:

Innotribe at Sibos is an integral part of Sibos. All Innotribe sessions are open to any Sibos delegate with a full week or day pass.

Follow us via live-postings at www.innotribe.com or via our Twitter account #Innotribe or via our Innotribe group on LinkedIn.

PayPal vs. Banks

On Nov 3, 2009 the world of payments will change. PayPal will open its platform to developer worldwide.

A glimpse of what this means can be seen in the following video:

How will traditional banks respond ? Hopefully a subject for the Innotribe Face to Face discussion on The Future of Banking next week during Sibos 2009.

Print

Innotribe News Flash 4 – Innotribe Closing on Thursday morning

Also posted on

Print

at https://www.swiftcommunity.net/blogs/blogdetail.cfm?id=1563

In this 4th News Flash on Innotribe @ Sibos, we’d like to give you an update on the Innotribe closing session. This session will take place on Thursday 17 Sep 2009 from 10:30 till 12:00, just before the Sibos closing plenary in the afternoon.

The results of the Innotribe Sibos Labs will be revealed, and the winner of the Sibos 2009 Innovation Award will be selected based on the assessment of a panel of buyer’s (composed of senior members of our community) and the opinion of the Sibos crowd.

This Innotribe closing will be the place where all the activities of the Innotribe Sibos Labs (see Innotribe News Flash 2) will come together.

The Innotribe closing is composed of following elements:

– A Face to Face discussion with venture capitalists on “Where does the money go?”

– Condensed power pitches by the Innotribe Sibos Labs teams.

– Q&A session between the Buyer’s Panel, venture capitalists and the teams.

– A crowdsourcing event, where our facilitators will collect the feedback from the audience.

– A (closed) session of the Buyers Panel to elect the Sibos 2009 Innovation Award

Face to Face discussion with venture capitalists:

The Innotribe closing session will start with a 30 minute panel discussion lead by Matthaus Krzykowski from Venturebeat, in which venture capitalists will share with us what the typical criteria are they use to fund new projects and what sort of projects they still invest in the current economic climate. Based on their investment insights they will also talk about their vision how tomorrow’s startups could transform the finance industry. Also, they will share their tactical experience about the wisdom of investing – what do great innovative ideas look like and how to recognize when one knocks on your door. The panel will include:

Guy Kawasaki – Founding Partner, Garage Technology Ventures and guest speaker for the Sibos Closing Plenary

Eghosa D. Omoigui, Director Strategic Investments, Intel Capital

Wouter de Ploey – Partner, McKinsey

 

Presentation of innovative ideas by Innotribe Sibos Labs teams:

The Innotribe Sibos Labs will culminate into the presentation to the buyer’s panel. Each team will get maximum 8 minutes to give a condensed power presentation about the ideas they have developed throughout the week. After each presentation, we plan a Q&A session with the Buyer’s Panel, the venture capitalists, and the teams.

Our facilitator The Value Web will then try to feel the pulse of the audience, and collect their preference on the best idea to be moved forward.

The Buyer’s Panel:

The Buyer’s Panel is composed as follows:

Ignace Combes – SWIFT Board member, Deputy CEO, Euroclear

Javier Santamaria – SWIFT Board member, Assistant General Manager, Banco Santander

Paul Simpson – Managing Director and Global Head of Treasury and Trade Solutions, CITI

Guy Kawasaki – Founding Partner, Garage Technology Ventures

zaro Campos – CEO, SWIFT

Gottfried Leibbrandt – Head of Markets, SWIFT

Kosta Peric – Head of Innovation, SWIFT

Armed with the input from the Innotribe teams, the face to face panel discussions and the opinion of the crowd, the Buyer’s panel will evaluate the presented ideas and judge their originality, potential for success, and ability to advance our industry.

In a following closed session, the Buyer’s Panel will elect the Sibos 2009 Innovation Award winner that will be announced in the final Sibos Closing Plenary in the afternoon of 17 Sep 2009.

Practical:

Where: The Innotribe Closing will take place in the Innotribe Dome (located in the Sibos Labs room).

When: Thursday 17 Sep 2009, from 10:30 – 12:00

Innotribe at Sibos is an integral part of Sibos. The Innotribe closing sessions is open to any Sibos delegate with a full week or day pass. Just pop-in and join us on the Innotribe Closing session.

To let us know if you will be coming to this event, login to www.swiftcommunity.net, go to the Innotribe Closing event and click I will attend button next to the event. You can also see who else is coming.

Robonomics

3838440758_2143b4757b

Really great post by Jamais Caisco on FastCompany blog.

Very much in line with my last posts on massive manias, booms and busts. I have not added much here: just mixing some different sources. But some folks told me i am not that bad in mashing-up stuff 😉

Think you can’t be replaced by a machine? Think again.

Definitely read this article in more depth. Key passage in ‘Think Again”:

Structural Shifts

The issue of a future in which there are large parts of the economy that are underemployed, unemployed, or unemployable is a serious issue. And the data already suggests this:

(source) Notice how after the last recession in 2001 the number shifted upwards. The boom year of 2006 have an additional 5% long-term unemployed than the boom years of 1998. If you go back even further in that graph, to the 1960s, you see an even larger structural shifts upwards. Here’s University of Chicago Economist Kevin Murphy thinking through this issue.

Robots are becoming more dextrous, able to do a growing number of tasks requiring precision and strength, and computer systems are becoming smarter, able to tackle jobs needing pattern-matching and creative skills.

Humans are still cheaper, for now, but this puts downward pressure on wages–and the old rule that new technology opens up entirely new fields of human labor won’t hold true forever. Smarter, more capable machines will snap up those jobs, too.

Robonomics: If robots and digital systems can do everything, let them–but let human society skim value from the result. This becomes a technologically-driven version of the Basic Income Guarantee model, where citizens are given a basic above-poverty income guarantee and are free to explore education, entrepreneurship, or even a life of indolence. Or they can get one of the remaining human jobs, jobs that may pay much more than they do now in order to attract people who otherwise wouldn’t want the work.

Picture Credits:
Money, courtesy Jamais Cascio, Creative-Commons Licensed

Massive manias, booms and busts.

Remarkable video from Peter Thiel speaking at the Singularity Summit two years ago about the need for Singularity in todays Financial Markets.

Peter Andreas Thiel (born 1967) is an American entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, libertarian and venture capitalist. With Max Levchin, Thiel co-founded PayPal and was its CEO. He currently serves as president of Clarium Capital.

Thiel has made early-stage investments in several startups, including Slide, LinkedIn, Friendster, Geni.com, Yammer, Yelp, Powerset, Vator, Palantir Technologies, Joyent and IronPort.

Btw, we already mentioned Palantir Technologies in this earlier blog post. Also those folks are ex-PayPal.

“As you can’t predict, you have to bet” says Thiel.

And “The alternative to the singularity is the apocalypse”. See also my previous post on the need for a singleton if we want to avoid humans to be overruled by Artificial Intelligence

We will (are) witness massive manias, booms and busts

on a scale unprecedented.

But that’s not normal for markets that are well connected. Markets that are well connected (such as the financial markets) have more information circulating on their networks. Normally, when more and more information is floating around in a market, that market gets smoothened out and gets more efficient. Stocks would evolve at a smooth 6-7% per year, and most volatility would go out of the market.

Well, unless you have been living on another planet, the contrary is true. And worse,

the frequency ànd amplitude of the booms and busts gets bigger.

There was the Japanese crash end 80ies, the emerging markets mid 90ies, the intro of the financial derivatives that scaled to a 1 trillion hype industry, in 98 Russian market blew up, the March 2000 Internet bubble, the 2008 bust of Lehman’s and the big crisis we are in now. Peter Thiel explains how in March 2009 was the last month of insanity before the bust.

Dillusion and insanity were at their peak.

What i really like is when he says: “at the peak of the boom, you can see furthest”.

It reminds me of another quote – can’t find right away from who – that when innovating you better start with the future in mind, rather than starting from the now. The latter approach usually leads to small incremental adjacencies, whereas the first approach at least gives you a chance of driving something disruptive.

All big breakthroughs were disruptive. None of them were predictable by extrapolating the past of the now. See also Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan book.

Btw, in the last Wired (Aug 2009), you can read that speaking of the Black Swan is really “tired”. That’s the stage before “expired”. Old-fashioned.

Isn’t this about big trends ? Like that all sorts of businesses will  not work in the enterprise 2.0 economy. That running a more authentic business becomes mandatory. See book industry, see newspapers, etc.

However, the biggest trend –says Thiel in 2007 -  is the trend from old to new media. So big a trend you don’t even see it.

That was at the Singularity Summit in 2007 two years ago. Next summit is in October 2009. Have  a look at the line-up of speakers. Very curious what those great thinkers will spot as trends you don’t even see.

What are the biggest manias, busts and booms to come ?