Zemanta and the Semantic Web

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If you want to have an idea what Semantic Web can mean for you and your business, have a look at www.zemanta.com.

It comes as a Google Chrome Extension, or a Firefox extension, or a IE Plug-in or Safari Bookmarklet.

I tested the Google Chrome extension on my PC. In this case a Mini-HP with Windows 7 installed. I also use Windows Live Writer to do my blogs. Zemanta also has a Live Writer Plug-in that i also installed.

This looks quite similar to the viewer of Open Calais that i commented on already way back in April 2009.

UPDATE: just today, there was an article on ReadWriteWeb referring back to Open Calais, Google and Wolfram Alpha. Note that “Semantic Web” is now renamed into “Structured Data”.

But is is way more user-friendly, and so well integrated with Live Writer. Anybody writing blogs should install this.

To get you an idea of the powerful stuff under the hood of this semantic engine, go to the home page and click on the try demo button.

 

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You then get presented with an free-text box that you can fill with any text you want. In my case, i just cut and pasted the intro-section of our Think Tank document.

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You just hit “Run Demo”, and what you get then is really unbelievable !

Your content gets enhanced with images. See example below.

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Or you get links to related articles:

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The beauty really comes and the end of the page of the demo:

 

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Yep, you got it. It shows all in-text links, and all words that have automatically semantically tagged, based on the sources you have given during set-up (or later when logging into your personal account). And yes, it also looks into Twitter and Facebook.

When you install Zemanta for Live Writer, you are presented with a list of recommended articles while you are blogging. You can then select interesting and related articles to reference in your blogs posts with just a click of the mouse. The benefits of being included within our recommended content pool are: trackback links to your blog, discovery of your blog by new readers, and connecting topical blogs together.

Zemanta expands the author’s regular blogging dashboard, populating it on the fly with content suggestions relevant to the current text. It presents images, links, articles, tags in a simple interface. It encourages re-use and linking to other content with as little effort as possible – a single click.

Zemanta supports Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Ning, Drupal, LiveJournal, Tumblr and email platforms Google Mail and Yahoo!Mail.

Here is a screenshot of my screen as i was making this blog, and how it automatically added in-text links to the word “Blogger” etc above…

 

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Main features of Zemanta are:
● on the fly contextual suggestions of related articles, images, links and tags;
● affiliate linking support;
● re-blogging – cross-platform quoting for blogs;
● spam-free database of 10000 news sources and blogs;
● copyright filtering of suggested images.

Use cases for email include:
● Individualized personal “postcards” as you can easily add images from your Flickr collection or from others.
● Persuasive professional introductions with easy addition of personal images and links to social networks.
● Informative report-style mails with links to other points on Internet for further reading.

These are the use cases suggested on the Zemanta site and during the install procedure.

However, i strongly believe that these sort of technologies will change in a very disruptive way how we think about standards. In the context of my employer SWIFT, standards are one of the pillars of our value proposition. So far, we “only” looked at standards for message formats, but we could/should apply our 30+ years experience in semantics and ontologies for financial services into this new domain of semantics of … well, anything.

UPDATE: by renaming “Semantic Web” into “Structured Data”, it all becomes even more obvious what role SWIFT could play in this area. XBRL and CLOUD are already moving big way into this space.

BTW: the “REBLOG” button at the end of this posting was also added automatically by Zemanta.

 

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Cloud Security and other Cloudy observations

Another great article on Technology Review MIT, this time about cloud computing. Together with the 2 documents i posted earlier today on innotribe.com this should give the average IT literate reader a good overview of where we stand end 2009/begin 2010.

The clientele for Amazon’s cloud services now includes the New York Times and Pfizer. And Google’s browser and forthcoming operating system (both named Chrome) mean to provide easy access to cloud applications.

The focus of IT innovation has shifted from hardware to software applications

But not everyone is so sanguine. At a computer security conference last spring, John Chambers, the chairman of Cisco Systems, called cloud computing a "security nightmare" that "can’t be handled in traditional ways."

A similar viewpoint, if less colorfully expressed, animates a new effort by NIST to define just what cloud computing is and how its security can be assessed. "Everybody has confusion on this topic," says Peter Mell; NIST is on its 15th version of the document defining the term. "The typical cloud definition is vague enough that it encompasses all of existing modern IT,"

Given the industry’s rapid growth, the murkiness of its current security standards, and the anecdotal accounts of breakdowns, it’s not surprising that many companies still look askance at the idea of putting sensitive data in clouds. Though security is currently fairly good, cloud providers will have to prove their reliability over the long term

Cloud providers don’t yet have a virtual steel fence to sell you. But at a minimum, they can promise to keep your data on servers in, say, the United States or the European Union, for regulatory compliance or other reasons.

But fully ensuring the security of cloud computing will inevitably fall to the field of cryptography. Of course, cloud users can already encrypt data to protect it from being leaked, stolen, or–perhaps above all–released by a cloud provider facing a subpoena.

To find and retrieve encrypted documents, groups at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere are working on new search strategies that start by tagging encrypted cloud-based files with encrypted metadata.

"For me," Zittrain says, "the biggest issue in cloud security is not the Sidekick situation where Microsoft loses your data." More worrisome to him are "the increased ability for the government to get your stuff, and fewer constitutional protections against it; the increased ability for government to censor; and increased ability for a vendor or government to control innovation and squash truly disruptive things."

Google Chrome: who is right and who is wrong?

All over the tech websites last week: Google previewing their Chrome OS and releasing it’s code to the open source community.

Planning, pre-viewing and releasing an OS is a big thing. Especially if everybody is looking at you as the provider of THE cloud OS.

It stroke me that some of the comments are so diverging. Some examples. Who is right and who is wrong ? With – as usual – some additional thoughts and spices by yours truly.

Negative

When the title says “Why Chrome OS will fail” you know what to expect.

However, it also inherits that platform’s (Linux) many warts, including spotty hardware compatibility.

It’s a move born of desperation. Google knows it can’t possibly establish a viable hardware ecosystem and still meet its self-imposed release deadline of "mid-2010”.

…no surprise that the primary interface to the Chrome OS is … Chrome, as in the Google browser. Unlike a traditional OS, there’s no desktop. The "applications" running under the Chrome OS are really just interactive Web pages,…

The bottom line is that while there is virtually nothing that you’ll be able to do with the Chrome OS that you won’t be able to do equally well with Windows, there are literally millions of things that you can do with Windows today that you’ll likely never be able to do with the Chrome OS.

It should come as no surprise that this is the article that is tweeted around Twitterspace with great and almost malicious pleasure by current Microsoft employees. Still loyal to their employer.

But think twice when you use the word loyalty in this context. See how fast the love can turn into competition when the company does not treat its ambassadors rightly (Don Dodges 180° love/hate turn around after being hired by Google)

See also James Gardner on the “Evidence of the (Microsoft) chip (in Microsoft employees)” and the introduction of a new term:

the Borgocrat

Fake Steve Jobs, one of my favourite blogs on the internet, summarised the whole thing very nicely I thought, in a post where he calls Don a Borgocrat (Fake Steve refers to everything Microsoft as the Borg), and compares previous posts Don has made with his new position on products for the company.

If this isn’t evidence that the “chip” still exists, I don’t know what is.

The more a read those opinions of some of head-in-the-sand Microsoft opinion makers , the more they are irritating and even not credible.

What to think of a Microsoftie making fun of Google Gmail being down, when their Hotmail has been down and hacked so many times.

But it’s a more general irritation.

What to think of traditional network vendors making fun of some cloud outages, knowing that their legacy technology is 30 years old, and the cloud players are doing relatively well, if you would add an adoption ratio of number of users and the incredible short time to market for users to take up.

That sort of arguments are so passé,

so old game

Neutral

Starting with a safe “Personally, I think it’s too early to tell.” The more interesting part in this posting is the effect that “geeks” can have on mainstream.

Yes, the "geek" audience is without a doubt a niche market. So it’s easy for Microsoft or Apple to write off Chrome OS. But that’s a mistake. As John Gruber wrote in his excellent piece, "Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline":

People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.

Microsoft’s losses to Apple aren’t based on "regular people" choosing the Mac. Rather, these "regular people" were encouraged to do so by the geeks in their lives who had made the switch to a Mac years ago. Consumer technology vendors can ignore the alpha geek niche at their peril.

Positive

Louis Gray has a long term view.

Google’s preview of the Chrome OS was more than a product release. It was a milestone in a vision of a Web-centric world, one in which we are increasingly living.

For the vast majority of my own activity, I am online, not using software. I intentionally use some applications, like Microsoft’s Office suite or Adobe Photoshop, quickly, and then close them just as quickly, as to not slow down my computer’s performance. Google’s Chrome OS is the latest development in a vision that says our activity will be online, our data will be stored in the cloud, and applications that have traditionally been desktop software will make their way online.

Under no uncertain terms, I agree with their vision. This is happening and it is happening fast.

Robert Scoble (an ex-Microsoft himself) has as usual a more documented insight on his blog.

Google is playing a different game. Google Chrome OS is NOT about killing Microsoft or Apple.

What is it about? Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

This reminds me of the famous video where Steve Ballmer cheers up the developer’s audience in the good old days. It looks however – like pointed out in the neutral article above – that Microsoft has lost its’ “clout” with the developers at large.

It’s even getting worse: last week at PDC, Ray Ozzie was saying that apps won’t be a differentiating factor on smart phones. Sounds a bit arrogant to me when you know that iPhone Appstore has 100,000+ apps in store, and Android Marketplace building up fast.

Scobleizer continues:

I have not seen a single thing demonstrated on stage yet that won’t run on Google Chrome OS.

This is a winner, but on a new field

Cloud Computing and Marketplace are just happening

Three interesting news items that Cloud computing and marketplace are just happening.

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Nobody else than Salesforce – a 10-year old company running a 10B+ $ cloud business, with 60,000 customers and 1,5M users (talking about reach…) – has as helped to launch FinancialForce.com , a new company that offers financial software. The new startup is funded by Unit 4 Agresso, the parent company of Coda, which had sold the Coda2Go SaaS through Salesforce.com’s on-demand application store. The new company is co-headquartered from Salesforce.com’s offices in San Mateo, Calif., and from an office in Harrogate, England. Salesforce.com will provide the customer support for the startup’s core product, also called FinancialForce (formerly Coda2Go). Salesforce.com is looking to position Force.com as a platform to launch new SaaS companies. FinancialForce.com is one of their first big case studies. The new solution includes general ledger accounting, user-defined budgets, spreadsheet integration, accounts payable and receivable, and invoicing. Pricing starts at $125 per user per month, and customers do not have to be Salesforce.com customers. Yes, i know, it is "just" accounting. But if you know that force.com already has 80 Financial Apps on their marketplace, it’s obvious on how the dots will connect.

The second is nobody else The U.S. Defense Department. They just put into operation their cloud computing services for military personnel. Originally launched a year ago, the platform, called RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment) , was initially used for testing and development of new applications. The military says RACE is ready to go live with 99.999% uptime.

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The third is a company Schumachergroup .

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Their CIO was speaking at the Cloud Computing conference in London this week. This presentation was by far the best of the whole conference.

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75% of all their business critical apps are now in the cloud. And targeting 90 % by 2010. The rest in a traditional on-premise data center. The cloud is 99,5% uptime and is manned by 25% of their IT FTE’s. This is the area where they innovate. Their data-center is 98% uptime, has 75% of the IT FTE’s running it and it’s the data center that keeps the CIO awake. In the cloud, they can deliver 5-10 times more value faster. What does faster mean: on average 5 months to deploy a new app into the cloud.

We have invited this CIO to Innotribe at Sibos2010 to deliver a real-life case study from another industry.

Print

See also the article "Marketplace – a commodity" on my personal blog here . Some people believe a Marketplace for Financial Services is years away, even beyond 2015. Don’t think so. It’s getting build-in in platforms.

Marketplace: a commodity

Here is force.com from Salesforce. As far as i am concerned, the way a marketplace should look like. Already more than 800 apps available, more than 70 of them are financial apps.

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Also have a look at the US Government marketplace.

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Everything’s up there. With pricing info, liability clauses, shopping basket, etc

Some believe building an application marketplace is something exotic, and if your not an Force.com, Apple, Google or the US Government it is something that is years away.

Reset your thinking. Picked up via ReadWriteWeb. Microsoft is going to offer application marketplace in SharePoint 2010. See the interview in the article on ReadWriteWeb.

What is even more interesting in this article is the video from Citrix Dazzle solution, embedded below:

Search for a financial application, make sure you get the right approval level for being allowed this app, mix and match online and offline apps, etc. It’s like an iTunes for apps, but then in an enterprise environment.

Can’t wait to see an out-of-the box offering that allows me to set up a marketplace of financial services in the cloud.

The Future by Chris Anderson

 

Big Think Interview with Chris Anderson

Chris_anderson

CHRIS ANDERSON

Editor-in-Chief, Wired

A conversation with the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail and Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

October 29, 2009  |  In Business & Economics, Science & Tech, Media & Internet

You can see the 36 min video here.

The full transcript is also available. Some extracts and quotes (red highlights by me)

On “free”:

What happened with the Internet is that it took computers and storage and bandwidth, silicone chips, spinning metal platters, and fiber optics and put them together. It turns out that Moore’s law falls in price 50 percent every 18 months. Storage and bandwidth fall in price every 14 and 12 months, each by 50 percent and they’re accelerating their race to zero even faster than Moore’s law. You put all three together and you have this general rule that anything you do on the internet, whatever it costs today, it will cost half as much a year from now. This has relatively profound consequences. First, it makes zero – It makes free not really a marketing gimmick but kind of an inevitable price. Not to say that everything is going to be free. The greatest misunderstanding of free is that everything’s going to be free.

At the same time, they have iTunes, a very successful way to sell music. In that case, what they’re selling is convenience, not music.

On “infinities” (see also Peter Hinssen’s Innotribe Keynote on “exploring the limits.”

I think the most profound thing about turning products into digital products from my prospective is that price becomes arbitrary. In the traditional world, there’s a pretty strong correlation between the cost of a product to make and the price you can charge for it. You charge something that’s slightly above the cost and the more competition there is, the less you can charge. It tends to drive prices down to the marginal cost. In digital products where the marginal cost is zero, the price can be anywhere from zero to infinity.

On “Cloud Computing”:

We talk about lowering the barriers to entry but you also want to lower the barriers to exit so that people don’t feel like they’re risking everything.

Open ID and open apps are two examples. I think we’re seeing these two battles play out and although Jonathon is absolutely right, that this is a risk, I perhaps have more confidence in the power of the marketplace to sort this out. I think that the one thing we’re sure about in this era is that we have choice, lots and lots of choice. If Facebook gets it wrong or if Twitter gets it wrong, there are a thousand other companies in the wings just waiting to get it righter. Knowing that, I believe –and so true for Google the elephant in the room on this– I think knowing that their hold on the consumer is not permanent, it’s not cast in stone and is only permitted as long as they serve the consumer better than the obvious alternatives, I believe, will keep them doing the right thing.

About “monopolies”:

I can only hope that the regulators move slowly because I don’t think the answers are clear and any answer we give today will be wrong tomorrow. I mean, today, isn’t it sort of absurd the fuss we made over Microsoft, now, in retrospect? Now Microsoft looks like the underdog right? We were so worried about their monologist abuse of the desktop. I mean, desktop, when was the last time you even saw your desktop?

About “going after small or big business (the next 1B$ business):

That model distributed innovation. Letting the community sort of invent products, try them out at small scale, figure out the bugs, whether there is real demand, and then use the big company’s power to scale them up to mass markets. That feels about right.

See also my yesterday’s blog post about Failure is NOT an Option.

On “what upcoming technology will disrupt the industry ?”

The simple answer to your question is the most disruptive thing I can see right now is the fact that you and I are carrying GPS chips in our pocket. If you have an iPhone in your pocket or any other smart phone, you’ve got a GPS chip. Now we’re not doing much with them right now but we have, for the first time in history, the capacity to link our physical world, the world we live in, to the virtual world.

I think GPS and the internet combined is a game changer. Now I’ll add just one thing on top of that. The fact that your phone is not just GPS and internet connection, but also other sensors, accelerometers, it has proximity sensors, light sensors, things like that. It could have other sensors. You know, we’ll see what we do with that. To what extent could that be used for health care? To what extent can that be used for, sort of, environmental monitoring? I don’t know but we now have nodes. We have smart nodes in people’s pockets, in their hands, spread all around the world, connected to each other and the internet that know where they are. I think that’s a big deal.

Anderson is also mentioning a company called 37Signals. Ever heard of them ?

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37signals is a different approach in that they are relatively lean and targeted. They are not trying to become Microsoft. They know who they are. They were kind of born on the web and, as a result, the products sort of feel organically web centric.

And finally, on “Small is the new big”

Lower transaction cost was the advantage of the firm. Now we’re in an era where it’s completely reversed. Now big companies have bureaucracy. They have red tape. They have long procedures. They have certain profit requirements. The transaction costs are actually higher inside the walls of a big company than they are outside.

Bill Joy famously said that the smarter people in the world for any given project don’t work for you. That’s a problem if you can only work with people that work with you. I mean, why are you working with this guy? Is he the best person in world?

No, he’s the closest person in the world. Now it’s incredible easy to find the best person in the world and to get them to work with you. The internet has provided a sort of global lowering of transaction and so we can now, it’s often more efficient to look outside your company and, you know, I’m joking on some level. The idea of finding the right person via Elance versus your internal HR is actually often easier to go outside and get things done. What that’s done is that it’s said we have a diseconomy of scale with big companies. The bigger they are, the harder it is to get things done. Small companies are nimble. They’re focused. The cost base is lower. They don’t need big markets so they can target more narrow opportunities.

Open source software, hosted solutions, all this cloud stuff, those will lower the cost of starting a company. The internet has lowered the barrier of reaching products. These global markets of talent have lowered the cost of finding people the right people to work on your project. All of it is really creating an army of competitors to the large company model. Large companies are still great at mass but there is a long tail. And large companies are bad at the long tail. Small companies are perfect for the long tail. And we’re not going to see a battle between the two.

Google Wave integrations for the Enterprise

Interesting blog straight from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Wish i was there :-/

Integrations by SAP, Thoughtworks, and Novell. Boy, and knowing there are still people who don’t believe Wave is going to happen big time.

Watch till the end, where there is an BPEL export of the business process that was collaboraively edited on the Gravity canvas in a cross-company wave. Piece of cake !

More details here on the Enterprise 2.0 Blog.

Btw: thx to my good friend Roger, i got an invite for Wave. You can find me there at: p.vanderauwera@googlewave.com (don’t use as an email address 😉

Wikipedia for Data

My colleague Mariela popped into my office the other day: “Peter, when we talk cloud computing we should highlight something fundamental: it’s about making DATA more accessible/interoperable, more than making applications interoperable”.

In essence, she saw that Cloud computing is in essence about

OPEN DATA

Mariela is right on.

This is btw one of the big beliefs as well of Russell Daniels from HP, who was a speaker at our Innotribe @ Sibos. Short video interview with Russ below right after the cloud panel discussion:

Over the last couple of days, i found some more evidence on several blogs.

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There are positive ways to proceed. Google, for example, a leader in cloud computing, has recently launched a specific project — The Data Liberation Front — explicitly including as a key facet the goal of making sure that users can quickly and easily export data from Google products. This ambitious and extremely important effort should be a model for the rest of the cloud computing industry.

See also Wolfram Alpha API to be released later today and the actual release page

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And also the release of the WolframAlpha iPhone app:

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My friend Peter Hinssen installed the iPhone app and tweeted yesterday this is the COOLEST thing he has ever seen.

Lots of writers have compared Alpha to Google, but I think that’s a mistake. it’s a data source, not a search engine, and that’s a significant difference. What matters with a data source is the ability to ask a question, get an answer back, and use it as easily as possible. An API minimizes the impedance mismatch: you can do computing directly with Alpha’s curated data.

But there’s another comparison that’s even more relevant: Twitter. What has made Twitter success isn’t so much the web application that lives at twitter.com. What has made Twitter valuable is the huge ecosystem that has grown up around that application: alternate clients for all sorts of platforms, web sites for searching, slicing, dicing, and remixing. Those have all been enabled by a simple and well-thought-out API for dealing with Twitter programmatically. The web isn’t about web pages; it’s about interactions between data sources.

Some other newcomers on the scene:

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Good Data raises $2.5M for business intelligence by Andreessen Horowitz, the firm run by Netscape billionaire Mark Andreessen. Btw the same firm is one of the candidates for acquiring Skype, but the Skype founders don’t seem to like it very much. Have a look at the great video on Gooddata’s homepage.

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There is Factual.

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Factual wants to be the center of the web’s open data. Not a minor detail: Elbaz, who co-founded Applied Semantics and sold it to Google, has self-funded the company. Well-known technology commentator and investor Esther Dyson recently joined Factual’s advisory board. Also Nova Spivack blogged about Factual here. Nova Spivack and Ester Dyson are two of the smartest people when it comes to semantic web and new technologies

250px-Nova_spivack 200px-Esther_Dyson-20050316

And Techcrunch Erik Schonfeld had a blog as well last week. With a link to a great video:

This is like Wikipedia but then for structured data ! It not about mashing-up user interfaces anymore. The next web is about being able to source good data sources and mash them up.

Imagine if we would start using this for all sort of financial services.

Semantic data/web will definitely be a topic for Innotribe @ Sibos 2010 in Amsterdam. Book already the dates in your calendars: 25-29 Oct 2010.

The Power of Choice

Great post on the confused of calcutta.

How consumerization of IT now really starts hitting the enterprise. Quite obvious, and i am sure you too use more and more external tools like Google Docs, iPhone Apps, Drop-It and other company external services to get your job done.

The article however is on something more profound that is emerging. The power of choice, and how companies need to plan to design services to be “choice-able”:

The more intriguing questions of choice come up when you look at how tasks and resources get allocated to each other within an enterprise. Firms exist at least partly because they serve to reduce transaction costs. They could borrow capital cheaply, obtain global reach and scale, attract and retain staff by the provision of pay and benefits. At least that was the theory; over the years those advantages have dwindled: enterprise credit ratings aren’t what they used to be, the internet lowers the barrier for global reach and scale, security of tenure is no longer to be assumed and benefits sometimes  become millstones around legacy operations. So yes, firms are changing.

Despite all that change, some things haven’t changed. Management structures exist to define and agree objectives, to prioritise activities in the context of those objectives, to allocate scarce resources to the completion of those objectives, to monitor feedback on performance and to intervene when and where appropriate, to fix problems, overcome obstacles, resolve conflicts.

and

People choosing what they do, when and how they do it, where they do it, what services and tools they need to do it, what devices they use. All possible. All being done now. But not holistically across the enterprise anywhere.

For that we need to architect our services differently. Which is where outside-in design comes in, designing for the customer, designing to provide that customer with choice. At a level of abstraction, everyone’s a customer. Your actual customers. Your trading partners. Your supply chain. And your staff.

Innotribe @ Sibos: preparing for next year

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Oh boy, what a fantastic week this was !

More than 40 speakers, 7 keynotes, 15 R&D sessions, 3 face to face discussions, and a great opening and closing session.

We did some cool “order from chaos” things: Peter Hinssen has an AHA ! moment on his flight to Hong-Kong, and produced a brand new mind blowing presentation on the limits of the web. This was the start of Innotribe @ Sibos and set the scene for the quality level we were aiming for the rest of the week.

We also re-designed the workshops as the hours and days passed.

Russ Daniels – Vice President and CTO of EDS/HP decided on the spot not to deliver his planned PowerPoint, and instead gave a whiteboard session on cloud. It was like getting a private lecture by your most favorite professor at university. Awesome !

Below a short interview with Russ after that whiteboard session:

We improvised a debate with Aza Rasking from Mozilla Labs and Greg Skibiski of SenseNetworks on the Innotribe stand.

Here is an interview with Aza:

We had our Chief Executive Officer of Happiness – Mariela Atanassova – who was our super-sweet host on the Innotribe stand. All speakers felt immediately at home by the attention and care of Mariela. Mariela did awesome things in the background and produced very nice visualisations: are your going to post them somewhere, Mariela ?

What was really exciting were the Innotribe Sibos Labs where more than 50 folks took more than 10 hours out of their normal agenda to brainstorm and work on new ideas during workshops facilitated by Philippe Coullomb from The Value Web. Thank you very much to each of the 50 individuals who participated in the Innotribe labs.

The teams were lead by our 6 “Innotribe leaders”: Peter Hinssen from A-Cross, Nick Davies from Lombard Risk Management, Casper van Amelsvoort – Rabobank, Mary Knox – Gartner Research, Chris Skinner – Balatro Ltd – but more knows as active blogger on The Financial Services Club Blog, and Tim Collins from Wells Fargo. Leaders: you did a fantastic job !

In addition the teams were coached by 2 great guys from the venture capitalist community: Mattheus Krzykowsky from Venturebeat, and Eghosa D. Omoigui, Director Strategic Investments for Intel Capital. Your contribution was beyond any expectation !

We got a lot of coverage. Of course there is our own Innotribe at www.innotribe.com: Jeroen was our flying reporter during the week. And we has a lot of tweets #innotribe.

There is also a great article on Finestra about Innotribe – detailing the different pitches – and we made the cover page of friday’s Sibos Issues publication. You can download that publication here. See also Chris Skinner’s reports on Innotribe. Good example is here. Of course also Jeroen’s coverage on Innotribe.com

In the end, there was a winner. The eMe project of the Cloud team, lead by Peter Hinssen & Nick Davies. What a pitch ! As reported by Finestra, Guy Kawasaki loved it:

Kawasaki was impressed with the pitch, and said it sounded to him something like "Mint on steroids meets Open ID". He was also clearly impressed with the presentation skills of group leader Peter Hinssen, managing director of A-Cross Technology. "You’re just full of sh*t enough to be really attractive to a VC," he said.

Or also:

This presentation is better than 98% of the VC-pitched i see every day in Silicon Valley

Matteo Rizzi was great when he opened the “Grand Finale” with a “wake up and smell the coffee sunshine” type of call to the public. It was clear that he spoke straight from the heart and wanted to shake up the fully packed room. “look at what we have realized in the course of just 4 days at Innotribe” Create the right atmosphere, provide coaching and a sounding board, challenge the ideas and you end up with 3 executable ideas! “But this must not be a one-off thing” he warned. Innovation has to become a continuous and sustainable process and everybody in the banking industry must understand that this is critical for our survival.

Was Innotribe @ Sibos 2009 a one-off ? Certainly not. We are designing Innotribe as an ongoing innovation engine for the SWIFT community. We will be present a quite a number of regional events. We are preparing an on-line collaboration and idea generation tool. And last but not least, we are starting to scout and recruit speakers for next year. Where do we set the bar ? High, very high ! I would like that next year that all speakers match this year’s quality levels of speakers such as Peter Hinssen, Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs (interview here), Russ Daniels from HP (interview here), and Joe Weinman from AT&T.  With that, you now also know my personal top-4 for this edition of Innotribe @ Sibos 2009.

Probably the biggest outcome of this Innotribe @ Sibos is that we have build a network of great smart people that we can call at any time if we need help for Innotribe or the next edition of Sibos.

Thanks to everybody who has contributed to this edition of Innotribe @ Sibos.