Innotribe at Sibos 2013 – Innovation Track

As from now, we offer you weekly updates related to our 5^th edition of Innotribe at Sibos in Dubai from 16-19 Sep 2013.

As you probably know by now, we’ve designed our programme like a metro map. Just like the underground or subway, it’s up to you to decide which “track” to follow, depending on your expertise, interests, learning objectives, and availability.

In this week’s post, we’d like to walk you through the Innovation Track at Innotribe@Sibos 2013.

We’ll move away from the traditional polarizing discussions such as old vs. new, startups vs. incumbents, incremental vs. disruptive, close vs. open, core vs. non-core and we will help you discover the richness of the options in the middle of the extremes and help you identify which model to best apply in your company. All examples will have specific relevance to financial services.

The track will open with disruptions impacting the traditional banking model. We will also offer you some practice sessions about new non-linear ways of thinking to help you succeed in the ever faster changing world. The track continues with a session that offers deep insights into what else is out there beyond open innovation. The track ends on Thursday morning with a selection of “Power Talks” illustrating how new players are already significantly disrupting banking – and not just the fringes of our industry, but already heading for the core with early signs of scale. We’re not talking about the distant future, but what’s happening right now!

Future of Money

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Monday 16 Sep 2013

Time: 09:30 – 10:30

This session is also part of the Value track.

We had a post about that last week: http://innotribe.com/2013/08/05/the-value-track-explained/

Toolkit: Better decision-making through creative techniques

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Monday 16 Sep 2013

Time: 15:30 – 17:00

Decision-making is “making sense” of things. This raises issues of what criteria we bring to decisions when contexts change. Most of economic history industry has been driven by new developments in sense awareness.

This context changes are very significant because what digital does is alter decision-contexts. It makes us have to respond to more changes, more often and make more decisions in a more delegated way, against a backdrop of criteria that we are having to capture and describe.

This is a “Toolkit” session: an immersive learning experience to help you internalize the basic principles of creative thinking to help improve judgment and decision-making. The audience will learn to internalize the difference between linear and non-linear decision taking, complemented with practice exercises based on creative decision-making based on colour, word, and sound.

We will setup 3 separate experimentation stations:

Art school with Dave
Word school with Haydn
Music school with Petervan

Speakers

Dave Gray, Author, The Connected Company: Dave is world authority in visual thinking
Haydn Shaughnessy, Author, The Innovation Lifestyle. Haydn is a deep thinker and expert on innovation.

Toolkit: Planning for Unpredictable Futures

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Tuesday 17 Sep 2013

Time: 09:30 – 10:30

Another “Toolkit” session: an immersive learning experience to help you internalize the basic principles of scenario thinking in support of better future planning. This session will lead into the Network Insights session later that day. We will detail this session in the upcoming blog post on the Big Data track.

Speaker:

Daniel Erasmus, Owner, Digital Thinking Network. Daniel brings the unique combination of scenario thinking and big data.
Fabian VandenReydt, Head of Securities Markets and Core Business Development at SWIFT

Toolkit: Thinking in Images

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Tuesday 17 Sep 2013

Time: 16:30 – 17:30

Visualization is increasingly used in business and science to simplify complexity: a picture is worth a thousand words. Drawing is a natural process for thinking, exploring ideas and learning. Every child enjoys drawing — but at some point in our lives we learn that drawing is the province of artists. We begin to say things like:

“I’m no artist”
“I can’t draw a straight line”
“I can’t draw a stick figure”

This is a fallacy. You can draw, and when you were a kid you knew it. You just forgot. It’s time to remember what it was like to draw as a child — and to rediscover the joy of exploring ideas and learning without boundaries. It’s time to forget that you don’t know how to draw. Play isn’t just for fun. It’s how we learn. You can practice your visual thinking skills and have fun at the same time. Enjoy yourself, and take some new abilities back to work with you.

The room will be set-up like a classroom, with the audience as students. Like a Zen-master with his disciples, Dave Gray – one of the masters in the field of visual thinking – will help his students discover step by step their hidden power of visual expression.

New Innovation Models

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Wednesday 18 Sep 2013

Time: 09:30 – 10:30

Our speakers will first give you a fascinating overview on what’s new in innovation models: from “castle and sandbox” one way of doing Open Innovation, to incremental innovation, disruptive innovation, narrow innovation, Jugaad innovation, Reverse innovation, Shanzai innovation (copycatting), computational innovation, radical adjacencies, and algorithmic innovation.

After the intro, we offer you two immersive learning experiences:

Copycatting feels like a taboo in innovation. What if we could get rid of these taboos, and innovate again like kids? In this exercise we will actually train you to copycat, by copying one of the newcomers in payments space. In the coming days, we will also publish here and on swift.com an op-ed by Jaspar Roos, based on a research he did on copycatting.
Crowd-source everything. We will practice how to involve crowds in innovation decision-making: how can a crowd shape a product? How can we crowd-develop, crowd-manage and crowd-design for example. You will be invited to pick one of your existing processes and crowd-source it. Also here, an article based on Haydn’s research on crowd-activities will be published soon.

Speakers

Jaspar Roos, Chief Inspiration Officer, ABN AMRO Dialogues FutureIdeas.eu and Ventur.es
Haydn Shaughnessy, Author, The Innovation Lifestyle

Powertalks: Best innovations in Fintech

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Thursday 19 Sep 2013

Time: 09:30 – 10:30

Inspired by TED Power Talks, we have invited some awesome innovators from the financial industry to present real, live innovations, which are in the market and starting to scale. In other words, this is not about Star Trek, but actual innovations, where the “rubber meets the road”.

Patrick Griffin, Head of Business Development of OpenCoin, the organization that first built the Ripple protocol. A Ripple is a unit of the native currency that exists in the Ripple network. The Ripple network is a peer-to-peer payment network. It enables free payments to merchants, consumers and developers, and to send and receive money in dollars, euros, yen or Bitcoin without having to do extra work for foreign exchange transactions and without charge backs. Ripple is also an open source protocol created for anyone to build on top of or use.
Kristoffer Lawson, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist, Holvi. Kris will talk about Holvi’s upcoming European launch and his work as initiator of the Popup Society movement: setting up a company, forming a team and building a product, all within 48 hours. In true popup fashion many of these ideas die immediately, but not all. Some have gone on to become great companies.
Jaspar Roos will showcase some of the latest innovations in financial services his teams build over the last year in his different roles as Chief Inspiration Officer, ABN AMRO, Dialogues, FutureIdeas.eu and Ventur.es
Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO, Digital Bazaar and Chairman PaySwarm will share what happens if payments get commoditized to the level of the W3C protocol? Manu spends most of his time creating open standards and open technology that will integrate payments into the core architecture of the Web. His vision is to democratize finance, making the financial tools that are only available to large organizations today, available to everyone on the Web.

Closing Plenary Innotribe: “Around the campfire”

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Thursday 19 Sep 2013

Time: 14:30 – 15:30

Later in the afternoon on Thursday – at 14:30pm – we will all join the Closing Plenary Innotribe: “Around the campfire”, where we will share the lessons, tools and techniques learned during the week. We are very proud to confirm our two tribal wise men:

JP Rangaswami (Chief Scientist of Salesforce.com and direct report of Marc Benioff) and;
Andrew Davis (Global Head of e-Commerce Strategy and Innovation, HSBC).

More information about the Innotribe@Sibos 2013 programme can be found in our programme Brochure (PDF flyer), on Sibos.com and of course Innotribe.com. The full Innotribe 2013 speaker list with bios is here.

By @petervan from the Innotribe Team

Dystopian Futures

On 10-12 June 2013, I was invited as a panel participant to the ISACA Insights World Congress. It was the second time in two weeks – the previous time was during a session at the Amplify Festival – that the panel was asked by the moderator what the future would look like in 2040. At Amplify the question was around the future of work. At ISACA, the question was even more open ended.

Although nobody of course knows what the future will hold, and everything I say on this topic is almost wrong by definition, I believe I surprised my audience with my very dystopian view on the future.

Many seem to believe that the future will be “bright”, with lots of possibilities for hyper-collaboration, in open and shared spaces, where serendipities happen every minute, where hierarchies don’t exist anymore, sort of love-and-peace in a sharing collaborative back-to-Woodstock environment.

That may be the case in 2020, but I think the picture will be less rosy in 2040. Already today, algorithms trade in matter of milliseconds, a real-time world that we as humans can’t even grasp, let only survive. Where those algorithms now work for stock trading companies, by 2040 we will most probably be “augmented” – at best – by our personal algorithms.

It will not be a nice picture to look forward to: by that time, we will be totally ruled by robots and algorithms, and we will have to fight – assisted by our “devices” – for that very last minute of work in a crowded world marketplace where we will have to compete at rates of 1.5$ per hour. And this for probably high-skilled tasks, as the rest will be taken over by robots: a “Present Shock” of technological presence, a world undone of human presence, a very disturbing place where we are ruled by algorithms working on our behalf, where betting on peoples future is the new normal, where siren server masters raise interest fees on the mortgage of the personal success/failure of the data slaves.

The Singularity will have happened, but in quite a different way, in a way that technology owns us, eats us, swallows us, not a singularity of jolly happy people being more intelligent or augmented. A world of technology versus machines, where technology will dictate what it wants from us (See also Kevin Kelly “What Technology Wants” – with Kelly being the technology optimist he is – and Jaron Lanier “Who Owns the Future?”).

What we have witnessed during the last weeks’ revelations represents a true tipping point. Where we still may have had the illusion that we could empower ourselves, take charge, we will be at best be empowered by other powers: a new dystopian world where authoritarian technology rules, an authoritarian singularity, where we are reduced to data slaves of the new data masters.

As part of the Digital Asset Grid (DAG) project (an Innotribe project stopped after its incubation phase, and given back to the community), I have written in the past about the “Catastrophic Complexity” that is emerging right now through the explosion of the number of nodes on the grid, ànd the explosion of data. Where these data are more and more stored by “Siren Servers” – a metaphor used by Jaron Lanier – and where the DAG proposed a 100% distributed model of data storage in personal or corporate clouds, but with a choice of appropriate Trust Models, so that we don’t end up in another worldwide west. Indeed, with the advent of trillions of nodes on the grid, we will require a new kind of species, a new kind of architecture, but more importantly a new type of governance.

I am also getting more and more disturbed by a sort of “over-glorification of technology. This may be surprising as a “Techonomist”, where the belief is that technology will enable a new philosophy for progress – I still believe that – but we need some solid healthy criticism in the debate.

When I read this week in The Guardian – a quality newspaper, right? – about the “gadgetry and behavior concepts for the 21 century” and the related comments that these are “super important” new behaviors, I believe we are missing the point; we need to counterbalance all this excitement with way more attention for humanizing our businesses.

I am afraid we are slipping into an “Authoritarian Surveillance State” as described in Washington Post, or even a “Techtarian State” as articulated by Stan Stalnaker in The Huffington Post.

To understand what’s really going on, let’s looks at some understreams that cause the waves of change at the surface. I have split them in technological and more societal changes:

Technological:
- SMAC: Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud
- Platforms and APIs leading towards the end of highly vertically integrated organizations, and where the new skill becomes horizontal sourcing of pin-point functionality
- Explosion and loss of control of data.
- Explosion of Cyber-threats
- Our identity schemes not keeping up with the sheer explosion of nodes, hampering our security, as the internet was never built with identity in mind
- Disintermediation through hyper-connectivity (example Über)
Societal
- Erosion of Privacy
- Platform, everything as a service
- New economies (P2P, Sharing, Reputation,…)
- New expression of value, currencies, assets, cred, influence, reputation,
- Crowdsourcing everything (credit cards, funding, investing, lending, mapping, reputation, …)

We probably most underestimate this trend of crowd-everything. There is something deeper going on: this is really about the use of external power to scale; think platform, using crowds as change accelerators, like developers for building on your APIs, but now through users. Google recently acquired Waze for 1B$ !.

The industrial scale application of crowd is very much a “Singularity University Meme”, says Haydn Shaughnessy in Forbes. Crowd-recording, crowd-sensing, crowd-data collection, more eyes and ears and sensors, through Waze, through Glasses, etc. It’s clear some parties want way more data to be available, searchable, to be monetized, with us working like slaves to provide all these data for free. We evolve from democracy to “crowdocracy”.

Our near future will witness the “fragmentation of everything”: the fragmentation of work, of applications, of hierarchies, and states giving in to power data houses, data guerillas, pods, and cells.

We will see the “asymmetry of everything”: asymmetry of transparency, of search and computing power, of concentration of data. This will lead to power unbalances, to surveillance mania, to loss of freedom of speech. Already now the recent developments makes me more selective on what I tweet and share. The only way out is a 100% distributed system, but I am afraid that it is already too late for that and that our future is already owned by Jaron Lanier’s “Siren Servers”

We already see the “exceptionalism of everything”, where the exceptions become the norm: events such as stock exchange black swans become the norm. We take for granted the exceptional qualities of uber-people like Marissa Mayer, Zuckerberg, and other “heroes”.

We are “attacked by everything”: our secrecy is attacked by Wikileaks, our privacy by Siren-Servers, our security by cyber-attacks, our value creation by thousands of narrow innovations at the speed of light. All this happens at the speed of light, at “Un-Human” speeds, runs on a different clock, lives in another world.

We seem to live in a “perpetual crisis”, jumping from one incident to another, where there is no room anymore for building a story with a begin, middle, and an end; no room for reflection, no room to assess and scan the waves of change on the surface of the data ocean.

The world enters into a complexity

that cannot be addressed anymore

by conventional binary linear thinking.

We need new tools, capabilities, and ways of thinking, more non-linear, be prepared to open up for more options. These new tools are about forecasting and assessing in different ways (scenario thinking), decide our options in different ways, design thinking in context with intent and within constraints, and richer ways of expressing our options through visual thinking and other techniques more leveraging the human senses of color, sound, smell, trust, sensuality, presence.

We have come at a point where our only options out are a revolution of the data slaves and evolving as a new kind of species in the data ocean, trying to preserve what makes us human.

I have no clue how we can avoid this dystopia, but we will need a new set of practices for value creation; where data slaves dare to stand up and call for a revolution; where value creation and tax declarations go way beyond being compliant with the law; where we see the emergence of ethically responsible individuals and organizations. But it will be very difficult to turn back the wheel that has already been set in motion several decades ago.

You have to be somebody before you can share yourself

It’s holiday time, and I have reduced significantly my blogging, reading RSS feeds, tweeting, mailing, etc

Time for hanging around, some biking, some good food, and… a good book. If you want to follow what I am reading, check-out my page on Goodreads.

For me, a good book is one that leaves you puzzled, that makes you think,

that re-calibrates your perspective,

that is a pleasant read, that has depth.

“You are not a gadget” by Jaron Larnier is such a book. I discovered it thanks to a tweet of my friend Paul, who reacted to one of my enthusiastic Singularity tweets. The title of this blog post “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself” is very early in the book, and captures its essence.

Jaron Larnier was listed on The 2010 TIME 100 in the Thinkers category. His Wikipedia entry is here.

It’s a great read if you are in your over-enthusiasm mode about computationalism, the noosphere, the Singularity, web 2.0, the long tail, the hive mind, the global brain, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence and all the other buzzwords and trends and all the rest. It gives you some solid pushback and sound criticism.

I am not going to do a book review, but my experience of the book was like there were 3 stories interwoven:

How technology is limiting our potential and who we are on-line. This of course resonated a lot with my work on Digital Identity.
Our communication limitations. He has a great chapter on how cephalopods have the great ability to “morph” and how one could use “visual” communication and another dimension of communication, other than language. And how humans in virtual reality environments quickly adapt to a body with tentacles. Intriguing !
The notion of “neoteny”: humans are born as fetuses in air, and our brain is being developed during childhood. Lanier compares this to a newborn horse that can stand on its own and already possesses almost all the skills of an adult horse. Humans – in modern civilizations – have an artificial, protected space called “the classroom, the extended womb”.

Neoteny opens a window to the world before our brains can be developed under the sole influence of instinct.

A similar concept related to neoteny – “generativity” – comes back in another great read Firms of Endearment: How World-class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose.

This is a book about

the pragmatic role of

love in business

It’s about the epochal change into the Age of Transcendence. The dictionary defines transcendence as a "state of excelling or surpassing or going beyond usual limits."

The second event is the aging of the population. For the first time in history, people 40 and older are the adult majority. This is driving deep systemic changes in the moral foundations of culture. Higher levels of psychological maturity mean greater influence on society of what Erik Erikson called "generativity"—the disposition of older people to help incoming generations prepare for their time of stewardship of the common good

The Firms of Endearment book in essence talks about a new form of capitalism that is not only focused on profit and shareholders’ value, but on value creation for all parties in a company’s stakeholders’ ecosystem.

Joran also has an opinion on capitalism when he says:

Visiting the offices of financial cloud engines (like high-tech hedge funds) feels like visiting the Googleplex. There are software engineers all around, but few of the sorts of topical experts and analysts who usually populate investment houses. These pioneers have brought capitalism into a new phase, and I don’t think it’s working… capitalism in a digital future will require a general acceptance of a social contract

He is also calling for “so-called AI techniques to create formal versions of certain complicated or innovative contracts that define financial instruments” and that setting standards for these could be facilitated by “a cooperative international body” that

would probably have specific requirements for the formal representation, but any individual application making use of it could be created by a government, a nongovernmental organization, an individual, a school, or a for-profit company. The formal transaction-representation format would be nonproprietary, but there would be a huge market for proprietary tools that make it useful. These tools would quickly become part of the standard practice of finance

What a great potential for my employer SWIFT ! We are indeed a full-blown cooperative international organization with our roots in financial services.

In essence, Jaron Laniers’ manifesto and rant is about “The deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits”.

That should make us reflect deeply on how we want to engage as human beings in an on-line world, how we define digital identity in the relative and the absolute, and be very vigilant that we don’t loose our potential in our technology enthusiasm.

For me, the prospect of an entirely different notion of communication is more thrilling than a construction like the Singularity. Any gadget, even a big one like the Singularity, gets boring after a while. But a deepening of meaning is the most intense potential kind of adventure available to us

Finally, I also found some consolation to deal with my 3/4 Life Crisis. The following quote always helps:

If you are young and childless, you can run around in a van to gigs, and you can promote those gigs online. You will make barely any money, but you can crash on couches and dine with fans you meet through the web. This is a good era for that kind of musical adventure. If I were in my twenties I would be doing it. But it is a youthiness career. Very few people can raise kids with that lifestyle. It’s treacherous in the long run, as youth fades.

My blog is my “adult” way of doing gigs online.

Need for a new currency based on abundancy

Thanks to my subscription to Fredzimmy’s blog, I found this wonderful blog from Esko Kilpi.

I really recommend you to explore this site from A to Z.

Look at the wonderful slidedeck on Slideshare
Have a look at the Flickr photos
Have a look at the Bookmarks

MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics Group, Howard Rheingold (one of the first ever “internet”-books i ever bought,…, Barbarian Blog.

Yummy, Yummy. This is great stuff for a Sunday afternoon. So inspiring. Delicious 😉

This way, i discovered the FANTASTIC Web 2.0 Expo speech of Douglas Rushkoff about Radical Abundance.

It is a 15 min video, and worth every minute:

Not sure if the video embed worked, so in any case you can find it here by clicking the below image.

Some mind-blowing quotes (in 140 characters ;-):

The operating system for money is obsolete…
Abundance based currencies and monopoly based currencies…
Central Bank Monarch imprinted currencies are scarcity based currencies…
The money we use today was created so that rich people to stay rich by being rich (and lending) rather than doing anything…

Our economy is based on the growth of interest
The people lending money get richer, the people creating value are getting poorer
But, what happens if you get something that’s abundant ? That you can’t make scarce.
The computers and networks change the “centrality” of value creation
You are now able to exchange value directly between one another rather than through a centralized currency
Optimize human beings to technology
Technology is more compatible with the values of efficiency than with all the other human values
Now you’re open and free to Google-Ads
Web³ will be won by the power of those who can index and aggregate. Is that what we want ?
Open Source and Crowdsourcing are not the same things
This notion of “free” leads to a society of copying, to no creativity, to no originality, to DJ’ing of culture
The abundance of genuinely creative output is declining
What we need is the development of a digital culture that respects the labor of individuals
What we need is the creation of new modes of currency based on abundance rather than scarcity.
I am talking about the original PayPal dream before banks asked them to be regulated like… banks
The next BIG thing are from people who will create genuine alternative electronic currencies and P2P exchange that do not involve cash.
I am talking about primitive local currencies such as Timebanks, Itex, Superfluid’s Quids
Cash has already lost its utility value, as it has been sucked out into investment capital, in the speculative marketplace
The only real competition against a Google universe (and their ideas of openness – see last weeks Google Blog post about openness btw) would be peer to peer exchange
We are not suffering from an abundance of creativity, just from an abundance of productivity, efficiency and openness.
If Web² leads to aggregation and indexers, then genuine P2P will lead to bottom-up value creation.
The next era is not about scaling-up anymore, it’s about figuring out how to exchange value, in stead of extracting value.
We are at a crossroads: right now we have the opportunity to optimize our systems, technologies, currencies to humans in stead of optimizing humans to them.

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.

Social Volume Knob

Also all hyped up by “The Wisdom of Crowds” and “We are smarter than Me” ?

Time for some anti-dose 😉

Two articles about some recent studies done on this subject. One from ReadWriteWeb and one from MIT Technology Review. It’s again from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The author professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today’s web.

The articles speak for themselves, but what’s also interesting are the comments on the MIT article.

Some quotes:

I think that crowds are not wise and what we call Wisdom of Crowds is nothing else and not more than the Power of Diversity. This paper shows that it can be the Weakness of Diversity too.

The true critic is NOT motivated by money or the subjective personal biases of the non-critic. A true critic is motivated by the objective enhancement of the human experience through careful and educated examination of the subject at hand. We need more well-honed critical voices and less of the braying of the crowd. Crowd wisdom is built on a logical fallacy: just because a lot of people say it is so, doesn’t make it so.

Democractic Intelligence = FAIL.

OR this one is even better:

The conversation needs to be different when we are talking about social networks within an organization’s firewall. In that instance, it’s not about trusting the crowd’s wisdom. Rather, it’s about managing the community by knowing whose input should be trusted, along with managing and moderating the community. This must all be done in the context of how the community relates to business initiatives and the information assets of the organization. At our company, Inmagic, we call this the

"social volume knob."

As organizations roll out social technologies, they might want to start with the volume knob set "low" for certain classes of users. For example, some users might be allowed to tag one type of content, or other certain users can blog or comment.

Controversy ? Sure. What do you think ? Still 100% convinced of the Wisdom of Crowds ?

Innotribe @ Sibos: preparing for next year

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.

Innotribe @ Sibos – News Flash 9 – The Specials

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

In this 8^th 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

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 7^th 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:

Innotribe Dome (follow the signs Sibos Labs):
1. Keynotes on Mash-Ups: by innovation leaders on how this trend transforms their business.
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.

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The world enters into a complexity

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