I am just back from the #disruptiontour with tour leaders Peter Hinssen https://twitter.com/hinssen and Steven Van Belleghem https://twitter.com/StevenVBe, and flawlessly put together by tour organizer Ilse Debondt from Connected Visions (https://twitter.com/ConnectdVisions ).

The PDF of the full program can be found here: http://www.connectedvisions.eu/pdf/cvdtour_program2014.pdf

I have made two blog posts about this excellent study tour:

• “Highlights Disruption Tour” with a sequential overview of highlights per company visited (this post)
• “The Uberization of Everything”, a more holistic analysis and sensemaking effort of what I believe are the disruption understreams.

The tour started in the Bay Area on Monday 2 June 2014 with a visit to Google and ended on Friday 6 June 2014 at Scripps Research in San Diego.

In chronological order, please find below some highlights in telegram style with my 100% subjective views for which I am 100% responsible 😉

Google https://www.google.be/intl/en/about/

Google Play marketplace is cross platform. Focus on avoidance fragmentation Android platform. Focused on monetization developers, OEMs, Carriers, HW device manufacturers with “lead devices” launching new versions of android. “Interesting” to see that focus and monetization is on ecosystem, and not end customer. Trends: everything going mobile and multi-screen

Next:

• Android beyond phones and tablets’, TVs, cars and wearables
• Voice based search, and not only one way search but also leading into CONVERSATIONS
• Car display as remote display for your phone
• OS for the rest of the car, cars have much longer life cycles, how do we keep innovating?
• Wearables: same strategy of platform, specific versions of android, skimmed down versions
• Enterprise, “android at work”, with specific focus on security

Brand: speaker acknowledges that he does not know anymore what the Google brand is standing for…

Google Glass https://www.google.com/glass/start/

We had opportunity to “play” with Google Glass. Some disappointment as far as I am concerned. Needs much more value prop. Baffled that some folks pay 1,500 USD for this.

YouTube https://www.youtube.com

Metaphor Switzerland vs India: Switzerland, cost of entry high, lots of barriers, everybody follows the rules; India, the opposite: low cost of entry, less barriers, no rules. Video is like India. Astonishing volumes of videos on YouTube. YouTube is the new search for Millenials. Little control what is watched. Organize for variation. Cost of production and distribution drastically down. Biggest learning: from “audience” to “fan-base”. However, still talking in terms of “targeting the right adds to the right “audience”, not fans (sics) > not eating their own dog food

Khan Academy https://www.khanacademy.org

Mainly focused on math courses, some other categories emerging. Interesting: more focus on non-cognitive aspects coming: fear of math, fear of success, how to build confidence. Disrupting education: teachers become fellows/coaches

Tesla http://www.teslamotors.com

Wow! I was almost in a shock when entering the industrial the open office space (no pictures allowed inside) of Tesla in the ex-Toyota manufacturing plant. Really feels like pigeons in open cubicles. Before complaining about your open office space, first have a look at this one. From 600 to 6000 people in 3 years, and 6000 more this year. Presenter and head of supply chain: “The first 18 months were brutally tough”. The vehicle is a software platform, every car is a connected vehicle, over the air software upgrade of the vehicle. Burning 100m USD per quarter!!! Mission is about “transporting human beings” and caring about the customer: “somebody is looking after you” > we call them pro-actively in their car… “We want to transform the automotive industry into sustainable practices”

The key thing for Tesla is driving he revolution, self driving vehicles are coming much much faster, and the future is one of no combustion engines, self driving, full connected vehicles.

Biggest eye-opener: the people at Tesla are more proud and more engaged than the Google folks. Also here: fighting regulation of retail structure of dealerships, and fighting regulation requires deep pockets

23andMe https://www.23andme.com

Who gets money of making sure people do NOT getting sick. Towards “data ethical organizations” and personalised medicine. Google-like big data principles applied to genetics. FDA update: “FDA was more concerned with The INTERPRETATION of The data”. Embraced the process of FDA regulation > will be very beneficial for us!!! The only one standing FDA approved one… “going through the regulation process makes you stronger, but required deep pockets”. Research: ONE big aggregated database: shared (against fee) with pharma research, even with P&G > makes me feel very uncomfortable. Do I have the right to be forgotten in the aggregates data pool of 23andMe?

Paypal http://www.paypal.com

Mobile, mobile, mobile. Target, target, target. Get in, get out, any currency. Next target, move bodies and shopping. In shop cameras, sensors, real time, creepy. Fascinating how easy they say “what the heck, it’s cool…” shop more efficient, immediate satisfaction. Making payments invisible. ONE hour delivery in Manhattan.

Cross “method of value”, anything in, anything out. They were avoiding my question about supporting crypto-currencies, although their (now ex-) CEO Marcus seemed to open the door. Marcus is now with Facebook….. Online and offline. Blurring into the OFFLINE physical world

PayPal Beacon: It’s a tracking and checking device handsfree. “You have been “tagged”

Cross merchant payment profile: “It’s creepy but we will get over this”

Very nice showroom/lab: User experience looks more and more like “Spotification” of commerce information stream. Payment becomes invisible aspect of commerce experience

Palantir Technologies http://www.palantir.com

Had very high expectations. Awesome opening presentation by Ari Gersher, #9 non-founding employee of Palantir

• AI and chess: “weak human plus weak machine plus better interface beats the grandmaster”
• Human machine symbiosis
• Engineering all the friction between human and machine
• A “synergistic system” for decision making
• “Just works” experiences for enterprise, like what Apple did for consumer
• We can build Facebook in one day
• HR: Seniority does not encompass competence
• 40% is government work
• Data integration in 8 weeks in stead of 5 years, anecdote of McKinsey brain just incapable of taking in this sort of time disruption
• “Nuanced analysis” > love the vocabulary
• Have a philanthropic engineering team
• Do things not because the law, but because it is the right thing to do
• Working on changing IT purchasing in government
  • “We have learned that you don’t sell to a government, you sell to a budget”
• Great metaphor, comparing Hadoop to engine block and LeMans car race with team of 120 people…
• Doing UX is always hard: have team of 20 product designers for UX > UX is major capability for 21^st century

Demo section of visit was disappointing. A lot of the demo videos on their website are much more convincing. A missed opportunity for Palantir.

• Cyber crime demo, Turn around exploits in 4-6 hours, 1-2 TB per day digital exhaust
• Credit card processor demo: 100 billion data points, “fluid” data exploration, showing their Valhalla application

Singularity University http://singularityu.org

On NASA Research Park, Moffet Field. Old building. Glasses, drones, genome, and other over glorifications of technology and abundance. Missing the critical dialogue here. Referring to CIA TED video about ethics > how cynical can you get post Snowden? Interesting: spokesperson herself does not believe in a singularity one single moment… “Singularity University is not about the singularity and not a university”, another brand identification issue. Singularity University is also and incubation space for startups/companies. “lots of ethical stuff about all that, but… Anyway…“

Scanadu https://www.scanadu.com

Quick visit and chat with Samia from Scanadu, who have office in incubation space of Singularity University. Lots of issues to solve with regulators. Almost forgot the story/narrative of why Scanadu was started > narrative is so important

Coursera https://www.coursera.org

One of the highlights of this tour. Very impressive track record in only 2^nd year of existence. Quality education at scale. Peer assessment is as good as teacher assessment

• From lectures to high quality feedback loops
• From audience to fan-base
• From audience to peer-base

Specializations: Capstone project, apply in real world project. Sponsorships by corporates for specific curriculum possible

Stanford Faculty Club panel discussion http://facultyclub.stanford.edu

About corporate Labs/Outposts in Silicon Valley. Btw: Vodaphone just closed their InnoLab in Silicon Valley

Panel discussion introduced by Mark Zawacki http://www.650labs.com/team-member/mark-zawacki/ of http://www.650labs.com with Todd Schofield from Standard Chartered Bank Studios and Ursula Oesterle from Swisscom

• Todd also spearheads a group of 20 banks that have presence in Silicon Valley
• Swisscom have 4 people, most rotating, projects-based, looking into foresights, insights, actions

o   Common themes

• Corporate needs to sell to startup and not the other way around
• Stop, go, stop, go,….you lab activities: the worst things you can do to your brand and reputation
• Remote silicon valley labs only work if you have high quality alignment at exec level

Ripple Labs https://www.ripplelabs.com

Presented by the awesome Patrick Griffin, who was at Innotribe Sibos 2013 in Dubai last year.

Excellent presentation:

• Peer to peer exchange of currency
• It is a settlement system, it is not a payment system
• Bitcoin is single currency Ledger (the currency is Bitcoin), Ripple is multi-currency

Ripple is attacking the correspondent banking space.

Ripple super-sweet for SWIFT, talking about “complementarity” although difficult to believe this is not disruptive for SWIFT. Positioning Ripple as “complementary” to SWIFT. Sending swift messages on top of the ripple layer.

StockTwits http://stocktwits.com

Founder (now Chairman) Howard Lindzon was already at Innotribe Sibos in Toronto in 2011. I know it’s a great company, but our presenter was Chris Corriveau (CTO), who apparently just left the company.. Interesting to see other end of spectrum of somebody who has run out of energy and motivation. Had lot of funding: “4M here, 4M there….”, Lots of funding, but no clear direction: “Throw stuff and see what sticks “. New CEO comes from media, stock tweets seen as media. Personal aha moment: “Social IS media”

EvoNexus http://www.commnexus.org/evonexus/

No strings attached high tech incubator Www.commnexus.org. 30 startups now in incubation. “Wet lab, dry lab” > only dry labs. Started in 2009.

Feeling of me too old, they too young

Here is their International Business Development Manager

What’s special? Free for startups. Tough to get in. No board seat, no equity, and no legal oversight. Can kick you out if no progress shown. All buildings owned by Irvine Company, largest property owner in California. Provide this completely free, growing next generation of tenants. “An engineer can always reinvent himself, a banker not”

Liked the Timeline for managing the startups

Janssens Labs (Johnson and Johnson) http://www.janssenrnd.com/our-innovation/partnerships/janssen-labs-at-san-diego

Without doubt the absolute highlight of this tour.

Wow, what a campus!!!! Corporate Credo in welcome hall. See PDF version here: http://www.jnj.com/sites/default/files/pdf/jnj_ourcredo_english_us_8.5x11_cmyk.pdf Here is an extract:

Our host is Diego Miralles, Global Head Innovation at Janssen. Very impressive. Walks into room, says hello, and gets right into the subject, and entertains audience for 1 ½ hour without slides. Absolute magic!

• Story of Janssen Labs is story of shared infrastructure
• Life sciences is very different from tech, you need a lot of infrastructure, highly regulated, etc > so many parallels with financial sector
• “we should all be humble , there are a lot of smart people in the world”
• Money in healthcare is almost exclusively made in the presence of disease > this business is highly dysfunctional
• The current system of medicine is based on healer having all the knowledge and the recipient
• The system is so vested, the problem is not technical, it is societal
• The idea of fee for service in this business is the problem, based in volume, based on keeping the status quo of the system > a lot of parallels with financial services
• The regulator is not evolving: too much focus on preventing harm vs. enabling progress
• We a getting old too > you have to refill your organization with mentally young healthy minds for sustained innovation
• Beware of entitlement

Qualcomm http://www.qualcomm.com

This was new territory for me. Huge campus, huge company. Qualcomm can best be summarized as “the Intel for Mobile”? 5B USD last year in R&D. Vibrant partner ecosystem, like Microsoft, but for device design. 4 focus areas: energy, infrastructure, transportation, government. Look at things that are IP-addressable . 8B smartphones to be shipped 2014-2018. Smart Cities Connectivity has to be heterogeneous. Thinking through the longevity of connectivity. Decision making in cities is a mess: 40 different city departments making decisions about city connectivity. Also in Cars and in metering. Cities getting afraid of being punished for NOT doing anything with the data collected. Interesting how longevity of infrastructure is so important in this business 

Qualcomm Museum Tour http://www.qualcomm.com/about/buildings/museum

First Kindle is in museum as item #30. In overview of smartphones, the timeline starts in the year 2000

Scripps Research http://www.scripps.edu

When we came in, we all got a copy of the book “Creative Destruction of Medecine”, just to set the scene 😉

First part of presentation was relatively basic with Airbnb, Uber, Mobile, etc. Surprised to hear that 40 USD for a 15 min doctor appointment is seen here as progress. Key message: monitoring you see today in hospital emergency room will soon be available on your wrist: blood pressure, ECG, Physical exam, house calls can now all be done with mobile device.

End

This was just a chronological overview of the Disruption Tour. See also my blog post “The Uberization of Everything” for some transversal sensemaking.

Some years ago, when Facebook “only” had 356M users, I remember Marc Zuckerberg saying:

“… changing the privacy options of 356M users overnight, that’s not something everybody would do. Well, we decided to do it, and to decide what are the social norms.”

 

But who decides those social norms?

In my opinion it’s not normal or desirable that we leave those decisions to powerhouses with commercial interests like Facebook, Google, or any other “siren servers” like your health insurance company, your bank, your retailer, or even your government. These norms should be given back to the commons, with equal rights, obligation and benefits for all parties in the data-ecosystem, from providers of services and products, to data-intermediaries, and including the end-users.

“Siren servers” was a term coined by Jaron Lanier in his seminal book “Who owns the Future?” It reminded me of the master-slave relationship spelled out by Doc Searls, the godfather of VRM (Vender Relationship Management). With VRM users get the tools to decide what data they want to share with whom in what particular transaction context. In other words, the opposite of CRM, where the goal of the product/service provider is to collect as much as possible information/data about the customer in order to be able to “shoot” as good as possible products, services, and ads to the “target” “consumer”. This is a language of war. This is a language of slavery.

To put things into perspective, I recommend all of you to watch the fantastic BBC video series “The Century of the Self” by Adam Curtis. It’s four hours of video, but if you only watch episode-1, you will get the hang of it.

It’s the story of the invention of PR, or maybe better “propaganda”, as a set of techniques to appeal to the immediate satisfaction of the conscious and unconscious needs of the “target” audience, who is deemed not smart enough to think for itself, or worse, an attempt to suppress any dissenting voices that may challenge the status quo of those who are in power.

We are not only becoming data slaves of those siren servers, but we are also becoming slaves of their invisible algorithms. That, combined with the recent revelations of mass surveillance by our own governments, leads to a very unhealthy environment with very little privacy and freedom of speech/thought is left, both online and offline.

We are in urgent need of finding a new balance between privacy, transparency, shelter, censorship, propaganda, governance, regulation, oversight, surveillance, co-veillance, sous-veillance, trust and even human intimacy.

To get a good sense of how bad it gets, I strongly recommend Glenn Greenwald’s “No place to hide”, and Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother”, which was very recently put on the black list of some schools in the US, because the ideas in the book would incentivize young people to revolt and rebel against the power in place, against the accepted social norms.

Or listen to Bruce Schneier in this TEDxCambrigde talk on “Trust in Networks”, where he explains how we have put our trust in “Feudal Lords”, who are betraying our trust for profit. That feudal model is based on power. The feudal lords have created the utopia/illusion of the Internet: that we have given power to the masses and unpowered the governments.

“It does not work this way”, says Schneier, “on the contrary it magnifies power, because there are huge asymmetries in power, disorganizing the initially more agile groundswell movements, and letting the initially slower institutions catch up quickly through sheer computer power and science, and thus fast becoming more effective than the nimble and quick.”

Feudal lords should get responsibilities as well as rights.

There should be limitations on what vendors can do with our data and public scrutiny on the rules by which we are judged by our data.

More Bruce Schneier thinking in this Atlantic piece from Oct 2013:

“Medieval feudalism was a hierarchical political system, with obligations in both directions. Lords offered protection, and vassals offered service. The lord-peasant relationship was similar, with a much greater power differential. It was a response to a dangerous world. Feudal security consolidates power in the hands of the few.”

Or Kevin Kelly in March 2014 in Wired:

“So our central choice now is whether this surveillance is a secret, one-way panopticon — or a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers. The first option is hell, the second redeemable.”

“So while a world of total surveillance seems inevitable, we don’t know if such a mode will nurture a strong sense of self, which is the engine of innovation and creativity — and thus all future progress. How would an individual maintain the boundaries of self when their every thought, utterance, and action is captured, archived, analyzed, and eventually anticipated by others?”

I went back to my history books – these days on Wikipedia – and tried to find out what happened in the medieval era when feudal lords misused their power.

What happens then is revolt and rebellion, what happens then is revolution and take back of control.

In 1215, the Barons and the Servants rebelled against King John, and that revolt led to the signature of the Magna Carta, that was the basis of our current democracy.

I used this metaphor in the first version of my talk “The upcoming revolution of the data slaves” at the Nov 2013 Future Trends event in Los Angeles, echoing Bruce Schneier’s call for the need of a new Magna Carta. And in March 2014, nobody less than Tim Berners Lee himself repeated this need for a new on-line Magna Carta.

But what would be the basis and fundamentals of such Magna Carta? To know, we may want to have a look in one of the fundamental changes happening in full sight, but not getting enough attention.

It was technology and trends researcher Michel Zappa, who really got my attention when he published his work on “The Future of Money”. The key insight was that we are at a tipping point in the transition from centralized to decentralized to fully distributed models, architectures, topologies and the associated shifts in power.

Zappa’s study focused on the impact of this shift on the future of money and the appearance of decentralized currencies like Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies. But in my opinion, this shift is not only relevant for virtual currencies, but more importantly leading to a whole new set of technical protocols that enable a fully decentralized sharing of any data between millions – of not trillions – if we think Internet of Things – independent nodes on the grid.

We are evolving towards infrastructure that is owned by the nodes, owned by the commons.

To get a good feel of what’s next, check out the Ethereum Project, with Vitalik Buterin as one of the 20 year old founders. By adding a scripting language on top of the Bitcoin protocol, Ethereum is laying the basis of an lego-brick architecture for financial services based on the shared ledger.

What if we could extend these models to people self-tracking themselves, maintain a ledger and blockchain memory of their life, and letting the next generation issue their own currencies and becoming themselves their “truest source of data”

And once having established this “truest source of data” what mechanisms could we put in place to let the people – the independent nodes – control the sharing of their data, whilst preserving their rights on privacy? And what would privacy mean in such a word?

It depends on whom you ask, because privacy – just like identity – is something highly contextual.

Andrew Keen talks about “the right to have a secret” in Digital Vertigo. John Havens from the Happathon Project talks about “user’s preferences and control of sharing” vs. “looking after the rights of data brokers”

I agree:

it is not about what we want to hide, but what we want to share 

Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, explained in her publication “Privacy by design” that privacy is about control, not about keeping secrets. “Privacy does not equal secrecy of personal data, it equates to individual control of one’s data.”

And Cory Doctorow feels that “Privacy doesn’t mean that no one in the world knows about your business. It means that you get to choose who knows about your business.”

I would like to add that “The meaning of the word privacy includes shelter” paraphrasing architect Frank Lloyd Wright “The meaning of the word shelter includes privacy” when reflecting on Philip Johnson’s fully transparent Glass House from 1948.

Just think about this metaphor in the context of today’s mass surveillance revelations and how it would “feel” to live in such hyper-transparent environment.

Like identity, privacy and sharing of data are highly contextual.

Today, people are not really involved in the data collection that is what is wrong. The consent model is broken. We need to re-build trust with our consumers beyond consent at data collection.

I would dare to go further than trust and call for a deep sense of intimacy in our evolution towards a higher ambition for quality in our personal and business relationships. I would like to hope that “Intimacy is the new black”. The data-relationship economy needs to be more human, and needs context of what wealth really means. It is about the deeper self.

Way back, Carl Jung was already making the distinction between the external self and the real self, and how our identity has been instigated by archetypes and mythologies that have formed our species’ mental DNA over many thousands of years. So far, we “only” share some aspects of our external self on Facebook and alike. But don’t touch my archetype, my real self, what really drives me subconsciously, based on this Darwinian evolution of our mental selves.

Jennifer Sertl called this an identity crisis:

“I believe we are all in an identity crisis. A crisis between nature and technology, a crisis between capitalism and collaboration, a crisis between big data and intuition, and finally a crisis between influencer seduction and our own solo voice.”

So where is all this leading us?

Some weeks ago, the moderator of a panel on privacy asked the following question: “How can data be used responsibly and non-intrusively when marketing a product/ Service?” I believe the question is somewhat outdated 😉

It is not anymore about pushing out and “marketing” (like in propaganda) products and services. I think we are moving from marketing a product/service to users intent-casting their needs. I believe we are evolving towards a new set of Trust Frameworks for peer-to-peer data sharing. I believe that – like already the case in some cryptocurrencies – we will need to provide the users the possibility of a “scaling” their data sharing, controlled and “tuned-on-a-scale” by the user.

In summary, the biggest revolution in my opinion is the advent of peer-to-peer network topologies and business models. We are moving from a centralized to a fully distributed model, with a new type of architecture, a new business model, new governance, and even a new meta-morality, where it is not good enough anymore to do what is legal but to do what is ethically right. We are evolving from a “century of me” towards a “century of we”. (I already reserved the domain http://www.centuryofwe.com and “Century of We” is another upcoming post on this site 😉

The Century of We

That revolution is coming. In November 2013, my audience was asking “when?” and I answered “in 2014”.

Today, I can be more precise: the privacy revolution starts today on 23 June 2014, when Respect Network will launch globally at the start of their worldwide launch tour in London’s City Hall. It will be my privilege to be one of their guests this evening and one of the keynote speakers at the subsequent event tomorrow 24 June 2014, in my capacity of independent thinker, creator and sensemaker.

The Revolution of the Data Slaves starts today. Join the revolution and co-shape the next Internet with privacy and respect. Own your digital future. Join Respect Network and be one of the first million members to co-own the infrastructure for future privacy.

Take back control.

Disclosure: I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and earlier this year decided to become an (modest) investor in the Series-A funding round of Respect Network.

It’s been six years since we launched Innotribe@Sibos, and we have put together a comprehensive programme covering a range of topics crucial to the future of the financial industry. A powerful mix of world experts in engaging keynote sessions, in-depth case studies and interactive immersive discussions, and of course the Innotribe Startup Challenge 2014 Grand Finale.

As usual, our content curators have explored the edges of our ecosystem, giving you a sneak preview of developments that have the potential to impact or even disrupt our industry in 3-5 years. Remember: Cloud, Mobile, and Social were already on the Innotribe agenda in 2009, and many of these topics have now moved mainstream.

The tagline of Innotribe at Sibos 2014 is “Building Bridges”: bridges between the core and the non-core, bridges between the disruptors and the incumbents, between what’s happening at Innotribe and the rest of the Sibos conference, bridges between the InnoTRIBE Space and our presence on the exhibition floor with our brand new InnoTRIBE Stand.

The overall theme of this year’s Innotribe at Sibos is “Network Disruptions” We will explore the move from centralised to decentralised to fully distributed networks and how these network dynamics cause a phase-change of innovation and radical disruption at an ever-faster pace and scale. With thought leaders from our Innotribe network, we will assess the impact on the financial industry, with a specific focus on the payments, securities and investment management verticals.

Our design principle this year is “depth”: in stead of scattered subjects throughout the week, we’d like to spend a full day on one particular theme, look at it from all angles, and offer advanced sensemaking and reflection for the financial industry.

Innotribe at Sibos 2014 will run over four days, each day focused on a particular set of phase-changes, disruptions and innovations:

• Monday 29 Sep 2014: Disruption and Opportunities of Cryptocurrencies
• Tuesday 30 Sep 2014: Network Effects – Towards a 21^st Century Networked Organization
• Wednesday 1 Oct 2014: Innovation Capabilities and Grand Finale Innotribe Startup Challenge 2014
• Thursday 2 Oct 2014: Federation of the Fintech Innovation Ecosystem

Most of the sessions will happen in the InnoTRIBE Space:

• A space designed where people come alive, with multiple stages, and physical bridges to make the connections happen.
• Overlaid with an non-intrusive digital layer, with direct feedback loops, almost real-time production of video snippets, and live production of infographics, leading to a knowledge repository for you to take back home your learning.
• And for the first time ever, we will Live Stream the whole event, in a way that you never saw Live Streaming before

We are biased of course, but we believe we have once more re-defined what an “event” is. Our ambition has never been higher:

“We are not in the events business; we are in the business of creating high quality feedback loops to enable immersive learning experiences.”

Program overview

http://www.sibos.com/conference/conference-programme/2014?field_session_stream_tid%5B%5D=203&op=Filter

Day-1 (Monday 29 Sep 2014): Disruption and Opportunities of Cryptocurrencies

Location: InnoTRIBE Space

Bitcoin has been the talk of the town in 2013/2014. We will offer critical conversations about the currency, the asset class, and the technical protocols. We aim to include an impact assessment of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on the core business of correspondent banking, and highlight some VC investment strategies and drivers. Cryptocurrencies represent another cataclysmic shift that is real and here to stay: will financial institutions ignore this phase-change, or will they hopefully embrace for the greater interest for the industry and the customers it serves?

A mix of keynote sessions and interactive learning experiences spread of four sessions on cryptocurrencies:

• Future of Money
• Regulation
• Disruption
• Disruption, Big Banks and VCs

Confirmed speakers include:

• Gottfried Leibbrandt, CEO SWIFT
• Believers: Jon Matonis, Executive Director & Board Member, Bitcoin Foundation
• Skeptics: Jem Bendell, Professor and Director of IFLAS and WEF Young Global Leader
• Disruptors: Chris Larsen (Co-founder and CEO of Ripple Labs), Jeremy Allaire (Founder and CEO, Circle Internet Financial), Scott Millar (Founder & CEO Cryex), Marcus Swaenepoel (Co-founder and CEO Switchless), Yoni Assia (CEO eToro and Board member Israel Bitcoin Association)
• Sensemakers: Richard Gendal Brown (Executive Architect for Industry Innovation, Banking and Financial Markets, IBM UK), Marc Hochstein (Executive Editor American Banker), Udayan Goyal (Founder Anthemis Group), Chris Skinner (Chairman, The Financial Services Club, Author of Digital Bank), Dan Marovitz (CEO Faculty of 1000 Ltd, former Managing Director, Head of Product Management, Global Transaction Banking Deutsche Bank)
• Regulation, Stan Stalnaker (Member of the Board, Digital Asset Transfer Authority (DATA), Founder Hub Culture / Ven Currency), Adam Shapiro (Director Promontory Financial Group), Dirk Haubrich (Head of Consumer Protection and Financial Innovation, European Banking Authority EBA, via Skype) and Anne Shere Wallwork (Senior Counselor for Strategic Policy, Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes – U.S. Department of the Treasury)
• Visionaries: Vitalik Buterin, Founder of the Ethereum Project, Dan Elitzer and Jeremy Rubin, Co-creators of the MIT Bitcoin Project.
• Investors: Barry Silbert (Founder Secondmarket and Creator Bitcoin Investment Trust)
• Financial Institutions: Ebru Pakcan (Managing Director, Head of Global Payments, Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions), and Mark Buitenhek (Global Head Transaction Services at ING), Lee Fulmer (CTO, Global Head of Cash Management at JP Morgan), Gautam Jain (Managing Director and Global Head of Client Access, Standard Chartered Bank)

At the end of the day, we will transform the InnoTRIBE Space into an Innotribe Movie lounge – with popcorn – for a film screening of a brand new film on Bitcoin from the Trebeka film festival.

Day-2 (Tuesday 30 Sep 2014): Network Effects: Towards a 21^st Century Networked Organization

Location: InnoTRIBE Space

What are the mechanisms driving network dynamics versus more linear models? How do speed and scale of disrupt everything, from HR, to innovation, software and hardware deployment, platform thinking and a revamped definition of work? What’s the impact on architecture, governance, and security when millions of devices will join the conversation?

A mix of keynote sessions and interactive learning experiences spread over five sessions:

• The Network always wins
• From Hierarchies to Wierarchies
• Platform thinking
• APIs
• Ecosystem Innovation

Confirmed speakers:

• Peter Hinssen (Thought leader and Co-founder of NexxWorks): keynote “The Network always Wins”
• Mickey McManus (Chairman @ Principal MAYA Design): when Trillions join the conversation
• Jon Husband (Founder, Wierarchy)
• Celine Schillinger (Charter Member, Change Agents Worldwide LLC and Senior Director, Stakeholder Engagement Sanofi, 2013 French Woman’s Award by La Tribune)
• Sangeet Paul Choudary (Founder and Managing Director, Platform Thinking Labs)
• Haydn Shaughnessy (Author and Consultant on platform-based transformation and innovation/ Owner, Bearing-Cogenuity Research)
• John Sheldon (SVP, Group Head of Innovation Management, MasterCard)
• Ann Badillo (Entrepreneur in Residence, T2 Venture Creation) on Ecosystems
• Todd Johnston (Entrepreneur in Residence, T2 Venture Creation) on Ecosystems

Evening: informal Innotribe speakers dinner in the sky, on one of the conference bridges that will be transformed in a lounge area (by invitation).

Day-3 AM (Wednesday 1 Oct 2014): Innovation Capabilities for the 21st Century

Location: InnoTRIBE Space

In this session we will discuss the Innovation Capabilities needed by organisations to succeed in the 21st century. We will look at cross-industry Innovation Indices/Benchmarks based on both input and the output of the innovation process.

Confirmed speakers:

• Haydn Shaughnessy (Author and Consultant on platform-based transformation and innovation/ Owner, Bearing-Cogenuity Research)

Day-3 PM (Wednesday 1 Oct 2014):Innotribe Startup Challenge 2014

Location: InnoTRIBE Space

For sure one of the climax moments of this year’s edition, the now famous Innotribe Startup Challenge 2014 Grand Finale, showcases the 15 finalists from our regional showcases in London, Singapore and New York. Sponsored this year by HP, SAP, Invest Northern Ireland, Level 39, and SWIFT.

New this year is that we have tagged the startups that applied to the Startup Challenge in order to highlight new trends that are affecting the financial service industry.

We will use this information to understand what threats and opportunities are currently in the financial service industry space and identify the areas where the startups are innovating these days.

Followed by a reception and celebration of the winners.

Day-4 (Thursday 2 Oct 2014): The federation of the Fintech innovation ecosystem

Location: InnoTRIBE Space

On day-4, we create a true federation of as many as possible movers and shakers of the Fintech ecosystem.

With keynotes, interactive sessions and informal conversations, we hope to give an overview of the successes, lessons learned, challenges and opportunities in the Fintech innovation ecosystem.

We plan to gather the who’s who of the Fintech innovation scene:

• Heads of Innovation of the major financial institutions
• Fintech accelerators, incubators, and bootcamps
• Innotribe and other Startup communities
• Angel Investors, Venture Capitalists and Captive Funds from some major financial institutions.

A mix of keynote sessions and interactive learning experiences spread over four sessions:

• Captive Funds
• Reverse Pitching
• Ties Bank vs Facebook Bank with Innovate Finance
• Topical Speed Networking
• Closing ceremony Innotribe

To kick-off day-4 we have gathered the top captive funds in one session starting on 2 Oct at 09:30 am, and moderated by Tony Fish, Founder AMF Ventures:

• Vanessa Colella, Director Citi Ventures
• Christophe Chazot, New Group Head of Innovation, HSBC
• Derek White, Chief Design Officer, Barclays
• Matteo Rizzi, General Partner, Sberbank SBT Venture Capital
• Julio Faura, Head of R&D and Innovation, Banco Santander
• Manual Silva Martinez, Vice-President BBVA Ventures

More to follow on day-4

All days: Startup Alumni Stand

Location: InnoTRIBE Stand (next to the main SWIFT stand)

Throughout the Sibos week, we are welcoming you in our wonderful Startup Alumni Village/Satellite/Stand on the exhibition floor: we’ll have a focus on the Alumni of the Innotribe Startup Challenge.

Winners of previous years will have a chance to:

• Present their offerings to the Sibos audience
• Have private conversations “Office Hours” with interested financial institutions and investors.

Bookstore and Publications

We’ll have a Bookstore corner in our InnoTRIBE Space, including:

• The 2014 Innotribe/Informilo Magazine, a glossy publication reflecting the Innotribe program, startups, and federated ecosystem. Advertising and sponsoring options still available.
• Books and essays published by our speakers, and opportunity for signing by the authors.
• A curated set of other non-commercial publications, research documents, and innovation whitepapers (please let us know if you have a publication you would like to share for free in the InnoTRIBE Space)

We are super excited by the brainpower and insights we bring together in this 2014 edition of Innotribe at Sibos.

The Innotribe Team @innotribe

Written by @petervan, Executive Producer, Architect and Content Curator Innotribe@Sibos

HOLD THE DATE May 30 – 31: 24-hour online rebel jam

Only creative rebel thinkers would hold a free, online 24-hour Rebel Jam with new speakers, inspiring entertainment and provocative discussions every hour, with hosts from Europe, North America and Asia.

There’s such a global groundswell of interest in how rebels can positively change business, government, education, healthcare and the world itself, that we thought it was time for rebels to share their stories and practices with as many people in the world as possible, in the easiest, least expensive way.

All you’ll need is to be able to connect to the Internet and clear your calendar.  Thanks to the generosity of Cisco, which is providing WebEx technology to us, we are able to do this jam free of charge.

You can tune in any time – or all 24 hours if you’re one of the crazy ones – to learn from thought leaders and Rebels about:

• What are the big shifts that require our organizations to respond in fundamentally different ways to achieve dramatically higher levels of velocity
• What has helped Rebels to be successful?
• Set backs and obstacles Rebels experienced and how they’ve navigated through them.
• Habits that help them stay creative, positive and respected.

There will be time after each speaker for questions and conversations to encourage as much learning and camaraderie as possible in an online way. We’ll also be inviting performers and artists to share and perform their work with us to fill our rebel spirits, and just have some fun.

The conference kicks off on May 30 at noon in Europe/6 a.m. North America East Coast; 3 a.m. North America Pacific, and 8 p.m. Sydney.

If you’re interested in speaking or performing, please contact Peter (p.vanderauwera@gmail.com) from Corporate Rebels United or Lois Kelly (lkelly@foghound.com) from Rebels at Work. We will soon reach out to thought leaders, rebels, and performers and provide an updated 24h schedule of activities.

So for the time being, HOLD THE DATES!

24h Rebels Jam: a joint initiative of Corporate Rebels United and Rebels At Work

Our Innotribe flight 876 from Bangkok to the hyper-connected future landed on schedule on 27 April at 17:30pm local time. It was quite a flight with lots of turbulences.

It was one of the first times that we designed an event with a metaphor end-to-end. Our metaphor was that of a flight. We had some nice gimmicks like a boarding pass, seats lined up like in an aircraft, security video and seat pocket flyer.

But more importantly, we made sure we took our passengers on a journey, from check-in, taxiing, takeoff, cruising altitude, approach landing: building up the content slice by slice, and not slide by slide.

We had expected more people to attend the Innotribe 2-day flight. And we tested the agility and adaptability of our team to deal with this by making in-flight changes to the program. We scaled down day-1 to a “private jet” flight, and day-2 into a new format “Innotribe Unplugged”. I made a separate blog post some days ago on how our team is exploring the limits.

With hindsight, I believe we touched this way on some of the “irreducibles” of Innotribe events.

• I believe “intimacy” is our real secret sauce. That’s why we created the Innotribe space as a no-tie zone
• Create immersive learning experiences
• Our ability to create tribes and groupies, whatever size of the audience, and the qualities of our team, as Mark Pesce @mpesce described them in a kudos mail:

“It was wonderful working with people so passionate, intelligent, driven and creative.  We covered a huge amount of territory in two days – a round the world tour.”

The lack of attendees was made good by a genius move by Matteo @matteorizzi to convince the Asian Banker Summit organization to run their closing session in our Innotribe space.

If you cannot bring innotribe to the plenary, bring the plenary to innotribe

It felt like a complete take-over of the Asian Banker Summit, and to take some perspective here – if I listen to the words of Emmanuel Daniel @EmmanuelDaniel – the Asian Banker Summit will never be the same again. We are with Innotribe Bangkok where we were with Innotribe at Sibos in Hong-Kong 3 years ago. Everybody knows how the Innotribe-way has made in-roads and impact on the overall Sibos event. Expect something similar with Asian Banker Summit in the next 3 years.

Disruptions:

William Saito @whsaito gave us his insights in Innovation in Asia. I specifically liked his distinction between “incremental” innovation and “entrepreneurial” innovation, where the latter addresses NEW markets.

This nicely dovetails with my “levels of disruption” of my TEDxNewWallStreet talk of 11 March 2012. That talk is now on-line on YouTube. I was supposed to give a tailored version of this talk in Bangkok, but we decided to drop it as part of the in-flight changes.

The biggest disruption over these 2 days was witnessing the end of highly vertical (financial or other) organizations and the emergence of a new type of organization where horizontal sourcing of point functionalities – exposed through APIs – becomes the norm.

The following slide out of Petervan’s API presentation should scare the hell out of bankers.

As most of my readers know, the original version of this slide (I saw a version already 2 years ago) comes from Sean Park from Anthemis Group, who did a great “Re-inventing Finance” presentation (Feb 23, 2012) on this specific subject during the LIFT#12 conference this year in Geneva. The slide above is part of that talk, and has evolved a lot since. Recommended viewing!

We are all nodes in a grid

Hidden, as another metaphor in the whole Bangkok program was the comparison between the cells, synapses and electric signals in the brain, and the entities, functions and API’s in a value chain/ecosystem. I have written about this recently in “The Programmable Me: we are all nodes in the grid”

In Bangkok, our flight plan took us first through some basic concepts of this topology, and gradually added evolution of message types (request/response and event signals), identity of the entities in the graph, the choreography/dance of the nodes, collaboration and expression and finally cultural differences and appreciations.

One specific theme was on visibility, by Eiji Hagiwara from Mitsui & Co, himself a proficient airplane and helicopter pilot. He used airplane navigation systems as a metaphor for visibility in value chains.

Our ad-hoc McKinsey consultant Luc Meurant, added additional perspectives from corporates in the financial corporate to bank value chain:

In addition to visibility, what corporates are looking for are predictability, action, and independence

It suddenly became clear to me we are witnessing the birth of a fractal value system, almost layered but probably more like a Spiral Dynamics construct.

The “zooms” into the fractal are different layers of human and agent organization such as individuals, teams, tribes, companies, and ecosystems. It’s similar to the Second Economy of Brian Arthur, but where Brian Arthur focuses on the machine artifacts underlying the real economy, I am trying to point at the human artifacts and levels of organizations.

The consultant matrix

As we were preparing the event and the input for our scribers, I hit by accident on what I would call a typical two-dimensional consultant matrix:

On the horizontal axe, we have the elements that are subject of measurement, almost the fractal levels of the previous paragraph: organization as a whole, inward-looking and outward looking. Inward to people, teams and internal processes. Outward to external nodes (customers, suppliers, developers, etc) and external processes and value chains. (Although I feel “Chain” is too much of a flat-landers word, too two-dimensional)

On the vertical axis, we have the dimensions of measurement or the KPIs. During the Bangkok session, we saw emerging:

• The 7 key KPI’s for assessing the readiness of organizations for the hyper-connected future/reality
  • Situational awareness
  • Reputation
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Adoption rate
  • Openness
  • Connectedness
  • Q-curve about asking enough and relevant questions
• There are many other possible KPIs: Idea generation, Fitness and Vitality, Autonomy, Agility, Resilience to adapt, Responsiveness, Tolerance, REducing/INTROducing frictions, Openness, Autonomy, Visibility, Connectedness, Enablement of competitors, Density of your eco-system, Sensing, and Purposefulness.

Taxi drivers are the smartest people on earth

The whole discussion of hyper-connected companies, and especially the story of Uber taxi, made me reflect deeply on the role of the old taxi company as a dispatching service.

The dispatching role itself was in essence the friction in the system, and the dispatching service became completely obsolete when the nodes (in this case taxi drivers and their customers) started talking to each other via API’s (in this was built into iPhone apps).

Every company should assess whether it is reducing frictions, or whether it is introducing frictions. This friction (less)-rule not only applies to organizations and functions but also to people and events.

But be aware, there are some “irreducible” frictions. Mark Pesce identifies 6 of them, all starting with a “T”. Here is how Mark Pesce describes the 6 “Ts”:

No matter how ‘smooth’ and frictionless hyper-connected commerce becomes, certain frictions in the business world will persist.  These represent both speed humps and opportunities.  The businesses of the 21st century will find leverage and differentiation by identifying and exploiting them.

 

1. Time – If it were done when it were done, twere well done quickly;
2. Territory – you can’t be everywhere at once;
3. Talent – some people are naturally better at it than others;
4. Trust – is rarely immediately conferred, instead growing from a continuing relationship, and must exist for commerce to succeed;
5. Tongue – language barriers persist until we all speak Globish.
6. Tension – frictions in teams between humans

Identity

I have already spent significant time on my blog on the topic of digital identity and digital assets. Check-out my post on “The programmable me: we are all nodes in the grid”.

In Bangkok, we started the journey from SWIFT’s recent 3SKey offering, and through a choreography and theater play, we illustrated how 3SKey solved the friction of multiple tokens, but does not solve the friction that customer and personal data information is being kept locked in silos.

We moved on to the concepts of the Digital Spectrum and the Digital Asset Grid. And we had an exercise for the Innotribe participants to identity frictions solved/unsolved and opportunities for financial institutions in this data services space.

Artwork by Kosta Peric (@copernicc)

I am very grateful for the feedback:

• Answering the question of frictions and opportunities is difficult, if not impossible without the context of a use case
• There is a key role for SWIFT standardization in the semantics of digital assets to be exchanged
• The Digital Asset Grid is like oil on fire. Once the API’s of the infrastructure are opened-up, there will be a wildfire or data services popping up, offered by banks ànd competitors of banks.

But there is no way back. The only way to be agile in this hyper-connected future is to choose radically for 100% openness, leveraging the skills of the crowd-sourced community, and opening up even to competitors. Exactly like Amazon did: they have made their infrastructure indispensible for the operation of the Internet. When Amazon went down last year, it became clear that 40% of Internet services were running from AWS.

The concept of the programmable me is just a start. We are clearly evolving into a world where all entities are recording ànd sharing everything of what is going on.

I case you need to be convinced, have a look at some of the latest developments:

Placeme, built by Alohar Mobile, simply records everything in the background. Robert Scobleizer recently posted this 32-minute video with Alohar Mobile’s founder, Sam Liang, to get a complete description of the app. I recommend watching the entire conversation, but if you skip to the 2:40 mark, you’ll see Liang show you where he’s been and what he’s done for the past day, as captured automatically by Placeme.

Or check-out this short video from MIT project P.A.U.S.E.S. , where portable computing is now ubiquitous, and has been a key factor in fueling the explosion of social networking. These guys are exploring the projecting a better version of ourselves through edited sharing of our lives.

Don’t be surprised to see more and more of the “tricorder” functionality coming up in next versions of Siri on Apple iPhone 6 later this year.

It is clear that for this short of sharing of digital assets and footprints or even better “footstreams”, there will be a need for a Trust Framework, and some level of standardization of the semantic in this space.

If you are interested in more on this topic, follow my curation on Scoop.it

Organizational Fitness and Vitality

Just when everybody more or less got it that we are talking here about a real-time sharing of signals between all sort of nodes in the grid through APIs etc, we injected a first turbulence into our flight.

Guibert Englebienne @guibert did a fascinating talk/ignition on Corporate Fitness, focusing on the body of the organization. Guibert talked about the corporate fitness of Globant.com and the their clients, and as the day progressed with discussing the KPI’s, I wondered how much of these internal measurements Guibert would be ready to share with his customers and other stakeholders. We also had some interesting thoughts on what companies would have the guts to publish a real-time leadership satisfaction index based on the crowd-sourced results of assessments by staff. That would be quite some innovative form of transparency!

Artwork by Kosta Peric (@copernicc)

Jennifer Sertl @jennifersertl is all about corporate “soul”, the mind-complement of the body. Jennifer inspired us all with the 3 R’s of Agility: Resilience, Responsiveness and reflection.

It became clear for me that the 3 R’s both play at company and individual level. Jennifer wrote a book about it, where she explains that the real magic happens when the individual and company value prisms are aligned. But these are fairly abstract concepts, and to ensure that all participants internalized these through an immersive learning experience, we let them play casino-game, letting everybody fill in their own cultural meaning of the words resilience, responsiveness and reflection.

Collaboration

As a well-oiled tandem (they just met a couple of hours before); Dan Marovitz @marovdan and Matt McDougall @sinotechian looked into the history of communication and collaboration.

Dan asked the question how it comes those true digital knowledge providers like consultancies are still struggling with offering their deliverables in a full virtual way. There is a need for an integrated enterprise collaboration suite composed of  directory serviced, scheduling, messaging, payments, workflow, Analytics, Search and Communication

And Matt McDougall mind-boggled us with his 8 connectors:

Note here again the connected nodes in a grid 😉

• Shared values (peace, equality, liberty,… )
• Shared roots (religion, ethnicity, language, citizenship,…)
• Shared fights (politics, environment, wildlife, …)
• Shared Interest and benefits (wealth, power, information, notoriety,…)
• Shared Lifestyle (fashion, housing, restaurants, vacation, …)
• Shared Hobbies (sports, arts, gaming, collecting, travelling, …)
• Shared Access (sites, platforms, devices,…)
• Shared Preferences (food, drinks, cars, music, clothing,…)

In perspective

With hindsight of the Innotribe Bangkok event, I would like to offer the following perspectives:

• We are witnessing 3 parallel revolutions: hyper-connectivity, openness through APIs, and the advent of P2P vs hierarchical organizations
• The hyper-connected future is huge challenge for the financial industry, and there is little chance that the incumbents win the race
• The Asian Banker Summit will be different the next years: the seeding has happened and there is no way back
• The real problem: only 5 out of 250 bank-attendees are in contact with the start-up community: the Innotribe startup challenge helps to close gap

Outlook to Innotribe@Sibos, Osaka, 29 Oct – 1 Nov 2012

I have a dream: I would like to see an Innotribe opening session at Sibos with William, Sean, Mark, Guibert on the tatami.

I am looking forward to the grand-finale of that Start-Up Challenge in Osaka. In Bangkok we had the opportunity to see the pitches of the winning candidates from the APAC competition just a couple of days before on 24 April 2012 in Singapore.

Wrapping up this blog post

In case you were wondering what the flight number 876 is all about: 8 connectors, 7 KPIs, 6 irreducibles.

The next Innotribe flights are:

• SWIFT African Regional Conference 2012 Kampala, Uganda: 8-10 May. Here we are part of a classic SWIFT regional conference. Matteo and Martine will be there with one Innovation plenary, and two Innotribe Labs, one on Remittances, and one on Mobile Payments.
• The Age of the Empowered Customer, Sydney: 8 May. This is a small-scale event for 40 people, invitation only, organized together with Microsoft Australia.
• Innotribe@Belfast on 13-14 June 2012: this is a full-blown Innotribe event like Innotribe Belfast. We already received the first registrations.
• For other Innotribe events, check-out our Innotribe events page

Acknowledgments

Innotribe Bangkok would not have been possible without the help of the Asian Banker Summer, our APAC colleagues and the full Innotribe team. Special kudos to the Innotribe design team with Mela, Martine, and Dominik. Also thx to Kosta, Matteo, Nektarios and Muche for helping out with all the executions and facilitations.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team (cross-posted on the Innotribe Blog)

After our busy Asian week with our Innotribe Start-Up Challenge 2012 in Singapore, and the Innotribe event for Corporates in Bangkok,  SWIFT and Microsoft are bringing Innotribe to Australia for the first time, with a half-day event built around an energizing mix of new perspectives and provocative thoughts.

Through a series of deep conservations ignited by influential thinkers, participants will be able to learn from each others’ opinions, ideas and perspectives.

Innovation in Australia’s financial industry is a hot topic in 2012, with much of the focus on innovation in the payments system itself. But what of the relationship between banks and their customers?

What about the proliferation of connected, aware mobile devices?  What about the rise of trusted social networks and the consumerisation of IT? Are we living in the age of the customer? What does the emergence of a new generation of banks, virtual currencies and digital wallets mean for the future of money? How can we leverage digital identity, your digital footprint and a digital asset grid to empower consumers? How will businesses capture this potential and survive the dramatic business model shifts they will likely experience as this future becomes a reality?

The Age of the Empowered Customer brings together the best and brightest thinkers to ignite those conversations:

• Marcus Barber, Strategic Futurist and Value Systems Specialist
• Andrew Davis, Global Head of e-Channels Strategy and Innovation for GTB, HSBC
• Andrew Rechtman, Director of Product, New Business and Strategy, Paypal Australia
• Stephen Wilson, Digital Identity Innovator and Thought Leader, Lockstep Technologies
• Peter Vanderauwera, Innovation Leader, SWIFT

This event is a small-scale event for 30-50 participants max. Invitations are sent out on a one-on-one basis. If you would be interested to attend, please contact contact James.Bibby@microsoft.com or peter.vanderauwera@swift.com

Our tentative agenda looks as follows:

Tuesday 08 May 2012

Innotribe Sydney will be held on 8 May 2012 in the Microsoft offices, 1 Epping Road,  North Ryde NSW 2113, Australia (Sydney). Looking forward to meet some of our Aussie tribe members in real life.

@petervan from the Innotribe team. Cross posted on the Innotribe Blog.