Recently had a good discussion with Tony Fish, author of My Digital Footprint, and entrepreneur/investor with AMFventures. The discussion was in the context of our digital identity incubation project (more about that project in an upcoming blog post).

Not sure who invented it, but he came up with a really good metaphor based on the railway systems, that we could use very well in a lot of our discussions on innovation and how we have to position new services on top of or adjacent to our core messaging infrastructure.

“Infrastructure”

There we have it

With credits to Tony, a classic railway system is made up from:

• Infrastructure (rails, connection);
• Enablers (signaling and control);
• Ticketing (collection of money, the market place/ exchange);
• Platforms (access – something to get customers in and out the service), and;
• Trains (the service – what I am actually paying for in the mind of the customer).

SWIFT in this model already delivers critical parts of the international payments infrastructure.

• From an innovation point of view, I believe the core of our innovation focus should be to extent our current remit to offer industry wide services that will enable Banks and Corporates to offer new services to its customers (signaling and control)
• The Banks will provide the services (ticketing, platforms and trains)

In that sense, the SWIFT 2015 strategy is spot on by stating there is still enough juice and room for innovation in the core.

But I believe a lot of thinking in the industry about innovation at SWIFT is “limited” to the messaging paradigm, and anything that goes beyond messaging seems to make some of our shareholders nervous, as it may be the space where they compete for business with each other.

The railway system metaphor is in my opinion a great help to get rid of the pure emotions in this debate, and to well articulate the roles of the different players in a “system”.

In other words

to do some system-thinking

And metaphors always help in system thinking.

Another metaphor is the operator of a horse-track: you offer the infrastructure, and the horses (or rather the horse owners) compete on the horse-track.

The worst thing the horse-track operator can do is to have horses of his own and put them in the race in competition with the other horses.

Better is to think of the horse-track as something exciting with lots of new enabling services giving horses a better experience, and enabling new merchants to offer new services to the horse-owners. And the ticketing: you can run it yourself, or outsource it.

Just one more thought. Railways make me think of old, messy, noisy, rusty environments and coaches.

Unless you take the Thalys/Eurostars in First class, or Shanghai Maglev train that propels you forward at 431 Km/hour.

I’d prefer something that “smells” like the infrastructure and ecosystem described in the book “Aerotropolis” by John D. Kasandra. (Amazon Affiliate link)

Most of my readers are probably familiar with my addiction to cities. Because they never die. They create “intencities”. Platforms of intensities where ideas can flow freely.

Now

we add the city transportation

to the mix,

and how that can be

a real catalyst

for systemic growth

Some quotes from the Aerotropolis book:

“Look for yesterday’s busiest train terminals and you will find today’s great urban centers. Look for today’s busiest airports and you will find the great urban centers of tomorrow.”

“Cities are always created around whatever the state-of-the-art transportation device is at the time.”

“The shapes and fates of cities have always been defined by transportation. Today, this means air travel”.

Aerotropolis. It’s just sounds so much better than railway station or infrastructure:

Modern

Fresh

Fast

Convenient

Transparent

So, is SWIFT a Railway Station ? You should be able to cook up the answer yourself now.

Something funny to close 2009 and to start 2010.

Comes from the Geek & Poke site.

Enjoy and Happy New Year !

Now that Innotribe @ Sibos is over, back to the real purpose of this blog: “Inspire others to dream”. For a recap, see the very first post of this blog, back in April 2009.

There is something fascinating and very profound that is going on with on-line reputation. This post is  about values in the on-line world. It is very much related to the upcoming Think Tank on Long Term Future, where we want to deeply thing about the value kit needed in a transhumanistic and singularity type of world. It also relates to our on-line identity and its evolution, a theme that i often have addresses on this blog.

As Chief Executive Mixer of ideas, i would like to mix the following memes:

1. The Whuffie Bank presentation at last week’s Techcrunch50
2. Seth Gondin’s blog on “ClouT” (yes with a “t” and not a “d”) of a couple of weeks ago
3. The Trust-Score idea presented by the crowdsourcing team at last week’s Sibos and Innotribe
4. Matteo’s idea for Mindtagger

First, The Whuffie Bank. Nothing better than watching yourself the TC50 Video and comments here. Also the second part of the video is interesting: the debate and feedback session: the most important comments was that reputation is contextual. I maybe interested in the ideas of a couple of on-line friends only. My own tribe so to speak. But even in my own tribe, i may appreciate the techie knowledge of Nick for example, but not at all be interested in his political ideas or preferences.

Or have a look at The Whuffie Bank website.

The Whuffie Bank from The Whuffie Bank on Vimeo.

It is very profound what these guys are saying:

The Whuffie Bank is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a new currency based on reputation that could be redeemed for real and virtual products and services.

The higher your reputation, the wealthier you are.

It’s in the same spirit of Creative Commons, an organization that’s changing the contract between our ideas and us; we want to build an open organization that aims to measure and enable the exchange of online reputation.

The Whuffie bank also has some crazy ideas on how they could you beyond the web into the brick & mortar world, by for ex printing money or having credit cards with whuffies on it.

I tried myself. I do NOT tweet or RT very much, but do have a Whuffie balance:

More interesting is to see where my “Whuffies” come from, and what triggers reputation changes and endorsement ranking.

It’s all in the same spirit Creative Commons, where fundamental re-thinking was done on the relationship we have with ideas and the copyright contract.

Now we are re-thinking the relationship we have between our values and the money contract.

The Whuffie bank is based on 4 principles

1. Endorses public endorsement
2. Based on degree of influence on other people: if you retweet often your influence on others will be greater
3. Considers existing reputation of each member: it’s different to get an endorsement from the president of the USA, than from me for  example
4. The message content is analyzed. If a tweet has a link, the link is more important than the couple of words before it.

Second, one of Seth Godin’s latest posts. Seth is the author of “Tribes” and the name Innotribe was based on the title of his book.

The web knows something, but it’s not telling us, at least not yet.

The web knows how many followers you have on Twitter, how many friends you have on Facebook, how many people read your blog.

It also knows how often those people retweet, amplify and spread your ideas.

It also knows how many followers your followers have…

So, what if, Google-style, someone took all this data and figured out who has clout.

Which of your readers is the one capable of making an idea break through the noise and spread? Bloggers don’t have impact because they have a lot of readers, they have a lot of impact because of who their readers are (my readers, of course, are the most sophisticated and cloutful on the entire web).

If you knew which of your followers had clout, you could invest more time and energy in personal attention. If we knew where big ideas were starting, that would be neat, and even more useful would be understanding who the key people were in bringing those new ideas to the rest of the world.

Back in the old days, we had no idea, so we defaulted to big newspapers, or magazines or the TV networks. But now we know. We just need to surface the data in a way that is useful.

So, it is really about how impactful your

followers

are.

That’s pretty profound.

Thirdly, at last week’s Innotribe @ Sibos, the crowdsourcing team pitched the idea of “Trust-Score”. What a pity this one did not get a better pitch Because it’s also really about trust-reputation. But then in the real-world of money. And how one could spot patterns in somebody’s online money behavior and how deviations from the measured average could lead to fraud detection algorithms and alike.

Or, fourth, what would happen if we mix all the above with my colleague Matteo Rizzi’s “Mindtagger”. At this stage “just” a searchable repository of people as mind-skills, but what if we throw reputation on top of it ? And Whuffies, based on how much good somebody does for the community. And Clout to see who is helping spread our ideas ?

Maybe at next year’s Innotribe @ Sibos2010, we should have a theme on “Clout” in stead of “Cloud”. Wouldn’t it be great to tribe together smart people to brainstorm on ideas that could add value through reputation mechanism to the SWIFT eco-system. As a matter of fact,

why wait till next year ?

Who is interested ? Please comment to this posting. We’ll feed it into the Think Tank for the value bit and into Innotribe for the project bit.

As a start of a new series, i will regularly post examples of old-new game economy.

As a starter, a slide i once made as input to my Leading by Being Coming-Out. For more info on Leading by Being, please go to my very first post on this blog.

On the left the “old” culture, on the right the “new” culture.

Today, i saw a perfect example of Old Game when looking at the chaos at the Fortis General Assembly. The attitude of lawyer Mondrikamen was appalling, and it was very disappointing to see a man of that caliber and education misbehaving and playing populist techniques.

Old Game of today: Modrikamen at the Fortis General Assembly on 28 April 2009

http://www.holding.fortis.com/shareholders/webcast.asp or in the meantime the news-site of Belgian (Flemish) Television. Use this link, and start somewhere half-way the video.

New Game of today: also in banking. The new release of Mint.com, a company introducing innovation week after week for the interest and added value of its customers:

And it is their own CEO delivering the demos. Have a peek at it and let me know when we’re going to have this sort of bank-service from one of our European banks.

Looking for a nice free tool to capture parts of screens, make a screen video tutorial, share this via the web, integrated with Facebook, YouTube, etc ?

Go Jing.

And the tutorials are super. This is how software always should be.