Business

@SXSW: foursquare and the future of direct(ed) messaging

By Robert Fabricant

New inspiration always floods in after a speaking appearance is over. Kicking myself for not highlighting a couple of things that were right in front of me @ my SXSW panel. Perfectly timed gifts  as usual, in this case foursquare and tweetluck. Let me explain: in the world of social cohesion messaging rules. So, any conversation around behavior change needs to respect that role. Successful behavior change requires immediate feedback, and social relationships offer the best form of encouragement. But messaging platforms are direct, not directED. We spend a lot of time in them because they are … Read more

Business, Ethics, Barcelona: Doing Good When You're Not Doing So Well

I just returned from Barcelona (where every tourist now seems to be tracking the path of Woody Allen's Vicky and Christina...), attending a few sessions of the Doing Good and Doing Well Conference organized by IESE Business School and Net Impact, an organization that connects MBA students interested in social responsibility.

That a leading business school is dedicating an entire student-run conference to the topic of responsible business is remarkable (HEC Paris will do the same soon in May, also in collaboration with Net Impact) but not an isolated phenomenon. In the past few years, several top business schools, … Read more

LIFT09: The future in permanent beta

I've been conference-hopping through Europe for the past two weeks. In Berlin, I discussed new "quality of life" concepts for Germany, and in Geneva I listened to speakers who held Utopian visions from an earlier era accountable for what could have been but wasn't. My own personal well-being was more mundane. I schlepped two big suitcases with me and saw the sun shine only twice. When you travel so much, you start to feel like Tyler Brule: quality of life is defined by the quality of the airports you pass through, the quality of the Wi-Fi … Read more

Healthcare innovation: The files are IN the computer!

From our DesignWell blog

President Obama's stimulus package is putting aside roughly $21 billion for healthcare technology and the development of electronic health records (EHRs). At this point when we say "billion" or even "trillion" it doesn’t have much of an effect. So let’s try that again – Obama's stimulus package is putting aside $21,000,000,000 for healthcare technology. It is a ridiculous amount of money.But, where will it all go? Most of it is earmarked for the creation and utilization of electronic health records, which is essentially a digitized … Read more

Schmidt pulls a Ballmer

By Marc Fenigstein, Senior Strategist, frog design

The web is all atwitter today with news of Eric Schmidt's dismissive response at yesterday's Morgan Stanley Technology Conference here in San Francisco to a question from Eminence Capital analyst, Josef Jung, of whether Google sees Twitter's real-time search as a threat. An explosion of schadenfreude-laden articles and a furiously defiant pile of tweets have already responded to Mr. Schmidt's comments that demonstrated a clear lack of understanding of both the present value AND tremendous future potential of the twitter platform. The contrarians at Motley Fool are holding out … Read more

Coup d'etat on Twitter

Matt Webb pointed out in his LIFT presentation today that humans “take pleasure in watching things unfold.” True – even if the events are a quasi-authentic account of something that has already happened.

Coincidentally, the Spanish site Per Soitu reports about a fascinating example of “fake authenticity” and the emerging trend of using Twitter for storytelling. On February 23, 2009, exactly 28 years after about 200 soldiers and paramilitary members of the Spanish Civil Guard toppled remnants of General Franco's dictatorship, a group of Spanish Twitterers revived minute by minute the historical coup d'etat that occurred on February 23, … Read more

Twitter buzz gets a status update

Not only because a surgery conducted via Twitter made headlines the other day, Twitter is all the buzz (again). And it seems as if almost three years after its now-legendary debut at South by Southwest Interactive, the popular microblogging service has reached the second (or third) hype cycle, entering the business and media mainstream as the ultimate narrow--and broadcast--network.

As Joel Comm, CEO of InfoMedia and author of "Twitter Power," points out:

It's like the old saying, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." People who use … Read more

The power of the crowd, revisited

Almost three years after Jeff Howe coined the term in his seminal article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," and, ironically, in the very week 1,300 handpicked scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and other thinkers, movers, and shakers assembled at the TED conference in Long Beach, the term "crowdsourcing" yielded more than 1 million search results on Google.

That's quite an accomplishment. Crowdsourcing is no longer an exclusive noun for a few in the know, it has become a verb for the crowd. Mom-and pop shops, SME's, and large corporations, receptionists, interns, middle managers, and CEOs – everyone'… Read more

Generation G: Wired to care, wired to share

Trendwatching gets it right (again): "Giving is the new taking, and sharing is the new giving." That's the key assertion in this month's trend briefing, which describes the characteristics of Generation G (for generosity) and offers eight ways for brands to join: from Tryvertising to Brand Butlers to Random Acts of Kindness (RAK).… Read more