Super-fast Internet is the new ‘Wealth of Nations’ – enabling innovation competitive advantage & improving destination desirability; failure is not an option.

COMMENT, USA — There’s a lot of fear and loathing about Microsoft buying Yahoo.

The initial discussion seems to focus on Yahoo as a search offering for Microsoft, to strengthen Microsoft against Google. That won’t deliver value.
Fact is Yahoo has a strong email brand, but few people use yahoo for search. Google is widely used, and mostly returns the best results.

Yahoo & Microsoft merger/takeover is not really a threat to competition as a younger, more powerful competitor is likely to emerge as the innovator in the search sector.
A young unknown start-up …

COMMENT, Global: 2thinknow ® have identified Web 2.0 as one of the big trends sweeping the business world in a short to medium term.
If you feel Web 2.0 is a buzzword. it is. But then again unlike most, this one is useful.
What is Web 2.0?
In short Web 2.0 is the new new printing press, wireless and TV Tube.

ANALYSIS-IN-BRIEF, Global –Tim Berners-Lee is the father of the internet as a useful tool, in the form of the Web. He was there at the web’s birth, as the picture of the CERN web server following shows.

If you want to understand the future of the internet, as a communication medium then read Berners-Lee’s book, “Weaving the Web”.

ANALYSIS, Global – The answer is to ‘Stand on the Shoulders of Giants’.
This is the first part of a regular series on how to speak the language of ideas in coming weeks. How to be an Ideas Person.
Ideas and an intellectual education are important no matter how old we are. Both help us make better decisions in terms of positive change in our societies.
How do we personally understand what is positive change and what is not?
We talk incessantly about success, about wanting positive change.
We talk about love, relationships, children, families, …

COMMENT, Global — We’ve have been in a post-modernist age for some time now.
But someone forgot to tell those 1950s-loving industrialist neo-cons.
The innovation zeitgeist is with the Creative Age.
Let’s look at where that innovation is for a moment.

COMMENT, Global — The modern world seems complex.
That’s because we’re trying to understand it with modernist 1950s metaphors from the age of the soon-to-be-gone Oil Economy.
The Neo-Cons were really the last hurrah, and just look how well Iraq is working out for them.
That’s despite all the freedoms they managed to crush in Western countries by invoking a straw man of terrorism and turning a blind eye to some desert-dwelling nutcases.
But the fact is they don’t get it. The modern world. The internet. Or trends.

COMMENT, Melbourne, Australia — Social networks are the next big thing, depending on where you are located in the physical world, they can be at various stages of adoption.
I asked this to a few people at WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco, and in a case of preaching to the converted, many felt blogs were already ‘established’.
But blogs & social networks have not gone mainstream yet in most markets.
(If one applies a model called the Innovation Diffusion curve, that is.)
PS. If you are reading this and twittering, you are probably not …

COMMENT, Melbourne, Australia — First of all let me say I am not partisan. I vote right, I vote left.
Personally, I think Giuliani, Gore, Clinton and McCain would all make good presidents at different times. Professionally I think Gore, Giuliani and Clinton may all lead to good outcomes for innovation.
The Left/Right divide is increasingly irrelevant, in any case. In a prior analysis from 2thinknowTM I made the case that the real contest is between Engaged and Not Engaged. See: Election innovation: why Left & Right don’t matter.
How Bush happened:
The people …

ANALYSIS, San Francisco – WordCamp 2007 commenced today in San Francisco, at the Swedish American Hall on Market St. This is my second post.Presenter in the second session, was experienced journalist and IT veteran John Dvorak. He was joined by writer from the (sadly rumoured to be defunct) Business 2.0, OM Malik.
Dvorak had two interesting points regarding innovation:
“Bloggers present themselves as bloggers”
“Citizen journalism”
Schedule: http://2007.wordcamp.org/schedule/blogs-vs-journalism/
Both these allude to the innovation zeitgeist as 2thinknowTM define it.
The innovation zeitgesit in blogging is the upcoming professionalism and redesign of the presentation of user …

ANALYSIS, San Francisco — From WordCamp 2007. Podcasting will be a new media, and will grow in revenues. By then it may not be called podcasting.
It may be called something new and snappy, and will be in some ways more like TV/radio.
Marketing, including naming (eg. iPod is sexier than media player and is now the generic name) is important to product development and adoption (see Apple…)
Thanks to Dan Kuykendall, of www.mightyseek.com for an excellent and well balanced presentation of the what, why and how of pod-casting; and despite being first …

ANALYSIS — I don’t like Left and Right. They are increasingly irrelevant to political elections like the US political race or Australian federal race.
Try engagement and inevitability as the key distinctions to examine elections.
In my time working for various government departments I could tell you some stories, but then the saying goes, I (or someone else) really would have to kill you.
But I can tell you as someone who has seen things first hand that Left & Right alliances, factions and segmentation are more about alliance and …

ANALYSIS, Sydney — Prague proves the point. Culture determines innovation.
Markets do not, not in isolation.
The Czech Republic has one of the least basket-case economies in Eastern Europe and key investment destination of the former Eastern European business investment destinations.
Walking the streets of Prague, we can see all the consulting firms, and major corporations, who have established offices here.
Remote analysis is useful, but research-including-walking-around and observing is often invaluable in pointing out flaws in statistical analysis.
The Balkan problem with Innovation – dogma
Croatia, a very beautiful place, and Slovakia its former sister …

San Francisco is showing innovation leadership beyond technology, it has emerging west coast alternative to US east coast cultural dominance. It also has strong hub ties to Australia and Asia, whereas East Coast has strong hub ties to Europe.
In San Francisco, July 21/22 their will be the Wordpress, Word-Camp. Wordpress will be the next big thing in blogging. All races become two horse races, with a third trailing eventually. Wordpress is well-placed to be horse # 1, 2 or at least 3. I think #1.
Wordpress has innovation leadership in the …

Humour is a way of breaking through a problem. It’s a form of distraction.
Also, a distraction can sometimes help you un-focus so the answer pops in your head. In terms of inspiration, rather than force a problem I try to eat, distract myself, joke, go for a walk, basically anything to shift my mind or environment when i am stuck.
I purposefully load up problems before flights or travel, as on a 90 minute flight I often do a weeks worth of thinking.
Grinding a way at the problem often does not …

Librarians are having to deal with the vast amount of content that only occurs in web or electronic form. It’s a massive trend. So a term, Library 2.0 and a support network has arisen. One of their communities online is at: library20.ning.com
Organising electronic data: this is a big issue. I predict veteran website snapshots will be a collectors item one day, much like movie merchandise/posters are now.
Social networking innovations: I found this whilst researching on Marc Andreessen’s new venture Ning.com, basically a site that lets you create your own social …

If I have not responded to your email in the past 3 days, it’s because I didn’t get it! I believe (but have no way to be sure) I may be still missing some mail, as some newsletters haven’t arrived. If you got a bounce this is also why.
Here’s Webcentral’s response to ‘email down’. I am interested to see what the cause was, I hope it’s open and honest. I think to be honest, this is about the best response I have had from any ISP or webhost over these …

Sir Tim Berners Lee on the next big innovation beyond Web 2.0. That would be the semantic web. Or basically interchangeable data, data from your contact database, talks to data from a website allowing you to file someone you meet online in your contacts. Or an invoice in your accounting system is machine-readable as an invoice on the web.
In other words no more data conversion. This is what XML is all about, but that is one part of it.
If it wasn’t Berners Lee, i’d say perhaps that’s a B I …

In what I think is very interesting, and can only be described as a positive thing, uni students at melbourne Uni have been running a ‘First year Students’ blog since last year.
It’s a sign of the times. I like positive social engagement, I want to see positive change, indeed 2thinknow define innovation, in short, as positive change.
Using a blog to create communities, and share experiences and humanity is a positive change. Too much push media – TV,radio is about telling us what to think. (often based on what stats say …

Webcentral , Australia’s largest Web hosting company, have been having email outtages and delays to most customers for the last 3 days, according to their support line.
This is the longest sustained email outage I have experienced since 1999.
In Whirlpool, the broadband users forum, there were calls for compensation and/or a class action. (link below)
Personally, we have not been able to receive emails consistently for 3 days, consistently. It is driving us nuts, and worse as it doesn’t effect all accounts or all domains at the same time. I cannot …