Stayin' Alive in 2009 - Gadget 1 - PC workstation on Treadmill

I can see Bart Simpson ordered to write 10,000 times '2009 is going to be a difficult year'. Certainly there are 10,000 plus blog pages that start that way - I've written a couple myself. So how do we stay alive and healthy when we have to work in front of a monitor for years. It doesn't matter whether the stress comes from the next article, or keeping the zombies at bay - Our bodies are designed to be mobile, need to be mobile and clog up like the intertubes on Inauguration Day if we don't keep mobile. So.. how do we do it? Here's the first gadget I built:

A PC workstation on a Treadmill.
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It's really easy to do, and it is fine for emails, twitters and the occasional thought for driving GTD software. The secret is to buy a treadmill that is powerful enough to go really slow - 1 mph (about 1.5 kph). This is a 'natural human strolling pace. People have lost incredible amounts of weight from it (Believe it or not I've lost 22 lbs or about 10 Kilos - I show noone the 'before' picture). If you will read on, I have the Mayo Clinic research references (for those of you unable to accept my clear authority on the matter without confirmation), how I put it together, plus some helpful hints for walking. I also have found some interesting videos on using it for pets to exercise. The secret for cats seems to be to keep it slow.

Why?

Improved alertness and productivity at work, the ability to concentrate throughout the entire day, enhanced fitness and weight control without spending hours in the Gym away from work or family – these are all good reasons. Or, as my wife calls it, “bizarre”. It started because of the findings of Dr James Levine
– an obesity and nutrition researcher at the Mayo Clinic.

Activity levels have declined, and he and many other obesity researchers say that decline, more than increases in eating, is to blame for rises in obesity. What has changed is the artificial environment: there is far more opportunity today than in the past to be sedentary. And some people may be genetically predisposed to seize that opportunity. (New Weight-Loss Focus: The Lean and the Restless; By DENISE GRADY, New York Times Online, Published: May 24, 2005).

As you read the following quote, bear in mind that SCRUM Project Management meetings are supposed to be held standing up - serendipity!

"Given an environment that lets people sit for hours and hours a day, they will," he said.
A solution, then, may be to change the environment, to make moving around easier and sitting still less convenient. At meetings, Dr Levine stands instead of sitting. Talking on the telephone, he paces around. In his office he has a treadmill in place of a desk. He got it last year when he saw the data from the study comparing lean people and obese ones. "My computer is stationed over the treadmill," he said. "I work at 0.7 miles an hour."

"You have a natural tendency to want to move your legs. Zero point seven is the key. You don't get sweaty, you can't jiggle too much. It's about one step a second. It's very comfortable. Most people seem to like it around 0.7."

For him, the treadmill has eliminated the afternoon slump, when a lot of people feel sleepy and crave candy bars or caffeine. "I've become convinced we really can generate an office environment where people are on the move and are happier," he said.

Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University, called the Science paper "great," and added, "I believe the data; it's done correctly and an interesting set of findings."



The NY Times noted that Nonexercise activity (NEAT) can account for a significant portion of the calories burned in a day, anywhere from 15 percent in a sedentary person to 50 percent in someone who is very
active. Standing takes more energy than sitting, and strolling along at just one mile an hour burns twice the calories of sitting.

So this gadget is all about living through 2009 and perhaps even thriving. I encourage the kids to watch their programs while walking on it, and try to do so myself. I keep a stopwatch by it to measure how much time I use it every day.

Next: Constructing the Treadmill, Walking with Friends

Are you Bulldozer or Speedbump This Year?

Stayin' Alive

Chaos Paves the Way for Creation - i-Ching

If you stand in front of the Bulldozer of Technology change you are just a Speedbump on the Information Superhighway - Alistair Nicholson, IBM IT Strategy Course, Singapore 1999

Ten years on from "the Internet will change everything", 2009 presents the next version of disruption - disruption in business, technology and personal lifestyle. I just pray that no one will call it 'Disruption 2.0'. The good news is these challenges also create personal and professional opportunities. The opportunities arise because of the combination of economic and technological change -- the sort of "perfect storm" -- that influences our career path for the next decade (at least). Back in 1999 our IT Strategy course was divided into two camps - one (the mainframers) had Amazon driven out of business by the 'bricks and mortar' advantage of Barnes & Noble, the other (early adopters and web developers like me) that thought Amazon would understand the web better, and keep its customer base.

Amazon has survived, and thrived through a serious meltdown by understanding and 'infusing itself with IT' to use Tim O'Reilly's phrase. If I'm to get through this year I'll need a pretty good infusion myself, and I'm sharing where my path is taking me. Feel free to use what you can. Over the next few weeks I'll develop effective personal and professional strategies by assessing the economic cycle, the main technological and business changes, and our business and personal plans. (Enter Bee Gees Stage left singing "stayin' alii--ii- iive").

Let me be clear though - this is a time of great disruption. There is opportunity, but it is deadly opportunity. Wrong moves will end in checkmate, serious removal from the Island. I found an interesting re-analysis of the Chinese character for Crisis:

It is basically true that the modern word for "crisis", wei2-ji1 or wei1-ji1, is analyzed as "danger" + "opportunity"... The main meaning of the xiesheng character ("wood" added to "subtle sign") is "trigger of a crossbow", clearly related to the idea of a subtle but powerful military moment. Derived meanings include "weapon" (in general), "key object or idea", and "turning point" or "crucial moment". ...

One of the most idiomatic modern expressions incorporating this character is shi2-ji1, "time" + "trigger", meaning something like "turning point" or "key moment in time". The concept of seizing the correct moment is of great importance in traditional Chinese thought, military and otherwise.

I know the word 'opportunity' is substituted for 'problem' in corporate speak - but think of this 'opportunity' as a turning point in a battlefield full of violent, armoured, fighting warriors armed to the teeth, with half of them trying to turn you into one of the corpses strewn across the ground... 2009 is THAT sort of opportunity.

There are New Shoots Emerging

The commentators I respect agree on this - imitators will be swept away, but there is venture capital and market share for people that do something real. Peter Rip from Crosslink Capital explains some of the reasons in "The coming Venture Capital Boom".

... I see the today’s carnage as much as everyone else. This year is going to be tough. .. But the forest will begin its renewal because Life Goes On, and with it ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and innovation..... We will see dozens of these opportunities in the coming years, but it requires an investment discipline tethered to public market realities about who are likely buyers, why, and at what valuations.

The second phenomenon to emerge from 2000 was the re-invigoration of the Web. As with every wave of innovation, much of the activity became more imitative than innovative as this matured.... The venture money that went into most of these imitations will soon be written off.
.....
So why am I so sanguine about the prospects for venture capital as everyone seems to sound the alarm about Recession, the lack of capital, and the fear gripping the markets? It is simple:

1. Venture capital returns are predicated on scarcity of risk capital. It has been all too abundant. That will change.
2. Many good businesses will be left on the beach as the rest are washed out to sea – the remaining VCs will invest in them and both the entrepreneurs and VCs will get rewarded as the survivors gain market share and become successes in the economic recover[y].
3. The economic recovery plan of the new Administration will be massive and favor investments in productivity-enhancing growth sectors like information technology and energy technology.

We also need to think through what Depression 2009 would look like to ensure we are looking for new developments in the right place. This will be similar but different to what has gone before.

Social and Cloud are Real, Real, Real

How many cycles have we seen now? They all start with some bright idea. Gradually the ideas change into practical applications. This is the tipping point, but also a difficult time to risk clients or career. The 'sensible' manager will just have to point to promoters of the technology (and a few ever-present disasters) to show how 'unsound' it is. Managers and organisations that behave that way will arrive too late and lack the skill set needed for the new technology.

It is a fundamental strategic planning error "playing the man not the ball", but an easy debating style. The problem is that the tipping point occurs at the very moment the first effective tools enter the market enabling commercially viable implementations.

The story from that moment is the same - whether it is adoption of PC's, Unix midrange servers, NT Servers, web sites, Relational database, online editors, high-level development languages or web-based email - rapid momentum becoming explosive. At the end of the process that same manager expressing that same idea ridiculing the technology is considered incompetent, hopelessly inefficient and a liability to the organisation.

So, this means more change, but we have to deal with it because it's reality - it's part of what IT is about. The Obama campaign changed the view of Social software techniques for managing activity. Once Harvard Business School starts blogging about it, the outcome is foregone. Harvard had several blog articles out the morning after the election. In fact it is such an orthodoxy that Doc Searls is calling social another bubble.

“Social” is a bubble. Trust me on this. I urge all consultants on “social ______” (fill in the blank) to make hay while the sun shines. Even as the current depression deepens, lots of companies are starting to realize that this “social” thing is hot stuff and they need to get hip to Twitter and the rest of it....

Meanwhile, here’s the challenge: make the Net personal. Make relationships personal. Equip individuals with tools of independence and engagement. That’s what VRM is about.

Social is colliding with technology outsourcing to create the new Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 beasts. Language for opening up the technology options moved from leading edge to hit the mainstream in 2008; Cloud computing, Software as a Service (SaaS), application service provider (ASP), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Are you prepared? Are your people prepared? Are you sure? Look at this:

Robert Scoble (Fastcompany, Scobelizer.com) started the year with a cool product that prompted The story of 2009? Enterprise disruption?. He found a product that has let me finish a Web 2.0 environment for building Business Service Transformation skills for a very low cost. He said:

So, why did this catch my eye? First, they are taking something very expensive, Business Intelligence charting and dashboarding, and making it free. That alone is pretty disruptive. ...

But don’t focus on that disruption.

Instead, look at the bigger picture. Here they are using Google spreadsheets to bring you live, collaborative, business intelligence. Watch the second video to see how different this is from most of the “old-school” approaches that haven’t yet built on a platform designed for the web from the start.

See that’s the real disruption: there’s a new platform being built. Right now it’s ugly and incomplete. But every year it gets better and better. Will 2009 be the year when lots of you try out a web-based collaboration suite like the ones from Zoho or Google?

However, we must be careful how this is interpreted. Many will go for the comfort of a 'quick fix' and familiar letters. The point is not that successful organisations use Web 2.0 or SOA or whatever. It is that they are using IT to do their business better - focusing on the Institute of Government Business Mantra of "more effective and efficient business Processes" through technology. Tim O'Reilly puts it this way in the Power of the Real Time Enterprise:

What do Google, WalMart, and MyBarackObama.com have in common, besides their extraordinary success? They are organizations that are infused with IT in such a way that it leads to a qualitative change in their entire business.

I get frustrated when I see people highlighting use of social media--blogging, wikis, twitter, customer feedback systems like Dell IdeaStorm or MyStarbucksIdea--as if they were exemplars of what has come to be called "Enterprise 2.0."

So what can you do to survive? Here are my personal short term action items, yours might be similar:

Action: Make sure YOU understand the emerging technology for Social and Cloud computing.
Action: Make sure you have a plan to use this for your own career.
Action: Make sure your organisation or business has a plan to use Social and Cloud computing, train the staff, create new and adapt existing systems.
Action: Make sure your organisation isn't going to be destroyed by Social and Cloud computing. If so, move now, not soon, now!

Create Something with Meaning

Tim O'Reilly has been through these cycles before. He keeps saying that to get through downturns "do stuff that matters".

• Work on stuff that matters...
• Exert visionary leadership in our markets....
• Be prudent in what we spend money on....

  These are all things we should be doing every day anyway. Sometimes, though, a crisis can provide an unexpected gift, a reminder that nobody promised us tomorrow, so we need to make what we do today count.

Tim O'Reilly is suggesting that although the guy that developed a "Fart" application for the iPhone made $40,000 in two weeks, this superficial 'eyecandy' application is fleeting, and will evaporate in difficult times. We can survive this downturn, if we understand what is changing and what is emerging.

Understand the new social and Cloud implications. Understand the way the economy is reshaping. Plan well. Train yourself. Train your staff. Bon chance.

Business Survival needs good IT People

What a ridiculous proposition. How could embracing web 2.0 and having a good IT strategy be important for business survival in a recession/depression? Or even anywhere near the top of the list. This sounds like spending money.

Well, yes it is spending money, just like wages. One lesson that is common from all our previous experiences is that strategic shortcomings are punished hard in downturns. When we learn lessons from the Great Depression we have to make sure we adjust for a world that really is different (telephones, TV, internet, for example). How could IT and Web 2.0 be important though, for a washing machine manufacturer for example? How can a web site and good IT affect their sales? Surely only Geek-based businesses have to worry.

Our washing machine broke down two days ago and we rang our trusted repair technician. He won't repair that brand any more. I asked him why not? Reply "their website is crap". In what way? "well, to give you an example, of the last 7 orders we put through it for spare parts, 5 were wrong. It wastes our time, which costs us money, and the customers get annoyed because of the delays and blame us, so we don't touch them anymore". His recommended brand? - Bosch or Miele. Our replacement brand - not the one we have now, even though I was happy with it. Sure it can be fixed by the outfit in town that doesn't care what they fix, but the point is that they don't care. People that don't care usually cost a lot more in the end. I'm not going to drill down to the cause - it's probably a poorly implemented parts catalogue. What I am interested in is that I am lost as a customer through a poor website, and the Company won't even know it has happened. It's not the customer-facing part of the site - it is the maintenance person part. There is no obvious way to measure the loss of my custom, nor how many others are lost as well.

What has fundamentally changed is the way customers interact with businesses and each other. There's good news in this because transforming technology gives us future growth. There's bad news in this because managing by, and measuring the wrong things will kill a business stone dead. The toxic effects of bad measurement have been discussed before. It's affecting the new crop of IT people - the very people that will save their organisations - but the organisations don't even know it.

Business (including Government) is still slow to recognise the importance of web 2.0 to future survival, and to identify their own people that can help them. I recently responded to a Twitter stream from a 'thought leader' - an influential networker, who needed to explain what he does in 'value adding' to his own IT management.

Yeah, how can IT or even HR (who should be making the call on productivity) measure the efficiency and quality of work I perform ..
.. that I've leveraged through my professional social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn etc?


YOU are 'peer reviewed' as worth following on a daily basis by 573 people (twitter followers) - the peer review bit is key
HR does not measure quality. So give them stats. Training.gov.au has nn unique hits and 17 committed (daily) followers from zero [in just a few days]

So why aren't we asking these questions? These are the very people that will lead our organisations to better efficency and effectiveness. At the very least they will see us through to survival. What do you know of your people -

• who blogs,
• how are their blogs rated by peers,
• who Twitters,
• how many followers do they have,
• how many retweets,
• who is monitoring the twitterspace for mentions of your organisation, service or product?

Right now is the time to update your business and IT strategies for what will be the toughest year we will have ever faced in our working lifetime. Are you ready? Are you measuring the behaviours you need to have a future?

More Management lessons from Obama Campaign.

Well, in my earlier post (8 factors for Web 2.0 Business Success) I said the Obama victory would have an impact on how management theories for Enterprise 2.0 and business agility would be applied. Huffington Posts' Daniel Debow believes that the clear results from the new way of doing business and the ongoing communication with the Obama base will convince business to move and adopt faster. Success is a real convincer.

Daniel Debow: How Fast is Bottom-Up Coming Up? What Does Obama's Internet-Powered Election Mean for How Business is Managed?

This week, I attended Don Tapscott's book launch for Grown Up Digital. Don's latest is a follow-up to his two prior best-sellers, Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital.

Don didn't disappoint. He outlined two key trends that are changing the way businesses are organized: Internet-based, bottom-up collaboration; and demographics. Don focused on the Net Generation's entry into the workforce and their use of the Internet as a communication and self-organization platform.

I loved the talk, but wondered: "How long will it take for traditional business people to really start changing their organizational structures, social norms, and expectations to account for the reality of the Net Gen?" Will this change occur over the next 12-24 months? Will it take a few years? Or will it take a decade or longer? Will it wait for the Net Gen to take on more senior management roles and force business to redesign around Net Gen models of communication and collaboration?

I don't know for sure, but I think the shift to "bottom-up" is going to happen a whole lot faster than most business people imagine.

When I talk to people about Rypple's goal of re-inventing performance management and professional development as a bottom-up, collaborative, and self-organizing process that integrates work with learning... light-bulbs go off. People get it, which is great.

But, I wonder... how long until the early majority start to get it and change how they do business?

Up until last week, I didn't think the mainstream population took this stuff very seriously. Sure, people heard about Linux software being built in a open source fashion, but... hey, that was just a bunch of tech stuff, right? There have been dozens of stories about corporate wiki-style innovation. But these were just gimmicks and experiments, right? And while everyone (not under a rock) got YouTubes emailed and chatted about (and maybe joined) Facebook, most people were cynical when they heard how things are "different" with this generation.

The Harvard blogs were out the morning after the election. Umair Haque posted Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators said:

It's a momentous day for America - and the world. Barack Obama is poised to take the reins of the Presidency.

So how did this unlikeliest of candidates do it? How did Obama utilize radically asymmetrical competition to shatter Washington's toxic, bitter 20th century status quo?

The most critical part of the story is the organization Obama built. Though conservatives are still arguing that Obama has little executive experience, nothing could be further from the truth.

Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama's team built something truly world-changing: a new kind of political organization for the 21st century. It differs from yesterday's political organizations as much as Google and Threadless differ from yesterday's corporations: all are a tiny handful of truly new, 21st century institutions in the world today.

This is just qthe start of the analysis. If you are a manager or a strategist - it is time to get across what just happened and understand why.

Low cost high speed broadband access for rural and regional communities

Low cost high speed broadband access for rural and regional communities - could it be reality?

CNET reports a step closer to delivering phone and broadband services over powerlines with strong backup and service providers. IBM bringing broadband over power line to rural America | Cutting Edge - CNET News

IBM has been hired to help rural Americans get broadband access using power lines.

On Wednesday, Big Blue announced it has signed a $9.6 million contract with International Broadband Electric Communications to bring the technology to rural America where it hopes to deliver high-speed broadband connectivity to millions of people who otherwise wouldn't be able to get it. IBM and IBEC, which will build and manage the networks, are working with over a dozen electricity cooperatives in seven states, The Wall Street Journal reported.

For years, people have hoped broadband-over-power line technology, or BPL, would allow power companies to become the third alternative in the broadband market, competing against cable operators and telephone companies. But technical limitations and interference issues with local emergency radios and short-wave ham radios have stood in the way of mass adoption.

In recent years, new modulation techniques supported by other technological advances have helped BPL evolve. Most services today are capable of delivering between 512Kbps and 3Mbps of throughput, which is comparable to most DSL offerings.

In rural areas in particular, BPL technology could finally bring high-speed Internet access to people who otherwise couldn't get it. Traditional phone and cable companies often find it too expensive to deploy new infrastructure to provide service to the far reaches of rural America.

8 Factors for Web 2.0 Business Success

There is a 'Tipping Point' in how business is conducted - public sector or private - that the Obama campaign has highlighted. American or not, supporter or not, every manager/strategist must recognise that something important has to be learnt from that campaign. Like Senator Obama, Ron Paul reached an audience and retained a presence that would have been impossible 8 years ago. Business is as much about communication as Politics is. The new tools are essential for business too. That's why companies like Oracle so keenly embraced a PR 2.0 (Public Relations 2.0) strategy.

Governments are reviewing the efficiency and effectiveness of their service delivery. The Australian Government is running presentations for their Departments on Web 2.0. The Department of Finance website, somewhat ominously, states "The Government and particularly the Minister for Finance, the Hon Lindsay Tanner, has a keen interest in this area and is promoting increased use of Web 2.0 applications to engage with the public and to enhance government information and service delivery."

Let's drill down into what and why a bit more. The article from The Huffington Post The New Organizers, Part 1: What's really behind Obama's ground game is one of the few 'must reads' about the campaign that examines the management structures and the communication tools that were brought together to make the campaign effective. Key activities I can see here are:

1. Recruiting people that are interested - heavy use of advertising and social media.
2. Allocation of basic 'test tasks' - note the transfer of empowerment and communication tools for reporting results. Also note that there is a complete set of instructions and a backup person to go to for help - all online.
3. Assessment - easy to overlook that all advancement is on the basis of assessment.
4. Allocation of new roles to fit the person's skills - not the 'holes' in the organisation - using the virtualised organisation to get the person's input to where it is needed e.g. a person in one location phone banking in another. Even tasks like door to door canvassing could use people bussed in from elsewhere.
5. Empowerment and full briefing with support materials and training courses - yes I've mentioned this before but three things are important here - empowerment comes after assessment (again), empowerment is given clear direction through support materials and training and there is constant engagement - not monitoring, but awareness.
   
6. Maintaining engagement - whether donor or volunteer the regular news keeps you involved and feeling that you are part of a larger movement - and there is always someone online to help you - quickly. (Have you ever been in a Bank and seen the internal staff having to wait on the same phone queues as we do - it wastes everyone's time and leaves us all feeling secondary to profit - your call is valuable to us - well answer it then). Constant engagement means that all levels of the organisation know what is happening above and below in a collaborative way - not a directive/enforcement way.
   
7. Finishing the job of communication - 2 days after the election one of the other major campaign sites was still asking for phone volunteers.
8. Fundraising - why did I put this last when it grabbed the headlines? Because it was the result - the outcome - of doing the rest right. Ron Paul also used the web effectively to raise funds, although his power brokers did not react to social pressures in the same way. It was about more than funds.
   

Some these factors translate into business directly. TS14plus is a clothing company for the Woman with Curves. Every day one or other of the management team sends out an email to all staff and shops with news about the TS14plus world. A new shop has opened, there is above target turnover in a store, an opening sale here, an event there and new stock just released. It is upbeat, semi-formal, professional but community - and it helps keep the franchise engaged as a community across Cities and States - and going gangbusters when other clothing stores are feeling a chill wind.

Engaging staff, volunteers and donors is not easy - it has to be done right - but the path is clear. How do we reach customers and stakeholders? Oracle finds that clients respond to the 'voice of genuine experience'. White papers have a role, the academic framework and list of product features is an essential part of informing clients - but what they really respond to is a real person and a real voice. The pasteurised, neutralised language of the traditional white paper doesn't create enough of the trust relationship - it forms part of the foundation, but not the motivation to act. Oracle took action and created the Oracle Blog Centre where any authorised blogger (note assessment before empowerment) is allowed to blog, and the community rates the blogs up or down. Clients and stakeholders help Oracle identify their MVP's (a basketball term - Most Valuable Player) and they get all the second level information (e.g. what are the hot topics right now, where are ou problems) that social software communities offer.

What else can social software show? This example is from The Network Thinker blog. The article Complete Polarization analyses Amazon book buying data to show the extent of political group polarisation during the lead up to the 2008 US Presidential Election. Using the data to gain behavioural insights can give important strategic direction. This example helps explain why political comments in blogs drew such strong reactions during the immediate lead-up to the election.

An associated blog is Network Weaving. In one article it discusses using twitter (Triangles on Twitter) concluding "Connect on your similarities and profit from your differences".

Imagine the information about us, our organisations and our competitors that a similar analysis of Twitter would reveal.

How

So where do we start? How do we find out what this means? Glad you asked. PR 2.0 The Social Media Manifesto – Integrating Social Media into Marketing Communications is where I would start

Why

Because you want you or your organisation to live on the web. Doc Searls has written succinctly about the difference. "A question arose: Why are there so few visitors to our websites? Millions use their services, yet few bother with visiting their sites, except every once in awhile.

The answer, I suggested, was that their sites were buildings. They were architected, designed and constructed. They were conceived and built on the real estate model: domains with addresses, places people could visit. They were necessary and sufficient for the old Static Web, but lacked sufficiency for the Live one.

The Web isn’t just real estate. It’s a habitat, an environment, an ever-increasingly-connected place where fecundity rules, vivifying business, culture and everything else that thrives there. It is alive." Read the rest of this Harvard article if you are serious about your web presence.

What

What is Web 2.0 anyway? Participatative Anthropologist M Wesch probably explains it best from the links in Understanding the Dance - Web 2.0 through Youtube - brilliant videos.

When

Do it now. A community organiser has shown the World what can be done. Governments are training staff in it. EDS is sponsoring training sites. Leading companies are using it to reach customers in a trusted relationship. The time is now. The wave is here.

New IT Policy for Obama Administration

The new policy for IT in the USA is up. For the full text follow the link:


Technology | Change.gov

Science, Technology and Innovation for a New Generation

“Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age. Let's set high standards for our schools and give them the resources they need to succeed. Let's recruit a new army of teachers, and give them better pay and more support in exchange for more accountability. Let's make college more affordable, and let's invest in scientific research, and let's lay down broadband lines through the heart of inner cities and rural towns all across America.”

— Barack Obama Presidential Announcement Speech in Springfield, IL 02/10/07

Web 2.0 Inspirational Startups

Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly Media, Inc., Enterprise Radar - yes - THAT publishing empire is talking about how Web 2.0 (c) is changing into something that interacts with the real world - sensors, people, user created content. He addresses the inspirational and vision aspects of startups - going for the big idea. Ordinary ideas and me too are already funded and won't attract more. During the talk Tim refers to several sites - I've put links to some of them here:

• 23andme - 23andMe's mission is to be the world's trusted source of personal genetic information. They offer a high-density, custom genome scan. Data is used for research as well as personal health information.



• Benetech - Benetech emerged out of the pioneering work for Arkenstone, the world leader in reading machines for the blind. Seeing the value in providing affordable tools that greatly empowered the reading disabled, Jim Fruchterman was inspired to found a business that utilized technology to serve social causes. Benetech was born.
  

More links to sites below the video ...

Click To Play

• ClickDiagnostics - ClickDiagnostics, Inc. has a dual mission of bringing quality medical advice at the doorstep of every household in the developing world at an affordable price, and developing cost-effective solutions for gathering critical data needed for planning and executing public health interventions. They utilise mobile phone technology to connect rural patients with remote medical specialists.


• InSTEDD - InSTEDD is an innovation lab for technologies designed to improve community resilience and save lives through early disease detection and rapid disaster response.


• Omidyar - Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm that is committed to creating and fostering opportunity for people around the world. It makes both grants and investments, identifying likeminded organizations that they support, scale, and champion to maximize their social impact.
  
  Omidyar sees philanthropy as more than a type of funding. In its truest sense, philanthropy is about improving the lives of others, independent of the mechanism. Therefore, they use a wide range of tools in their work, embracing market-based systems and open, web-enabled platforms as key means for making the world a better place.


• PatientsLikeMe - PatientsLikeMe is committed to providing a better, more effective way to capture valuable results and share them with patients, healthcare professionals, and industry organizations that are trying to treat the disease.


• Prosper - Prosper.com is a peer to peer Bank - an online community for lending and borrowing money, with over 810,000 members and $173,000,000 in loans funded on Prosper. Borrowers enjoy fixed monthly payments, no hidden fees and no pre-payment penalties.


• Ushahidi - The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. The goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.


• WITNESS - WITNESS is an international human rights organization that provides training and support to local groups to use video in their human rights advocacy campaigns. Beyond providing video cameras and editing equipment, WITNESS is committed to facilitating exposure for their partners' issues on a global scale. They help broker relationships with international media outlets, government officials, policymakers, activists, and the general public so that once a video is made, it can be used as a tool to advocate for change.

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