This is a wonderful talk. It doesn’t all absolutely fit with me, my beliefs. But the core of what Jim says, the essence of what it is to be part of a human network, that works for me. And I love how real and authentic his delivery is, how ‘him’ it is.
Great.
Month: July 2011
Time creation, the billion dollar opportunity
Business and entrepreneurial literature describe the big new business opportunities: cleantech, the bottom of the pyramid, health 2.0 and so on it goes.
I believe these are all big, valid market opportunities.
Another one is – or should be – time creation.
Study after study shows that people say they are too busy, that they don’t have enough time. (I was reminded of this today at the Arts Marketing Association’s annual conference in Glasgow where I was part of the opening keynote and where my fellow speaker Jerry Yoshitomi shared a study from New Zealand that showed that by far and away the biggest cited reason for people to not attend arts events was lack of time/too busy.)
These people I refer to are already afforded an abundant life full of necessities and luxuries. They are mostly in the developed world, mostly in the West.
What these people are generally (but not always) driving for are chunked experiences, shorter emails, on-demand stuff that can fit in.
As information overload grows to crisis levels, as our internet addiction spirals and our positive and counterbalancing moves towards greater work life balance and more integrated lives add to the pile of tasks to do, so our time fritters away.
There are products and services that create or reclaim time for us.
The concierge and virtual PA. Google’s Priority Inbox. The Getting Things Done religion. And much more I’m sure.
There are products and services that have sympathy for the time constraints we now willingly live with.
On-demand and catch up TV. Reminder text messages from dentists. Other things you can probably think of.
This is a huge business opportunity. If I were starting a business today I would be asking ‘how does this reclaim time for our customers?’ and ‘how does this play nice and fit into the madly busy lives of our customers?’.
If you believe we could be doing good, useful things with the reclaimed or unlocked time, then this is also an important contribution to society.
Time creation: it’s where the smart money should go.
Certainty fucks me off
I had a conversation last night, in a pub (drunk) that about where we each ‘come from’.
It was good-natured banter, but I’ve realised this morning what it was that got my goat. Certainty really fucks me off.
The gist of this banter was that I look a bit non-English, whatever that means, and this friendly guy was trying to guess where I was from (which is fine), and what pissed me off was the certainty that I was or wasn’t something. How can we know? How can we absolutely belong or come from somewhere? (This guy thought he was ‘English’, which when pressed he considered himself to be ‘Anglo-Saxon’, which is pretty funny).
Anyway, that’s not the real nub of it for me. This isn’t about nationality – it’s about certainty.
The last conversation I had that agitated this same sense for me was about humans as rational beings.
In this conversation a mate of mine was staunchly advocating the idea of humans as being frequently rational – making rational decisions, thinking sensibly, thoroughly, rigorously.
I think that’s bollocks 🙂 Personally I believe that even when we’re making ‘rational decisions’ or ‘being rational’, that we’re not at all. Utter guff! But this friend was utterly convinced of the certainty that we are often rational.
I just don’t get certainty. I can’t seem to tolerate it. It doesn’t fit with what I see and have experienced in my limited quaint little life.
What also excites this intolerance in me is the religion of Science, and those espousing a kind of fundamentalist atheism, both of which seem to be all the rage in my world of otherwise likeminded left-leaning liberal folk.
I really appreciate and admire the work of science and its huge contributions to the world we live in. That’s all good. And I agree that lots of religious stuff is silly, oppresses millions of people, is the banner and excuse for war and unnecessary pain, and mostly doesn’t make any sense. But there’s a kind of certainty – sometimes – that I can’t bear.
Won’t there always be things that elude or surprise us? Can’t we only really know stuff and account for it once it’s happened (Black Swan kinda thing)? Doesn’t history tell us that we have a track record of convincing ourself of stuff and then later finding out that we were, in fact, completely wrong? Isn’t the world always going to be partly unknowable?
For me, certainty is the preserve of haughty pompous fools and can fuck right off 🙂
The Interactive Blackmail Squad: NEW SERVICE!
LONDON/MOSCOW/MUMBAI 2011
“As of today I am delighted to announce that we are offering a new high value, long-term investment service.
We call it The Interactive Blackmail Squad.
You give us a list of upto 25 up-and-coming people you think will be movers and shakers in the next 10 years.
They might be competitors, peers, industry rising stars, family members or randoms plucked from a telephone directory.
Using our blackhat techniques, proprietary methods and over-the-counter digital tracking & monitoring technologies we immediately start collating as much of their digital footprint as possible – following them across different avatars and pseudonyms, across different social platforms and spaces, aggregating and storing their contrails and online contributions. (In fact, we may already be tracking them as we add to our database every single day!).
And when it comes to finding them online, there is no place we won’t go!
Annually, we provide you with a bespoke ‘Yearbook’ report into each of their digital lives, detailing uncovered sensitive facts, infographics highlighting interesting trends and patterns in their behaviour and an executive summary of their gaffes, flirtations, mentions of key brands/individuals and any other non-generic statements/actions.
The Yearbook will also include visual graphics depticting your trackees social graph, with a brief narrative on ‘connections of interest’.
We will also contact you at this time to arrange your annual consultation with our Global Privacy Engineers based for a 45 minute VOIP briefing and Q&A. This is your opportunity to really dig deeper.
However, the real value is in the accretion and synthesis of data collated over time. We expect our clients to reap the greatest Return-on-Investment in their 8th, 9th and 10th years of this ten year service – just as their trackees careers reach their apogee. WINNING!
Payment is accepted in Bitcoin (pref) or US Dollars. The service requires an investment of ¢5,000 per trackee, per annum.
Think long-term, pick some winners, and invest today! ”
——-
Related: http://willmcinnes.co.uk/2011/01/29/you-know-me-the-president/
Technology and our expectations
Instagram provides filters and tidy borders that make his photos look much richer and warmer and better than they really are.
Call of Duty provides prediction code and auto-aim that makes her aim and positioning better than they really are.
Karaoke bars provide clever stuff that makes my rendition of Eye of the Tiger less awful than it really is (and even then it’s still shockingly bad) 🙂
Spellcheck – for the most part – lessens the awfulness of people’s spelling.
As technology seeps into every facet of our lives, what will these enhanced abilities and invisible helping hands do to our expectations of how good we are at stuff really?
As a parent I see the resilience and fragility that come with learning, with trying, the tears, the ‘I’m rubbish’. It seems healthy, good.
So what it will be like to *not* know you’re rubbish? To cruise around propped up, prompted, auto-corrected – all wrinkles smoothed out.
Will there be clanging moments where lords and ladies of technology suddenly reenter the physical world and find they can’t fix the tap, mow the lawn, cook a meal, drive the basic car?
Will there be different classes of people, new strata in society – those that tech, those that fetch and fix? Will it be symbiotic or will one class of people dominate and bully the other?
Will McInnes 