Networks and the Nature of the Firm — What’s The Future of Work? One of the themes we’re exploring at the Next:Economy summit is the way that networks trump traditional forms of corporate organization, and how they are changing traditional ways of managing that organization. Uber and Airbnb are textbook examples of this trend. Uber has ambitious plans to manage hundreds of thousands — eventually even millions — of independent drivers with a small core of employees building a technology platform that manages those workers. Airbnb is on track to have more rooms on offer than large hotel chains, with under a thousand employees. Esko Kilpi beautifully described the power of networks in an essay on Medium, “The Future of Firms,” reflecting on economist Ronald Coase’s theory of 20th century business organization. He wrote: The mainstream firm, as we have known it, becomes the more expensive alternative.
Today, we stand on the threshold of an economy where the familiar economic entities are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The Evolution of Platforms. Self-Publishing Is Good for You ... and Authors and the Book Industry. Making movies for virtual reality is unlike any previous kind of filmmaking. You can’t “frame” a 360-degree shot. There are no cuts.
And, weirdly enough, the characters can know you’re there. It lets filmmakers surround you with their world, but it also means they have to factor in a lot more to make sure they don’t just immerse you in an uncanny valley. We asked Oculus Story Studio’s creative director Saschka Unseld and character lead Bernhard Haux to explain that process for Henry, their bittersweet animated short about a balloon-loving hedgehog. Make Eye Contact Because viewers are in Henry’s space, he does something almost no other protagonist has done before: look them in the eye. Show the Viewer Around The freedom of VR can be daunting, so Story Studio added a ladybug that enters the scene and draws viewers’ eyes to the different places they can look at and explore—like the underside of a table. Pay Attention to Scale Get It Real but Not Too Real Don’t Overload Your Rendering Machines.
Essential Elements of an Effective Facebook Posting Strategy. You use your personal Facebook account to have fun, relax and stay in touch with friends. But it's different when you get down to business... right? No goofing around there. You've got to sell, sell, sell. Let's talk about that for a few minutes. Let's step back and look at the basics. Maybe there's a way to make your job easier AND more effective. Maybe there's a way to have more fun, make more money and realize a greater return on investment from the Facebook business Pages you manage. Here's a 5-minute guide to developing a Facebook posting strategy that works! >> Click to Tweet << Essential Elements of an Effective Facebook Posting Strategy I've a friend on Facebook who gets a flurry of likes and comments on everything he posts.
Here's the (complete) text of something he posted recently: "Sing it now all together, JOY TO THE WORLD, JOY TO THE FISHES IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA, JOY TO YOU AND ME !! " That was it! Why do all of my friend's shares get around-the-clock interaction and support? 1. 2. 3. How The Digital Economy Can Help End Extreme Poverty. When I was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia recently as part of the U.S. government’s delegation to the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, I was struck by how much the international development landscape is changing.
Where governments were once the primary source of development assistance, today the private sector, civil society, academia and donors are all working together to discover, fund and scale innovative solutions to longtime development challenges. Some of these solutions have already resulted in transformative innovations that have improved development outcomes. Building the skills and ecosystem to participate in the fast-growing digital economy is likely one of the most powerful drivers for future employment and economic prosperity. In the past two decades alone, advances in mobile technology and digital connectivity have completely revolutionized how we interact with the world around us. We’re already seeing promising signs of this digitization in Africa. Do brands benefit from making a scene on social media? When Tinder tweet-stormed a rant at a Vanity Fair writer, it left many people agog. Vanity Fair's Nancy Jo Sales had written a story on the uglier, seedier side of Tinder's use for soulless hookups.
But it wasn't anything shocking. Was a company really sweating a story that stated the obvious? It was. But the brand's public tantrum seems to have been more calculated than it appeared. Here's the key: for brands, success is defined surprisingly coldly. "Provocation is a very important part of brand-building," said branding consultant Dean Crutchfield A short sharp shock can certainly be effective, but shock for shock's sake doesn't work well. A short sharp shock can certainly be effective, but shock for shock's sake doesn't work well.
" It's a tradeoff that plenty of brands make in the age of social media: give fodder to some inevitable haters in exchange for the viral buzz that advertisers crave above all else. "How do you stand out in a crowded market? " Stand out or die Brands are people too. The new normal: five ways that retail is set to change under the influence of digital shopping. A new round of digital disruption is set to change forever the way shoppers buy, a new report concludes.
Retailers will respond by fully digitising the end-to-end customer experience, from the store onwards, predicts Forrester’s The Future of the Retail Experience. Report author Nigel Fenwick says that customers’ expectations of the ‘normal’ in-store experience will change as they become more used to digital experiences. That in turn, he argues, will mean all retailers must provide similar experiences, or risk losing customers. “Traditional retailers are in a race with online retailers to develop high-value shopping experiences,” he writes.
We’ve singled out five ways that Forrester predicts the retail experience will change as the new normal shopping emerges. Personalised experiences in-store Store traders will use digital technology to give individual customers personalised shopping experiences. In-store beacons will also help shoppers find the items they want to buy. The Changing Face Of Today’s Consumer - ReadWrite. Guest author Ori Karev is general manager of enterprise and the U.S. CEO of Gett, an on-demand purveyor of ground transportation. Back in the 80s and the 90s, companies worked hard on their interactions with consumers. Everything was about communicating correctly. Legions of experts taught employees how to speak with clients. Others worked on corporate communications materials. Then came the first decade of the new millennium and the brave new world of the smartphone took off.
As we’ve become more connected, our behavior as consumers is also changing at the speed of light. In this environment, products or services either succeed or fail in minutes or days, not weeks or months. Today’s Shopper: More Pragmatic Than Ever Connectivity is everything, especially when we’re on the move. The instantaneous nature of business today extends to all kinds of products and services. The new online consumer persona shares many traits of the business-to-business consumer. The Bottom Line. 100 Resilient Cities. 50pc of Irish firms replace people with software and robots. Almost half of businesses in Ireland (48pc) have automated business functions or are in the process of replacing people with software and machines, according to new research.
According to data from the Grant Thornton International Business Report (IBR), this is slightly behind the global average of 55pc. A further 24pc of Irish businesses state that they may automate processes in the next 12 months. These companies are principally looking for greater accuracy and efficiency in production (67pc), and enhanced flexibility to increase or decrease production (50pc). The findings suggest that some jobs will go as a result, with one-in-four businesses expecting automation will lead to a reduction in headcount, and with capital costs low as labour costs rise, the findings pose fundamental questions about the implications of advancing technologies on the workforce.
“Post the financial crisis, firms continue to strive for greater efficiency and better productivity. Robot image via Shutterstock. Are We Living In A "Post-Startup" World? - ReadWrite. Guest author Carol Broadbent is the cofounder and principal of Crowded Ocean, a Silicon Valley marketing agency. She wrote this post with cofounder Tom Hogan. Industry pundits like to talk about how we’re now inhabiting the post-PC, post-desktop, post-software world. Recently, after launching our 36th startup, we sat back and looked at how much has changed in terms of the rules and ‘best practices’ governing the startup world.
We realized that most of the rules that governed our first startups—only five years ago—no longer apply or are under serious reconsideration. For example: Post-Geographic This category used to be called "virtual": in other words, there is no headquarters. Post-Intellectual Property This might seem like a part of the post-geographic trend, but there’s a fundamental difference. Post-Post-Silicon Valley Today, there are literally hundreds of startup incubators and accelerators scattered nationwide. But it’s not just startups that thrive in the region. Post-Bullpen. Businessinsider. The future of food shopping: holograms and cloud control? Imagine walking into your local giant supermarket and being greeted by a smiling hologram waiting to take you to all points of interest in the shop.
What if you could wave your increasingly smart phone at an unusual vegetable and call up a virtual chef to take you through some brilliant recipes? Or imagine being able to hold your device up to a shirt hanging lifelessly from a rack so that a Gok Wan type could magically materialise to give you fashion tips. It all sounds faintly ridiculous, right? Well, it isn’t. Over the past two or three years, augmented reality has become one of the retail sector’s big talking points. In days of old, World Fairs and Expos took place in great cities and left great legacies, such as the ill-fated Crystal Palace in London and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. And not just any old supermarket. Another feature of the future shop is a huge TV showing real-time data about the most popular products in the shop. Consumer empowerment It all sounds a bit exhausting. Striping down The Brands: The Actual Price of Things.
We all love and enjoy branded cars, clothes, sneakers and all the other toys, but we rarely ask ourselves how much do these products actually cost. The long and pricey road a product travels from a manufacturer to a distribution network, catches a few zeros on its tail here and there, and today we will strip down the brands and take a look how high is the real expenditure of our beloved belongings, and what it takes to make them. Let’s start from cars, since the price of the certain vehicles is almost legendary and incomprehensible to the most of us. But let’s not discuss collectible automobiles, because the current price of the Ferrari GTO from the year 1963 is breaking all records, and as a collectible item it doesn’t concern us, everyday consumers. A Pricey Ride Believe it or not, car companies don’t make as much as we think they do, at least the world famous ones. Poppin’ Them Tags An average cost for a Nike shoe to get made is $30. High Priced Gadgetry. New Financial Times And Economist Owners Ponder The Future Of Digital Media.
Who saw the recent sale of the Financial Times (FT) from Pearson to Nikkei for $1.3 billion coming? The sale of The Economist, also owned by Pearson, three weeks later, was less of a surprise, as Pearson set forth its new streamlined “digital ambitions.” While everyone and their dog was talking about Bloomberg or Axel Springer being the likely new owners (see graph), nobody mentioned Nikkei, despite it being one of the largest media companies in the world. FT journalists even published an article the day before, outlining their publication’s “talks with Springer are further advanced” than with Nikkei (which, by contrast, was only mentioned once in the original FT article). Now Pearson has sold another big name: the Economist has gone this week for around $731 million (£469m), and Exor will end the week as the largest single shareholder in the Economist Group.
The new owners of both the FT and the Economist have stated their intention to continue pushing hard with new digital initiatives. The Revolution Of The Cashless Society. For over 500 years, Britons have been trading with the much-loved and popular paper currency. This is a similar trend to that which has developed overseas, where paper and coin currency has driven economies and purchasing for generations. It wasn’t always this way, however, and the orientation of technological advancement suggests that a cashless society may soon be in-vogue once again. Prior to the emergence of paper currency, citizens would trade using certain items such as food or weaponry.
These were the most coveted assets of the time, and they could be used to barter for whatever people were in need of. The ease with which society adapted to using bank notes and coins underlines the flexible nature of currency and makes it easier to consider a world without it. Technology has played a key role in ageing the paper currency, with advanced software and increasingly capable mobile devices now enabling real-time electronic transactions negating the need for cash.
The Future of Work: We Have Been Here Before - Pacific Standard. This is not the first time society has fretted over the impact of ever-smarter machines on jobs and work—and not the first time we have overreacted. In the Depression-beset 1930s, labor Jeremiahs warned that robots would decimate American factory jobs. Three decades later, mid-1960s prognosticators offered a hopeful silver lining to an otherwise apocalyptic assessment of automation’s dark cloud: the displacement of work and workers would usher in a new “leisure society.”
Paul Saffo teaches forecasting at Stanford University and chairs the Future Studies and Forecasting track at Singularity University. Reality stubbornly ignored 1930s and 1960s expectations. The robots of extravagant imagination never arrived. Now the specter of job-killing robots is back. Advertisement — Continue reading below Even in the face of today’s considerable uncertainty, it is a safe bet that the most extravagant claims are no more likely now than they were in 1965 or 1933. Redfront. A short while ago we developed some materials around the sharing economy. As part of a wider service design toolkit we created a simple tool for developing sharing economy startup ideas.
This tool was first tested in an open workshop at Mozilla London and subsequently used with Ravensbourne students. You can download a printable version with some simple instructions here. For usage ideas and an example read on. Each outer segment of the canvas suggests an attribute of a service/product idea. The best way to demonstrate this is with an example. Lots of people have musical instruments sitting around. After the first sweep around you can go back and start to relate two or more attributes and see how this makes you rethink the original attributes. From this canvas you can start to fill in other design tools such as the Business Model Canvas or Persona descriptions.
Download the canvas, use it tool and let us know how you get on in the comments. How Self-Driving Vehicles Will Change Us - ReadWrite. Cities As Platforms. The Devil Shares Prada: The Sharing Economy Boosts Luxury. I, For One, Welcome Our New (Google) Overlords « INC Longform. How Museums Are Using Technology. Bits.blogs.nytimes. At Vidcon, cute YouTube stars are the best moneymakers. Less Than One Percent of All Things That Could Be Internet-Connected Actually Are | Centric Digital. Electronic Word of Mouth Marketing: Relationship between Brand Loyalty and Electronic Word of Mouth in Social Marketing Networks: Business and Management Book Chapter.
10 sought after "Areas of Expertise" in the New Internet Economy! See Ya Later, Capitalism — the Collaborative Economy Is Taking Over — Backchannel. The end of capitalism has begun. Facebook Oozed Rainbows, but LGBT Activists Say It Denies Them Their Identity. Katy Perry's Left Shark Has a Page, but Facebook Still Wants Native Americans to Prove They're Real.
Space Race 2.0: Avanti claims headstart in bringing Africa online. In the Digital Economy, Reinvention is the Word. Facebook e il declino dell'Occidente. From Remnant To Riches: What The Quest For Premium Inventory Means For The Industry. Microsoft's new augmented reality project, "SemanticPaint," lets you digitize your environment. Microsoft backs 'micro-celebrities' "Matematica dei sentimenti e telepatia": il futuro secondo il visionario Zuckerberg. Paired With AI and VR, Google Earth Will Change the Planet. Top 10 Emerging Technologies Changing Our Lives. From Social Networks To Market Networks. Ready or Not, Millennials Are Changing How We Do Business Forever | Jason van den Brand.
The Berlin Startup Ecosystem Needs An IPO In The U.S. 0965254X.2015. The Recycling Industry is Losing Money -- and Fast. How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine. Nano Satellites Will Stop the Internet of Things from Ever Going Offline. Royalty-creating app Eternify targets Spotify. How Industrial Systems Are Turning into Digital Services. Michael Wolff's War: TV Vs. The Web. From A to Z: 200 Essential Resources for Entrepreneurs Building a Business. API-Based Money Mover Currency Cloud Taps Sapphire Ventures And Rakuten For $18M. Anarchy at the checkout: You can now own a Sex Pistols credit card. How the Internet of Things is Poised to Shake Up Sports Marketing. How Digital has reduced the B2B buying cycle across the globe. - Valve Solutions. Power beamed to camera via ambient wi-fi signals. Organizing Connected Transportation – Brand Marketing Evolution: The Future of Content Creation. Philip N. Howard: Extremists fear the Web: politics, liberty and the new Internet of things.
The Unbundling Of Finance. Guest Post: 3 Ways to Monetize Users (And Keep Them Happy) With Mobile Video Ads. MassRetailer NZ - Top trends impacting the retail sector. Retailers sacrificing £6.6bn a year due to lack of mobile investment. 70,000 pictures make up this panorama of Mont Blanc. Location-Based Marketing Startup Ubimo Gets $7.5M To Create Ad Campaigns Using Real-Time Data. Daimler and Qualcomm team up on wireless charging for electric cars.
365 Million Reasons Why Email Is A Solid Investment. Net Neutrality: the struggle for the future of the Internet has only just begun. Futuro, idee e innovazione alla Luiss il primo evento TedxLuiss. Nikon legitimizes the selfie stick once and for all. ValueMyCV | Get a free estimate of what's your CV worth. The smart traveler and the experience economy. The philosophy of privacy: why surveillance reduces us to objects | Technology. "Emerging Trends towards Connect2020" The car of the future is 'the most powerful computer you will ever own' About IFTTT. We're Running Out of Internet. Shadow Banks Could Take $11 Billion Annual Profit, Goldman Says. Using Technology To Humanize Finance. Co-innoviamo tutto! - cheFare. What is the future of work, travel and mobility? 'Facebook for Scientists' Could Change Science Research For Good -- And For The Better.
You Can't Defend Public Libraries and Oppose File-Sharing. How This Teenager Turned Her Childhood Hobby Into a Global Business. The Technologies That Will Change The Way You Shop | Inc.com. Retail's new reality: Invisible shopping centers and virtual assistants—commentary. How to make Social Media Day official in your city. Propelling business into the future with science fiction | AWE 2015 + UploadVR. The Future of Interfaces is Mobile, Screen-less and Invisible.
Just Eat Snaps Up Menulog For $687M To Enter Australia And New Zealand. 5 technologies that will transform shopping. The Care-Centered Economy: A New Theory of Value. The global commodification of agriculture and its perils. Fashion Revolution. Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage, and supplies.
Curbing the New Corporate Power. Internet 'rationing' needed as UK cannot keep up with demand. Facebook Opens Internet.Org To All Developers In Response To Net Neutrality Concerns. Le big data prédit très bien vos comportements (ceci n’est plus de la fiction)