Archive for 'United Kingdom'
Europreneur Secrets – Favorite Web Aps of European Entrepreneurs from Traveling Geeks Trip #TG2009
Klaas Wiema and Mathys van Abbe
This is first in a series where I take JD Lasica’s meme “Coolest Power Tools” on a “spin” to see not what our US geeks are using, but what our European Brethren find as their favorite aps. (more…)
Traveling Geeks favorite tech tools
Hey, the folks who went to the UK on the Traveling Geeks tour listed what tech tools they use every day.
Here’re mine:
• Pine, an old-timey email application
• Firefox
• Picasa
• iPhone apps, including Rimshot and Trombone (sound effects)
What Advertising Should Take From TED
These are some thoughts on TED and the advertising industry after Green Thing returned from TED Global 2009 a few weeks ago.
The big problem for the advertising industry is that it wrote the manifesto for the 20th century’s ideology of triumphant consumerism and excessive individualism. Advertising defined what it was that those who had a newfound capacity to consume should buy, and how to spend their money in a way that suited themselves and no-one else. (more…)
So What Did We Accomplish?
This morning I spoke with Roland Harwood, our counterpart at NESTA, who did so much to make The Geeks trip to London as productive and beneficial as we all could conceive. We agreed it was an extraordinary experiment with a leap of faith that our formal and informal encounters would have both short and long term beneficial impact on the region as well as for everyone involved.
Our visit, sponsored by NESTA, EEI and other donors, was a pilot experiment to see what would happen if we could turn bloggers, authors, and videocasters loose to communicate about innovation in London/Cambridge. Using the connectivity and immediacy of the Web in service of extending “knowing” rather than just knowledge about London/Cambridge, we took the leap. (more…)
Kwaga and Skimlinks Recap
Improve Your Inductive Reasoning Through Mind360
I recently learned about this cool Israel-based company Mind360, which develops mind games and it’s not just for older folks with aging brains.
As you get older that it’s harder to find where you left your car keys, your brush, even your cup of coffee while you’re running around the house trying to get out in the morning?
The brain is a muscle – I learned a lot about how the brain tools and retrains itself after my grandfather had a stroke. (more…)
Howard Rheingold- 21st Century Literacies
Howard Rheingold’s message is that we need to attend to 21st-Century literacies. meaning that we need to know (or learn) how to sort out the good from the bad.
Howard suggests the critical skills are: attention; participation; collaboration; network-savvy and critical consumption (what Howard often calls crap detection). (more…)
Seedcamp 2009 for European high tech
Tech Recap from Traveling Geeks
JD Lasica interviewed me (for socialmedia.biz) about some of the tech we used on the Traveling Geeks trip to London. Topics covered are connectivity using cellular modems (provided by BT), the FeedWordPress plug-in, Flip (Mino and Ultra) video cameras, video streaming (on Nokia n79 using kyte.com), Google Latitude…
You can download and use Google Latitude in the US, but you can’t download Google Latitude in the UK because it is “voluntarily” blocked by BT for privacy reasons (it discloses your location to others).
I just can’t say enough about how much use I get out of the little Flip MinoHD and UltraHD video cameras. I use them for all of my interviews now, and for shooting “trailers” to serve as proposals for projects. (more…)
The World of the Crowd Surfer
In a dialogue back and forth with Martin Thomas recently, we talked “crowd surfing.” Below are some interesting and amusing extracts from his book.
“There is a story, probably apocryphal, about an architect who designed a university campus. On the day of the grand opening, he was approached by the Head of the University, who commented that ‘the buildings look fantastic, but why haven’t you put in any paths to connect them?’
The architect smiled knowingly and replied, “I will come back in six months to put in the paths, once I have seen how the students have chosen to walk between the buildings.” Rather than impose his own views of where the paths should go, or use some elaborate computer simulation model, he believed that an enlightened architect should respond to the behavior of the crowd.
Welcome to the world of the crowd surfer: a world in which a new generation of business and political leaders have learned how to harness the energy, ideas and enthusiasm of today’s empowered consumers. They are not manipulators, demagogues or mere populists.
They have been smart enough to recognize that people around the globe – emboldened and enthused by a new spirit of enquiry and self-expression, and powered by the internet – have changed the rules of the game.
They realize that surrendering absolute control – giving their customers, partners and employees a greater say in the way that their businesses operate – is paradoxically, the most effective way to manage their corporate or political destiny.
Crowd surfers are the people that concur with racing driver Mario Andretti’s maxim that: ‘If everything seems under control you’re just not going fast enough.'”
