The Startup Genome project setup a year ago to gather comparative data on startups around the world. Its Startup Compass allows entrepreneurs to compare statistics on their companies with others in their locality and around the world.

A post on Techcrunch provides a great summary of some of the data gathered in the almost 12 months since the launch of the project.

I was particularly interested in the rankings of startup cities around the world, reproduced below. There is no question that the US is no longer the predominant startup country in a world in which economic and entrepreneurial activity is increasingly global. ...

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Here is an updated version (V3) of the WSD Framework with more charts and descriptions, and now available as a PDF  to download under a Creative Commons Licence.

Social tools are changing not only the way that professionals are working and learning but also the way that organisations are transforming into social businesses. In the new connected workplace, current training, e-learning or blended learning services, which take a top-down, ”command and control” approach to organising and managing “learning” will not be appropriate to support these new ways of working and learning. What will be required is a completely new range of services – which we might call non-training services – that are focused on supporting continuous performance improvement and learning in the workflow as people do their jobs. ...

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Ceci est le premier billet de blog que j’écris en français. Je suis Australien, né à Canberra, mais mon père travaillais pour l’ONU et j’ai passé presque tout ma jeunesse à Genève. Je vivais ainsi à quelques kilomètres de la France et j’y allais tous les samedis pour skier. Cela fait bien longtemps que je n’ai pas vécu dans un pays francophone, mais heureusement je n’ai pas trop oublié mon français.

Je vais passer de la fin avril à la fin mai en Europe, commençant avec...

 

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I recently spoke at an event organised by Building the Organisation of Tomorrow, a group created by alumni of University of Technology Sydney’s Master of Business in IT Management program.

The format was very stimulating, with three 15 minute presentations, each followed by 15 minutes QA and then a ‘disruptive event’, including some awesome satirical musical performances and a planted heckler in the audience. Below are notes from the three speakers.

Bryan Fenech spoke about what the organisation of tomorrow will...

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For many who come across the idea of crowdsourcing in its many forms, their first thoughts are about the ethical issues. As such, in writing Getting Results From Crowds, it was important to address the ethical domain rather than ignoring or glossing it.

We address the ethical issues of crowdsourcing in Chapter 5 on Relationship Value, offering Points and Counterpoints on a number of the major ethical issues in the field.

To bring the debate to life we have created a video providing some of the arguments on each side. ...

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Our online magazine FutureofSex.net explores this fascinating aspect of the intersection of technology and society.

The rise of our connected world has implications that reach into almost every aspect of our lives. I did many Valentine’s Day interviews back in 2003 and 2004, talking about proximity dating, one way in which technology is changing how we connect romantically.

This year we thought it would be worth putting out word to media about the fascinating topic of remote sex, as it is a topic in which their audience will very likely be interested. Here is our press release...

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My favorite part of reading S-1 IPO filings is always the risk factors. They are seemingly endless, as the company tries to cover its ass for all the things that might conceivably go wrong. But they are often very insightful in pointing to the real issues facing the company.

To save you reading it all, here is a highly selective summary of just a few of the interesting risk factors Facebook points to in its IPO filing:

If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with Facebook, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed.
…
Any number of factors could potentially negatively affect user retention, growth, and engagement, including if:

* we are unable to successfully balance our efforts to provide a compelling user experience with the decisions we make with respect to...

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The latest issue of the annual publication Media Trends + Strategy magazine kicks off with a feature article I wrote titled The Decade Ahead for Media. Here is the article:

The future of the media industry as a whole is extraordinarily bright. Alongside the extraordinary rise of social media and a connected world, in the last years we have learned the previously undiscovered depths of the intrinsic hunger humans have for media. As value creation in the global economy increasingly shifts to the flow of information and ideas, and every company can be considered a media organisation, those with the ...

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[This post first appeared on the Getting Results From Crowds book website]

Research firm IDC has forecastthat there will be 1.3 billion ‘mobile workers’ in the world by 2015, representing 37.2% of the global workforce. This points to the massive explosion of what I call the ‘global talent economy’, in which talent can be and will be anywhere.

The forecasts suggest that the bulk of the growth will be in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), which will see 838 million mobile workers in 2015, up 237 million from 2010, representing well over half the global mobile workforce. ...

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