Meeker revealed that 81% of users of the top ten global internet properties are outside the USA, which makes global markets a force to be reckoned with.
2. Mobile – Early Innings Growth, Still…
iPhones, iPods and iPads have revolutionized the market. But Android tablets and phones, at a different price point, are not to be underestimated.
3. User Interface – Text/Graphical/ Touch / Sound / Move
“Sound is going to be bigger than video. Record is the new Qwerty,” say SoundCloud CEO Alexander Ljung.
“Percolate is the first content curation platform that works by bubbling up interesting content based on your network and presenting it back to you for reaction.
Percolate works by hooking up to streams of content (like RSS and Twitter, with more to come) and filtering down to the most interesting stuff for you (by way of a lot of math and technical wizardry). We then present that content back to you for you to react to, which is as easy as hitting an “awesome” button.”
“The US secret intelligence community is long overdue for a draconian reduction of its budget from the $80-90 billion a year today that it wastes on contractors producing vaporware, to something closer to the $20 billion a year that Jim Woolsey is on record as saying would be sufficient, and for once I agree with him.”
“General Tony Zinni is on record as saying that when he was in charge of the US Central Command, the secret intelligence community provided, ‘at best' 4% of what he needed to know. The fact is that the secret world is primarily a means of transferring wealth from taxpayers to corporations and banks–it not only lacks intelligence, it lacks integrity.”
Thanks to everyone who participated and responded to the 4 question survey for the Future of Facebook Project. Below are your results! We’ll be integrating these responses with the ones given by the experts for our final video and written report.
Phi Beta Iota: Weak signals, most fascinating are two. First, open source the code and open Application Program Interfaces (API) are the most hoped for immediate change; and second, social (peer to peer or P2P) commerce is the next hoped for big big thing.
Occupy Wall Street is at a delicate point both in the USA and overseas. Despite its clear commitment to non-violence, police violence in the USA–and provocateur violence in Europe–are eroding the moral legitimacy of the Occupy Wall Street.
1) Occupy Wall Street needs to maintain discipline, and both domestically and overseas, when provocateurs begin violence, they must be shut down, shunned, or fled from. The anarchists causing so much damage in Europe must be repudiated instantly and completely, even if this means fleeing the area to regroup elsewhere.
2) Gandhi and Martin Luther King both agreed that non-violence was preferable to violence, but violence is preferable to passive acceptance of great crimes against humanity such as we have witnessed within the Empire for the past fifty years.
3) It is my personal judgment that violence is NOT necessary and could be fatal for the OWS Movement. Because of the Internet, there are so many alternatives to violence–flash mobs being one of them–that I am certain that violence of any sort on the part of OWS adherents is self-defeating.
4) With this in mind, I salute US Day of Rage and their focus on Electoral Reform. This is the reason I have devoted myself to spreading the gospel of Electoral Reform as the singular demand for #OWS around the world beginning in the USA. A General Strike may well be required to force a very corrupt entrenched two-party tyranny to fold (as Ronald Reagan pointed out, less turnover than the Soviet politburo), but in my view Electoral Reform and a General Strike are the two sides of a non-violent revolution that restores integrity to the Republic and shows the way for all other countries (including those that wish to eliminate artificially imposed borders from the colonial era).
Below are some headlines focusing on both non-violence as the avowed method, and violence as the undesired result today, caused by infiltrators to the group (e.g. anarchists, undercover police) not by the group itself. Emphasis is added. The media is exaggerating the violence and failing to properly investigate the actual sources of the violence. OWS is going to have to do this for them, and denounce, in detail and with audio-visual precision, those who do violence to OWS, alongside OWS, or in the name of OWS. But first, here is what I said on the air eight hours before the media figured out it was Anarchists (and probably also undercover police) doing the violence: Robert Steele (Video): Two-Party Tyranny, Obama Will NOT Co-Ops OWS, Violence by Provocateurs Not OWS
Within Twitter, #OWS is the new tag displacing #OccupyWallStreet, and #nonviolence is the method tag.
Below the line: Commitment to Non-Violence, & Provocateur Violence
Earlier this week I attended a breakfast panel sponsored by Gensler (http://www.gensler.com), an architecture, design, planning and consultation firm that focuses (among other things) on effective workplace environments, consulting for companies like Google, HP, Yahoo and Facebook. The title of the panel was “Designing your workplace for a competitive edge.”
Here’s my set of notes from the panel:
Evolving workplace:
Version 1.0: Move fast and break things. Emerging culture. Workplaces built for speed, transparency, flexibility.
Version 2.0: 8×8, 1:1. Cubic farms on vast floor plates. Cube dwellers. Butts in seats. Embedded hierarchy.
Version 3.0: (Now). Activity-based era. Changing work process. Mobile, remote work. “We” spaces, not “me” spaces. Support for collaboration. Drivers: faster pace, distributed teams, lean and mean. Changing work processes (from waterfall to agile). Closed to open. Get products to market faster. Multiple space times for multiple work modes. Coworking. Workers not tethered to one company.
Panelists
Derek Woodgate, The Futures Lab: futurist perspective
Eden Bruckman, International Living Future Institute: sustainability perspective
David Bumgardner, HP: real estate acquisition and management perspective.
Bumgardner’s job is to maximize HP’s real estate portfolio. He has to consider how employees work and what kind of environment is conducive to productivity, at the same time maintaining standards across the global HP properties. He focuses on optimal use of all properties, noting that the workforce increasingly consists of mobile employees who require no office or desk. The need for consistent standards is so that wherever the mobile employee goes to an HP facility, the work environment is fairly consistent. Other factors: environmental sustainability, affordability.
A green and sustainable workplace environment can be a competitive edge: some of the most talented employees will factor environmental impact into their decisions about where to work.
Google is another company that focuses on sustainability. The focus is authentic, no greenwashing. Google wants to move beyond LEED, looking through the lens of the Living Building Challenge (https://ilbi.org/lbc).
The build environment is an extension of who we are. We see increasing interest in building bio measurement and feedback into environments. China is looking closely at metrics in building 20 megacities.
Community will no longer be a matter of who’s aggregated in any place, but also how they share and manage resources.
Health and well-being is the new perq for employees; it’s no longer about having a corner office or other sings of hierarchy.
At Zappos, the number 1 priority is company culture, feeling that if you get that right, the rest will happen naturally. How does the built environment impact that culture?
The contemporary work environment needs spaces for energizing and spaces for discharging that energy.
Technology is moving fast, but the build environment is inherently slow.
HP created the Halo Room (http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/archive_blogs/2007/08/28/hp_halo_releases_hp_meeting_ro.php), a set of global networked technology-mediated remote conferencing environments. As these kinds of environments proliferate, travel requirements will decrease. “You’re not going to see that people interaction go away. You’re going to see better ways to get it.”
Increasingly building sustainability into design standards, which may have to vary for different (non-U.S.) contexts. Striving for a zero effect (carbon neutral). Changing densities.
Currently workers don’t feel the same commitment from companies as before, and vice versa. Companies are reducing the numbers of employees and relying more on contractors. We’re creating a world of experts (consultants).
Future workers (currently under 25 years of age) are growing up with a different set of assumptions. Their world is a world of peer groups, not authoritarian hierarchies. It’s a world that’s saturated with technology, especially for communications. For the first time ever, we’re starting to see multiple generations of employees working together in the same office.
Phi Beta Iota: Notice the butts in seats model, which is where the US and most governments are today. OWS is already at the new model. All this was known in the 1980's, relearned in the 1990's, and is now being relearned a third time, but the lack of integrity in senior management–an inability to listen and adapt–has retarded both democracy and capitalism. See the list below for many new books, and the two books not on the old lists. The earliest book to “get it” that we know of was by Robert Carkhuff, The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity (Human Resource Development Press, 1984).
To block the bank protest, Mayor Bloomberg initiated a plan to evict the Occupation from Liberty Square on the 14th of October. He claimed the city needed to “clean” the park.
In recognition of the threat, the Occupy movement gathers its strength. It makes a widely reported call to come to the park on the morning of the 14th to block the eviction.
Occupy then rapidly delegitimizes the complaint. It starts to deep clean Liberty Square with powerwashers, brooms, and mops (they even hired a dump truck). It even offers to let cleaners into the square to clean 1/3 of it at a time.
With the complaint delegitimized, the Occupy movement goes on the offensive. It personalizes the eviction move (already inside Bloomberg's OODA). It finds Bloomberg. He's at a gala dinner at Ciprianis (a Wall Street restaurant). They surround the restaurant and try to enter it to deliver a petition with 310,000 signatures. Bloomberg hides, departs from the rear.
Spoiling Bloomberg's Dinner
Surprise! The deputy mayor announces that the eviction is cancelled.
Phi Beta Iota: Strongly recommended with all of the comments that represent a maturing discussion of what #OWS is about–it is NOT against capitalism and it is NOT in favor of income redistribution. Rather, it is against the institutionalization of greed and the rigging of the system to exclude, disenfranchise, and impoverish the 99% that the system is supposed to nurture.
