BusinessQuests - tailored advice and facilitation for business progress

Why we need the explorers...

Brian Cox beautifully makes the case for curiosity, exploration, science and innovation.

Tim Berners-Lee calls for the next leap: raw data

Through a recent post of one of my contacts, I got to view for a second time a presentation Tim Berners-Lee gave at TED for the 20 years of the web. What had not struck me the first time I saw the presentation is the claim Berners-Lee makes that everything we have today of the web resulted from the idea of hyperlink / hypertext. A big bang of sorts. 

It's almost a stereotype of the kind of claims brilliant conceptual types do, because they're so focused on discovery, innovation in its rawest form, beginnings and not necessarily finished forms... which is also one of the reasons why Tim Berners-Lee was not the many economic beneficiary of the discovery. Can you imagine the turn of events had he decided to patent the hyperlink idea and ask for a trillionth of a Euro for each hyperlink created? One of the reasons why I'm not a fan of extreme patenting and rigid copyright.

In this presentation Tim Berners-Lee calls from a new leap, which he thinks is as important as the hyperlink: open availability of raw data. Can you imagine what that means if he's right? I'm ready to bet he is and I'm ready to bet it's a matter that's far more important than data: it's a matter of civilization and a defining factor for civil liberties. 

His presentation  mentions several examples and he mentions the excellent work of Professor Hans Rosling that I covered in December 2006 in this post (here are the notes of Rossling's talk back then).

Slides from the conference at Technoport

A mini-conference about the basics of how to use search marketing to develop the business was organized today at Technoport with eTeamsys and BusinessQuests presenting.

Mike Mitchell, eTeamsys' CEO, spoke about the challenges and the major trends affecting search marketing, with a highlight on e-reputation. When speaking about e-reputation he showed how search results about Clearstream are currently affected by a high-profile trial that took place in France recently and by video content making a number of negative claims about the Luxembourg-based player in securities clearing & settlement. By contrast, Mike showed how search results about Euroclear were consistent with a more desirable image for such a player. That was pretty interesting and I certainly recommend you look at the slides with evidence of the difference between the search results of these two players. Now you might ask what the impact may be since these are B2B players and their business is unlikely to be affected by that kind of results as industry insiders will filter out the noise. Well, it may well affect the ability of the organization to recruit talent (remember how people became uncomfortable saying they were working for Philip Morris a few years ago or how people working for virtually bankrupt investment banks were being very discreet about that last year?). And since there is a war for talent and these organizations do need good IT people, there may be an impact. At any rate I'm not sure you want your brand to be tarnished even if that can boost your PageRank, right?

I spoke for BusinessQuests to highlight:

• the imperative of aligning online strategy to overall business strategy
• the scarcity of human attention, 
• how to consider people when publishing content online, especially when you want your ads to get clicked and to lead to actual commercial results
• the need to think in terms of audience, experience and influence when defining your approach to search and more largely your online presence
• what can be done in the field of analytics in terms of audience profiling, content performance and ultimately business performance 

The two sets of slides are to be found below.

eTeamsys on search marketing

BQ on objectives driven online presence

Slides from the conference at Technoport

A mini-conference about the basics of how to use search marketing to develop the business was organized today at Technoport with eTeamsys and BusinessQuests presenting.

Mike Mitchell, eTeamsys' CEO, spoke about the challenges and the major trends affecting search marketing, with a highlight on e-reputation. When speaking about e-reputation he showed how search results about Clearstream are currently affected by a high-profile trial that took place in France recently and by video content making a number of negative claims about the Luxembourg-based player in securities clearing & settlement. By contrast, Mike showed how search results about Euroclear were consistent with a more desirable image for such a player. That was pretty interesting and I certainly recommend you look at the slides with evidence of the difference between the search results of these two players. Now you might ask what the impact may be since these are B2B players and their business is unlikely to be affected by that kind of results as industry insiders will filter out the noise. Well, it may well affect the ability of the organization to recruit talent (remember how people became uncomfortable saying they were working for Philip Morris a few years ago or how people working for virtually bankrupt investment banks were being very discreet about that last year?). And since there is a war for talent and these organizations do need good IT people, there may be an impact. At any rate I'm not sure you want your brand to be tarnished even if that can boost your PageRank, right?

I spoke for BusinessQuests to highlight:

• the imperative of aligning online strategy to overall business strategy
• the scarcity of human attention, 
• how to consider people when publishing content online, especially when you want your ads to get clicked and to lead to actual commercial results
• the need to think in terms of audience, experience and influence when defining your approach to search and more largely your online presence
• what can be done in the field of analytics in terms of audience profiling, content performance and ultimately business performance 

The two sets of slides are to be found below.

eTeamsys presentation on search marketing

BusinessQuests presentation on online marketing for real people

Creative approaches to fighting climate change

Conference on the economic situation

Last Thursday BusinessQuests helped organize a conference on the financial situation. We had Prof. Bruno Colmant, who also happens to be the CEO of Euronext, and Prof. Philippe Defeyt on the panel and they presented a number of interesting developments to explain the causes and the dynamics of the current situation. Aside from the content, which is very much within my field of attention, the event has been a great opportunity for me to test the adoption of online tools by a predominantly tech-conservative  audience. Results of my tests in a future post. This one is about the content of the conference.

Day of conferences

This is a day of conferences for me. First I'll be spending most of the day at Plugg and then I'll be off to a conference I helped organize on the economic situation and its impacts.
I certainly look forward to meeting a bunch of enthusiastic people at Plugg and attending presentations and panels which will hopefully be good food for thought.

Beta Group in Brussels

Back to the Beta Group this evening at my Alma Mater, home of the B-school that has given me much useful knowledge at a time that feels like centuries ago for anyone who's been heavily involved with innovation in the past decade or so. There were more than 200 people in the room, which I find particularly positive for innovative ventures.

Again a couple of very interesting initiatives and very refreshingly most of them had credible business models. As I've said before on this blog I completely disagree with people downplaying the importance of a business model as they develop extreme positions to support the (correct IMHO) position that innovation needs to be supported regardless of the existence of a business model.

Let me give you my top 3 and some notes I took during the presentations...

Twitter overview at TED by Evan Williams

An interesting presentation at TED by the evangelist-founder of Twitter. I came across this one as I was doing some research on existing analyses of the phenomenon and in particular the types of use cases that were "invented" by users who made extremely creative use of the minimalism of Twitter's design. To me it's an example of chaos, flow and emergence that I think will be a necessary ingredient in any initiative of the future.

Excellent discussion on the crisis at Digital Life Design

Late January at Digital Life Design in Munich, there was an interesting panel with Nasim Taleb (always insightful and full of common sense | his site) and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (always fascinating pioneer of psychology applied to finance and the economy | his Nobel profile ). Taleb has a realistic approach by saying that what he basically want is not to improve forecasts but rather to review the way the world is working in order to make it resistant to forecastign errors. Like Roubini he advocates the nationalization of banks. I suspect he means the "utility" part, not the "casino" part of the banking system (for a view of utility vs casino listen to the podcast at the end of this post). Kahneman shows how human psychology is a key driving force for understanding organizations, companies, the economy and markets because, as he very correctly points out, these entities do not exist in any other way than through human behavior.

Video and comments below.

Sample noise level with WideNoise at FOSDEM

I paid a very short visit to FOSDEM yesterday. A bit too technical for me, but still some very good vibes of a beautifully creative crowd and an excellent opportunity to answer an existential question with WideTag's WideNoise. Watch and don't take my "scientific" conclusions too seriously.

200902087_BQ_QuestsCast-0901_Fosdem
Vidéo envoyée par alexpapa

President Obama blasting bankers' bonuses

How could one disagree with the opinion expressed by President Obama regarding the bonuses some Wall Street bankers have decided to pay themselves? We’re really witnessing recklessness of untold and unprecedented proportions. Those bankers’ behaviro testifies to the fact that there is a complete disconnect between modern finance and the field reality of what we call the "real" economy. But of course when things are getting tough for their girlfriends, wives and mistresses who need to change lifestyle (see the DABA Girls blog to get a feel for the utter disconnect of this crowd from real life), these guys feel the pressure to do something, no? Sadly enough a limited number of people damage the reputation of an entire profession. Most of my contacts in the world of finance are just very fine persons, working hard and decently to fulfill their mission and serve real companies with real customers and real services and real employees and real profits and real problems. They’re part of economic life, whereas the people President Obama is targeting are causing economic death and loss of confidence. If we are serious about solving the current crisis, both they and the pervert system they’ve created must be taken out of the system.

Read on for an analysis take and a video embedded.

Going to Twestival

Twestival seems like a terrific idea to make a brilliant case about how social media (Twitter in this case), new technologies and the international connected community of geeks, tech enthusiasts, creators, media types, marketers, home mums, retired pros...etc can actually make an impact. The event takes place on February 12th in over 100 cities around the world and the proceeds will go to Charity Water, whose mission I find outstanding. If you want to join, here's where to register if you can make a donation of 5, 10, 25  or 50 Euros. Looking forward to meeting the fun online crowd on February 12th in Brussels!