THE DREAM IN ACTION

Today the Finnish government announced that it will become the first in the world to make broadband internet access a legal right of every individual in Finland.

They’ll start in July of 2010 providing every person one-megabit of broadband connection with full intention to increase that to 100mb by 2015. This is an enormous first step towards a future of unbelievable connectivity. Obviously, we would all say that the world is extremely well connected today, but if this law were to be passed in other countries I believe we would see unparalleled positive effects.

The amount of people that would benefit from a program like this around the world is staggering and it’s exciting to think about the increase in thought, sharing, innovation, productivity, and yes, entrepreneurial effort that would occur because of a change like this. A few startup pioneers are pushing for something called the Startup Visa. My opinion has yet to be made on this issue but I sincerely believe that a “broadband for all” effort would dominate that effort in it’s affect on innovation in the States. I’d like to see those same pioneers push for something similar to this here in the US.

In my humble opinion, I believe that Umair Haque is one of the most innovative thinkers of our time. But, to be consistent with his own arguments, that doesn’t matter. What matters for Umair is ‘awesomeness’ and he gets that through his ability to deconstruct complex thoughts. Innovation, he claims is not enough for success today, but awesomeness is. Umair is the Director of the Havas Media Lab, a company that works to strategically advise investors, entrepreneurs, and those working on strategic innovations awesomeness in business models and management.

Umair writes regularly on the Harvard Business Review under the title of ‘Edge Economy’ and he truly is on the cutting edge of thought. In his recent article Umair argues that in this day and age, innovation will not be enough for success. What is required now is awesomeness.

In thinking about the economics of innovation there are 3 emerging concepts that are expressed in this article.

1. Innovation makes yesterdays goods and services obsolete, thus the result of innovation is recession and depression.

When Apple released the first iPhone it didn’t have copy/paste functionality. It was a easy feature that everyone immediately realized it was missing. But Apple waited over 18 months to release an iPhone that included this functionality. Do you really believe they didn’t know how to include this feature? How easy it would have been for them to push a software update just like they did with 3.0 and give everyone the functionality a month or 6 months after the release. But that innovation would not have been economical. They waited so that they could extract all the value possible from the original release, then maximize the value of said software upgrade. Innovation is not enough economically speaking, but I think we’ll all agree that copy/paste aside, the iPhone is awesome, thus it’s success.

2. The challenge of the 21st century isn’t entrepreneurial it’s creative.

lanjut →

Late last year I started thinking a bit about gen-Y and what my generation means to the workforce. I wondered how we would affect the way businesses hire, how they’d treat employees, what opportunities companies would create for us, and how we would create opportunities for ourselves even when companies wouldn’t (or couldn’t). Those thoughts lead to the other side of the coin, how will companies react to my generation, and future generations as customers and adopters of their products?

I started by looking into the official names of past generations:

1900-1924 – G.I. Generation
1925-1945 – Silent Generation
1946-1953 – Baby Boomers

Added thanks to yw600’s comment: 1954-1965 – Generation Jones
1965-1979 – Generation X
1980-2000 – Millennials or Generation Y
2000/2001-Present – New Silent Generation or Generation Z

lanjut →

If you’re like me you constantly have a new ideas for web technologies. The point of most of these technologies is to just keep things simple and in order to keep things simple user interface is critical. Mozilla (who developed the Firefox browser) has just launched Ubiquity.

Mozilla says that the goals of this new tool are:

“Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)

Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone (not just Web developers) to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

Extend the browser functionality easily.”

This demo shows a few easy example of how Ubiquity can be used to simplify your web experience. This is innovation made simple.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.