New Business Models for the Participation Age

Today, Don Tapscott, author of “Wikinomics” presented a keynote about how mass-collaboration is changing the way that value is created in the world economy. This stems from both software functionality and network economies of scale. Obviously the enablement of new forms of economic co-operation is also a factor at continuing to drive specialisation. Tapscott quotes Carr’s “IT does matter” and mentions that he has often debated with him, which is hard because Carr is good, but he (Tapscott) says “I have an advantage in this debate, he’s wrong”. The last three days has made me question about how one can innovate in corporate IT. …

More Futurology, Gartner’s “Emerging Trends”

I am in Barcelona, attending Gartner’s European Symposium and Expo. They have two of these each year and the spring event is positioned as broader and more forward looking. It was opened by a tour de force from Peter Cole, (CEO) and six of their top researchers. Later discussions brought home to me that one needs to be very careful when listening to clever people, as sometimes one (i.e. I ) can assume that they mean the same things as yourself, this isn’t always so. …

Project Blackbox, it’s real you know

Yesterday, Sun’s Project Blackbox Tour visited the Thames Valley at Sun’s UK HQ Campus and today we have taken it to the National Army Museum so prospective customers, journalists and analysts can inspect it and ‘kick the tyres’, and I am one of the engineers answering the mediumly hard questions. The really difficult ones have been handled by Joe Carvalho, one of the designers. …