 I've just made a significant switch in one of the main tools I use for my own personal productivity which highlights a key trend for the industry and all of us - the personal cloud. Whether it is for work or our personal lives we use desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, media players and tablets and a lot of the time we need to get at the same stuff from each device. For some time we've been used to setting up our smart phones so we can sync and access the same email as on the computer or the web, and the early adopters and geeky types have been sharing photos and documents too. The personal cloud will make that easy and more pervasive for everyone.  Let me explain more with the key tool that I use for all my writing, note taking, project documentation and capturing of ideas. Since January 2005 I've been using what I believe is Microsoft's best and most undervalued product - OneNote. OneNote is a free form note taking application with a user interface that looks like the Windows equivalent of a cool Moleskin notebook. I can type, draw, insert pictures or make screen clippings and capture my thoughts in multiple notebooks. .. ...
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Some of you may know that Sir Ken Robinson is a hero of mine. His 2006 TED talk on education, that I've blogged about before, is inspirational. Track down and read his book Out of Our Minds. Until doing some research on another topic I had missed completely this October 2009 Toronto, Canada event at which he spoke - Artscape's third Creative Places + Spaces: The Collaborative City conference. Sir Ken talks about collaboration in the 21st century and creativity as an operational idea, which you can plan for and make happen systematically.
Here are some quotes from his talk: "Creativity is an operational idea. You can plan for it and make it happen systematically"
"We need to make innovation a habit"
"Politician's say the trouble is you can't define creativity, and I say the trouble is YOU can't! That's the problem"
"We need to teach creativity in education just like numeracy and literacy"
"It's a key operating principle for the next phase of development in the 21st century"
"Creativity Is a step on from imagination"
"it's applied imagination"
"Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value"
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 Careful with that spelling (for some reason I preferred it to Canute or Kanute). Here is my premise. I think, like Clay Shirky, that we are living in a period of transformation rivalling the changes in society triggered by the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, photography, film, television, or the start of the Internet (web 1.0). The application of social media inside and outside of business is changing everything. However, since around 2009 some of us on the leading edge of this curve, who up to this point have talked about enterprise 2.0 or web 2.0 applied to business, have been drifting towards using the term Social Business to describe it. Language is important. For me that language is wrong. If I ask the average woman or man in the street what a social business is they would tell me about organisations with a social conscience, philanthropic goals and ethical conduct - micro-blogging, collaboration and social media monitoring wouldn't enter their heads.
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 Now look. I have a real problem with the term " Social Business" as it's being used by Dachis and IBM and others. However, let me put that to one side for another post later this week, but it's a thread that starts here and runs through my thoughts on the London edition of the Dachis Social Business Summit that Lee Bryant kindly invited me to this week. The venue (awesome architecture), agenda, speakers, food and organisation were all set at a very high standard, with the sole negative of conference wifi that didn't work. It's a social media conference. It's obvious that the majority of attendees are going to turn up with Macs, PCs, iPads and smart phones and want to live blog and tweet. When are venues and conference organizers going to realize that their normal bandwidth just won't cut it for us enterprise 2.0, social media types? ( Rant over, on with normal programming.) For me the conference highlights were the opening two sessions from JP Rangaswami (Salesforce.com's Chief Scientist) and John Hagel (Director of Deloitte and authour of The Power of pull). JP's " Nature Doesn't Do SLA's" used Zen style slides - small white . ...
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 Earlier this week I attended the UK launch event for just another Twitter style microblogging tool for the enterprise like Chatter or Yammer or Signals inside SocialText. This one's called tibbr. Some people would have been underwhelmed and said "so what?", but I got excited - I can see some huge potential here, and I'd argue that every enterprise should be taking a serious look at this product. Let me try and explain.
It's from TIBCO, which is hardly a particularly well known, sexy or significant name in the IT world. They are pretty big though - they are a US company (NASDAQ:TIBX) who have been around since 1997 and formed out of Teknekron who started back in 1983 (with a product called The Information Bus, which is where TIB comes from). They have grown to have offices in 40 countries and provide over 4,000 customers with tools for business process management, SOA, and application integration - crucially important middleware that connects things together in the background for big companies. They might be very well known to the IT guys, but fairly invisible to the rest of the business. That could all change now they've ...
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 There are changes underway across the worlds of social media marketing, social media applied inside business (what some people would call enterprise 2.0) and where these tools connect (or not) to the business processes in ( Cloud based) CRM and ERP systems. Products like Salesforce are adding Chatter, and Twitter connectivity. Enterprise 2.0 tools that started as wikis or forums are adding micro-blogging along with more and more social functionality. Content Management Systems are adding or acquiring a social dimension. Marketing departments are struggling with, or looking for tools to help with, brand reputation monitoring and management. One significant segment of this change just got much clearer with Altimeter Group's R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang producing Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management. R told the Enterprise Irregulars earlier this morning that this report is the culmination of 6 months of research, collaboration, hours of white boarding, phone calls, and skype calls in the early morning and on weekends working with an ecosystem of 42 partners. The document identifies 18 use cases for Social ...
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Yesterday I got the "lowdown" on how Thingamy, which Sigurd Rinde describes as a "Work Processor", has just been connected to ESME, the microsharing and collaboration platform. I believe the combination is a big step forward for Sig's solution, as well as representing one of several approaches that signpost the direction of enterprise 2.0, or enterprise collaboration for 2010. It's all about linking collaboration to process. First let me disclose that, although we don't have a contractual relationship, we're big fans of Thingamy, we've been playing around with the product for years, and we're on the look out to help and support Sig to find potential clients here in the UK. Although the basic concept of Thingamy remains the same, the user interface and way you use and deploy the product have steadily improved over time making the product much easier to grasp than when we first met Sig back at the start of 2006. So what is Thingamy? It's a product that addresses all of the things that any organisation does which are NOT handled by their conventional business process based systems. Sig calls these Easily Repeatable . ...
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A month ago on Monday 7 December I was sitting in the London version of the CloudForce2 Partner Summit, and then stricken by a virus overnight, I watched Marc Benioff livestreamed for the 2 hours and 15 minutes of his keynote in the general customer session on the following day. It sounds like he did a shorter, sharper version than his reported performance at the big Dreamforce show in San Francisco where 19,000 attended. I've been re-acquainting myself with the Salesforce story, and considering whether my company and our Twinfield colleagues should become part of their partner ecosystem. The combination of Force.com platform, combined with Salesforce applications, and partner applications makes a strong story. Benioff was emphasizing companies like FinancialForce.com and Jobpartners who have developed their applications natively using their Cloud technology. However, the big announcement was their new "Twitter and Facebook" style micro-blogging product and the addition of the Chatter Cloud, alongside the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Custom Cloud in their presentations and messaging. I'm impressed by the functionality . ...
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Over the last few months I've been neglecting this blog. I know I'm not the only blogger in that same boat - a lot of my blogging buddies have been doing less, although they've generally been Tweeting more. However, the time has come to get back to blogging more regularly, and Business Two Zero needs new look to revitalize it too.  I actually started on the Blogger platform back in October 2005. At that m ...
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