Social Summit
Conversing
During the panel on 'How Social Impacts Tech etc' I was joined by Dave Tuner, Salman Ansari, and Tony Katsur while Jonathan Yarmis took the task of moderating, appearing as Dr Disruptive.
During the 30 min on stage we rallied from why Big Data is not 'Smart Data' (Jonathan), that a 'Data Tsunami' (Dave) is on its way, all the way to that it's really about the culture, not the tech (Tony), even though it is mature enough to make things happen (Salman), if only the people could.
The discussion I enjoyed the most however, was as we explored the opportunity of conversations. There has always been communications, but the nature of social media is to host conversations, i.e. multiple communications advancing a common topic. Technology (or the infamous Big Data) lets a brand analyze millions of those conversations and participate in them. However, technology goes only so far to make that a valuable exercise. It needs a strategy where the objective of that action is clear and the goal of an agreement that is followed by a commercial transaction is a pre-planned outcome. The smart company works that out before it dives into social interactions and uses big data to guide its way.More
The main sessions started at noon, split between the main stage where the Social Summit took place and a second stage right next to the start-up booths. The proximity of booths and 2nd stage made it near impossible to understand what the presenters there said, if you didn't press your head against the speaker. And that looks silly, so I didn't get to hear any of that.However, the main stage provided plenty of opportunity to follow insightful presentations, when there wasn't a circumstantial conversation with interesting people happening at the same time which took precedence for me.
BING - yes, BING
- Entities such as user profiles (1.2B today) or real world objects like restaurants,
- Geospacial Knowledge from photos (in 153PB) or 3D models (250,000), and
- Natural User Interfaces to make all of that accessible
A couple of years ago it seemed as if the bottom up creation of virtual worlds through platforms like SecondLife, combined with 3D modeling and the semantic web would get us to the most representative digital version of the real world. But each aspect stalled, probably primarily due to users loosing interest and patience to knit everything together manually, which consequentially also killed underlying business models.
However, if Microsoft (and Google and ... ?) can keep the ball rolling by recombining results from many different successful business models and user activities, we might get to amazing results.
Launch Competition
Not to be missed at any conference like this is the competition for the best pitch from a start-up. Here we mostly saw entrepreneurs showcasing offerings that just opened to the market. That showed in the maturity and thus clarity of their value proposition and uniqueness of the solution (let alone robustness). While some were much more interesting from the standpoint of how they might positively impact the world, such as overcoming typical hurdles in health care where, when unsupported, people quickly become non-compliant in their goal pursuance (e.g. eat well, stay fit etc), others seemed robust and pragmatic as they offer to solve a very clear process problem. The latter category then logically offered the winner with Seamless Docs:
A solution that translates forms from any legacy format into HTML to make it easy to fill them in and send them away.and else
At the very end the FashionShow was a bit of a let down, as it took the models just 10-15 min to show what they had to show. I would have loved to see more of how tech and fashion fuses together and the stage was all set up for it. Maybe next time?!But plenty of introductions and entertaining discussions made the day very worthwhile, even though my voice started to give up as I had to overcome the noise level during the whole day. (Thanks for the advice Steve Shaheen, to actively breath in while talking)
