Keynote at Forum des 100: “Les réseaux sociaux, point de bascule vers une nouvelle révolution digitale”

Here is the video of my keynote presentation at last week’s Forum des 100. I explain (in French) why social media are one of several factors about to bring many fundamental changes to our societies.

En 2009, l’inventeur du Web Tim Berners-Lee me confiait qu’il y a eu ” beaucoup de changements depuis la naissance du Web en 1989. Et pourtant le plus gros est à venir…”

Partant de ce constat, j’explique que les réseaux sociaux sont un point de bascule. En simplifiant plusieurs aspects importants pour l’apparition d’innovation (facilité de promotion, de création de masse critique d’utilisateurs, systèmes de réputation favorisant la confiance), les réseaux sociaux sont un point de bascule vers une deuxième phase de la révolution digitale initiée par le Web.

Les caractéristiques du monde de 2012 (combinaison de nouvelles technologies, globalisation, réseaux, transdisciplinarité et démocratisation) ressemblent étrangement à la période de la belle époque, moment de l’histoire ou l’Europe et plus particulièrement la France étaient le centre du monde du progrès et de l’innovation.

En m’appuyant sur cette riche histoire – celle-là même qui fait que les anglais utilisent un mot français, “entrepreneur” – je partage avec le public quelques conseils qui permettront de profiter de cette seconde révolution plus que de la première.

Mes conseils:
- Essayer et prendre des risques (comme à Paris, appelée ville lumière car elle a été la première citée à installer l’éclairage électrique sur ses grands boulevards)
- S’ouvrir aux talents étrangers au lieu de fermer les frontières
- Créer des ponts entre art, science et industrie
- S’ancrer dans le passé pour éviter que l’innovation fasse peur
- Créer de grands événements fédérateurs
- Anticiper au lieu de subir, veiller
- Innover (à l’extérieur s’il le faut)
- Tout va très vite (Netscape, MySpace, Yahoo)
- Apprendre à désaprendre
- Ne pas soutenir les entreprises dont le modèle est dépassé
- Changer de regard sur les startups

Je rappelle que certaines des plus grandes sociétés de notre temps ont été crées à la belle époque, et que si nous recréons des conditions favorables nous pourrions de nouveau voir éclore des leaders mondiaux en Europe.

Exciting days for online education

I have been following a couple of Udacity courses for a while. And it is quite amazing.

Udacity was referred to me by my dad, a veteran education expert who had read about it in a… Brazilian magazine. Not surprisingly this kind of initiative gets a lot of attention in the South, and I suspect that in our countries a lot of people must be secretly hoping it will not work. One of the keys to the existing tertiary education is the fact that not everybody has access to it. A Harvard diploma has value only if few have one.

Online universities (Coursera is another example) open a whole new set of possibilities. At first, e-learning was simply putting lectures online, and hoping for the best. Now someone is finally rethinking the whole educative process from the ground up.

The genius of Udacity is that it is adapting learning for the online, short attention span, knowledge hungry generation. Courses are divided in short, carefully edited segments, usually followed by a quizz. I am taking programming lessons (cs101 Building a Search Engine and cs253 Web Application Engineering) and can directly type my code in a browser window, click submit, and see if I did well. A lot of small things make Udacity great. I will not explain in too many details, and just encourage you to test it for yourself (courses are free).

As usual, as soon as the mainstream media pick this up, you will here a few “this will replace universities” here and there. And that will not happen. Udacity is a new possibility, a complementary way of transmitting a certain type of knowledge. It works wonders for computer science. I am not sure how effective this will be for art, philosophy, or cooking classes. Complement, not replace.

Lots is happening, innovators are exploring the possibles. This popped on my radar today, “the world’s tiniest University that provides digestible shortcuts for ‘busy’ entrepreneurs”. Exciting times!

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The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children

Titled The war agains youth, this article is one of the 3-4 reading that really struck me these past months. Not surprisingly, Western societies are designed around their most influential generation, and “money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably”.

While the need to care for the older generation can not be denied nor ignored, there is a major imbalance, and my gut tell me it is not only a US problem. Old Europe is not doing much better. At a time of great changes, at a time where society needs a radical reinvention, this could be a dramatic combination, the generation able to drive the necessary changes being muzzled by catastrophic economical conditions. A huge, huge issue of our times.

There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don’t form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start [a program of the US Dpt of Health and Human Services that provides comprehensive education services to low-income children and their families]: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, “The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget.”

The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers’ deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there’s just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety.

There are many problems here. One is certainly that our democratic systems do not give politicians many incentives to care about problems that will arise in twenty years. How could that be fixed?

What employees want

I regularly preach that we need to unlearn, and here is another example. If you taught yourself how to do business during the 20th century, you probably think that employees want money, security, and promotions. Apparently reality is quite different.

Listen to 3615

In case you understand French, and if you haven’t already: listen to my newest project, a talk show called 3615. I sit down with interesting people every week, to ask them their view on our times’ exciting possibilities and challenges. Here is the last episode, a discussion on books (and of course – ebooks!) with Frédéric Kaplan and Laurent Bolli.

PS: If you do not know what the 3615 name means, read a little bit more here, just know it is the 4-figure combination used to access Minitel services.

Back to blogging

After four months of Google+, I decided to come back to blogging. I miss having more space for longer thoughts, and the interaction with readers.

I migrated my former liftlab.com site to the new laurenthaug.com server, and will continue concentrating as much content as I can on this new site. So the new blog address is laurenthaug.com/blog.

Thanks to my faithful readers to follow me through my experiments. Looking forward to more fruitful conversations with you all :)

3615, le podcast!

Un nouveau projet que j’ai lancé avec le soutien de World Radio Switzerland: une émission bi-mensuelle qui explore notre société ultra connectée: 3615!

A découvrir sur le site de 3615, iTunes et SoundCloud, avec comme premiers invités Alessandra Roversi (présidente de slow food Léman), Mathieu Besson (Edificom), Michel Jaccard (Avocat spécialiste des nouvelles technologies) et Nicholas Wolff (Programmeur indépendant).

Moving to Google+

Important note: this blog will no longer be updated! Please follow me on Google+.

[Update: RSS feed still unchanged on feedburner]

I really like Google+. I noticed that, over the past months, I spent much more time sharing content over there than anywhere else. I like the convenience of the system, the fact it is an extremely fast and powerful way to push content to the world. And the 3000+ followers are also a nice audience :)

I therefore decided to stop updating this blog. Please change your bookmarks to my Google+ page, and see you there to continue a discussion that started on January 29th, 2001, the day I wrote my first blog post on blogger.com!

PS: I will remain a little bit active on Twitter too, even if it is definitely not a channel I like.
PS2: I will start a bi-monthly talk show later this week. It will be in French and about 21st century society. Stay tuned!

Conférence TechnoArk 2012, Internet+Mobiles = Fiabilité des informations?

TechnoArk is organizing the 7th edition of their conference, traditionally a few days before Lift12. If you are interested in Mobile, this is the place to be at the end of January. I will host the day (in French) curated by the Institut Icare.

La septième édition de la Conférence TechnoArk aura lieu le 27 janvier prochain au Techno-Pôle de Sierre. Le thème de ce rendez-vous incontournable sera « Internet et Mobiles : Fiabilité des informations ? ».

D’un geste du doigt, le consommateur accède à une myriade d’informations depuis son téléphone portable. Mais comment peut-il s’assurer de la fiabilité des informations? Comment peut-il faire confiance aux nombreuses sources de données? La fiabilité, l’exactitude et l’authenticité des données constituent le nouvel enjeu de l’internet mobile.

Des conférenciers issus par exemple du MIT de Boston ou du GS1 de Bruxelles vous permettront d’approfondir ce thème d’actualité. Vous trouverez le programme complet de la manifestation sur la page www.technoark.ch/technoark2012.