A new world is coming. It’s scary. Freaky. Over the freaky line, if you will. But it is coming. Investors like Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen are investing in it. Companies from Google to startups you’ve never heard of, like Wovyn or Highlight, are building it. With more than a couple of new ones already on the way that you’ll hear about over the next six months.
In less than seven years, social media has rewritten the rules. The Age of Conversation is just seven years old and already there are forces forming to bring in yet another new age. Shel Israel and Robert Scoble call it the Age of Context, the title of their new book.
Scoble and Israel will discuss the convergence of five technology forces, the combination of which are changing the world in ways we never imagined:
1. Proliferation of always-connected sensors.
2. New kinds of cloud-based databases.
3. New kinds of contextual software development kits (SDKs).
4. A maturing in social data that nearly everyone is participating in.
5. Wearable computers and sensors like the Nike FuelBand, FitBit, and soon, Google Glasses.
Scoble and Israel will explain why users will end up giving over their most private of information. You will store everything you do in life in this system and, to most, that is extremely scary. Yes, these systems can even tell when you are having sex and, worse of all, will know what brands you like and where your favorite gas station is. This future is coming and will sit on our smart phones and other devices we’ll wear.
Social isn't dead, but it is changing. Social Business is how you take all the insights you learned about social media and apply it to your business. Your goal is not ROI, but creating long lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with your customers.
Sound too new-age, or squishy for you? You may need to get used to it as this is how revenue will be made, and companies will flourish, or perish.
This session will provide insights into how to think about developing a company-wide strategy for social business, how to get exec buy-in, and how to execute the change in your organization.
Pure Matter presents what will no doubt be a lively and engaging session with Todd Wilms, an author, speaker and strategist who has worked with PayPal, Citrix and PeopleSoft among others. Currently he's Head of Social Business Strategy at SAP and a Forbes.com columnist.
He's spoken at SES London 2012, Online Marketing Summit 2012, Benchmark The Corporate Social Media conference in San Francisco. Todd is a really entertaining speaker and will keep you awake better than a strong espresso.
Silicon Valley is home to innovation across every technology discipline, and technology entrepreneurs spring from STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics—and liberal arts backgrounds alike. And while venture-funded companies get most of the attention, Series A, B, and C could just as likely be Angel, Bootstrapping, and Crowd funding in today's entrepreneurial environment.
A panel of entrepreneurs across media, mobile and app development discuss the winding roads they have traveled as entrepreneurs. They’ll talk about new ways to fund and launch companies and how the rest of us, without the billion-dollar valuations, get the job done.
New digital tools are having a dramatic effect on public institutions and are being used with greater precision to effect social change and political reform.
Venture investor and former Ebay exec Steve Westly served as California's controller, overseeing the finances of the world's 8th largest economy. He is one of the key Silicon Valley figures in President Obama's historic 2008 campaign. His firm's investment strategy focuses on supporting transformation of companies addressing critical social and environmental issues.
Josh Silver will talk about Represent.Us, a movement leveraging social media and technology to enact the American Anti-Corruption Act, a law that would overhaul campaign finance and impose strict lobbying and conflict of interest laws. Using a model borrowed from cyber-security, Represent.us recruited convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff to identify loopholes and harden the target against monied interests influencing government.
Mobile apps are evolving and incorporating artificial intelligence capabilities and making smartphones smarter. The new generation of applications are rethinking classic workhorses and using cloud based processing, allowing mobile devices to access an expanding global brain.
One of these is Tempo, a calendaring app for iPhone that has built-in information gathering and communication functions that gather documents for a meeting, do Yelp look ups, take Siri instructions and text meeting participants when you are running late. Tempo founder Raj Singh will be on hand to discuss how mobile apps are rising to the next level and making smartphones smarter.
Another smart calendar is Mynd, a context-aware app that learns what users do, has built-in time management functions and automatically calls up LinkedIn profiles. CEO Max Wheeler will be on hand.
Tying this world of smart apps together will be Liron Shapira, CTO of Quixey, whose app searches across apps by function to create a new type of search engine.
Growth is a core tenet of success. Technology has limits. The whole network is set to collapse if we don’t cull it down.
Brain scientist James Stibel has looked at how systems hit the tipping point and fail — from ant colonies to the civilization on Easter Island—and has some insights into how we can keep the Web healthy and growing.
Since the explosion of the app ecosystem, the common view has been that apps and the web are somehow in contention with one another. Much attention has been payed to metrics such as whether mobile devices or websites get more attention and which devices have the most market share. What's more relevant for understanding the future of apps the web, however, is focusing on the URL. It's been around since 1994, but changed a lot in 20 years to accommodate website-supported functions, app-supported functions, and all technology-supported functions. Taking this evolution into account, we can begin to understand the growing web of apps and form quicker ways to navigate through it similar to how we navigate the web. In this panel, Liron Shapira, CTO and Co-Founder of Quixey, “The Search Engine for Apps,” will be joined by Peter Hoddie, Vice President of the Kinoma® Platform at Marvell, and Kevin Marks, Vice President of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce.com to discuss the rise of the web of apps, and how deep-linking can bring us closer to a unified functional web.
