IdeaEconomy.Net » trends

What Happens When Average Lifespans hit 100 years old, or 150?

John — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 05:58:16 +0000

Big Ideas

Average lifespans have been increasing for more than a century.
Science is on the verge of substantially increasing our longevity.
Aging is a disease and it can be slowed.
Increased lifespans are already altering our economies, this is only the beginning.

Sonia Arrison, author of the recent book, 100+: How The Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And Faith, writes on her website:

We are about to enter the golden age of aging. During the Cro-Magnon era, average human life expectancy was eighteen years. By the European Renaissance it was closer to thirty. Today in the developed West it is approximately eighty. As a species we are rightfully proud of this testament to our will and ingenuity. But few among us are prepared for the revolution on our doorstep—the coming explosion of scientific know-ledge that will increase the length and quality of life in ways that were unimaginable even twenty years ago.

On my JetSetCitizen.com blog I wrote a post titled, You are going to live to 150 years old. I linked to three TED videos, pointing to much longer lifespans in the near future:

Dean Ornish says your genes are not your fate

Aubrey de Grey says we can avoid aging

Barry Schuler: Genomics 101

And all I can tell you is, stay healthy for 20 years. If you can stay healthy for 20 years, you’ll see 150, maybe 300.

What if we do live to 100 or 150 years old or more?

Even if you doubt the claims of the above authors and scientists, extended lifespans are already having a profound impact on our society. I have an 80 year old uncle who spends six months in Thailand every year. My 91 year old grandmother still plants her own garden. We are already living longer now and we haven’t started implementing the key genetic research that is still being tested on animals.

Consider some of the ramifications:

Retirement ages must increase or government pension obligations will not be met. In my JetSetCitizen post, I wrote:

In 1935 when the Social Security Act was implemented in the United States, average life expectancy was 59 years old. Introducing pensions to those over 65 years old seemed like a good idea because most people would die before they ever received any money. Now people are living to 78 on average in the US and even longer in other countries. There are people collecting pensions for more years than they worked.
100 will be the new 60. Consider the lifestyle and activities of people aged 60 now. That’s what it will be like for 80 or 100 year-olds in the future.
Our medical systems will be crushed. In 1960, US health care expenditures were 5.2% of GDP. They are now about 16% and rising. The cheap revolution we have enjoyed in manufactured goods and technology, will not be experience in service industries like education and health care.

Action Items

If you are under 50, it is unlikely that your government will be able to afford your retirement pension. Start saving for yourself.
Take care of your body. Living longer won’t be enjoyable with deteriorating joints, injuries and other medical maladies. Your current lifestyle decisions will catch up with you.
Prepare for an extra decade or more of work. 65 is an arbitrary retirement age. It will most certainly be increased.
If you are under about 50, it is not too late to change your career or lifestyle. You will still have 20 or more productive work years ahead of you.
With decades of work ahead of you, why not travel the world or follow your dreams now? There will be time to make up the work later if needed.

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Occupy Wall Street – Grows to a World Wide Protest

John — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 05:46:43 +0000

Big Ideas

Tens of thousands are now involved with the Occupy Wall Street Protests worldwide
Web based platforms facilitate the coordination of mass gatherings and protests around the world
With online collaboration tools, a single leader or clear plan are not required.

You have undoubtedly heard about the Occupy Wall Street protests that have been growing around the world. The short news snippets don’t really capture the magnitude of the movement. Protests are being scheduled in dozens of cities around the world and recently the Almalgamated Transit Union, with 190,000 members has given its support. This is a world wide phenomenon and it is growing quickly.

How Occupy Wall Street Started

The birth of the movement was a post on the Adbusters website on July 13th. Here is a small quote from that first call to action,

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

The home page of OccupyWallSt.org describes the movement as,

Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

Occupy Wall Street to Occupy the World

Another website, OccupyTogether, has since been created to coordinate some of the scheduled protests and other activities in dozens of cities around the world.

On Oct. 4th, the date of this post, there were more than 39,000 followers for the @OccupyWallSt Twitter account, with many thousands more for city focused protests around the world. (@OccupyChicago – 7000, @OccupyLA – 5000, @Occupy_Boston – 3500, @OccupyToronto – 1600, @OccupyTokyo – 400, with many more for every major city on the planet.)

Lessons in Collaboration

We have learned from the middle east uprisings this spring that leaderless movements have the power to topple governments and really change the world. Occupy Wall Street is no different. There is no central organization or leader directing the movement, participants are connecting and coordinating with widely available web based platforms . There are groups like MoveOn.org, that are trying to co-opt the protests, but for the most part, it is a largely ego-less and egalitarian process. Even the demands of OccupyWallStreet.org have been community driven.

The Future of Collaboration

Whether you support the protests or not, there are many principles here to learn from. With the internet, and social media in particular, ordinary citizens can coordinate and mobilize on a large scale. Time, money and central leadership are no longer necessary for massive collaboration.

Consider some of these implications.

Motivating and involving a dispersed volunteer effort is starkly different than an employer – employee relationship. Try motivating people to take action without paying them.
A vision to do good in the world is far more powerful than any monetary reward. Is your company making the world a better place?
Large groups of people can be mobilized without central control or authority. What could your employees accomplish if given the freedom?
Democratic and egalitarian processes can formulate a unified vision. Direction doesn’t have to come from the boss. Give your employees the information and freedom to direct their own future.
Self-interests and ego gratification only serve to derail the process. Let the cause or vision be the focus, not a rock star executive.

Action Items

For your next project, try an egalitarian process where there is no leader and decisions must be made democratically.
Find a meaningful unifying vision for the project, and get out of the way.
Put trust in the process. You will not always get your way, but continued involvement by motivated participants is far more valuable than being in control.
If your company is not making the world a better place, than maybe it is time to adjust your priorities.

Links
OccupyWallSt.org
OccupyTogether.org
General Assembly for Occupy Wall Street
Reddit - Occupy Wall Street

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How Small of a House Could you Live in?

John — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:38:15 +0000

Big Ideas

Downsizing the size of your home can save you money and time.
It is likely that you could live in 1/4 of the space you currently do.
Smaller designs can still be beautiful.

Average home sizes in the U.S. have increased from 983 square feet in 1950, to 2,430 square feet in 2006, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Over that same period, the average number of people per household has declined from 3.37 to 2.57. (US Census) With record high foreclosures in the U.S. in recent years, perhaps Americans in particular have been living in too large, for too long?

Trading up to a bigger house is expensive. There are reality fees on the new and old home, moving costs, new furniture. Then the monthly costs of a larger mortgage, higher energy costs, more cleaning and maintenance, larger yards and expensive entertainment equipment. Keeping up with the Jones’s is expensive.

How small of a house could you downsize to?

Here is a video of an 89 square house, that could be bought ready made for $46,000. Now this is extreme and not feasible for most, but it is a good starting point for consideration.

Smaller houses don’t have to be ugly either. Check out these designer micro-houses in Japan.

The best part of downsizing your lifestyle is that you purchase much less of everything. It is hard to buy new things if you don’t have room to store them.

My Experiences in Japan

I lived in Japan for many years in apartments and houses of all sizes from a one room apartment to a 4 bedroom house. One thing I can attest, is that the number of possessions I owned increased relative to the amount of space I had to store it. Now that I have sold most of my possessions and live location independent, I have very little need to buy any physical goods.

The End of Shopping

The money savings are significant, but more importantly, I am no longer a shopper. I don’t have any interest or need to buy anything other than food. That is a huge mental release. So much of our lives are spent thinking about things. We are jealous when our peers buy a car nicer than ours. We then spend time shopping for a new car or at least thinking about it. If we buy a new car, we spend more time cleaning it. We worry about it getting scratched. We pay more for insurance because it a more expensive vehicle. Maybe we worry that we paid too much or made the wrong choice. When newer models start coming out, we feel that our ‘old’ car is no longer adequate and really regret our decision. Then the process starts all over again.

Our possessions really do own us.

Of course, living smaller also means you will be using much less energy to heat and cool your home. Not only is it good for your wallet, it is also good for the planet.

Action Items

Don’t up-size your house or apartment. The money you save in real estate fees, a higher mortgage and moving costs can easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of your home.
Can you move to a smaller home? You might even find some prime real estate for cheap if you can squeeze into less land area.
How much better would your life be if you spent 10% or 20% less per month. I cut my living expenses by more than half, so it is definitely possible.
Think about how much of your free time is dedicated to the stuff you own. What else could you do with that time?

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Social Media and the Changing Face of Politics – Lessons from the Alberta PC Leadership Race

John — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:27:04 +0000

Big Ideas:

Social Media is transforming business, government and society in general.
Success requires embracing the principles of Authenticity, Transparency and Collaboration.
The Alberta PC Party Leadership Race offers a great case study in the future of politics.

Social media and technology in general, are having profound effects on all aspects of our lives. From toppling dictatorships in the Middle East, to getting an under dog in the white house, to outing rioting hoodlums in London and Vancouver, the world is much different than it was just a decade ago.

The Social Media Big Three

The way we work and live is undergoing nothing short of a revolution. Three themes that I tend to keep coming back to are authenticity, transparency and collaboration (or engagement).

Authenticity

Authenticity is somewhat of a loaded and overused term now, but it remains an integral part of this social media age. We can’t trust our food to have real ingredients, companies to represent our best interests, nor politicians to deliver on their promises. Everything around us seems to be a marketing pitch, so when we find someone or something that appears to be real, we embrace it.

Consider this video series of Alberta PC Leadership Candidate, Doug Griffiths. It is very refreshing to find a politician that is not afraid to be himself and honestly communicate in the open without media handlers getting in the way.

Transparency

In a world where everyone carries a camera with internet connectivity, it is very hard to hide anything for long. Police and governments are using social media to identify and locate criminals, just as the world is holding dictators responsible for the carnage they are wrecking on their own citizens. Corporations and politicians can no longer hide behind closed doors either.

Two of the Alberta PC Leadership Candidates had a short Twitter debate, highlighted on Stuart Thomson’s Tumblr blog. In the dialogue, candidate @Rick_Orman misrepresents @GriffMLA’s stand on a provincial sales tax and is soon called on it. Thomson offers a great commentary on the discussion, including “See if you can spot the younger candidate.”

With Doug Griffiths as the youngest candidate at 38 years old, it does appear that youth is a substantial advantage in understanding how to use the new new tools to connect and engage.

Collaboration (Engagement)

With social media, the one-to-many broadcast model of traditional communications has given way to a more egalitarian system where everyone has a voice and can publish their own articles, videos or anything else they wish. This change in power structure is hard for many to cope with. The ‘do as I say’ mentality of older and larger organizations, is not acceptable for younger generations brought up in with a culture of inclusion.

Even with smaller startups, non-profits and community groups, egos and turf protection still get in the way of the ultimate purpose of the business or organization. There always seems to be someone who thinks they are correct and refuses to listen to alternative view points. Skilled knowledge workers and citizens are no longer tolerating this lack of involvement and demand to be heard.

I have noticed substantial resistance to basic collaboration tools like shared Google Docs. General principles like respect for the ideas of others or inviting divergent view points are commonly overlooked by the stronger members of the group. Often, these people don’t even notice how they are trampling on the good intentions of others.

Politics, is no different. Inexpensive technology, ubiquitous internet access and robust social media platforms offer unprecedented opportunities to connect with constituents. Of course, there will be those who don’t get it, like Newt Gingrich and his purchased Twitter Followers. However, there is no doubting how integral social media was to Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign. As FastCompany magazine reported;

What Obama did so successfully is that he went to where his customer base was. He could no longer afford to meet with everyone at their kitchen tables, but he could friend them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.

Alberta PC Leadership Race

Getting back to the Alberta PC Leadership Campaign, here is a chart of all the candidates and their Twitter statistics. I will let you draw your own conclusions from this, but the real test is contacting the candidates via Twitter to see who responds and what they say. You can’t fake real engagement. It takes work.

Candidate	Twitter Link	Tweets	Following	Followers	Listed
Doug Griffiths	@GriffMLA	2,972	3,042	3,104	174
Alison Redford	@Alison4Premier	402	638	1,630	61
Gary Mar	@GaryMarPC	260	359	1,287	47
Doug Horner	@HornerForAB	228	84	930	44
Ted Morton	@Morton4Premier	123	151	784	29
Rick Orman	@Rick_Orman	244	282	636	27

(Full Disclosure: I am volunteering on Doug Griffiths campaign for the Alberta PC Party Leadership because he embraces the principles of Authenticity, Transparency and Collaboration more than anyone I have ever seen. In fact, he has a 100% volunteer campaign solely on his ability to inspire supporters.)

Action Items:

Are you and your company pretending to be something you are not? How about embracing the core of what you really stand for and letting the whole world know about it?
Do you have secrets you don’t want the public to know? If you have to hide your actions, perhaps it is time to stop doing bad things?
Do your employees have all the information they need to know to help you grow your company? Why not open up the books and let everyone contribute?
Make time every week to really listen to customers, employees and partners and try to understand their ideas and view points. Even if you feel they are wrong, there is much to be gained from giving employees an opportunity to fail.
Are you connecting with customers and potential customers through social media? Effective social media takes time, but the rewards can be worth it.

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The Rise of Social Entrepreneurship

John — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 10:24:59 +0000

Big Ideas:

Businesses can earn a profit and help better society at the same time.
Social entrepreneurship is a growing trend as we seek more meaning and fulfillment in our lives.

I am finding that people of all ages are increasingly searching for more meaning and fulfillment in work and life in general. There is much more to life than a good salary and conspicuous consumption. On my JetSetCitizen blog, I have interviewed dozens of digital nomads, perpetual travelers or location independents that are putting lifestyle ahead of materialism.

A great life is not just about leisure time and personal satisfaction; making a real difference in the world is also becoming an essential component. Entrepreneurship is often necessary to have the freedom to craft a perfect lifestyle, but an even more important factor is the opportunity to really create social good in the world.

What is Social Entrepreneurship?

Social Entrepreneurship is using business principles and practices in new ventures to bring about social change in the world. Profits are a by-product, or the organization will fail, but the real focus is to make a difference in the world.

Why isn’t Every Entrepreneur a Social Entrepreneur?

It is important to remember that our consumption oriented society is less than a century old. We have been trained to be consumers with insatiable wants and the planned obsolescence in all the things we buy is designed to generate more profits, not create societal value.

In the decades after WWII, affordable mass produced goods greatly increased living standards. Large corporations mastered the art of mass advertising. Getting people to buy more goods and services, created jobs and real wealth. Life was good.

Little was known of the environmental and social consequences of those actions. Crime, obesity, pollution and all the other negative externalities of a consumer society were either non-existent or not understood. What was good for corporations, was good for individuals so everyone was happy.

Businesses don’t profit by getting us to spend less, conserve energy or be generous with our time and money. Companies want us to consume high margin products and services.

Fast food restaurants make more money selling sugared water and manufactured food, than anyone could by selling vegetables or advocating drinking tap water. How can carrots and broccoli compete with movie endorsed happy meals?

Wealth is Not Measured by GDP

The health of an economy is commonly measured by GDP growth, basically buying and selling more stuff. Clean air and water, safety, parks and wilderness, income equality, strong community, family values, general health levels and virtually everything that we consider priceless aren’t valued in gross domestic product.

An under-employed worker may only contribute $10,000 or $20,000 per year to a modern economy, however put that same individual in jail, with incarceration costs at more than $40,000 per year and you have doubled or quadrupled that individual’s contribution to economic growth.

There is a Better Way

When business oriented individuals create enterprises to alleviate societal ills, business transactions take place to satisfy the economists, but more importantly real social value or social capital is created that truly enriches the quality of life for recipients. It might not be as profitable as fast food hamburgers or financial derivatives, but there are opportunities to make a real impact in our communities. Profits alone are not a particularly good motivator, we all want to do something good in the world and social entrepreneurship might be the answer.

Social Entrepreneurship Examples

Grameen Bank - Provides no-collateral loans to the rural poor in Bangladesh

Fifteen – Jamie Oliver’s chef apprenticeship program for unemployed youth.

The Big Issue – Print magazine giving homeless an opportunity to earn an income.

The Eden Project – Promoting environmental and global awareness through arts and music events, education, gardens and social projects.

Acumen Fund – Invests in social enterprises.

Ashoka.org – Promoting social entrepreneurship for more than three decades.

If you know of more examples, please tell us in the comments. I would love to create a directory of social entrepreneurship initiatives around the world.

Action Items

Can you shift your business to more socially beneficial activities?
Can you employ, educate or help socially disadvantaged in your community?
How much money do you need to earn? How about reinvesting the surplus into social change?
Having difficulty finding meaning and fulfillment in your life? Perhaps you should start thinking of how you can give more to those in need. The greatest happiness comes from contribution not consumption.

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The Gamification of Email

John — Fri, 06 May 2011 00:19:58 +0000

Big Ideas:

Here is a great web application that turns email into a game.
Game dynamics promise to transform many of our experiences into fun, challenging adventures.

Email as a Game?

Finally, one of the greatest productivity destroyers has been gamified. If you have trouble emptying your inbox, Baydin’s Email Game might be the solution.

The best games are simple to understand, yet difficult to master. The Email Game magically delivers those gaming dynamics and takes it one step further by providing a real world achievement, an empty inbox.

How it Works

Connecting to your Gmail account, the Email Game has access to your emails and forces you to take action on every item in your inbox, one at a time. With a time counter racing down to zero, you need to take action quickly to maximize your points.

Quick, what is it going to be? Reply? Delete?, Archive? Take action and earn points. Can’t decide? You can skip an email but you will lose points.

There is an interesting “Boomerang” feature that lets you archive emails, yet bring them back to your inbox at a specified time in the future.

This is a fantastic idea with great execution. Everything is designed to get you to clear emails from your inbox as efficiently as possible.

What else can be Gamified?

Simple gaming dynamics exist in many areas of our lives. We compete for followers, friends and likes online. We collect rewards points and frequent flyer miles. Instantly winning a free ice cream or candy bar used to be a popular motivator for children. Cars like the Chevy Leaf even reward you with a growing electronic plant on your dashboard when you save gas. What components of your business can be turned into a game?

Action Items

Think of ways to gamify your business offering.
Can your employees ‘level up’ instead of taking training programs or getting promotions?
Can you encourage customer loyalty and evangelism through friendly competitions to recommend your services?
Can service failures like waiting times be made enjoyable through games or contests?

Links
The Gamification of a Sushi Chain in Japan
Games Can Make the World a Better Place

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Games Can Make the World a Better Place

John — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:41:12 +0000

Big Ideas:

Game dynamics are invading real life and they have big influences on how we buy and behave.
A key psychological catch is essential to making these new business models work.
In games, we behave as the best versions of ourselves. We need to make real life more like a game.
Games are helping to solve real world problems like oil shortages and environmental degradation.

Games are Invading Real Life

Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, offers an interesting take on how games are invading real life and what the future my hold once games start playing a bigger role in how we buy and are marketed to.

Here are some examples Schell gives in the video.

Nintendo Wii - adds in physical movement to video games.
MafiaWars – a text based game where you compete against your real life friends.
Webkins – real stuffed animals that can be registered online to create online characters.
Club Penguin – can play for free but must become a paid member to be able to buy things with the points you earn.
Guitar Hero – play a physical guitar in a video game.
DARPA Network Challenge – a competition to find 10 red balloons tethered around the US.
Weightwatchers – earn points for losing weight.
Ford Hybrid Car- incorporates a virtual pet to encourage you to save gas.
Lee Sheldon, University of Indiana professor gives experience points instead of grades. Students “level up” through the class. Attendance, participation and quality of homework all increase.

We already have a wide variety of rewards systems like loyalty cards and airmiles so it is not so much of a stretch to see that these will evolve to more developed games. FourSquare is proving that where we shop can be greatly influenced by game dynamics and companies like Gamify are providing the tools to bring gaming to your business.

A Psychological Catch is the Key Business Model Innovation

The most important part of most of these games is a psychological catch to get you to buy. In Mafia Wars, you are competing against your friends so you are willing to pay to access extra features and benefits. In ClubPenguin, children can play for free, but can’t access key features without becoming a paid member. Even in sites like Facebook and Twitter, the number of followers, fans or likes is prominently displayed so that we end up competing to build our reputation.

Marketing has always played to our emotions, but now it is more important than ever to think of a clever catch with our offerings.

Gaming Can Make a Better World

This next video with game designer, Jane McGonigal feels that gaming can make a better world.

Here are some highlights from the TED.com video,

In a game world, most us behave like the best version of our self. We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games. And I don’t mean just good as in successful, although that’s part of it. We do achieve more in game worlds. But I also but I also mean good as in motivated to do something that matters, inspired to collaborate and to cooperate. And when we’re in game worlds I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves, the most likely to help at a moment’s notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again. And in real life, when we face failure,when we confront obstacles, we often don’t feel that way. We feel overcome. We feel overwhelmed. We feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical. We never have those feelings when we’re playing games, they just don’t exist in games.

Gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life. They can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life. They get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life. … it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world. Now, I also agree that that is rational, for now. But it is not, by any means, an optimal situation. We have to start making the real world more like a game.

Here are a couple of games that McGonigal has helped develop:

World Without Oil is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage… Nobody wants to change how they live just because it’s good for the world, or because we are supposed to. But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, “We’ve run out of oil.” This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive. Most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game.

Superstruct at The Institute For The Future. And the premise was, a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. It’s your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net. We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions.

John’s Note:

Learning through well designed games is very powerful, because if you complete the game, you will have learned all that you needed to learn. There is no failure, only not enough effort. The focus can shift away from creating effective tests to creating more enjoyable learning experiences in the games.

Action Items:

What can you do to bring game dynamics to your business?
Do you have a psychological catch that makes your company irresistible to customers?
Can you make your work environment more like a game by giving your employees “experience points” and opportunities to “level up?”

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An Amazing Example of Curated Content: Free as a Business Model

John — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 19:37:07 +0000

Big Ideas:

There are numerous examples of companies prospering by giving away their product for free. Can a free business model transform your business?
In a world of information overload, quality curated content is highly needed. Can you create evergreen content that your customers will search for and bookmark?

Trendwatching has an amazingly comprehensive page called Free Love with dozens of examples of business models where the main product is given away for free. It is a worthwhile exercise to study the examples to see if your company can rethink its business model to compete in a world of scarce attention and decreasing production costs.

Here is how Trendwatching describes the Free Love page:

FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that’s available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music.

FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers’ ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture.

Expect FREE LOVE to become an integral if not essential part of doing business.

Curation is the Future

Another important lesson here is the value of curated content, like Free Love. Blogs are a terrible format for non-fiction or how-to information. It would be much better to have this content sorted by difficulty and categorized, rather than reading the latest ranting on a subject. Free Love is a beautifully comprehensive page that people will bookmark and refer back to. Every business should have web pages or sites like this. In fact, I am working on similar pages for IdeaEconomy.net that I hope to roll out soon.

More Information
Another great article is Chris Anderson’s article in Wired magazine, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. This is based on his book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
Seth Godin has a great post on content curation called: Micro magazines and a future of media.

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Share Office Space to Lower Costs and Increase Collaboration

John — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 18:55:01 +0000

Big Ideas: ShareYourOffice.com is a matchmaker for surplus office space.
Co-working is a great way to add creativity and energy into a work environment.

GigaOM recently wrote of a new service matching freelancers with office space; ShareYourOffice Wants to Be a Dating Site for Office Space.

ShareYourOffice is a new website that wants to act as a matchmaker for office space, hooking up people looking for desk space and companies that have spare space available. With a rise in the number of freelancers worldwide, coworking centers have become increasingly popular, but they’re not yet available everywhere. The idea behind ShareYourOffice is to create mini-coworking centers everywhere there are firms with spare desk space. The benefit to the company renting out its space isn’t only financial — in terms of helping to cover the cost of the lease — but also from the kind of network effects and synergies that can eventuate as resources and ideas are pooled, and companies collaborate on ideas together.

I love the idea of co-working type environments where freelancers and smaller businesses can minimize some of the costs of having an office, yet still get the benefits of a shared work space. There is a buzz and energy when you work around other creative entrepreneurs that is near impossible to duplicate when in cafes or at home. These benefits can be amplified if you take time to find a company that you might work together with or for. ShareYourOffice is a fantastic idea that I hope is really successful.

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Is Social Media Making us Less Human?

John — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 20:02:44 +0000

Big Ideas: Social media is isolating us from real human interactions.
Have you thought about or measured the return on your social media efforts?

The Guardian writes about author and MIT professor, Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together. Turkle offers yet another criticism of our over-use and over-reliance on technology.

The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness.

Turkle’s thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.

“We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us.”

Social Media: The Good.

I have personally found social media to be a fantastic way to connect with people in meaningful ways. Many relationships that have started online have been extended to real world meet ups. There simply is no better way to connect with people and build relationships on an international scale.

Those relationships can be valuable only in the friendships they establish, or they can help with professional or commercial motives. Social media has changed the way we work and live. I am confident that this is only the beginning.

Social Media: The Bad

It also goes without saying that solely virtual interactions are not healthy. It is important to see social media as a way of connecting with others outside of our normal sphere of influence. Those relationships can be brief and superficial like responding to a customer service issue or they can develop into in-person meetings and real friendships. Social media is not a replacement for human interaction. It should be a way to engage more effectively with people we wouldn’t normally have a chance to connect with.

Social Media: The Ugly

The real downside of social media is when people allow it to interfere with real world connections. How many times have you eaten a meal with or talked to someone who is constantly checking their smart phone and responding to tweets, emails or Facebook updates?

Another major problem is the amount of time technology can consume. It is very easy to spend hours and hours per day writing about every thing you do and responding to as many others as you can.

In addition, how many hours do we waste learning to be more productive with our technology? Isn’t that defeating the purpose?

Look at the Twitter streams of some of your super user peers and you will see a steady flow of banal and meaningless communication. It is nice to connect with others but I don’t think we want to hear every thought and action of the people we follow.

This constant connection interferes with work and just creates noise among some of the more valuable information. How much time do you spend on non-work related social media on company time? The actual time might only be 20 or 30 minutes a day, but it also means that you are constantly distracted from what you are doing and have to spend time catching up where you left off before.

Conclusion

Technology and social media in particular, are allowing us to connect in unprecedented ways. We can collaborate on universal projects like Wikipedia or Linux, we can raise money for creative projects on sites like Kickstarter, we can make micro-loans to disadvantaged people on sites like Kiva. There is no question that technology is changing the world for the better. However even good things can be overdone. If you are spending more than an hour per day on social media, and that is not what you are paid to do, than you are probably spending too much time on it. How much better would your life be if you spent an extra hour a day with family or friends?

If you are a business, what is your return on your social media efforts? For most companies, there are much easier and higher return activities that they could be focusing their efforts on. Instead of spending lots of time responding to customer complaints, many companies would be better off investing in improving the quality of service. Instead of trying to create superficial conversations with others online, wouldn’t it make sense to maximize the value of the existing leads coming to your firm?

What do you think? Is social media making us less human?

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