I’ve been reading a new book called Smart Swarms recently. It’s one of those Tipping Point / Wikinomics types pop social science books, which doles out huge hunks of insightful wisdom. In Smart Swarm’s case, the book looks at how humans can learn from the collective intelligent behaviour of animals – in particular, how we can learn from animals (like bees and termites) swarm behaviour: i.e. how they manage to self-organise in such huge numbers. Read more »

I ordered some pin-badges the other day.  I ordered them from a company called Awesome Merchandise, and with great ease my badges duly arrived on my desk in good time.   So my e-commerce experience was everything you’d expect from a company called Awesome Merchandise – and more.  As in my package, alongside my badges came two simple pieces of promo material: a thank you card, and a sticker. Read more »

There are some people who get it, and others who don’t.  In the past week we’ve seen the social media team  at Warner Bros come up with a major social FAIL with a poorly executed piece of outreach.  Where some fail, others are awesome, and in the same week I received an AWESOME piece of engagement from a friendly (and successful) US agency called Humongo. Read more »

I first came across the idea of “government as a platform” when I was interviewing Tim O’Reilly earlier in the year about future visions of how government could be re-modelled for the digital age. Tim’s quickest way of explaining “gov as a platform” was using the iPhone as an analogy: i.e. just as the iPhone’s value has been optimised by opening up the iPhone platform to a legion apps, so government should do the same to optimise its value. Read more »

In the words of Mugatu in comedy flick Zoolander, crowd-sourcing is “so hot right now”. Dell want to launch a new computer – first thing they do is listen to the needs of the crowd across their Ideastorm crowd-sourcing app. President Obama wants ideas on how to develop up his new Recovery.gov project – first thing he does is run an open Dialogue process with the IT community using the Dialogue App. Read more »

TV was (is) the original social media. Whether it’s with a friend down the pub, a colleague in the office or your parents on the phone, a “did you see” conversation is a staple of anyone’s social life. Yet, although TV is naturally a social activity the integration of new social media channels beyond the straight broadcast model has been a fairly slow development for programme makers. Read more »

So, my girlfriend is eternally trying to get me to eat more healthily. As part of her fight against my KitKat addiction, she recently started slipping bags of granola into my work bag. And that’s where my love of *Bear* started. Read more »

I came across this the other day – and it’s a real potential game changer for the world of e-commerce. Square is a new mobile credit card payment device which simply plugs into your iPhone (or iPad or any other device) and allows you to make credit card payments with a swipe and a tap.  Read more »

According to research, only 0.001% get over 100,000.  And in fact, only 3.1% get over 1000.  So getting a million views on YouTube is a serious feat.  Read more »

So some clever wonks in the US have done a whole bunch of research into motivation at work.  And guess what – it turns out for the creative industries, money isn’t the main motivator at work.  Rather, there are three main drivers for creatives (unlike workers involved with more mechanical tasks):
- Autonomy: the desire to be self-directed
- Mastery: the desire to be good as something
- Purpose: the desire to make a difference – linked to some transcendent purpose which helps people get some kind of meaning and worth out of their work.

This genius video from an RSA lecture explains more:

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