I know, people like things to stay as they are. Especially in difficult economic times. But be prepared for this: everything you know will change in the next 10 years – at least once!
As long as you stay hungry and foolish, you will always make something out of change! One of the best speeches I have seen is the one from Steve Jobs at Standord University during the 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
don’t take anything for granted, expect things to change – why? here are some examples:
schedule meetings for doing business or meet with friends:
10 yrs ago: you used the phone. Or you scheduled this many days in advance
today: you use SMS, google calender or facebook invite and twitter direct messages
publishing announcements:
10 years ago: printing a flyer / copy at your school, university or work,
today: write a blog, comment on a website, send a email
and, of course, music:
10 years ago: go to virgin or any other record store, buy a CD. Listen to it. Tell your friends.
there are many many more examples out there. But the key message is:
only those will be successful and survive who don’t take everything for granted – try to rethink everything, everyday!
update I: great article on how google books can make life easier – It’s there, but you just don’t see it. Even as an “online student”
update II: Also check out the discussion on Y-Combinator how recession can help to change people’s & corporates mind in terms of “be free to work from where ever you like”! This would be a big step ahead to allow people to rethink much more privately and for their jobs.
The World Economic Forum and McKinsey have partnered up and created a “Innovation Heat Map”. They’ve identified factors that are common to successful innovation hubs all over the world. Including 700 variables, those who are driving innovation (business environment, regulations, human capital, infrastructure and local demand) as well as proxies for innovation output (e.g.: economic value added, journal publications, patent applications) to identify trends among the success stories.
They’ve divided the cities into different clusters such as “hot springs”, “dynamic oceans” and “shrinking pools”.
When I’ve tried it out, I strongly noticed that the number of patents filed strongly influence the rating. I’d rather would like to see such a chart based on “companies founded per 1.000 citizen”, for example.
This question and much more can be answered by taking 5 minutes of your time and a visit at http://tweetstats.com - interesting figures like at what day / time do you tweet most? to whom did you respond most? what twitter clients do you use?
Google News Timeline presents search results from a wide range of sources. You can search and browse results from Google News, including headlines, quotes, photos from our Hosted News partners, and YouTube partner videos. You can also search for thousands of archival newspapers and magazines from Google News Archive Search and Google Book Search.
the second one i barely expected from google so quick. Since a lot of startups working already on the similar-image-search (some in the ecommerce industry, some based on social media – like facebook etc). But google made it, once again, and enters into the highly competitive sector of image search:
Image Search is a tool you can use to find just about any kind of image, but it can sometimes be difficult to find the right image if you can’t describe it in words. The new Similar Images feature was developed with just this in mind. Using it you can now find images that look like an existing result simply by clicking on a link. Using visual similarity, you don’t have to refine the text of your search, instead, you can just click on the link of an image you like
Once again google has shown with his “20% time” rule working quite well!
I still remember the times of status bars “imitations” or universal toolbars on websites. Back than we where running a very successful service called framead.
What we’ve basically did was providing companies and website owners with an additional script for their site. Once plugged-in, visitors always received a status toolbar containing content of the given website as well as ad’s and link-exchange advertising for the framead community. This helped many website for additional visitor growths and gave sites a good revenue potential.
With the rise of ad-blockers, new browsers and new websites this kind of service kind of died, taking into account that more than 1.000 where running our service alone in January 2001 already.
Given this “history lesson”, I’m really surprised why toolbars such as facebooks, AOLs or the DIGG-BAR are so widely discussed on the web, like they’ve been the reinvention of the weel.
For some “plugins” I’ve seen rise and fall over the past 10 years. I’m very sure this trend will go the same way as it went before.
Habari seems to be a awesome new blogging software – easy to use and especially made for my needs. We’ll see if the first impression keeps the promisses for my future usage….
If so, you will find relevant blog-posts out of my “venn-spot” and everything surrounding it.
This site is running Habari, a state-of-the-art publishing platform! Habari is a community-driven project created and supported by people from all over the world. Please visit http://habariproject.org/ to find out more!
I know, people like things to stay as they are. Especially in difficult economic times. But be prepared for this: everything you know will change in the next 10 years – at least once! 
