Today I released an updated version of what my hopes are for the future of the Web and how online communities can EVOLVE OUR VALUE SYSTEMS wrt climate change and convert that into…..ACTION:

Btw, I love slideshare, was one of its early adopters and I think the team really have good savvy. Now, this isn’t because they sent me this notification to say that the above presentation is “HOT ON FACEBOOK”:

It’s simply because in terms of USER EXPERIENCE, the quality of content and the navigation, the site really works.

Onto why I updated the presentation from over 3 years ago………..

Well, the idea of harnessing the Net to accelerate collective intelligence, increase global consciousness, do good and foster democratic communities to realize objectives is not something I’m doing because it’s the “latest thing”. Way back in Web 1.0 I proposed e-Intelligence at the big bank precisely with those objectives and it managed to fulfill those objectives fairly well.

This month by random chance and what appears to be synchronicity I’ve been asked to contribute to a documentary on global consciousness and the Internet. The other contributors are all highly regarded in their specialist fields and I feel really lucky to be asked to provide the Everyperson in the Street view.

If I’m going to have my Warholian 15 minutes, then I’m going to talk about what the online community can really DO about climate change and ethical consumption, far over and above simply being able to blog, IM and group discuss about it online.

I WANT US TO ACTUALLY COLLABORATE TO BUILD BUSINESS CASES + CODE APPS WHICH WILL GET INVESTOR SIGN-OFF, HAVE A REALISTIC IMPLEMENTATION PATH and break the inertia of…….more talk, more text and more time wasted.

GOOGLE PROJECT 10TH TO 100TH COMPETITION: GREENSPOT

I made several realizations when I watched this video with Vint Cerf this month:

(1.) Just because icebergs worked for Al Gore in his presentations, does not mean we should spend another 5 years putting icebergs into our PPTs because ICEBERGS CAN’T CODE or sense-make solutions!

They also can’t produce incentive models that would make green living attractive and worth the opportunity costs of not doing so.

(2.) Icebergs are made from water, aka H20. LIFE and our species’ state of consciousness is actually……CARBON-based, so the sooner the non-scientists start thinking about organic ways to stop climate change, the more likely we’ll actually decrease the rates of change!

(3.) Iceberg analogies are relevant and prescient only in two scenarios:

* a CEO is being so myopic and stubborn he’s going to steer his company and staff into the corporate equivalent of one; or

* a person is as glacial and unwelcoming as one.

As for Vint Cerf’s comments about how great it would be if there was a way consumers could find out what the carbon footprint of a product is, end-to-end, to help them make their consumption decisions I’d say:

I HOPE SOMEONE FLAGS VINT CERF @ GOOGLE ABOUT THIS BLOG!!!

That Google Tech Talk happened in Nov 2008. I didn’t become aware of its content until this month. In Oct 2008, this is what my friends and I wrote in the GREENspot proposal:

GREENspot is a GoogleMaps overlay, developed for the Android phone, which will enable customers to plant a tree (leveraging Marker Manager) at the geocode location of their local green retail stores. The application will also automatically calculate the distance and carbon footprint between wherever the user currently is on the GPS grid and where the store is, offering them the most energy efficient route(s) and suggestions on how to carbon offset this journey.

Users will also be able to tag the location with the names of specific products that consumers can buy in the store, its price, its manufacturer’s brand name, its carbon footprint from manufacturing to retail PoS (including packaging, if available) and a Green Credibility mark out of 10 for the store. The higher the score, the more leaves there will be on their tree marker.

All tags will be searchable via Google’s core business verticals.

At the second stage of product development, in collaboration with third party agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Online Green Awards organization, a quality control system can also be developed to provide users with a standard metric (or kitemark) — akin to food product labels — that more clearly helps them to compare and contrast retailers’ green promises and their actual delivery. This metric will complement ordinary users’ own recommendations.

Both stages will lead naturally to the third-stage development of a mobile social network for green consumers, activities and activism.

In terms of the technical features of GREENspot it will combine Python, Adobe’s upcoming CS4 and Ruby-Ajax. Leveraging Android phone’s contact manager, users will also be able to Bluetooth synch their entries and recommendations to the GREENspot overlay. The system automatically updates each friend’s score-based recommendation.

See? Not an iceberg in sight and this is an implementable solution for Google. It will help differentiate their Android OS and its a win for consumers. Everyone benefits and we’ve converted awareness into actual consumption choice.

NOW PLEASE………………LET’S STOP TALKING ABOUT ICEBERGS AND START BUILDING CASES + APPS THAT WILL GET CORPORATE BUY-IN AND BE OF REAL TANGIBLE USE TO CONSUMERS.

Also, it’s the CARBON in our DNA that effects reactions and changes so if we really want to tackle global consciousness……….No more conversations around icebergs and H20. The challenge is:

HOW TO WE GET THE CARBON, CHEMISTRY, CODING AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS TO COMPLEMENT?

Meanwhile, the other global IPTV play that launched at around the same time as Joost has recently announced a Big Ideas competition with WWW.GOOD.IS. Details can be found here:

* http://www.emediawire.com/releases/Babelgum/GOOD/prweb2682414.htm

* http://www.good.is/post/big-ideas-2/

[THE DEADLINE IS 26 AUGUST AND I WILL BE SUBMITTING AN ENTRY WHILST ON VACATION IN MADRID. It will probably be a variation on the Google 10 to 100th submission we (Jack, Rick and I) did with GREENspot. That or something related to the Global Brain and socially-voiced co-creation.]

Interestingly, when Babelgum launched it adopted the equivalent of the Sundance Film Festival approach to IPTV and got involved with independent film-makers like Spike Lee:

* http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/sep2007/gb2007094_132928.htm

* http://www.babelgumonlinefilmfestival.com/

This is proving to be a model which sets Babelgum apart from other video-sharing and streaming sites. It makes it seem more cutting-edge and have closer ties to original content production. Having a festival competition sets a quality benchmark for content producers and means that it is not the type of UGC which may exist, for example, on YouTube and was initially responsible for driving its growth.

Babelgum seems to take UGC and encourage it to have more of a professional story-telling and story-boarding element to it along with higher production values.

This is good competitive positioning based on……..QUALITY.

This week my friend called me from Madrid and invited me to spend some time there this summer. Ok, she didn’t invite me as much as remind me of my obligations as a friend. She pointed out how I haven’t even visited her apartment yet despite several years of invitation, so (under friendly coercion) I’ve booked my flights — LOL.

It’s not that I don’t like Spain or Spaniards, it’s just that I prefer to go to Italy. I relax in a friend’s apartment near the Spanish Steps in Rome and that’s been about as close to Spain as I get! However, I do know that Spain is vibrant, varied, worth exploring and the country where they make the delicious Turrón and other marzipan confections. Oh, and of course, it’s where Jamon Ibérico de Bellota has its origins.

Here’s a memory from my previous visit to Madrid: the view from the Museo del Prado.

There was a Tiziano exhibition then which was superb; Tiziano is Spanish for Titian, btw. They’d sourced and borrowed various pieces I’d seen in the likes of the Uffizi and the National Art Gallery as well as ones I hadn’t seen before from places like the Kromeriz, Archbishop’s Palace. The sum effect was that I wandered around the corridors spellbound by the various interpretations of Venus and Cupid amongst Titian’s other masterpieces. There were 65 pieces on show and it was the largest collection of Titians in one place since 1935. Moreover, it was the first time Spain had hosted an exhibition of the great painter.

Here’s my favorite Titian masterstroke, Venus of Urbino, whose natural home is the Uffizi:

The art was a pleasure and a reprieve from all the serious business. Other people like to drink or be couch potatoes to de-stress. I like to wander around art galleries and be amazed by human creativity and skill.

I was in Madrid for the European Wind Energy Conference. We’d just set up the corporate finance boutique (4 guys and I) and everyone agreed that it would be a good idea if I went to the conference to develop some professional relationships and attract some advisory mandates. This was at a time when renewable energies were not on many bankers’ radars. I seemed to be the only female banker, so people came up and spoke with me just out of sheer novelty!

They were pleasantly surprised that:

(1.) I understood their explanations on the engineering of how a wind turbine operates. In fact, I got up close and personal with a large Vestas propeller and each blade was three times my height.

(2.) I wasn’t one of the many female conference organizers or a waitress pouring the coffees.

(3.) I was a lot younger than most of the attendees.

Luckily, I did study Physics, Chemistry and Maths before a maths degree, my mother was an engineer and my father had introduced us to car engines when I was about 7 so………………….the technical aspects of turbines were easy to grasp.

A few weeks’ later, the Chair of the Structured Finance team at a top NYC law firm was lovely enough to send me a complimentary copy of Global Securitization and Structured Finance (usual RRP: US$150). He’d written a brilliant and concise piece on multi-patent securitization inside. After one of the conference’s break-out sessions, we’d had a really interesting conversation about Bowie bonds and securitizing IP for film slates by the major studios, and we mused over its cross-applicability into the securitization of wind farms.

I noted that the issue with the then lack of investment in turbine manufacturers was that most of them were engineers rather than economists, so they had less experience in building a business case and presenting their paths to profitability. Their concept of “efficiency” was all about the aeronautics of curvature that would capture, convert and channel the optimal wind power. The bankers’ concept of “efficiency” was whether working capital was being put to good use and when ploughback would take place.

See? There too is………….SEMANTICS. It’s difficult to twain the different concepts of “efficiency” unless you understand the motivations of and solutions offered by both sides.

Most of the renewable product manufacturers weren’t even aware they needed to know when their break-even point would be. Therefore, the bankers saw no business model (as defined by what’s taught at business school, in mgt consultancies and in banks) and so they didn’t risk the investment.

One of the key ways to resolve this, I argued, was to pool the patents and IPs of their engine designs and securitize the projected revenue streams from those. This wasn’t me being a “Young Turk” (aka clueless but full of bravura). There was a precedent. I was aware that a big telco had managed to do this with their 10,000+ technology patents and so I was fairly convinced it could be cross-applied to turbine patents. He appreciated my perspective because he was (at that time-point) a principal advocate for innovating the securitization of new asset classes.

Historically, securitization had been for fungibles and tangibles like people’s mortgages, telephone lines, corporate buildings, physical land, etc. The securitization of IP and patents was new territory, albeit a necessary one if green tech companies were going to be able to offer investors a reason to trust in a future with green economics at its core and to risk their money in the hope of some potential return.

We even talked broadly about the SPV structures that could work, to make it appealing to bankers and incentivize them to become more involved with the sector; both from a financing and an issuance advisory side. SPV stands for special purpose vehicles, btw.

As is evident now, bankers at the conference went away and thought quite hard about how to develop expertise in the sector and become more green. It seems to be working, so. It’s good to know that I contributed my little bit of catalysis to the conference and to the attendees as they did to me too.

On the final evening of the conference, the attendees who opted to went into the Madrid countryside for an exclusive dinner. Someone said it was a palace of the Spanish royal family but, to this day, I still don’t know the name of the venue. In the photograph, readers can see all our tables beautifully laid out for dinner around a fountain.

If anyone knows the name, please let me know via this blog! “Muchos gracias!” as the Spaniards say,

Since that conference, more and more banks have become active investors in and advisors to renewable energy companies. They finance the incubation of renewable technologies, provide strategic support and create services to facilitate the sector. This is a positive development, imo. It was great that former Vice President, Al Gore, made his Inconvenient Truth documentary in 2006 but if the bankers, tech manufacturers and engineering consultancies like ABB hadn’t started to convene and innovate financing structures a few years earlier…………………….

Renewables and the whole Green Movement would NOT exist or be making the progress in the way they are. It would still be in a cycle of consciousness by a certain demographic of campaigners rather than commercial, accessible and applicable to more people.

As much as bankers have been maligned over the last 18 months (and there’s no excuse for that handful of people who wrecked global economies and hit taxpayers hard), it’s also been too easy for non-insiders to overlook or be wholly ignorant about bankers’ contribution to the Green Movement and green implementation. They took seeds of awareness and paid for the tractors to furrow the land, for the pipes of irrigation, for the personnel qualified to cultivate those green seeds and for the construction of energy efficient and pollution-free alternatives to coal. Some of them are helping to shape the green future as much as others have contributed to decimating economic growth.

The better bankers are the reasons we now have wind farms all over Europe, green consumerism and eco-towns. They went into companies, helped formulate the business models and then went out to actively seek new investors or recommended either a NASDAQ/AIM floatation to attract them.

I know because my first transaction in our corpfin boutique was to raise GBP25 million for a California-based company that manufactures renewable Redox batteries. The type which act as back-up when there’s a massive power outage as the States experiences every few years.

I hope this post will contribute towards a better understanding that bankers can be the ones who finance and get green commitments off the ground, into shops + homes + main streets, and profitable. A junior analyst I met back then is now Ernst+Young’s UK Head of Renewables Energy, so “corporate-types” are committed to careers in green technologies and the greater greener good.

Also, when I wrote the GREENspot proposal as an entry into Google’s Project 10 to 100th competition (potentially a US$2 million funding prize), it wasn’t on a whim or to jump onto some bandwagon. It’s because there is a synch between the relevance to Android as a potential mobile socnet, the innovation, the financing, the technology and the mass applicability and potential traction of GREENspot which is clear, based on my experiences as a banker and as a technologist.

Anyway, apart from EWEC, I did manage to see a little bit of Madrid — if not as much as I did of Bilbao where I once went for a New Year’s Eve break. This limited exploration of Madrid included del Prado as well as frequenting a few good Spanish tapas bars and fish restaurants at night where I tasted local signature dishes like their version of a crème brulée, and the architecture, people and nature of the city.

I’m looking forward to catching up with my friend. Maybe as well as experiencing indigenous Madrid properly, we’ll go to the beach or up to the Spanish-French borders where her family owns a boutique hotel. We have a running joke where we believe the other person is the link to our future husbands, so I keep teasing her about how I feel “twinges and vibes” that this or other boyfriend is “THE ONE” for her — ha ha.

Reciprocally, if she ever does actually introduce me to the future Mr. Twain or is the connection to him, this would make my mother…….ECSTATIC. LOL.

The reality is that neither of us believes in the fairy tale where Prince Charming charges along in his trusty steed and sweeps us off our feet. Life’s a lot more interesting and complex than saccharine, lightweight candy floss.

Still, I’m a firm believer that what is meant to be will be and we move forwards towards it; just like green economics, connective-collaborative intelligence that constitutes the Global Brain and what I call “socially-voiced co-creation”.

Here’s to my friend and Madrid and more of the green stuff called growth………….

*********************

SPRING ROLLS

This morning I made my first-ever spring rolls. I’ll post the pictures and YouTube video later.

In the same week that the media moguls are gathered in Sun Valley to attend boutique investment bank, Allen + Co’s, pow-pow over how to monetize social networks, get consumers to pay for content and make their investors happy, the political leaders are in Italy discussing the global economic crisis and climate change.

The two events may seem discrete and unconnected, but actually they can be “twained”. Here goes……..

Yesterday news reports said that G8 leaders had hailed a “historic” agreement on climate change policies to try and set new temperature and CO2 emission targets for 2050 (lowering by 2 degrees Celsius and halving, respectively). This follows on from 1990 agreements to cut CO2 emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Here’s the website of the July 2009 G8 summit being held in L’Aquila, Italy and hosted by the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi:

News coverage on the G8 is available here:

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/g8/

Below are some useful links on what the UN Environment Program, Oxfam, BBC forum bloggers, Open Democracy, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the All Africa network believes needs to be covered by the climate change agenda at the G8 summit:

· http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=593&ArticleID=6242&l=en

· http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/g8-2009

· http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?forumID=6705&edition=1&ttl=20090709111737

· http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-g8-and-climate-change-towards-copenhagen

· http://www.panda.org.za/?section=News_AboutUs&id=191

· http://allafrica.com/stories/200907070060.html

CLIMATE CHANGE: TWAINING SOCIAL NETWORKS TECHNOLOGY WITH PRODUCTION STREAMS AND CUTTING CO2 EMISSIONS

Several years ago, I posted a broad overview of my business case for “Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation” onto slideshare — an excellent site run by an excellent management team, btw. In its time it was ranked #1 if you searched for “Web 3.0”.

Now, I’m not going to be one of those people who allows the “Why should emerging economies agree to cuts when it’s the developed economies who’ve been responsible for polluting the world ever since the Industrial Revolution for the last two centuries?” argument distract me from what is a CLEAR CHALLENGE AND SOLUTION we all need to find. Nor am I going to argue, “Well, emerging economies like India and China are actually churning out more CO2 because their factories are manufacturing goods to fulfill the consumption demands of developed economies. It’s actually them that’s causing us to pollute in the first place. Factories built because developed country economies wanted to take advantage of the cheaper labor and wage costs abroad, etc. etc. etc.”

There are countless objections all sides can put forward to why developed and emerging economies shouldn’t do something about climate change but all of these objections are, frankly, fatuous and don’t move human progress forward (and I like moving human progress forward, :*)).

What also needs to be recognized is that what all governments have yet to do is to make COMPELLING BUSINESS ARGUMENTS for companies and consumers to tackle climate change. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth documentary remains a philosophical call to our conscience rather than a pragmatic program towards change in action — not simply attitude — of consumer behavior.

What we need is the model I propose in ‘Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation’.

At the moment, social networks seem to be little more than online meeting points where consumer herds are channeled into topic pens for marketers to push more information at them and increase their consumption habits. They then buy more goods (often not what they genuinely need but for momentary consumer satiation or fad reasons), cause factories to churn out more CO2 and other noxious chemicals to pollute the environment and then waste electricity on the gadgets and goods they’ve bought but don’t really need. Disposal of these over-produced gadgets with their harmful substances (e.g., mercury in monitors, aluminum smelting, etc.) further causes complications to the ozone layer which still need to be researched and mitigated against. Admittedly, there are political lobby groups set up on the social networks — including climate change activists — but still this is not the optimal harnessing of consumer intelligence, influence or active collaboration on a wider and more effective scale than some educated niche activists providing information and awareness rather than instigating actions which affect bottom line results.

In short, the non-virtuous cycle of climate concerns goes around: we’re marketed into wanting, we buy to satisfy this want and then we worry about what kind of Earth our children and their children will inherit (deforestation, ocean pollution, out of control weather, airborne chemicals which damage their lungs, etc.).

Now let’s turn the social network model on its head and think about a monetization model at the same time.

Imagine if, instead of registered users being pushed marketing at or lobbied, they were engaged in the production process. Imagine if they were harnessed as a gigantic market research pool to ask them:

· what products they’d like to buy

· what price point they’d be prepared to pay for that item

· when they plan to complete purchase (within 1 week, 1 month, 1 quarter, half a year, end of year)

· which distribution outlet they’re more likely to buy it from (online, boutique, super-store)

· who else they would recommend the product to

instead of the current market research methods which try to extrapolate purchase intent from demographic information gathered (e.g., if you live in a household where income is US$100K and you are a white, male professional who reads the New Yorker, you’re likely to buy the Apple iPhone).

Then imagine if they were enabled with tools to collaborate in the design of products, with a percentage share in the net profits of any sold for a defined period of time. Next, imagine that this market research and product collaboration feeds directly into a sophisticated inventory system so that the company produces a level of goods which more accurately reflects and meets consumer demands — rather than the current way this works which is whereby companies have to make projections 3 to 5 CAGR years in advance, based on consumption behavior gathered in reports from the likes of Datamonitor etc. which are only comparatively small sample populations with all their inherent skews, extrapolation inaccuracies and time lags rather than social network sampling which is instantaneous, targeted and more representative of sizeable populations. The way it currently works also means that there is a lot of wastage in materials used to market to consumers (e.g., flyers, billboards, paper cut-outs at consumer electronic shows).

Finally, consider how this change in engaging the consumer further upstream in the production process will change CO2 emissions and move the climate change issue towards a positive solution.

Companies will actually gain insights into what consumers REALLY need and want. They can better manage their inventories to produce at levels needed rather than over-stock. In this way, factories won’t be over-producing and churning out excessive chemicals to further damage the environment. Plus companies will increase their communication effectiveness and production efficiencies, and reduce the wastage and costs incurred in over-stocking of materials, labor, electricity etc. needed to produce goods to meet consumer demands.

Governments can support companies which foster this form of positive consumer influence by giving them tax breaks, emission offsets and assistance with factories abroad where the goods will be manufactured.

Moreover, the consumer can be incentivized and will be rewarded for their participation in product design process. They will also end up getting products they want: what, when, where and how they want it.

Now, THAT is the COMPELLING BUSINESS ARGUMENT governments, companies and policy-makers need to explore and implement.

These “2 degrees Celsius and halving CO2 emissions here and there, developed versus emerging economies claims to be allowed to build factories and use electricity” etc. are too ephemeral and theoretical to companies and to consumers.

What we need to do is transform the awareness of climate change into ACTION at the bottom line level. We need to engage consumers further upstream in the production process and not simply downstream where they’re pushed more marketing to increase unnecessary consumption (and, inadvertently, CO2 emissions).

There, that’s my “twaining” of the paradigms between technology, business models and government policy on climate change.

Now we just need Google to choose my GREENSPOT proposal (an Android / mobile devices application to develop a global social network for green consumers) in their 2008/9 Project 10 to 100th competition so that we can realize this vision of companies and consumers contributing positive action where climate change, changing consumption behavior and better production levels is concerned!

* http://www.project10tothe100.com/

Yes, we do need the commitment of tech giants like Google to do it — purely because they have the global resources to reach out towards corporate and consumer audiences and encourage them to convert to new consumption and production frameworks.

Yes and the ‘Web 3.0: socially-voiced co-creation” model is consistent with the Global Brain and Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web) constructs. The objective of any Global Brain is for us to collectively collaborate to solve the world’s major challenges which includes climate change. The usefulness of a Semantic Web would be for machines to be able to understand us and each other when, for example, there’s an inventory order out of Paris and we can work out that means from the capital of France instead of the Hilton celebrity.

Tesla is right: think through before we do. At some point, the theories and the practices will twain — LOL.