There is nothing new under the sun – just different combinations.
Therefore, all innovation is the combination of that which already exists.
While traveling across the country, I have begun considering what constitutes innovation.
Years ago, I read a quote from Peter Drucker regarding innovation where he defined innovation as “a new dimension of performance.”
While thinking about new products that successfully entered or disrupted markets, they all seem to have shared Drucker’s definition of innovation – a new dimension of performance.
What new product or service can hope to succeed ie., penetrate and serve a market let alone profit from it – without first having met his “new dimension of performance” definition?
As mentioned here and on my personal blog, I attended the AlwaysOn Summit @ Stanford last week and was impressed by the degrees of innovation discussed not only from within the panels and the Summit’s speakers but also that which was applied by the AlwaysOn conference itself.
As a virtual conference attendee, my experience was made entirely possible by technology that was incorporated into the show’s production.
Vivu.TV was the webcast / video provider for AlwaysOn and their technology made my virtual attendance possible.
More about Vivu.TV from their website:
Founded by startup veterans from Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and a team of IIT graduates, ViVu develops first-of-its-kind Participative Event Platform that enables live video participation from a PC, Mac or Linux without any proprietary downloads and seamlessly integrates with most of the popular streaming video and conference solutions.
The team developed the first enterprise quality video over IP a decade ago and is now building a participative platform that scales and provides the ease-of-use, quality and availability expected in an enterprise. ViVu solution is targeted at enterprises and is being used in a variety of ways: remote training courses, sales training on new products, and remote live video caller participation during Webcasts.
Like their site says – I am a Mac user and I was easily able to log into and participate in the AlwaysOn conference without having to download anything.
Peter Drucker defined Innovation as “a new dimension of performance”.
If Mr. Drucker were alive today, I am pretty sure the Vivu.TV “participative event platform” would qualify under his definition of innovation.
I virtually attended my first conference this week at Stanford University called the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford.
This year was the seventh addition of the conference and was titled: “Meet the New Captains of Innovation”.
I stumbled onto the conference while doing research and ended up “attending” two days worth of sessions via my laptop even though I was 1,600+ miles from Stanford.
From the Summit at Stanford conference website:
On July 28-30, leaders in the global technology industry will gather at the Athens of the Information Age for high-level debates on trends and opportunities.
Who Attends?
Summit at Stanford, features the most innovative companies, eminent technologists, influential investors, and journalists in keynote presentations, panel debates and private company CEO showcases. Our goal is to identify the most promising entrepreneurial opportunities and investments.
Indeed.
880 people attended the three day event in person while thousands of visitors like myself virtually attended the conference from 80 countries according to show founder Tony Perkins.
I particulary enjoyed the innovative interactivity of the show.
Web visitors could log on to the Stanford conference via Vivu.TV to view the panel discussions while also asking them questions via chat or Twitter during the Q&A segments.
I aggregated conference attendees Tweets via Twitter and then re-tweeted the comments I found most interesting.
I believe my approach to virtually attending this conference, aggregating and then rebroadcasting my findings was innovative in itself.
I enjoyed every panelists contributions particularly the comments about Silicon Valley’s origins from Norm Fogelsong, General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners.
The AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford has set the standard for how all other conferences should be run.
All my notes from the conference are posted on TimothyCohn.com.
From the Official Google blog yesterday:
“Today, we’re announcing a new logs retention policy: we’ll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We’re significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.”
“Although that was good for privacy, it was a difficult decision because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient of innovation. We have published a series of blog posts explaining how we use logs data for the benefit of our users: to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam.”
“While we’re glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we’re also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data.”
From these comments, can we infer search quality, innovation, searcher privacy and security are built on having the most search data?
What impact can anonymized data have when you still control it?
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