Why GFC explains everything (to Australians)
This morning an email from a client mentioned the GFC. Earlier this week another client was talking about the GEC (which has the advantage that you can pronounce it, while GFC has to be spelled out).
When this morning I Twittered about how we have a new acronym that doesn’t need to be explained, I got some interesting responses. @ITSinsider in America said that she had heard it before from someone else in Australia. An Australian initially thought I meant Geelong Football Club, so googled it to find out.
Which gives very interesting results…
If you Google “GFC” in Australia the #3 result is a newspaper story Tough week ends in talk of ‘GFC’, dated from October last year, with four of the top 10 results referring to the planet’s economic woes, including three newspaper headlines.
If you Google “GFC” in the US, aside from a #5 entry from Wikipedia which includes various acronyms including the contemporary one, the first entry which refers to GFC in this way is at #45.
So are Australians particularly acronym-crazy? Are we in the vanguard of what will be a global trend to summarize the state of the world as GFC?
Of course the very best thing about GFC is that it is an easy explanation for everything, in three easy letters. It was all getting very complicated for a while. Now it’s simple again – yay!
Profiting from Technology Trends: Keynote at National Growth Summit
Tomorrow morning I am delivering a keynote at the National Growth Summit, looking at how fast-growing companies can tap technology trends to build growth and opportunities.
The presentation is below (usual caveats – this is not intended as a stand-alone presentation but to accompany my speech). I’ll write more about this soon, but now I must get to bed – it was a long (though fun!) day at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum today.
Why traditional conferences are dying and how unconferences and audience participation are the future of events
For many, many years I have felt that the vast majority of conferences were very poorly run, continuing to apply ancient, didactic approaches. That’s one of the reasons that a few years ago I started running events, organizing the Future of Media Summit, which annually links Sydney and San Francisco, the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum (the second annual event is on next week), Web 2.0 in Australia etc. Earlier events including what was at the time the extremely innovative Living Networks Forum in New York in 2003, using social networking technologies embedded in the event. Even though the events industry is vastly oversupplied, the majority of them are crap, so there’s ample scope for something better, as the consistent success of our events has demonstrated.
Certainly the last few years have seen the beginning of a transformation in how events are run, with in the US, Europe, and Australia (less so in Asia so far) many novel and highly interactive formats. However there is still a massive opportunity to create immense value with face-to-face events, and we’re currently looking to spin off our events business into a new company that will grow aggressively. News on that soon.
I am unusual in that a large part of my work is as a keynote speaker, speaking primarily on the future of business (including sometimes the future of events), usually within a traditional conference format. However at the same time I endeavor to create (or help my clients to implement) participatory formats that transcend the talking head syndrome.
Now the issue is getting mainstream media attention. News.com.au has released an article titled: Networking trend: the ‘unconference’, which examines the plethora of interactive events that are arising, such as unconferences, Lightning Talks, Ignite, and Pecha Kucha, and drawing on an extensive interview with me on where the space is heading.
The entire article is well worth a read. Below are excerpts of the direct quotes from me in the article.
