Throughout the last 15+ years I’ve reviewed and tested hundreds of IT products for consulting and corporate projects as well as, like you, many for personal needs. I’ve even been fortunate to be part of the development and commercialization efforts of several IT startups.
I recently returned to the United States from a field project in Latin America that focused on helping IT startups in this rapidly growing emerging market bring products to their regional international markets. The underlying goal was to help them solve their own problems using technology they created. We researched 5 different countries and interviewed many entrepreneurs who were in different phases of the commercialization cycle.
As expected, the experience was beyond enlightening, but it truly reinforced that, for entrepreneurs, the United States still is a great country to be in. The United States continues being a tremendous innovation force and we must continue oiling that engine because it is what keeps our economy running.
Throughout my professional and personal experiences since I came to the United States as a Fulbright scholar, I have grown to believe that Steven Johnson is on target in his lesson that Chance Favors the Connected Mind, but I also believe that the difficulty to separate the noise from the value in the connections is often preventing us from being effective.
Is there a real value in the connection between the followed and his/her followers when the tribe reaches thousands of members? The answer might be in the fact that Seth Godin, the author of Tribes, has comments blocked in his very popular blog and automatically deletes any emails you send him (unless you are in his very inner circle?). His direct communication with his tribe members is pretty much one-sided. And the fact that he isn’t the only one indicates that there are very practical reasons for that.
Since 2005 I started focusing on online tools, particularly on those that enable collaboration. More recently, I have focused on cloud-based and mobile tools, which have evolved to include as a default requirement the ability to connect people in order to collaborate in one form or another.
Within just a few years, different functionality that enables collaboration has become ubiquitous throughout user-centric applications, making my focus on collaborative environments simply redundant and unnecessary. Which environment isn’t a collaborative one today? Collaboration, on the other hand, is an intrinsic aspect of being human and will just become more ubiquitous as we get more connected–which is resulting in a lot of more noise.
And for those of us who focused on collaborative environments for the last few years and bought into the web 2.0 terminology I ask: Were we just messing around with semantics? Isn’t the Internet’s beginnings and core foundation by default a collaborative environment?
I guess the most popular social media tools that are mastering the magnificence of the Internet have already answered that question. In fact, Twitter has proven to be an impressive collaborative tool with worldwide examples where masses are mobilized in just seconds. Yet, it isn’t a collaborative tool per say, but a microblogging one.
Therefore, I believe that the on-line collaboration lessons we have learned during the last few years have been invaluable and endless, and fortunately spread across all fields, but focusing on developing walled collaboration environments might no longer be necessary.
Yet, our challenge of achieving value thru connectivity has actually become more complex than it was in 2005, when I first joined the collaboration crowd. That is primarily resulting from how distracting the noise we create for each other can be. I’m certain that the next way of technology will focus on filtering that noise out. The pendulum must come back to the center.
Why Daily Coffeetoasts?
Coffeetoasts is part of my CoDePPFP efforts to refocus from collaboration to the natural magnificence of the Internet. The goal is to seek out and help promote innovators, mentors, new startups and technology that help us further leverage the natural magnificence of the Internet to solve real problems in our on-line lives and reduce the noise. And, with this exercise I seek to find out how I can be a better contributor to startups and entrepreneurs because I believe they are the ones that can help the country maintain and expand its role as a worldwide innovation force.
Coffeetoasts will evolve along the way as I further learn how to be of help to you!
My Warmest Regards,
@maricelam
