These are the kinds of cool things you can do when your country is:

a) small

b) starting an infrastructure from scratch after Soviet occupation

According to Raul Kaidro, spokesman of the SK Certification Center, which issues personal ID cards in Estonia, security will not be an issue as the cell phone, “is the most secure way to authenticate digital signatures.”

What does this mean for large countries for whom this would be punishingly expensive and/or difficult? As American, I feel like we won’t win the science fair this year…

It’s January 28th in Washington DC. You should come and be part of this discussion!

New Ways of Knowing 2.0: Social Media and the Future of Intelligence and Decision-Making

Intelligence is at a watershed moment. After decades of developing a profession to collect information and provide early warning, we find ourselves in a broad-reaching financial catastrophe that was unknown or ignored by decision makers. Despite a collection and analysis of economic information, most businesses walked unknowingly into a ruined banking sector, retail distribution on the brink of bankruptcy, housing grotesquely overvalued, American automobiles at the point of extinction - all while most leaders continued to view change as incremental.

This unprecedented current economic crisis seems to represent a failure of intelligence. After all, if intelligence cannot motivate leaders to action, then as professionals we must ask - what good is it? Many analyst voices in the desert warned about the risks in real estate, derivate markets and reliance on leverage, but it’s not clear that this led to action. Are we in our current mess because the leaders in business and government simply didn’t listen? If so, how can intelligence professionals deliver analysis that drives appropriate action?

The next generation of intelligence might solve the inherent weaknesses of Intelligence 1.0 by relying on a broad range of information, focusing on relationships over hierarchy and replacing official dogma with a continuous dialogue. Technology will be a major driver in this evolution: Web 2.0 and social media tools are moving into the mainstream– not just in the consumer space but also in business. 2008 has seen the year of “Enterprise 2.0.” Web 2.0 has gone to work to enable collaboration, smash silos and change business processes. Intelligence analysts have new tools and methods at their disposal for primary research, secondary discovery, collaborative analysis and communicating actionable insight.

“New Ways of Knowing 2.0″ will be an interactive educational event in which we will examine the potential of social media to improve the intelligent organization of the future. Participants can expect to teach as much as they learn and see connections among diverse concepts, tools, intelligence practices and business processes. Our panelists will include:

• Suki Fuller, social media maven and CI consultant
• Eric Garland, strategic forecaster, intelligence thought leader, author of Future Inc: How Businesses Can Anticipate and Profit from What’s NEXT, and principal of Competitive Futures, Inc.
• August Jackson, market and competitor intelligence analyst and Enterprise 2.0 evangelist at Verizon Business.

You will come away with this program with immediate and actionable advice about how you can incorporate Enterprise 2.0 tools into your intelligence processes to improve your ability to adapt to our ever-changing world. Discussions and highlights from the program will be posted to the new SCIP DC chapter blog at http://scipdc.wordpress.com.

Now, this seals it:

Mean Automakers Dash Nation’s Hope For Flying Cars

.Naturally, this has an unintended consequence: human being are generating massive amounts of data about their behavior, from travel patterns to shopping preferences. These data are being collected by central databases, both by governments and private entities. Free democracies have certain implicit and explicit expectations of privacy, but we are at the point of unprecedented technological power in tracking human beings and most everything they do.

Dialogue is in order - we need to decide what we feel about this, what we expect; our values of right and wrong.

Some have already started: France’s Le Figaro newspaper has an article this morning about how the rail company is sounding the alarm that it cannot necessarily guarantee “anonymous” travel when using the regular RFID-chipped NaviGo pass.

This has led to a higher paid, but anonymous version of the card called “Navigo Decouverte.” But also it leads to a polemic. Is our privacy ours, or must we purchase it just as we purchase other goods and services? Are our laws made with enough foresight to handle the challenges these technologies may pose to liberty and open society?

It’s nice to see that France is paying attention. Let’s dialogue!

While you’re thinking about doing new things well, watch this great video from Tim Ferriss, author of The Four-Hour Workweek,” on how showing up and working hard is not enough when trying new things - there are special tricks involved. These are the kinds of skills we’ll need to master if we are to navigate so many changes in the years to come.

Some highlights:

He’s not a fan of techno-solutions. (not unlike yours truly)

The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another.

He sees Dow 4000:

A consensus in the blogoshpere says that the stock markets will rebound strongly during the first Obama months. This is possible just on the basis of pure “animal spirits,” but the Obama Bounce will occur against a background of continued dismal business and financial news. It will appear to defy that news. By May of 2009, the stock markets will resume crashing with the ultimate destination of a Dow 4000 before the end of the year.

He believes that you’ll actually need positive cash flow to make a business run (old-fashioned, but radical!):

We’ll turn around early in 2009 and discover that we are a much poorer nation than we thought because from now on credit will be extremely hard to get for anyone for anything. The businesses that survive will have to keep going on the basis of accounts receivable…Giant enterprises requiring giant loans to get from quarter to quarter will tend to not make it. Borrowing from the future will become a practical impossibility as past bad debts from previous borrowings continue to unwind, cease performing, and get written off.

Real change. Not new technologies for old philosophies. Nobody will save the day. We’ll need to make workable solutions for many different types of people.

And still - people will need things. Goods and services will be required, perhaps just different types.

Business development will need to be on its toes! Are you ready?

Large organizations will start to do worse now, though, because for the first time in history they’re no longer getting the best people. An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn’t want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that’s rapidly growing into one. If they’re really ambitious, they want to start it.

This doesn’t mean big companies will disappear. To say that startups will succeed implies that big companies will exist, because startups that succeed either become big companies or are acquired by them. But large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Also last night, somebody sent me this link to Forbes top ten worst real estate markets. EIGHT of them are in California. The average projected drop in value is around 25%. A connection?

Of course, the tenth most overvalued market is mine in Washington DC. But then again if you read this blog, you knew that. I think some of that overvalue might be from people selling their apartments for $10,000 for the coming inauguration. We’ll see.