technology

Watching The Birds Play The Value Game

by Dan Robles on February 23, 2011

To some entrepreneurs, the problems with the aviation industries signal many insurmountable obstacles.  At  Social Flights these challenges portend an extraordinary opportunity for a new business method to bring efficiency, order, social value while eliminating artificial barriers.

Social Flights value proposition is very strong for travel ranging from 200-1000 miles between smaller airports. Social Flights can deploy quickly in response to specialized market needs, environmental condition, opportunities, or events. Social flights adapts the mission of the aircraft to meet the opportunities presented to the market.

Conversely, commercial aviation struggles dearly in this segment because they try to get the market to meet the pre-ordained mission of the aircraft. The entire air transportation system would be best served if commercial aviation concentrated on the long haul/high volume “migration” service.  There is no reason why private aviation cannot perform the job that gridlocks commercial aviation.  This would make both industries more efficient.

Commercial Aviation’s Race to Nowhere

The Deregulation Act of 1978 in the Commercial Aviation system led to the development of the Hub and Spoke system whereas commercial carriers would fly people from small locations into a one or more large “Hub” cities where they would transfer on to the next destination – usually another hub, or on to the final destination.

Deregulation undermined point-to-point service regardless of market demand, ignoring social objectives of the passengers, having no regard for the final destination of the passengers, and blowing off the “time-value” of their passengers.  Recently, the ever expanding security layer has reached the point of personal privacy invasion.  With the age of the Internet, sites such as Travelocity and Expedia diluted the “service class” market segmentation of the airlines in favor of the “price class” segmentation of airlines.  These forces caused the commercial airline experience to become a deceptive, deeply invasive, and physically strenuous experience.

Private Aviation’s starvation diet

Meanwhile, the private aviation sector has fallen under the thumb of listing agents who tie up the industry behind the gilded walls of Charter Brokerage Houses.  FAA regulation hampers the ability to attract passengers on a per-seat basis, which gives private operators a hugely limited marketing position.  Brokers took over to mark-up the price of chartered flights far beyond the reaches of a mainstream market.

For these reasons, the private aviation sector has had difficulty organizing itself into a self-sustaining cooperative, until now.  In Fact, the smaller the airplane and the more widely distributed the airports, the simpler and more efficient the whole social system can become.

Social Flights changes the Game by Changing the Mission.

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The Future Of Money And Technology Summit 2011

by Dan Robles on January 26, 2011

fom2In my opinion, The Future of Money and Technology Summit is among the most important conferences in America.  FOM&T is not the usual parade of polished celebrities selling books, consulting, or seminars.  Here you’ll find the people who work deep in the caldron of innovation enterprise bringing together some of the most important ideas in the world today.

The Moment is now

The challenges for the future are immense, the technologies unfolding before us are extraordinary, and the people on the front lines are visionaries.  For better or worse, future generations will look back on several key moments that marked the beginning of a new era.

Last year I was deeply humbled by the quantity, quality and razor sharp intellect from the audience and the speaking panels alike.  The panels were great, but the audience was just as awesome.  Every question asked of the panelists was as profound and inspired as the panelists themselves.   One common thread binds this conference like no other that I’ve attended:  we’re all in it together. I consider myself privileged to be a participant in this event.

A Portrait of The Future

For me it seemed like 800 pieces to a huge jigsaw puzzle walking around finding their place in a yet unknown portrait of the future.   Everyone has part of the answer and nobody has all the answers – this makes for an extraordinary collaborative learning environment and likely the best place to peer deep into the future.

I strongly recommend that anyone who engages in this conversation of the ‘future of money and technology’ in their work, research, blog, or start-up must attend this historic event.  This is truly an example that the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts, and there are some great parts!

Fight your reservations with your reservation

The Future of Money and Technology Summit will be held on February 28th 2011 at the beautiful Hotel Kabuki at 1625 Post Street, San Francisco, CA.  More details can be found here.

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America’s Uncivil War

October 30, 2010
Thumbnail image for America’s Uncivil War

I am terrorized by the notion that Americans will turn against Americans. The problems facing this nation are so complex, so controversial, and so far reaching into the past and the future that it is unlikely that any intelligent person is more qualified than any other intelligent person to hold the highest office. Barrack, Hillary, Sarah, John, would all have the same pressures pushing back on every move leading them down 95% similar paths. None could be better and none could be worse – we’re officially in this together.

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Independence Is A State of Mind

July 4, 2010

Just when everyone thinks that Americans are up against the ropes, they come up with an idea so radical, so creative, and so astonishingly consciousness-altering, the rest of the world just shakes their heads in collective disbelief.

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Enterprise Prediction Markets Summit

May 17, 2010

I’ll be speaking at the following event on June 4th. If you are in the area or blogging issues in this genre of ideas, let me know and drop by. Look up the other speakers and you’ll find an extraordinary group of visionaries preparing to make this PM Cluster Summit a truly enlightening event.

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Future of Money and Technology Summit; Non-Quantifiable Exchanges

May 8, 2010

Very few discussions about the future of money approach the subject with as much experience, introspection, and clarity as this historic panel has. This is not another doom-gloom room – but a truly optimistic model of a future financial system built on a platform of social media. These panelists represent some of the top thought leaders, visionaries, and practitioners in the area of “Local Social” – where nothing happens until the rubber meets the road.

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Two Sides Of The Social Value Equation

May 7, 2010

There are two sides to the Social Value Equation – the creation of social value and the destruction of social value. There are countless examples where innovation destroys the value of prior technologies. There are also many instances where “progress”, perhaps in the form of a freeway or public structure, divides a community where strong social bonds once acted.

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Facebook Derivatives

May 5, 2010

It seems ironic that people are using Facebook to urge others to quit Facebook. If they take their own advice, they would no longer be able to give their golden advice to others. If we took their advice, we would not be able to heed the advice of others in this matter. Is Facebook too [...]

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m-Via; Social Currency and Technology

May 5, 2010

If necessity is the mother of invention, then the Future of Money and Technology Summit 2010 was Paul Revere. There were many innovations that seek to change banking as we know it using a new denomination called social currency.

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Who Is Quantified by Whom?

May 3, 2010

Suppose I was to suggest that value stored in social currency may exceed the value stored by financial currency. The paradigm shift now becomes, who quantifies whom?

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Non Quantifiable Exchanges

April 29, 2010

When we bite into our tuna sandwich, we take this complexity for granted. We are in fact, consuming the strenuous articulation of a financial system disguised as the simplicity of the checkout stand, the application of mayonnaise, and aroma of toasted wheat bread.

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Future of Money and Technology Summit

April 23, 2010

I was invited to present at the Future of Money and Technology Summit in San Francisco on Monday April 26. Representing The Ingenesist Project, I’ll be seated on a panel with two very important futurists; Chris Heuer and Micki Krimmel discussing non-quantifiable exchanges. The ever esteemed and respectable Ms. Tara Hunt will be moderating the session.

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Twitter Me Elmo

April 13, 2010

Dorothy the goldfish is imagining Elmo reading his Twitter stream… and what would it say? Who would he follow? And who would follow Elmo?

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Is Anonymity an Asset or a Liability?

April 7, 2010

If Facebook is not careful, a huge opportunity awaits a competitor to disrupt the Facebook parade with high value, high segmentation, and high anonymity – and still monetize.

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Engineers Are Money

April 3, 2010

China and India are producing millions of engineers as part of their global economic dominance strategy. Engineers increase productivity and productivity creates wealth. Why? Because money is only a means for storage and exchange of value and engineers create the value.

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Does School Interfere With Education?

April 2, 2010

I guess that is could be considered sacrilege for a college professor to suggest that higher education is inadequate in some way. My position is that the college degree must go away in favor of strategic combinations of high resolution knowledge assets. The irony is that those who really “get it” understand “school” better than the schools.

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Criminals Steal Social Agreements

April 1, 2010

A criminal can steal your time, labor, intellect and possessions, or they can just steal your social agreements and replace them with a social disagreements.

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Foursquare Economics

March 18, 2010

The Next Economic Paradigm is arriving and the first entries include Foursquare. Few people understand the significance of this new class of social media applications. Foursquare contains many (but not yet all) of the components of the Innovation Economy that we have been discussing for several years at Ingenesist.com, Conversationalcurreny.com, and Relationship-economics.com.

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The Social Caterpillar Award Goes To Home Depot

March 18, 2010

Corporations may be getting social “online” but how are they doing offline? Anti-social behavior on the ground is the genesis of our not-so-coveted Social Caterpillar Award.

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The Invisible Surplus

March 16, 2010

I don’t care what the “definitions” by the Experts, the Patent System, Production Systems, Money, corporate bonds, marketing, advertising, or all the rest of that stuff. In the next economic paradigm, knowledge is an asset, knowledge is the only asset that matters because the transformation of knowledge into solutions will become the next currency. If not human knowledge, then what else?

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They’re Finally Saying Something New About Social Media

March 8, 2010

Now, all of a sudden, a new idea is emerging…it’s barely an audible chirp, but it will become a tectonic rumble before long: Social Media is beginning to take on the characteristics of Financial Instruments.

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Social Media: Power By The Hour

March 3, 2010

Making human knowledge and intentions tangible in a market place opens up the possibility of a whole new class of business plans. We call this Social Power by the Hour.

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Building Better Problems

February 22, 2010

The solution to any problem is entirely dependent on how the problem is defined. Likewise, redefining the problem, exposes huge opportunities for new solutions.

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The Interesting Thing About Interest Rates

February 17, 2010

The problem is that risk can never be negative, therefore interest rates can never be negative – that is called “breaking he buck”. Risk is a measure of volatility, or, “deviations from what is considered normal”. While there is certainly good deviations and bad deviations, there can never be a “negative” deviation from normal – it is a mathematical impossibility, a glitch.

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