nuance intelligence

You need to watch a video that captures, in just over five minutes, a strong analogy of the American mindset.

Last week, Steven Colbert had Cornell West on his show.  It is an incredible interview.  Two highly influential American change agents — each of whom has built an impactful and borderline absurd public persona — face off in a risky (albeit taped, not live) venue.

What’s the nuance?

Beyond the good theater — which was in ample supply on both sides –  I think there’s something deeper.   At the heart of the debate is a question of values.  And as we’re seeing revealed here is an allegory for the evolving American mind, times, and people.

Take a look, and tell me if you see it, too.

I couldn’t be more excited about getting to work with AWhere on helping design a collective intelligence engine for the UN Foundation.

Here’s a recent two-part intervew I did at the AWhere Blog with UNF change agent Kevin Starace.  In his words:

As chair of the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Performance Subcommittee we’re mandated to help the sector improve effectiveness.   Starting in 2007, we’ve been trying to find a technology that enables several things:

1. This one is the most important: we’ve got to break down silos across all boundaries, sectors and specialties, including but not limited to funding, institutional knowledge and to create a sector-wide peer review process.
2. Performance evaluation – how are we, collectively, achieving these huge global targets?  Specifically, those in alignment with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG), including an 85% distribution of bed nets and reduction of child mortality.
3. Provide platform by which all health initiatives can input information that is relevant to scientific advancement, investment evaluation, and providing a complete picture of what’s going on at the ground level.

After I first talked to [AWhere CEO] John Corbett, I realized that the common denominator for all of those problems is location.  What matters is not our organizational and bureaucratic divisions, but what’s happening to the people on the ground.  If we organize information sharing around the location of the problem, it helps us create a new collaborative holistic vantage point…

The ability to geographically correlate meaningful information from disparate sources in real time will forever alter our ability to improve the lives of people around the world.  That has never been possible before, and it’s literally going to change everything.

On a personal level, it’s incredibly humbling to even think in these terms.  That I’m helping design a small part of it is an honor.   Any advice?

Can you concentrate?  I’ve been having a rough time this week.

I have promised myself to leave politics out of this blog, but it’s not out of my mind.

And the economic debacle … I’m hardly consoled with the “I told you so” feeling that has been driving me nuts.  Since there were only one or two people who could stand to listen to me ramble on about you just can’t separate risk from reward for the past several years, it’s even less comforting to have been right.  As a good friend told me (in relation to a lawsuit he was losing), “being right is the booby prize.”  So where’s my booby?

In more trenchant commentary, see the following:

• The Underlying Basics of Finance and Credit is a great piece of  analysis of how we got here.

• Paul Kedrosky is doing a great job covering the story from a digital age perspective.

What happens over the weekend is anyone’s guess.  Enjoy the debates.

At Business Catapult, we’re powering the Angel Capital Summit.

As I wrote at the Business Catapult Blog,

As supporting partners, Business Catapult provides our entire suite of tools, and provide many new features to what would otherwise be a typical investor fair.  For instance:

• Investors can review deals prior to the conference, and participate in a collective intelligence process that identifies the best companies to present.
• Entrepreneurs use our Benchmark Survey as one component of the nomination process, and are able to refine their plan, based on the results of the business logic we build into the Benchmark Report.
• Trusted Advisors can contribute to the deal screening process, and gain an insight into the strongest new companies in the region.
• Organizations, including Business Schools, Small Business Development Center (SBDCs), incubators, angel investor networks and entrepreneurial meetup groups can each organize a group on the system, nominate their entrepreneurs and, after the conference is open, see the entirety of the pool of entrepreneurs who nominated themselves.

Entrepreneurs can apply now.  Investors can learn about unusual benefits.  Coloradans can look forward to what we’re calling an Entrepreneurial Renaissance, for as usual, the independently minded (seen the polls?) folks in the Centennial State are thinking differently.

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of reading and thinking about what it means to have virtual countries, as an extension of virtual communities.  I’ve investigated citizenship, legal and virtual, and have learned a lot about island nations, especially Sealand.

One of my current projects is designing a hybrid social network and media portal for citizens of a large South American nation.  We’re facing an interesting philosophical question — are we cataloging the experience of these ‘trans-nationalists’ (a term coined by the project founder), or are we creating a virtual country within which people fully exist, ala Second Life (but without the 3-d graphics).

Trans-nationalism becomes an interesting sub-text, the living of a life not in one country’s culture or another, but in two simultaneously.

The design challenges never end, which is the fun of nuance intelligence.

My “new best friend” Anita Burke has sent me two pieces recently that demonstrate how quickly climate change is affecting business in financial and legal ways.

First, a court in the UK just exonerated protesters who caused $70,000 worth of damage to a coal plant, using a British legal tenet exemplified as “it’s OK to break down a door to fight a fire inside the building.”

Summary:

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified
in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power
station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked
ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared
six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to
damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even
greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse”
under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to
property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door
of a burning house to tackle a fire.

Full story in The Independent.

Second, as the result of a high-profile law suit, New York State reached a legal agreement with  XCel energy that they must submit a comprehensive report of the financial risk related to climate change.

As [New York State] Attorney General Andrew Cuomo stated, the “agreement sets a new industry-wide precedent that will force companies to disclose the true financial risks that climate change poses to their investors.”

Read the entire legal briefing from Nixon Peabody.

What’s the nuance?

Climate change is hitting the balance sheets.  This will, in fact, change everything.

As part of our work in building a unique community that focuses on intelligent matching of entrepreneurs and investors, we have launched the Business Catapult blog.

Focused on the education of angel investors, and to a lesser extent, the provocation of venture capitalists, we break the blog down into three channels:

• 101: Investing Basics, including valuations, investment criteria and news and reports about investing trends.
• 201: Advanced Strategies, including managing an investment portfolio, advanced risk assessment and related issues.
• 301: Notes From The Cutting Edge, including investing in sustainability, clean-tech and emerging energy companies, venture philanthropy, disruptive technology and new investing memetics.

Thanks for taking a look, lots of smart stuff coming down the line over there.

It’s been a great summer over at AWhere, where breakthroughs in geo-analysis, location intelligence and busines map mashups have come one right after another.

• CPG Vision lets category managers at consumer package goods companies visualize the entirety of their Retail Link data from WalMart, and correlate it with demographic data from Neilsen as well as weather data that’s updated daily.

• InSite is AWhere’s big foray into web-based applications, which launched last month.  This product completes their primary product line roll-out, and fills the final gap between complex desktop GIS applications and Google Maps.

• The UN Foundation has announced their long-term partnership with AWhere in development of an implementation of InSite that, in the words of UNF’s Senior Malaria Advisor Kevin Starace, “will forever change the game in international aid”.

What’s the nuance?

The power of location intelligence and data visualization is coming on strong.  With projects touching the likes of WalMart and the UN Foundation, AWhere is poised to really take off in the next six months.

We expect that business mapping and next-generation of geo-web applications will become one of the big business process stories of 2009.  Thought leaders are on board.  The system conditions have changed.  Tidal wave to follow.

The New Yorker ran a great piece on the neuro-science of insight, which helps us see how we come to a place of mental inspiration.

In a nutshell, insight happens when ideas cross the hemispheres, and are acted upon in both halves of the brain.  As the article explains,

Once the brain is sufficiently focused on the problem, the cortex needs to relax, to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere that will provide the insight. As Kounios sees it, the insight process is an act of cognitive deliberation transformed by accidental, serendipitous connections.

 What’s the nuance?

Working longer hours and leaving fun and exercise out of  the equation really does reduce creativity, which makes it that much easier to get out for a bike ride, like, now.

OK, so we took August off.  Sue us.  (please don’t actually)

But things are rolling, work is exciting, thoughts are brewing and the world is changing (faster that you thought).