Gung Ho and the RFID Hunting Dogs of Virginia - Signs of our New Economy

Our year-end vacation took us off the beaten path down South where we had an epiphany of sorts about the new economy. Along the way, I read a book which explained that, although Gung Ho usually thought of as a Marine war cry bur it really is a Start-Up’s war cry. It was adopted by a Marine officer who was inspired by the determination of a very spirited guerilla entrepreneurial program in wartime China with that name!

(More about that later – but it may be the greatest irony of our economy that we used a Chinese idea to promote warfare and conquer who? while the Chinese used it to devastate our manufacturing base.)

We may also be so Social Media’d out in NY that we forget the potential for fundamental change occurring in the hinterland (OK I did see 3 people with Occupy Savannah signs, but they may have been leftover Yankees). So, I will give you a list of changes I saw that could outline our future…..you connect the dots.

1.      

1.    Factory building companies move from Chicago to South Carolina – because, said my engineer friend over dinner in GA “the South is the only place where factories are being build these days.” You can see a nice looking Honda plant from the highway when you drive through North Carolina. No signs promoting unions, plenty talking about the Bible.
2.    I meet two teachers looking to move to Ashland, N.C because they are virtual teachers working for the State of Florida. To save money, the Florida hired a group of ex-Disney execs to offer their troubled schools a low-cost alternative. The teachers are considering Ashland where costs are lower and the lifestyle pleasant. The schools may be good too.
3.   The country store talk in VA is about where to take their handheld transmitters in order to missing hunting dogs by locating the transponders. I hear that out West cattle herding is done from a laptop that sends signals out to cattle tags which lightly shock the cows into their pens.
4.   One of the fastest growing retail chains is a cheap tool supplier called Harbor Freight.
5.   All that shale gas fracking talk has inspired mineral searches in non-shale gas areas as well as a new fight over well water. Gold has been found in VA...
6.   I get 4G in the countryside – no problem.
7.  People love huntin’ and military bases seem to be just about everywhere. Is housing starting to come alive.
8.   No one talks about robots in farm mechanization but the farms are generally under 100 acres.....and you'd think......will returning solider use their newfound skills with predators and roadside robotics skills on the farms

9.   The point here is that the internet, social media and high tech are now entrenched in the heartland. For the most part, they are not used particularly innovatively. They are “paving the cowpath” – in other words doing traditional things but with better tech. The farmers complain about overregulation – our strawberries had to be tested for sweetness before they could be picked (they were still quite sour on FL) and wineries (yes there are wineries) can’t sell across state lines and so on…

We are still using an old state regulatory pre-internet infrastructure to govern while everywhere else they are bursting at the seams with tech and connectedness. Many regulations could be managed by online reputation and every consumer will have a 4G smartphone to keep them abreast. Yet, when states are desperate like Florida’s schools, they go virtual - no problem

As for innovation, we are sending factories down there because of unions and a supposed work ethic. Supposedly, rural people tend to value production more that urban people and are willing to do the repetitive work.

I can also add that the big Southern cities are mare diverse than you might have thought, but that is another story. The issue is, has the hinterland’s economy changed in a significant way due to the tech economy and the answer is probably no, not really. It’s doing the same only somewhat better.

But it could – and that’s where Gung Ho kicks in.

This is a long forgotten story that Marine connection has overshadowed. When the Japan occupied half of China in WWII, the free Chinese lost their major urban manufacturing and so the Communists and the Nationalists – a bipartisan group – launched a program of guerrilla manufacturing in the rural areas. They even threw in Angel money. Soon, small very nimble operators were making everything from soap and matchsticks to airplane parts in jungle factories that filled supplies, created jobs and kept the country going until it could take on the Japanese. Gung Ho is just an abbreviation for Chinese Industrial Cooperative or  "gōngyè hézuòshè" 工業合作社 shorted as " gōng hé" 工合 that coincidentally translates as “work together.”

The Communist revolution in China made us overlook this highly distributed form of manufacturing  which underwrote the revolution and then, when the dogma subsided, turned China into the manufacturing superpower it is today. [I write this on a China made PC, distributed through a China made router etc. etc.]

Whoever wants to win the next election should to revisit this story because it is the true source of our recovery. They should be underwriting exactly this kind of nimble manufacturing.

Sure, we are seeing some recovery but it tends to focused on big corporations that can make more money with fewer employees. In order to bring unemployment down we need to spark the creative abilities of agile, fast-changing highly informed low-cost specialty manufacturers. We have the connectedness, the high tech tools (designed here but made in China), the distributed education and the infrastructure to deliver. We need to foster the markets and get out of their way. With 50,000 or so returning troops that pressure but also the possibilities will increase. My guess is that our successes with unmanned flying will spark a revolution in robotics, remote control land & aerial technologies and a resurgence of mineralogical development.

Maybe they will remind their kin that hunting with dogs makes for lousy meat. All the excitement and fear sends adrenaline to the animals and the meat is soured. Wouldn't it be better if they found way to tag animals in the wild and then use to chips t lead them with a surprise?  

Anyone else been out in the country? I would like to compare notes!

PS There is nothing here that explain the mad crowds at Harry Potter World except to say that it is really well done, magical reality (read: cult marketing) is big and people will pay and suffer just to experience it…..

"Occupy" on Cover of Wired vs Our Town Hall Meeting

From our Town Hall meeting to this! Social Media nihilism.


We envisioned a self-organizing, people friendly group as in: Headless Body Seeks Topless Rule. However, at Wired it is: #Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You

To understand the phenomenon - more on it negative side - this article is a must read. So is the one in the same issue on the world's informal markets. They are unexpectedly linked.

The bottom line is that Social Media can either be "weaponized" or it can be an underlying force for the new economy. For that, see Marc Andreesen on Software Eating the World. 

Marc essay assumes everyone is on smartphones. The downside, as is widely pointed out - is the net loss of jobs and the rise of a new winner/loser economy that you typically see in "developing countries."

Fortunately, I have been travelling in the rural South where I have farm friends and I see the possibility of something quite different and for that, I ask you to read my next blog on the RFID hunting dogs and the real meaning of Gun Ho (its actually more of an entrepreneur's war cry - not a Marine slogan).

New articles on the PowerPitch NY Convergence

Great article series on the iEvening in NY Convergence

1.  The Key is Clarity

2. Its Not What You Tell - It's What They Tell About You

A Teachable Moment? Report from the Dec. iEvening

Report from the Pitch iEvening for Entrepreneurs 

Need to raise a million? The iBreakfast/iEvening series has helped Start-Ups raise over $40 million. This powerful iBreakfast/iEvening quarterly meeting of entrepreneurs, VCs and seasoned execs enables start-ups to find their "Power Pitch™" while offering a unique opportunity to raise capital.

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VC Panel lead by:    John Ason, Angel Investor   •   Heather Gilchrist, RAK Tech Fund   •   Allan Grafman, All Media Ventures    •    David Teten, ff Venture Capital      •      Moderated by Alan Brody    

Nikhil Paul, CEO Nfoshare & Alan Brody, Moderator, iEvening

The Report: A Teachable Moment

Every Entrepreneur iEvening seems to have its own theme. We don’t plan for it but it somehow works out that way. Last time it was medical plans.

This time it was education.

Not only was our winner, Andrew Cohen’s Brainscape, an educational product (popular multimedia flash card apps) but so where the runner’s up.

Even your humble host of the workshop was invited to put the collected wisdom of the Entrepreneur Power Pitch panels into an educational format. (More about this blog and eBook later).

Our panel of investors included Heather Gilchrist of RAK Tech Fund who had succeed with an educational product. John Ason, the Angel Investor who gets to write his own checks has some educational investment but Allan Grafman of All Media Ventures and David Teten of ff Venture Capital are not generally there. But they voted for it anyway.

Maybe it is just the current mood. No one seems to understand the economy, what to spend our money on or even what to manufacture - so why not get an education? And hasn’t the cost of education outpaced the economy. So there it is - an overpriced enterprise ready to be taken apart by technology: reducing analog dollars into digital pennies by turning pedantry into personal pedagogy.

BrainScape came out of Columbia and seems to include a little of a very hot commodity according to number of our judges, “gamification”. It is not just learning with your own flash cards, or borrowing from others who have been there before but you can have some fun doing so too.

The runner up was Rami Cohen, MD whose Tel-Aviv start-up, Telesofia comes with a special pedigree, he worked with ICQ founder and Israel Start-Up guru, Yossi Vardi. Telesofia, is a platform for creating personalized video communications between doctors and patients. A form of education, you might say.

Another runner-up was Nfoshare, a website that allows college students to tap the collective wisdom of their class by tying the professors, tutors and students into an ongoing forum. It spares the professors from endless of questions and lets the slow kids tap the knowledge of the smart kids.

Afiniate's IntentEngine™ software, produced by Ram Singh, the winner of our DC event, educates banks on the needs of their customers and feeds them offers they are likely to be interested in.

Firmcontour educates you on how to lose weight. After getting your personal profile it delivers a customized menu for your weight loss or dietary needs for just $12.95 a month.

ZeroIn Media educates banks customers on whatever the banks deems worthwhile -on flat screen TVs as they wait in line.

Finally, Candid Capture, educates employers about the candidates they are looking to hire by allowing them to capture structured video interviews for perusal on their own time.

PowerPitch workshop - once again we used the power of our panelists to help the Entrepreneurs shape their plans and calibrate their messages for various kinds of investors. It also raised so many issues that Entrepreneur asked us to begin the eBook below.

A special thanks to our sponsors Herrick Feinstein for hosting a marvelous event with great refreshment and food & wine breaks.

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Due to popular demand and as part of the iEvening Education theme, we will be releasing a compilation of our PowerPitch Workshop’s book of wisdom.

POWER PITCH™ - TAPPING THE HIDDEN RULES OF START-UPS

The heart of this workshop is focusing on the pitch - that 10 or 15 second elevator shpiel. It sounds simple and doing some kind of pitch is simple. But doing the right pitch is incredibly because it makes you focus on the essential, communicable element of your plan.

We stumbled upon this through two sources. One of our investors told us that the lives for 3 phone calls he gets every morning that rave about this new start-up or Entrepreneur. Then Bloomberg TV approached us to do a show about our startups and they asked, so what do these companies do?”

It turned out to be almost impossible to explain and so we recognized the challenge:

How do we get entrepreneurs to reduce their idea, management, specific experience, technology and marketing plan into a bite-sized chunk? How to make it relevant to a potential investor? How to turn it all into a meme so that angel investors can pass it around to their colleagues like a chit in the favor bank?

How do you get your idea to become remarkable to investors? How do you make it go viral for the checkwriters?

We came up with the idea of using their colleagues. We found out that the best way to do it is to make a group of your peers give you the feedback you need. After all, they are most like you: the VCs can be dumb, your loved one may never understand you but if your peers don’t get you then you know you have work to do.

That’s the essence of the PowerPitch Workshop. But in order to manage it you have to know a lot about the mindset of Angel VCs: what they are looking for, how they handicap you and how they get into their own kinds of buying frenzies. That is the essence of this book, gleaned from years of listening to the VCs after you’ve left the room.

They have their own ideas, their own rules of thumb which they generally don’t share with you. Much of the time they don’t really articulate it because it’s a given.

But not to you.

You also need to understand whether you are investible - how to improve your chances or how to find more accessible and far cheaper sources of capital.

Many of these points are on the blog and this outline will direct you to some of the points already written and all the rest waiting to come.

Are You Investable? An outline of our coming eBook

1. Are you investible? Understand what investors are looking for before you pitch. In our blog.
2. How do Investors rank you? Eskimos have 57 words to describe snow and the Bedouin have 100 for a camel. What do Investors have for entrepreneurs?
3. The Secret to Pitching: the “3rd Dimension”  In our blog.
4.  5 Things you should NEVER say to a VC - 5 things you SHOULD.
5. The Jockey vs. the Horse - the key to your future.  In our blog.
6. How to dream the meme - like DNA and Google you can make yourself stumble on the key idea.
7. How to spot a VC.
8. How to calibrate your message for different VCs.
9. VC Frenzy: What you can learn from Tupperware.
10. How to launch a business when you’re “the 99.”
11. How to survive the drought.
12. Plan B: Do you Pivot or Deconstruct?
13. Payday? All about Termsheets.
14. How to grow: Lessons from billion dollar companies I helped.

Disrupting Medicine: Report from mHealthcon I at Rutgers

mHealthcon opened to a full house at Rutgers, NJ. We are providing a full report below with numerous published articles about the conference - including a week-long series in NJ Tech.

 

With close to 300 delegates assembled at the heart of the pharmaceutical industry, this event saw the confluence of medical and pharma stakeholders, seasoned digital entrepreneurs and savvy early stage investors.

 
MHealthcon sprang from the ongoing mass adoption of powerful mobile devices - phones and tablets backed by global connectedness and the "data cloud". With health reform driving the digitization of patient records as providers and payers demand improved outcomes and cost efficiencies, there is a surge of innovation in medicine. Seasoned entrepreneurs and investors are exploring new channels to collect and distribute medical information, manage patient care and streamline payments.

Tom Wheeler, Chairman of the mHealth Alliance Partnership laid out the roadmap of adoption, proliferation and global opportunity.

The event attracted delegates throughout the U.S. and Canada and from as far away as Germany and Israel.

Tel Aviv's Dr. Rami Cohen won the Start-Up Award with TeleSofia, a personalized doctor-to-patient instruction video platform. His runners up were Atlanta's Dr. Nicholas' DocPons and one of the most seasoned start-ups we have seen, Sandford Roth's Medsonics.
 
Successful entrepreneurs like Anand Iyer from companies like WellDocs, Dr. Gopal K. Chopra from pingmd and Serge Loncar from CareSpeak discussed the adoption and growth process - with some surprising conclusions. Sonny Vu, the founder of Agamatrix gave a spellbound presentation of the growth of his Diabetes product from his college dorm room to a multimillion dollar sale.

David Shrier of Ernst & Young surprised the audience with the revelation that his company had consulted for Google from the time they were just "5 people in a garage" and were similarly interested in dealing such early stage companies today.

A significant number of dotcom entrepreneurs made the trip from New York's Silicon Alley to attend the conference - including such execs and the confounder of About.com that went public at $1.5 million in just 3 years.

As one investor and MD, Brad Weinberg said: "Great event. Engaging people and intimate enough to really meet people."

For more articles on mHealthcon visit:

Med City News  "Keynote: Stakeholder's Concerns"
NJ Biz NJ Tech Weekly  "Medical Entrepreneurs Gather"

MedicalCrunch  "Just the Apps"

 

Selected Presenter's Slides   

To see the full video

  

2012 Registration

www.mHealthcon.com

Headless Body Seeks Topless Rule - OWS Town Hall Meeting

What Happened at the OWS Town Hall Meeting?
Social Media Insiders Explain the Real Significance of Open Source Thinking and Self-Managed Groups

Headless Body Seeks Topless Rule

If it weren’t for the fight that broke out in the second hour of this Town Hall Meeting it would have been merely interesting. Social Media has gone from a dating, teen popularity management and marketing phenomenon to a revolutionary movement thanks to Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, Spanish indignados and so on.

When a Wall Streeter at the meeting objected to being photographed after making an impassioned statement about how hard he worked and how much he deserved the American Dream, the clash of cultures became apparent.

Any netizen would accept being photographed in a public setting as simple transparency but his group saw it as a violation of privacy. Social Media, when applied to organizations that only know top-down management of the opaque kind is an existential threat. Keeping out of the news is a big deal. Showing your face is asking for trouble.

That generational divide is evident at many levels. Even the founder of Social Media and our lead speaker, Andrew Weinreich, who created the prototypical social media site, sixdgrees.com back in the 90’s, had doubts about the power of this movement because the numbers, he noted, are still small. Only a few thousand show up at Zucotti Park vs. millions in the Arab World, Spain or for that matter, Israel. Even the money it has raised, is a mere $500,000. Obama will raise $1 billion for his next campaign.

He would not be alone - industry types often underestimate its power because they saw this as a consumer business and not a battleground for the politically disenchanted who would be so inspired as to put themselves in harm’s way. Nevertheless, most of the public seems to get the potential. They are well aware that just one police strike generated 953 Occupy movements in 84 countries within days. 

Headless Group Seeks a Topless Government.

The recurring complaint is that Occupy Wall Street has too many messages. Perhaps. Yet anytime they focus on one, it can be devastating. The numbers on the ground may small but the numbers at home or on their smartphones are immense. Americans may like to do their protesting from their couches but as long as a symbolic number are willing to take to the streets, the power of Social Media seems to hold.

What we are really witnessing is the battle testing of open source thinking vs. the old hierarchies. Like the civil war, where the bullets were more powerful than the military strategies of the day, there may be large and unexpected casualties. This may be more powerful than its creators imagined and harder for people in power to resolve than they know.

Thanks to our meeting, we have generated a few ideas - but they won’t be easy.

Legless and Headless

The courts may be the next testing ground. Yetta Kurland, is a legal activist and TV host who helps represent a Law society observer at an OWS protest who was run down by a police motorcycle. The police use these vehicles to control crowds and in the past, if an innocent person got in the way that was just too bad. They will arrest them, make up a story and bring them before the courts which would generally assume that the police are telling the truth. In this case there are widely distributed videos showing that the police mowed down this innocent observer, trapped him under the wheels of the vehicle and then beat and cuffed him as he writhed in pain. He now has to defend himself in court against some type of obstruction of justice charge. This charade continues even though the video is common knowledge thanks to YouTube and numerous cable TV news shows. One would imagine that the charges will be dropped but the issue will probably wind up costing the city dearly when it goes to Civil Court. The biggest cost to the NYPD, however, will be their credibility. Somewhere, heads will roll and a new management will have to rethink their practices in a world where everyone is watching.

Media Reorganization

Greg Galant, the founder of the Shorty Awards, arguably the “Oscars of the Twitterverse” talked about its impact on media. Journalists are now using Social Media tools like Storify, Klout and Hootsuite to keep tabs on the movement. Equally significant is the reshuffling of the media ecosystem – the blogosphere is generating stories that feeds the mainstream coverage while doing its own coverage of the traditional media’s reporting. Now that Google+ is adding journalists’ bios to the net, there is a channel for readers to communicate with them, thereby making the conversation interactive in all media.  Besides, as Kurland pointed out, the mayors and police chiefs are using Social Media to discuss the issues among themselves too - Social Media’s influence has become inescapable.

What Color is Your Social Media Parachute?

John Havens, the author “Tactical Transparency” cites Facebook’s 900 million users and $21Bn in ad sales as the transformational issue in the business world. If CEOs haven’t already been alerted by those numbers, then the Occupy movement is surely their ultimate wake up call – and the Social Media industry’s single greatest advertisement. Companies need a crisis protocol for Social Media. More importantly, CMO’s must know that the brand doesn’t entirely belong to them although they bear ultimate responsibility for it. Jet Blue still seems to be the poster child for this type of approach, with CEO David Neeleman responding to customer issues with a heartfelt and slightly ruffled apology on YouTube. Admission of responsibility and promises to change seem to be the mantra. To keep the promise, JetBlue now has a team of people with the power to respond to Twitter complaints on the spot. The last storm showed that the problem could sill recur, yet so far the response has been relatively tepid.

Damn You – I’m Good

Stuart Tracte, who runs his own geek talk show “Beer Diplomacy” notes that Apple has no Social Media effort to speak of. Steve Jobs put out occasional text statements when he hurt his faithful and almost none of their products are actually made in the US. He just makes a “damned good product and you want it.” From Stuart’s perspective, OWS is not a Social Media movement as much as a human movement: people don’t want business in their government. They want to end that unless, of course, that business is as good as Apple’s.

Topple the Banks

Co-host, TJ Walker of Worldwide Media Training noted that the movement lacked the kind of single message that animated the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements. He announced his own eBook “Bust up the Big Banks” as an antidote to this, since the banks in his opinion, are the real issue. Then again, as he noted, thanks to Social Media he is now competing with 40 books on the topic of Occupy Wall Street.

Too Promotional to Fail

So where’s this all going? The city believes that winter will put OWS out of business but I doubt that. What better advertisement for a hip new camping company than supplying them with thermal tents and sleeping bags? Ski clothing is so good these days that freezing temperatures are just a fun fact. The movement only needs a few hundred people to keep their foothold – any number of interchangeable volunteers who can do this in shifts seem to be endlessly available thanks to the 10% unemployment figures.

Going Public About Being Public

Generally, the powerful will try to co-opt the groups they can’t crush. But OWS is a leaderless group. There are key influencers but they could be anywhere and if co-opted they could be replaced at any time by another influencer. Over time, it is quite possible that the group will dig in. If they raise enough money, they can buy the protest property they want or, in the ultimate irony of ironies – they could go public. They generate income, so why not sell stock? In theory, they could wind up acquiring the companies they oppose – the first publicly traded anti-Wall street company on a hostile takeover frenzy. When you consider that the NASDAQ OTC has not one but two technically illegal medical marijuana companies, MJNA and CANA, the idea is not so far-fetched.

Headless vs Bodyless: The End of Two Party Democracies

The real issue is this clash of civilizations: what happens when an amorphous, open source group organizes synchronously and multinationally against the World Order? Anyone who has grown up with Wikipedia knows that it works. Anyone who grew up with a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas still can’t accept that it’s for real. Democracies are really based a binary system – its either Democrats or Republicans, Labor or Management with a revocable dictatorship granted to the majority. Over time, the power concentrates near the top where it is open to manipulation by the highest bidder. That might have been fine when there were majorities but today we are more diverse and the ruling party is really the one with the best plurality of constituents of which most are not really served.

As Ross Perot and Jack Nader proved, we can’t handle a third or fourth or fifth party but in an open source environment, you can sustain a plurality of voices without affecting the core functioning of the system. Most governments, when not unduly influenced by special interests, can function quite well in a transparent, self-organizing, user-operated fashion. That would lower costs and doom a lot of bureaucratic guilds whose first priority are self-protection and poliferation.

On the other hand, leaders can try to learn from Apple: become a cool cult while providing incredibly good and inventive programs.

The public may stand to benefit either way.

Warning: to be a cult you must have somehow died and come back to life. On the other hand, if you are incredibly good and inventive in politics, your opponents will help you with the former.

See article in NY Convergence 

Video Highlights to come

What the "Occupy Wall Street" Town Hall is All About

NOTE: This event is being streamed, starting at 6pm EST on Nov. 3

How did a web medium that was designed to help lonely people find dates or teenagers improve their social lives become what may be the most powerful medium of organized public resistance we have ever experienced?

To paraphrase Hemingway our a social writer in his own right – it happened to ways: gradually and then suddenly.

It probably incubated in Iran where Twitter feeds gave the world a blow-by-blow report of an oppress people trying to shake off a vicious regime.

Then it swept the Arab world with the speed and force of a desert storm. Out of nowhere – this time organized and chronicled though Facebook – it took down one dictatorship after another. This is a revolution that no amount of diplomacy, editorializing, letter writing or armed resistance has been unable to do in decades.

Then Europe – especially Spain – experienced the organization of los indignantes – angry young people who organized tent cities in dozens of cities in Spain.

We watched and thought – that’s over there. Never happen here…..

In Spain, the organizers wrote a manifesto that seemed to make perfect sense to anyone with a smartphone, a Facebook page, a twitter and blog account and no job prospects, that they could join a cause – a flash mob that grew virally and actually had a purpose.

And then it came here.

In our rational, issue driven world the idea of Occupying Wall Street seem quaintly absurd. Laughable. It looked like it was going nowhere. As Ben Stein famously said, how can banging a drum change Wall Street? When millions of people do it together, they can. Anyone remember the story of Jericho?

It only took one police lieutenant to get videoed pepper spraying 4 helpless women. The Video went viral on Youtube and within days, 953 Occupy sites had sprung up in 84 countries.

If you run a control and command, authoritarian system – then this has to be your worst nightmare. The people can bite back.

So what does this mean to business, government and the administration of society?

Can you still tell people what do to do? When everyone has a cell pone videocam and a YouTube account you no longer own the narrative – that has he legal consequences, as we will see.

When citizens can reach millions directly with their stories, the news media is no longer the information gatekeeper.

What about business, does the Fed and Wall Street still control the value of currency when we know that troubled cities in Greece have created their own barter systems using open source software.

What about crowdfunding – so far the SEC opposes it and leave financing to the good people on Wall Street. If enough people band their drums, Congress will have to pass laws enabling it.

Should the government own policing? Or will whistleblower laws and public surveillance change that. In South Korea citizens make a living by using their video cams to act as bounty hunters against crime and corruption everywhere. Their whistleblower laws already make that possible – the social technology makes that a certainly.

What about the political process? We live in a binary system – its either Republicans or Democrats. Labor vs. management but the world is no longer binary. We no longer have simple majorities – demographically the US is now a country of pluralities. Most jobs come from small, independent businesses not from mega-corporations and the Spanish manifesto makes it clear that unions are not welcome.

Crowd politics – well organized - may in fact be the future of our politics and the only way we can truly accommodate diversity. Maybe what looks unfocused to us is really the fuzzy, fractal logic of the new politics. We have already seen a microfinanced president.

Why not a politician who wins because he amasses more Facebook likes than anyone else or parties that are formed and reformed around issues that people care about and not about party lines.

Can bureaucracy exist when the Internet has shown it can eliminate inefficiency and the middlemen? Why is medicine run by insurance aggregators and medical unions or even education, which has only resulted in higher costs no matte how good or bad the marketplace.

What we will learn tonight is that we are witnessing the birth of a parallel system of government, decisionmaking and administration. All empowered by the Internet, mobile and social media. It looks messy and ridiculous to outsiders – as do all births – but it is the future and societies will never work quite the same way again.

Finally the Digital Media Industry has been put on the front page and it is already producing new products, ideas and opportunities.

So let’s discover what and how….