Wow!

Click for a larger picture.

Wireless everywhere....

I do extensive travel throughout North America, and I find that finding a Wi-Fi / WLAN signal can still be hit and miss.

And yet everytime I come to Europe, it continues to astound me how the coverage is everywhere; there has not been a moment that I havent' found a signal, whether it be with my hotel in Grindelwald or at the conference site.

And it's industrial strength too -- I've been able to use Skype on a regular basis to phone back home to my family without charge.

From what I've seen on several trips, European WLAN / Wi-FI providers continue to put their North American cousins to shame.

Swiss Innovation Forum keynote this Friday!

I'm off tomorrow night to Zurich; on Friday I will do a closing keynote for about 800 senior executives at the Swiss Innovation Forum. It's a wonderful forum in which individuals will be exchanging ideas and views on how to cope in a world which is changing at a furious pace.

Details about the conference can be found here:

I can't not go to Zurich and not ski the Alps, and so from Saturday to Monday, I'll be skiing in the Grindelwald region south of Zurich.

It should be an experience!

In my talk in Zurich, I'll be taking a look at the "innovation killers" that so many companies have in place -- but I'll also be taking a broader look at the types of innovation that companies can pursue.

Innovation isn't just about new product development -- it is all about looking at the way you operate, the business models you pursue, the markets you work within, the partners you seek, and the agility you put in place. I'll share with the audience some innovation success stories that define different types of innovation, including:

• Operational agility
• Market shift innovation
• Change acceptance innovation
• Service/partnership innovation
• Innovation through mission refocusing
• Sparking innovation through external relationships
• innovation that can come from cultural restructuring
• challenge changing innovation
• change embracement innovation
• design partnerships
• and complexity partnering innovation

Agility, innovation and execution

I've just flown out west to do a dinner keynote for a major telecom company. I wrote an article on my way related to what I've been talking about within the context of this and related industries.

I opened the article with these comments: "If there are three key words that should carry organizations and the people within them into the future, it is these: agility, innovation, and execution.

• Agility, because we are being confronted by absolutely furious rates of change, and you need an incredible amount of agility and flexibility in order to be able to respond.
• Innovation, because in this era in which new developments and technology are coming to the market faster than ever before, everyone must become an innovator, whether it be with new business models, skills partnerships or customer solutions.
• Execution, as we are now in a time in which everyone is becoming a competitor often offering the same commodity services, it will be excellence of delivery that will provide for distinction: excellence in customer service, product lineup, and the ability to respond instantly to the rapidly changing demands of the consumer."

Should you go to war with your customers?

Based on the email response and media coverage, my keynote at the SCTE in Tampa yesterday caused a bit of a buzz. There's an article from MultiChannel News (see below) that takes a look at my remarks.

A key message seems to be sticking: cable companies should not go to war with their customers.

Recently, exectives in some cable companies have suggested that they should be able to put a speed cap on emerging Internet services such as VoIP. Dumb: those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it. Look at what this strategy did for music companies.

No industry, including any company in telecom, entertainment, broadcast or tech, should choose to do battle with their customers. It's a losing strategy. Plain and simple.

Read the MultiChannel report :

Futurist: Cable Needs ‘Agility’
MultiChannel News
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By Matt Stump 1/11/2006 5:27:00 PM, Tampa, Fla. --

Author and futurist Jim Carroll urged engineers at the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers’ Emerging Technologies conference here to watch consumer behavior in order to determine the future direction of cable-technology implementation.

Whether telcos or cable will win market share in the future, he said, is the wrong question. Rather: How well will cable adapt and deliver platforms and services consumer want?

“You need to develop agility,” Carroll -- author of What I Learned from Frogs in Texas: Saving Your Skin with Forward-Thinking Innovation (Oblio Press, 2004) -- told an audience. “Innovation and invention has moved from the labs to the collective,” he added, citing consumer usage of portable music, video players and digital cameras.

He urged cable companies not to make the mistake the music industry did and go to war with their own consumers over how they obtain content.

“Customers will be pushing you for more choice,” he said, adding that future generations will want access to their video and audio content on many different devices. “TV is not a single-source medium,” he said. “There are multiple ubiquitous devices.”

Cable can provide those connections and help consumers to move content from one device to another, he added. At the same time, “the complexity of what you’re dealing with is increasing. No one cable engineer can know everything,” he said.

Carroll urged cable companies to develop partners for new and different technologies, as several top operators have with their recent joint venture with Sprint Nextel Corp. for wireless services.

"...the rapid rate of change in cable telecommunications is going from fast to furious ..."

Read the full SCTE press release here

Shortly after my keynote in Tampa today to open the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers Emerging Technologies conference, the SCTE put out this press release:

"Jim Carroll, international futurist, trends, and innovation expert, said the rapid rate of change in cable telecommunications is going from fast to furious in a stirring keynote address today to a sold-out Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) Conference on Emerging Technologies® 2006 in Tampa.

Carroll was a perfect fit for the forward-focused ET, with a high-energy speech that entertainingly challenged attendees to embrace constant change and see it as rife with opportunity as opposed to a threat."

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: 800-542-5040
Kimberly Maki, SCTE VP Marketing & Business Development, ext. 221, kmaki@scte.org
Joe Madagan, SCTE Editor Marketing & Communications, ext. 212, jmadagan@scte.org.
Visit SCTE online at www.scte.org.

SCTE ET KEYNOTE CARROLL HAILS COMPELLING CALL TO ACTION

JAN. 11, 2006 (Exton, PA)—Jim Carroll, international futurist, trends, and innovation expert, said the rapid rate of change in cable telecommunications is going from fast to furious in a stirring keynote address today to a sold-out Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) Conference on Emerging Technologies® 2006 in Tampa.

Carroll was a perfect fit for the forward-focused ET, with a high-energy speech that entertainingly challenged attendees to embrace constant change and see it as rife with opportunity as opposed to a threat.

“Furious rates of scientific advance will make the last 10 years of rapid technology development seem like a slow train ride,” said Carroll. “Optical researchers are learning how to slow the speed of light to 30 miles a second, in order to develop the next generation of optical router. Next-generation storage companies are dealing with concepts that involve storing three data bits in every single molecule. It's only a matter of time before VoIP is built into every laptop at the chip level. How do we ensure that we’ve hitched our train to everything that is going on?”

Carroll told the audience that bandwidth demand is set to explode. “With digital cameras having just entered our world, we are already taking 80 billion pictures a year and are sharing them online. Once we all start sharing video, bandwidth will take off in ways that are unimaginable.” Carroll challenged the audience members to ask themselves if they are thinking big enough.

“Everyone is focusing on 100 MBPS or 300 MBPS as being the key question for the year 2010,” he said. “I think we should be thinking about yottabits and zetabits when it comes to capacity.”

Carroll affirmed his audience members for their presence at a conference like ET, which, with its myriad networking opportunities, helps to meet the need to develop what he calls “complexity partners,” other companies that are specialists in their particular technical niche of the industry. “No one cable engineer, no one cable company, can possibly do it all,” he said.

The keynoter said that new competitors will continue to emerge at a furious pace overnight—and learning to tap into the global innovation mind is critical.

“We are now witnessing a sort of infinite idea loop, in which new ideas, inventions, and innovations occur faster than ever before,” he said. “No one can hope to define the future anymore—the best you can do is simply to plug into the future that is being developed all around you, and learn how to profit from it.”

Carroll said that, fueled by the Internet, what took four years to discover in years past can now take about four hours.

Carroll’s speech kicked off two full days of ET, which is featuring four hard-hitting sessions focused on what cable’s future will look like in three-to-five years.

####

The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers is a non-profit professional organization committed to advancing the careers of cable telecommunications professionals and serving the industry through excellence in professional development, information and standards. SCTE currently has more than 15,000 members from the U.S. and 70 countries worldwide and offers a variety of programs and services for the industry's educational benefit. SCTE has more than 70 chapters and meeting groups and has technically certified more than 3,000 employees of the cable telecommunications industry. SCTE is an ANSI-accredited standards development organization. Visit SCTE online at www.scte.org.