The mobile device is headed to dethrone the laptop as the de facto standard gear for knowledge work.

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2009 was the year that everything received a “social” prefix; social media, social web, social business and so on. I wanted to ask John Hagel – co-chair of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge – for his take on the significance of the term and its importance for business.
John starts with a great quote, “in many respects we are going back to the future:” the Internet began as a social tool with early bulletin boards that connected small groups with shared interests (mainly academic researchers). Then the Worldwide Web came along

I was fortunate enough to get a chance to sit down with John Hagel at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit and discuss a few big-ticket emerging trends: (1) the rise of the “real time” web, (2) the move from the information web (the web of documents) to the social web (the web of people) and (3) the continued promise of mobile devices.

I have had the privilege to do some work recently with Eric, author of the Lessons Learned blog — Eric’s basic premise is that a startup needs to maximize its resources and have a relentless focus on creating tight, iterative decision loops. A lean startup is defined by
1. Leveraging already-existing software and services whenever possible
2. Using Agile development to quickly prototype, test and deploy functional code
3. Aggressively testing reality every chance they get with REAL customers

The last time I saw Charlene Li was in the speaker’s lounge of the Web 2.0 conference. It was March 2008 and her defining book on social technologies, Groundswell, (co-authored with Josh Bernoff) was just being released. There have been tectonic shifts in our economy (and Charlene has moved from Forrester to found the Altimeter group) since then so I wanted to get her sense of the state of social media today.

I spent much of last week on assignment in Las Vegas at the FastForward ‘09 conference. FastForward is devoted to Search (more on that in the next post – along with a mindbending, Minority Report style video on the future of search). One of the highlights of the conference was this interview with Clay Shirky. He is one of the most incisive and articulate thinkers regarding the impacts that technology is having on society and business.

Generally speaking human beings consider possibility first and risk second… As a consequence we design for possibility and then retrofit for risk (if we are lucky). Drew Bartkiewicz of The Hartford has been considering data security and privacy in the age of social networks; an age marked by the explosion of personally identifiable information (PII) uploaded by users on blogs, video sites, social networks etc.

Last week I took a walk with Tim O’Reilly (my boss) and cameraman Kirk Walter (who has perfected the art of walking backwards with a 15 pound camera on his shoulder!). We spoke about a wide range of topics that will be released over the coming weeks. This is the first in that series, “Work on Stuff that Matters,” a subject that Tim spoke about throughout 2008. It seems even more relevant in 2009.

This interview is with April Allderdice, CEO and cofounder of MicroEnergy Credits. MicroEnergy Credits has developed a mechanism using microfinance institutions and GPS cell phones to allow carbon credits to reach small households in the developing world. Until now the relatively high transaction costs involved in set up and verification of a carbon trade has made the market available only to large companies.