SwampFox

Two fascinating bits of news you should pay attention to related to pulling resources and oppportunities to you

Submitted by: John Warner on Feb 08, 2011 at 4:00 am Tagged with: Innovation Source: InnoVenture Southeast

Fans of Apple products rave they are an elegant blend of aesthetics and ease of use far superior to competitors. In comparing Google's new Android operating system to the Apple's iOS, one commenter to a recent blog post opined:

You android lovers couldn’t be more wrong. Comparing an iPhone with android is like comparing a Mac with a PC. There is nothing to decide. Apple is better and always will be. Androids are wanna be’s. And always will be.

Given that "there is nothing left to decide," how do we explain the inconvenient truth that more than 9.5 out of 10 personal computers on the planet are not Apples. Or these fascinating bits of new news.

• Tickets Sell Out In 59 Minutes to Google I/O

• Android Passes iOS For Overall U.S. Smartphone Subscribers

Why would tickets selling out in less than an hour to Google's developers conference be related to Google's Android operating system passing the one on Apple's iPhone and iPad? Because Google's Android is an open platform versus Apple's proprietary platform, therefore it in more developer's interest for Android to win. For example, I recently saw a presentation by CU-ICAR students of the need to move data seamlessly from your office to your car to your home. Their recommendation was that this be done with the open Android platform, not the iOS. Multiply that by millions of developers around the world, and Android wins.

How does this apply to those of us involved in InnoVenture activities? InnoVenture is creating open communities that anyone is free to join. Historically that has been attending open events. While we have a community of 4,400 people online at Swamp Fox, the online community currently is disconnected from the events that originally created it.

We will announce at a March 16th InnoVenture Community Forum a new web-based community platform that allows the community that is created by a forum will stay in tact and grow. The Additive Manufacturing Community for example, which kicks off with a Forum on April 19th, will persist online after the forum is over. The more and easier we can make it for people to connect with one another and derive value from the community, the more it will be in their enlightened self-interest for the Additive Manufacturing Community to grow, which in turn helps our client, the Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology, to succeed as the community pulls more and more Additive Manufacturing Community Members and Opportunities to it. If we can reach a critical mass of enough people benefiting from a community, then the community will flip from one we have to push to one that pulls new members and new opportunities into the community in a self-sustaining way. If you look at SwampFox.ws you can see that has already happened there, with most of the news posted by members of the community themselves, which attracts more members, which encourages more people to post their own news.

The power of pull created by open communities is an elegant and powerful force InnoVenture intents to harness. Join us at our March 16th Community Forum to learn more.