Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:18:42 GMT Airbus Trumps Boeing, Hurdles Remain Forbes - Airbus ‘ shock win of a $1.5 billion United States defense contract may seem like a fairytale victory over the traditional American heavyweight Boeing , but there are likely to be big challenges ahead. The first is the American political backlash …
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:32:00 GMT European Futurists Conference Lucerne: Insights, Weak signals — and PowerPoint design from good to bad [Update 5.12.2007: The presentations are now online, check out the sections below for the links] Two weeks ago, I attended the 3rd European Futurists Conference Lucerne, a conference about Inspiration, Methods and Best Practice in Foresight . As probably with every such conference, for an outsider like me, it primary looks like a meet and greet of good ol friends. Nonetheless, within the 15 sessions and 2 panels, I found some gems I would like to comment on. A Fact Based World View One of the (visual) highlights certainly was Professor Hans Roslings presentation on A Fact Based World View famous for his presentation style since his talk at the TED 2007 conference[1]. It was a great pleasure to see professor Rosling talk about what he cares about and he showed quite a bit of humour: When asked for the slides of his presentation, he teached the audience that there are two kinds of presenters: One-fingered Two-fingered While the one-fingered presenteres merely push Return to advance to the next slide, the two-fingered presenters use Alt-Tab to switch between PowerPoint and some other software to make live demonstrations as he did with his know well-known stuff from Gapminder. (Watch the Presentation) How to Find Weak Signals Another highlight for me was the presentation held by Elina Hiltunen, a Finnish futurist and blogger. Elina demonstrated how she uses weak signals buried in blogs , Flickr and other sources of the Web 2.0 era. Her presentation was particular lively and well done, both in style and content. The presentation actually made me aware that my personal blog-reading style is often more of a weak signal scanning than the concentrated reading thats recommended by people like Leo Babauta of zen habits[2]. I definitely think that the approach shes presented can help anticipate future trends, particularly in technology, but elsewhere as well. (Download the slides) InnovationJam* The third session I would like to mention here is Dr. Mathias Kaiserswerths presentation on Innovations for the Society of the Future. Dr. Kaiserswerth is the director of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, famous for a couple of Nobel Prize winners. He presented very briefly the concept of the InnovationJam held by IBM last year: They gathered 1502000 persons around the world employees, partners, academia and even employees family members for a 72 hours brainstorm session on a select number of greater topics where IBM could or should (help) innovate. As far as I can tell, the results of this initiative are great and I will definitely take this mass-creativity-method into account for future studies. (One should probably mention, that after these 72 hours of jamming and some massive automated text-mining, a team of 10 people analysed the results for 5 consecutive days, after which, the results once more got refined and finally put into 10 ideas worth pursuing). (Download the slides) Honorable Mentions There were two other sessions I also enjoyed a lot, both for content and style: How Intellectual Property Regimes Might Evolve by 2025 an interesting, visually very well done and data-packed presentation on four scenarios for the future of Intellectual Property. The study itself can be found here, slides hereTrend & Scenario Analysis an insight in how Airbus Industries scout for trends and map these into scenarios and strategies for future designs of the Airbus cabin design. The slides can be downloaded here One more thing This posts title goes PowerPoint design from good to bad at the end. There were one or two presentations that were held as youd wish for: Lots of visual information supporting some kind of narrative. There were also some old-school presentations, presented in such a lively way and with additional information not on the slides that the bullet-points did not weigh in as much as they normally do. Sadly, most other presentations were the kind of presentation you would not suffer to see anymore: things becoming worse when bullet-points were presented in a dull, unengaged way. This, monce again, demonstrated that even the seemingly brightest and most engaged persons have to work hard to create rich, enticing and engaging presentations. Which is at the sime time sad but a hope, as everybody can avoid death by powerpoint. Conclusion If I have the slightest chance to get into the 4th European Futurists Conference next year, I will do so.[3] The only thing I will change from this years conference: Bring more business cards along. Images: European Futurists Lucerne, Wikipedia and IBM. [1] It was actually funny to see that the futurists invited Hans Rosling after theyd seen him or better his presentation at the TED conference. One has the impression they shouldve known better. [2] I actually value Leos tips very much, I just happen to have a different reading style than he has and therefore would probably never reduce my bloglist to just 10-20 instead of 130+. [3] Being a student saves thousands of Francs and makes this stuff affordable if your company is not paying for.
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:29:04 GMT CIA BOEING B-17s Most people who heard about the aircraft owned or operated by Air America would say that a Boeing B-17 had been used at the time of Civil Air Transport, but that Air America had never had one. Yet, among the papers preserved at the Air …
[Update 5.12.2007: The presentations are 
One of the (visual) highlights certainly was 
He presented very briefly the concept of the 
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